(6.29–7.5) Investment and Financing Weekly Report | A total of 28 public investment and financing events, with infrastructure standing out, and financing data continuing to warm up

From June 29 to July 5, the crypto market saw a total of 28 financing events, including 14 in infrastructure, 3 in gaming, 3 in DeFi, 2 in CeFi, 2 in security solutions, 1 in tools, 1 in mining, 1 in social, and 1 in creator economy.

This week, there were 7 financing events exceeding ten million dollars:

Bitcoin mining company Iris Energy completed a round of $413 million in financing, with unknown investors.

The open-source AI development platform Sentient completed a $85 million seed round financing, with investors including Pantera Capital, Framework Ventures, and others.

The Bitcoin DeFi protocol Lombard completed a $16 million seed round financing, with investors including Polychain, dao5, and others.

The cross-chain data oracle RedStone completed a $15 million Series A financing, with investors including Arrington Capital, gumi Cryptos Capital, and others.

Distributed cloud computing company Prodia completed a $15 million seed round financing, with investors including Dragonfly, HashKey Capital, and others.

Blockchain ZK solution Pi Squared completed a $12.5 million seed round financing, with investors including Polychain, Robot Ventures, and others.

Modular blockchain Astria completed a $12.5 million strategic financing, with investors including Placeholder, DBA, and others.

This week, the investment and financing heat in the crypto market continued to warm up compared to last week, with infrastructure standing out with 14 financing events. Bitcoin mining company Iris Energy secured the largest financing amount of the week, reaching $413 million.

The investment and financing projects this week sorted by financing amount are shown in the figure below:

Infrastructure

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 4, UniSat completed a round of financing with an unknown amount, with investors including Binance Labs. UniSat Wallet is a browser extension wallet that allows users to securely and easily store, send, and receive Bitcoin and Ordinals on the Bitcoin blockchain.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 4, Compute Labs completed a $3 million pre-seed round financing, with investors including Protocol Labs, MH Ventures, and others. Compute Labs is a tokenized computing protocol designed to finance AI, provide direct access to computing assets, and create computing derivatives, enabling investors to profit easily from computing (the currency of the future).
3. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 3, QED Protocol completed a $6 million seed round financing, with investors including Blockchain Capital, Arrington Capital, and others. QED is the zk-native execution layer for Bitcoin, aimed at addressing the challenges of Web3 development. This horizontally scalable, secure, and user-friendly platform is built for developers and users, supporting a wide range of applications from DeFi to NFTs. Decentralized applications built on QED can locally prove transactions, providing users with unlimited computation at fixed Gas fees. This innovative approach ensures that each user's public key acts as a custom ZK circuit, with a "smart signature" that can be read from the state, similar to smart contracts.
4. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 3, Tidus completed an $800,000 pre-seed round financing, with investors including DNA Fund, Transform Ventures, and others. Tidus is a decentralized wallet that offers a multi-chain, non-custodial platform, allowing users to have strong control and security over their digital assets. The product is developed by Nycrypto Labs.
5. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, SendBlocks completed an $8.2 million seed round financing, with investors including Castle Island Ventures, StarkWare, and others. SendBlocks is a blockchain data management company that simplifies access to blockchain data through a fully customizable platform. By enabling enterprises, ecosystems, and applications to define and access the data they need, SendBlocks eliminates the need for large internal data teams or expensive outsourced solutions for each data point.
6. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, Pi Squared completed a $12.5 million seed round financing, with investors including Polychain, Robot Ventures, and others. Pi Squared uses zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology to verify the correctness of any program's execution without relying on specific programming languages (PL) or virtual machines (VM). Based on the K framework and matching logic, it provides a universal and efficient verification method aimed at achieving seamless interoperability between blockchains, languages, and applications.
7. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, RedStone completed a $15 million Series A financing, with investors including Arrington Capital, gumi Cryptos Capital, and others. RedStone is a cross-chain data oracle technology that provides fast and cost-effective data access, complete historical audit trails, and insurance-backed decentralized dispute mechanisms, offering users recourse in case of inaccurate data provision. The Arweave blockchain project is used to store data and track reputation.
8. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, OpenLedger completed an $8 million seed round financing, with investors including Polychain, Borderless Capital, and others. OpenLedger builds permissionless, data-centric infrastructure for AI development.
9. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, Sentient completed an $85 million seed round financing, with investors including Pantera Capital, Framework Ventures, and others. Sentient is building community-contributed open-source AI models, aiming to compete directly with OpenAI. Sentient will launch campaigns for contributors, each with specific metrics to evaluate contributions and rewards based on those metrics.
10. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, Prodia completed a $15 million seed round financing, with investors including Dragonfly, HashKey Capital, and others. Prodia is a distributed cloud computing company that has built a distributed GPU network to provide more efficient cloud computing services at a lower cost using web3 infrastructure.
11. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, Solayer completed a financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Anatoly Yakovenko, Sandeep Nailwal, and others. Solayer is building a re-staking network on Solana. Solayer leverages its economic security and high-quality execution as decentralized cloud infrastructure to achieve a higher degree of consensus and customizable block space for application developers.
12. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 1, Astria completed a $12.5 million strategic financing, with investors including Placeholder, DBA, and others. Astria is a modular blockchain that allows rollups to share a decentralized Sequencer network, aiming to enable anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant rollup without relying on a centralized Sequencer.
13. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 1, Nubila Network completed a $2.5 million financing, with investors including IoTeX, Vechain, and others. Nubila is a data oracle platform specifically designed to provide accurate and actionable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data for decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) ecosystems.
14. According to ROOTDATA financing data on June 29, Futureverse completed a financing round, with investors including Animoca Brands. Futureverse is the technological and cultural foundation of the open metaverse, where creators, companies, and communities envision their future. The Futureverse infrastructure enables companies and creators to provide the open metaverse experience that audiences desire. Futureverse serves as a seamless gateway for all applications in the virtual universe, allowing users to travel with their passports, friends, communications, finances, and content. Futureverse's decentralized ASM AI protocol allows anyone to own, train, and trade unique AI through a digital brain. The FuturePass smart wallet SDK enables users to use web3 applications, games, and experiences simply, quickly, securely, and without passwords. It protects user identity and data, stores digital assets, tokens, and memberships, manages permissions, and establishes status anytime and anywhere.

Gaming

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 4, Swords & Dungeons completed a $5 million financing, with investors including Mirana Ventures, OKX Ventures, and others. Swords & Dungeons is a highly playable P2E DeFi MMORPG. It combines traditional gaming PvE, PvP, GvG systems with the P2E gaming model of the Web 3.0 era and advanced DAO governance concepts. Players enter a complex and dangerous metaverse as heroes, tasked with defeating evil creatures to become stronger and master powerful void powers. They collaborate with other players to integrate floating islands and the land below, bringing peace to the shattered void world.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, Cambria completed a $2.5 million seed round financing, with investors including Bitkraft Ventures, 1kx, and others. Cambria is a risk-oriented MMO game inspired by Runescape, featuring massive on-chain stakes. In the game's first iteration, Gold Rush, players must engage in economic and real-time PvP simultaneously to acquire Blast Gold and ETH, competing for dominance in a brutal struggle.
3. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 1, MonkeyBit completed a $2 million seed round financing, with investors including 3KBTC Capital, Hongyi Labs, and others. MonkeyBit is dedicated to creating long-term value in the new on-chain entertainment ecosystem, providing players with a new gaming experience. It not only offers users a diverse decentralized gaming experience but also provides multiple rewards for various ecosystem participants.

DeFi

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, Lombard completed a $16 million seed round financing, with investors including Polychain, dao5, and others. Founded in April 2024, Lombard aims to unlock the potential of Bitcoin as a dynamic financial tool by connecting Bitcoin with DeFi. Lombard enables yield-generating BTC to move across chains without fragmenting liquidity, paving the way to become the largest catalyst for bringing net new capital into DeFi. Its flagship product, LBTC, is a yield-bearing, cross-chain, highly liquid Bitcoin backed 1:1 by BTC.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 1, Sun Protocol completed a seed round financing with an unknown amount, with investors including DFG, Moore Foundation, and others. The Sun Protocol platform integrates multi-chain trading, cross-chain, staking, lightning network, and liquidity from other fields, providing users with a more convenient and secure trading ecosystem that delves into global assets.
3. According to ROOTDATA financing data on June 30, Pac Finance completed a multi-million dollar financing, with investors including Manifold Trading, Mapleblock, and others. Pac Finance is a DeFi lending protocol on the Blast network, operating on a non-custodial, permissionless principle. Its core functions include lending, swapping, and staking, aimed at providing flexible and efficient services for a wide range of financial needs within the decentralized finance ecosystem.

CeFi

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 5, FreeBnk completed a $3 million financing, with investors including Founderheads, LVT Capital, and others. FreeBNK is a blockchain-based comprehensive financial ecosystem. With a range of innovative features and products, FreeBnk serves as a gateway to a new era of financial empowerment. FreeBnk has over 300 DeFi and CeFi liquidity providers, offering low-fee payment methods that benefit all parties, reshaping fund management and trading.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 1, Amber Japan completed a merger financing round, with investors including Sony Corporation. Amber Japan has created a platform for trading various digital currencies and connecting different values.

Security Solutions

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 3, Wallet Guard completed a merger financing round, with investors including ConsenSys. Wallet Guard is a crypto account plugin designed to protect various crypto wallets. Wallet Guard aims to prevent common phishing attacks in Web3 through various detection algorithms. It provides a built-in whitelist for projects like Metamask, OpenSea, TradingView, Uniswap, etc., which can be used to detect and block suspicious URLs from various common phishing attack methods.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 1, Mamori completed a $5 million seed round financing, with investors including Blockchain Capital, Velocity Capital, and others. Mamori is a machine learning-based blockchain value extraction pioneer, applicable to zero-day economic vulnerabilities, MEV search, and intent resolution, addressing scalability, automation, vulnerability detection relevance, and effectiveness challenges in the Web3 value extraction space.

Tools

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 3, onaji completed a $2.5 million pre-seed round financing, with investors including Stratos, Maven11, and others. Onaji is a machine learning infrastructure for digital asset market intelligence. It provides a modular trader intelligence technology that uses machine learning to contextualize digital assets and peer into the future to predict individual traders' behaviors and market trends. It supports trading of small and large altcoins, NFTs, as well as quantitative intelligence for protocols and markets, increasing returns and making informed buy and sell decisions.

Mining

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, Iris Energy completed a $413 million financing, with unknown investors. Iris Energy is a Bitcoin miner that owns and operates real assets powered by renewable energy, including data center infrastructure.

Social

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 2, Ethos Network completed a $1.75 million pre-seed round financing, with investors including Zeneca, dingaling, and others. Ethos provides a reputation score with supporting documentation, similar to a credit report, but with open protocols and on-chain records. Ethos incentivizes ethical behavior through social proof of stake; this is a consensus-based decentralized verification mechanism driven by human values, judgment, and actions.

Creator Economy

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data on July 1, VAULT completed a merger financing round, with investors including DRiP. Vault is a Web3 platform for collecting exclusive limited digital music collectibles. It allows artists to earn more income from their works and brings back the collectible element of music in a new digital format for super fans.