Hotcoin Investment and Financing Weekly Report (7.20–7.26) | A total of 29 public investment and financing events, with financing data showing a rebound

From July 20 to July 26, the cryptocurrency market experienced a total of 29 investment and financing events, including 9 in infrastructure, 8 in DeFi, 4 in gaming, 3 in AI, 2 in social, 1 in DePIN, 1 in tools, and 1 in mining.

This week, there were 5 financing events over ten million dollars:

• Block Mining, focused on Bitcoin mining infrastructure and custody services, completed a $92.5 million merger financing round, with Riot Blockchain as the investor.
• The Base gaming ecosystem B3 completed a $21 million seed financing round, with investors including Pantera Capital and Hashed.
• The customizable and application-specific second-layer blockchain Caldera completed a $15 million Series A financing round, with investors including Founders Fund and Dragonfly.
• The consumer-centric blockchain Abstract completed an $11 million financing round, with investors including Founders Fund and Fenbushi Capital.
• The BitVM-based Bitcoin secure equivalent layer 2 Bitlayer completed an $11 million Series A financing round, with investors including ABCDE Capital and Framework Ventures.

This week, the investment and financing activity in the cryptocurrency market showed a rebound compared to last week, with infrastructure (9 events) and DeFi (8 events) growing the fastest. Block Mining, focused on Bitcoin mining infrastructure and custody services, secured the largest financing amount of the week at $92.5 million.

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

Infrastructure

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 26, Mezo completed a $7.5 million financing round, with investors including Ledger Cathay Capital and Flowdesk. Mezo is a Bitcoin Layer 2 network that enables users to access applications that facilitate Bitcoin token usage, promoting a circular Bitcoin economy, not just "savings technology." Mezo utilizes holders' idle Bitcoin through a "HODL proof" points program, where the longer the storage time, the more "HODL score multiplier" contributors receive.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 25, OpenSocial completed a $6 million strategic financing round, with investors including Framework Ventures and North Island Ventures. OpenSocial is a multi-chain SocialFi infrastructure that provides truly scalable and composable protocols for web3 users, creators, and developers, powering the future multi-chain SocialFi ecosystem.
3. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 24, RiskLayer completed a pre-seed financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Momentum 6 and Antler. RiskLayer is a DeFi economic security middleware based on EigenLayer developed by Chainrisk Labs. It broadcasts risk data across markets and helps build risk-smart DeFi. The RiskLayer team aims to bridge the gap between economic security and practical DeFi applications by proposing Risk Oracle AVS and Risk Rollup AVS. Risk Oracle AVS uses "risk proof" consensus to provide accessible and actionable risk data, enabling investors to deploy capital more effectively. Meanwhile, Risk Rollup AVS focuses on economically protecting application-specific rollups, facilitating the development of risk-smart financial products.
4. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 24, Caldera completed a $15 million Series A financing round, with investors including Founders Fund and Dragonfly. Caldera focuses on building high-performance, customizable, and application-specific second-layer blockchains. These customized blockchains (Caldera Chains) offer high throughput, low latency, and customizable features to optimize the performance and user experience of decentralized applications, capable of processing hundreds of transactions per second with sub-second confirmation times. Caldera allows anyone to launch and run dedicated, high-performance second-layer blockchain "Rollups."
5. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 23, Abstract completed an $11 million financing round, with investors including Founders Fund and Fenbushi Capital. Abstract is a consumer-centric blockchain powered by cutting-edge ZK cryptography for consumer encryption, cultural expansion, community, and on-chain creativity. Its mission is to build the world's largest on-chain community driven by the cultural economy, utilizing ZK Stack and EigenDA to provide cheap, fast, and secure transactions. Abstract was invented by individuals who launched and scaled Pudgy Penguins, Ethereum, and Kubernetes.
6. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 23, Bitlayer completed an $11 million Series A financing round, with investors including ABCDE Capital and Framework Ventures. Bitlayer is a layer 2 solution that provides Bitcoin-equivalent security and Turing completeness. It is also the first built on BitVM. Bitlayer aims to bring secure scalability to the Bitcoin ecosystem, promote asset diversity, and stimulate innovation to provide a faster, safer, and more flexible user experience.
7. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 22, Zircuit completed a financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Binance Labs and Mirana Ventures. Zircuit is an EVM-compatible zero-knowledge rollup, and its unique hybrid architecture combines optimistic infrastructure with zero-knowledge proofs, providing developers with the best of both worlds. With state-of-the-art performance and security at the sequencer level, users can explore new realms with faster transactions, lower fees, and complete peace of mind. Zircuit will protect sequencer-level users by monitoring malicious transactions in the memory pool and preventing them from being packed into blocks.
8. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 20, Solak completed a financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including NxGen and Kangaroo Capital. SolakGPT is an ecosystem that combines AI technology with decentralized finance (DeFi) capabilities. The ecosystem includes an AI browser and a DeFi platform where users can engage in various financial activities such as trading NFTs, collateralizing assets, swapping tokens, and borrowing.
9. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 20, Nirvana Labs completed a $4 million seed financing round, with investors including Castle Island Ventures and RW3 Ventures. Nirvana Labs is developing a Web3 infrastructure solution for building, managing, and supporting any blockchain application. Developers can create their own API gateways and connect to its low-latency global network nodes located in over 30 data center regions.

DeFi

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 26, LayerPixel completed a $2 million seed financing round, with investors including Kenetic Capital and Foresight Ventures. LayerPixel aims to provide a one-stop DeFi service for developers of Telegram Mini Apps, with core products including the first Weighted-Pool decentralized trading platform PixelSwap on the TON chain, the account abstraction wallet PixelWallet, and the lightweight oracle Pixacle.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 25, BitFi completed a seed financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Fundamental Labs and IBC Group. BitFi combines the advantages of centralized and decentralized financial solutions to maximize yields for users across various assets (such as BTC). By leveraging multi-chain adaptability and complex off-chain trading strategies, BitFi offers guaranteed staking yields and multi-layer yield generation.
3. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 25, Roxom completed a $4.3 million pre-seed financing round, with investors including Tim Draper and Borderless Capital. Roxom is an exchange for stocks, commodities, and futures priced and quoted in Bitcoin, allowing users to view and trade global markets using Bitcoin.
4. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 25, Kintsu completed a $4 million financing round, with investors including Castle Island Ventures and CMT Digital. Kintsu is a liquid staking protocol built on Monad. Kintsu's first product is a liquid staking protocol based on the Aleph Zero blockchain, but its focus later shifted to building on Monad.
5. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 25, Kuru completed a $2 million seed financing round, with investors including Electric Capital and CMS Holdings. Kuru is a fully on-chain order book DEX on Monad, providing users with a single platform to discover, research, and trade on-chain spot assets.
6. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 25, aPriori completed an $8 million seed financing round, with investors including Pantera Capital and ConsenSys. aPriori is an MEV infrastructure and liquid staking protocol designed for the era of parallel execution, built natively on Monad.
7. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 23, Multipool completed a financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Kronos Research. Multipool is a fair and equitable limit order DEX suitable for RWA and cryptocurrencies built on existing AMMs.
8. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 22, Etherfuse completed a $3 million seed financing round, with investors including White Star Capital and North Island Ventures. Etherfuse is a blockchain infrastructure platform dedicated to providing global enterprises and investors with simplified access to securities financial assets. Etherfuse launched the tokenized bond issuance product Stablebond based on Solana, creating a secure and transparent tool for investors by combining the traditional bond world with blockchain technology innovations, further enhancing the stability of DeFi and blockchain products.

Gaming

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 24, PANDA TITAN completed a $3 million financing round, with investors including Archer Capital. Panda Titan is a metaverse chain game ecosystem based on the panda IP. Unlike typical chain game studios, Panda Titan is not limited to game development but actively develops and promotes products related to the metaverse, Web3 community building, game engine development, and game streaming platforms.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 24, Catizen completed a strategic financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Binance Labs. Catizen is a cat-themed game that combines GameFi, AI, and the metaverse, merging the charm of virtual pets with blockchain technology and AI innovations to deliver a highly immersive interactive experience.
3. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 22, B3 completed a $21 million seed financing round, with investors including Pantera Capital and Hashed. B3 was created by a team of Base/Coinbase alumni and OG ETH contributors, and is a horizontally scalable gaming ecosystem built on Base. Its development company is NPC Labs.
4. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 21, Onchain Heroes completed a financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Gm Capital and Seedphrase. Onchain Heroes is an on-chain RPG aimed at degens.

AI

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 24, Redpill completed a $5 million seed financing round, with investors including Animoca Brands and DFG. RedPill is a decentralized AI platform that aggregates top AI models into a single API, democratizing access to them and providing faster, more affordable, and verifiable AI services globally. RedPill introduces a model that tokenizes LLM resources and issues equivalent model tokens to AI node providers based on "cost proof." These tokens can be traded by nodes or purchased by users through DeFi markets.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 23, Assisterr completed a $1.7 million seed financing round, with investors including Outlier Ventures and Web3.com Ventures. Assisterr is an incentive-driven network composed of community-owned AI models, aimed at developers, autonomous AI agents, and enterprises.
3. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 23, Network3 completed a $5.5 million seed financing round, with investors including SNZ Holding and Waterdrip Capital. Network3 is building a decentralized AI infrastructure where users can provide inference, fine-tuning, and training services for edge AI models by sharing bandwidth, computing power, datasets, etc., in exchange for token incentives.

Social

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 24, STIX completed a $1.8 million private financing round, with investors including Selini Capital and Presto. STIX is a meme competition and promotion platform based on Base, a derivative project of Stickerly, one of the largest user-generated content sticker publishing platforms in the world. Utilizing Stickerly's distribution platform, STIX increases gamification elements by regularly hosting meme popularity competitions. Such competitions can bring token rewards and are heavily promoted on STIX and Stickerly, leading non-crypto native audiences to embrace crypto culture.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 24, Yup completed a financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including NascentI and DEO CoLab Ventures. Yup is a Web3 social network for curators, where users can curate and share content online. Users can earn rewards through their taste and gain influence in topics.

Others

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 25, Multiple Network completed a $2 million seed financing round, with investors including OKX Ventures and Youbi Capital. Multiple Network is a Web3 DePIN project that builds a network layer using SD-WAN technology to achieve high-performance transmission of digital assets and data.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 24, DAOBase completed a $6 million financing round, with investors including LD Capital and SevenX Ventures. DAOBase is a DAO aggregator and treasury tracking platform. It helps establish a reputation system for DAOs by aggregating social graphs (on-chain + off-chain) and tracking, analyzing, and evaluating treasury assets, including FT and NFT assets.
3. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on July 24, Block Mining completed a $92.5 million merger financing round, with investors including Riot Blockchain. Block Mining is a diversified Bitcoin mining infrastructure and custody service provider. Block Mining offers customers one of the most competitive hardware and custody facilities, allowing miners to use the latest generation of mining equipment for hashing.