RootData August Cryptocurrency Market Data Summary: Financing Scale Continues to Decline, VC Fundraising Surges
Base and Ton ecosystems were the most favored by investors in August. Possibly affected by the overall sluggish market, only 22 projects were included in the statistics for TGE this month.整理：饼干 \& Elvin，RootData
In August 2024, BTC fell from a peak of $64,500 to around $59,000, with a low of $49,500. The investment and financing data in the crypto sector also showed a sluggish state, with total financing amounting to $785 million, a month-on-month decrease of 20.5%. The number of financing events was 111, consistent with the previous month.
Additionally, five crypto funds, including Robot Ventures, ParaFi Capital, and Lemniscap, announced a total fundraising of $246 million, marking the highest number of fundraising events since October 2022. The cumulative fundraising scale this year is only second to June (when Paradigm announced a fundraising of $850 million).
Funding trends in the crypto sector over the past two years
In this article, we will focus on specific funding data, active investors, trending projects, and other aspects to present the changing trends in the crypto market.
1. Funding Data
In August, the total funding amount in the cryptocurrency sector was $785 million, a month-on-month decrease of 20.5%, and a year-on-year decrease of 49.4%. Despite the significant drop in total funding, the number of funding events still reached 111, consistent with the previous month. This indicates that although the funding amount has decreased, investment activity in the market remains active. However, compared to last year, the number of funding events has decreased by 17.2%, reflecting a weakening overall market sentiment and a more cautious attitude among investors.
The on-chain IP ecosystem Story Protocol completed a $80 million Series B funding round, becoming the largest funding event of the month. Other popular projects that completed funding include the stablecoin API solution Bridge, the crypto economic cloud platform Chaos Labs, the decentralized lending protocol Morpho, and the decentralized AI network Sahara.
In terms of funding amount and rounds, the $1-3 million range accounted for the largest share, with seed rounds remaining the most popular funding rounds, with 37 projects completing seed round financing. Notable projects include the Solana re-staking network Solayer ($12 million), the all-in-one ZK trading platform Vessel ($10 million), the MEV solution Sorella ($7.5 million), the Ethereum L2 network Corn ($6.7 million), the zkEVM blockchain game publisher Pentagon Games ($6 million), and the decentralized AI agent network DeagentAI ($6 million).
Additionally, there were 8 merger and acquisition events in August. Bitcoin mining company Bitfarms agreed to acquire Stronghold Digital for $175 million, Alchemy acquired blockchain infrastructure provider Bware, 3Base acquired the modular blockchain Nautilus Chain, and blockchain security audit provider Zellic acquired the smart contract auditing platform Code4rena.
According to statistics, Base and Ton ecosystems were the most favored by investors in August. The Base ecosystem had 7 projects complete funding, including the lending protocol Morpho, the decentralized limit order book BSX, and the time tokenization platform time.fun, among others. The Ton ecosystem had 4 projects complete funding, including the gaming infrastructure Televerse and the fantasy football game Fanton. Additionally, Berachain and Scroll were also popular funding ecosystems.
2. Active Investors
Robot Ventures and Binance Labs were the most active venture capital firms in August, each making 9 investments. Robot Ventures invested in the stablecoin protocol Level, the Web3 credential network zkMe, the MEV solution Sorella Labs, and the decentralized lending protocol Morpho, among others. Binance Labs invested in the Solana re-staking network Solayer, the modular L1 blockchain Particle Network, the AI privacy network Sahara, the dynamic opinion and continuous prediction market Opinion Labs, and the decentralized data marketplace Aggregata, among others.
Following closely were OKX Ventures, Maelstrom Capital, Spartan Group, and Animoca Brands, each making more than 5 investments.
Web3 angel investor DCF GOD invested in 5 projects in August, becoming the most active individual investor of the month. Solana co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal also had investment records.
In terms of new fundraisings in the crypto sector, August showed more positive signals, with specific events including:
- Robot Ventures raising $75 million for its early-stage crypto venture capital fund, which is Robot Ventures' fourth fund, with investors including TrueBridge Capital Partners, Haun Ventures, Marc Andreessen, and Chris Dixon.
- Lemniscap launching a new $70 million fund to support early-stage Web3 startups, which will invest in various blockchain sectors, including zero-knowledge proof infrastructure, consumer applications, emerging Bitcoin ecosystems, and secure and decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN).
- Former TON Foundation executives launched a $40 million TON Ventures fund, focusing on consumer applications utilizing the Telegram social platform.
- ParaFi Capital completed a $120 million fundraising to acquire stakes in other crypto funds focused on specific niches, strategies, or regions. ParaFi founder Ben Forman stated in an interview that the company plans to build a portfolio by investing in 30 to 50 such funds over the next three to five years.
- The NFT community ARC raised $4.5 million to launch a crypto incubator, positioning itself as the "Y Combinator of the Web3 world."
- European venture capital firm XAnge has stopped fundraising for its first crypto venture capital fund due to difficulties in securing enough supporters to complete the initial fundraising.
3. Trending Projects
Based on a large amount of user search data from RootData, we also summarized some of the most searched projects in August, including:
Story Protocol is building web3 technology to fundamentally change the way narratives are created. Its mission is to unleash a new way to create, manage, and license on-chain IP, ultimately forming a "story Lego block" ecosystem that can be remixed and recombined. Story Protocol provides a simplified framework to manage the entire lifecycle of IP development, supporting features such as source tracking, frictionless licensing, and revenue sharing. Applications built on Story Protocol are designed for creators across all media (prose, images, games, audio, etc.), enabling writers and artists to track the provenance of their works, allowing anyone to contribute and remix while capturing the value of their contributions.
Babylon is a layer1 blockchain founded by Stanford University Professor David Tse. The project's mission is to bring Bitcoin's unparalleled security to all PoS blockchains without any additional energy costs. The team consists of researchers from Stanford University, experienced developers, and seasoned business advisors.
Fractal Bitcoin is a Bitcoin scaling solution that gradually extends the Bitcoin blockchain into a scalable computing system without compromising consistency with the Bitcoin main chain.
Movement is a modular framework for building and deploying Move-based infrastructure, applications, and blockchains in any distributed environment. The team is building a suite of products and services that enable non-Move protocols to leverage the power of the Move programming language without writing a single line of Move code. The team's first version, M1, redefines L1 as a vertically composable and horizontally scalable first-layer framework that is compatible with Solidity, connects EVM and Move liquidity, and allows builders to customize modular and interoperable application chains out of the box.
Chainbase is a full-chain data network. Its core mission is to provide a transparent, reliable, and permissionless data layer for the AI era. Through its modular design, it supports cross-chain data interoperability and programmability, making it easy to build and use data models.
Solv is a decentralized Bitcoin reserve protocol that unlocks the full potential of Bitcoin assets through liquidity consensus infrastructure. By addressing the fragmentation of BTC assets, yield opportunities, and custody solutions, Solv provides Bitcoin holders with a gateway to BTCFi, continuously establishing pathways and confidence for traditional funds to enter the cryptocurrency world.
Monad is building a high-performance layer 1 blockchain for the next generation of decentralized applications, with the mission of accelerating the disruptive power of decentralization by building blockchains that are 100 to 1000 times faster than the closest competitors, alleviating severe bottlenecks in existing blockchains, and enabling more complex applications and broader adoption.
Morpho is a lending protocol that combines the current liquidity pool model used in Compound or AAVE with the capital efficiency of a P2P matching engine used in order books. Morpho-Compound improves upon Compound by providing the same user experience, liquidity, and liquidation parameters, while increasing APY due to peer-to-peer matching.
Aleo is a developer platform for building fully private, scalable, and cost-effective applications. Using zero-knowledge cryptography, Aleo moves smart contract execution off-chain to enable a variety of decentralized applications that are both fully private and scalable to thousands of transactions per second.
TON (The Open Network) is a fully decentralized Layer 1 blockchain designed by Telegram. It is known for its ultra-fast transaction speeds, low fees, user-friendly applications, and eco-friendliness.
11. CARV
CARV is a modular data layer for gaming and AI, aimed at changing the way data is used and shared. To create a future where data creates value for everyone, CARV has built a modular data layer CARV protocol integrated with over 40 chain ecosystems, along with its flagship game and super application CARV Play.
io.net is a decentralized computing network that supports the development, execution, and scaling of ML applications on the Solana blockchain, combining 1 million GPUs to form the world's largest GPU cluster and DePIN. io.net aggregates GPUs from underutilized resources (such as independent data centers, crypto miners, and crypto projects like Filecoin and Render) to solve this problem, combining these resources into a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) that allows engineers to access massive computing power in an accessible, customizable, cost-effective, and easy-to-implement system.
Orderly Network is a liquidity platform built on the Near protocol, relying on smart contracts for peer-to-peer trading and providing users with risk management and shared asset pools. Orderly Network was established in April 2022, co-incubated by NEAR and WOO Network.
zkSync is a second-layer scaling solution developed by Matter Labs that retains the security properties of the underlying blockchain by leveraging the latest generation of succinct zero-knowledge proofs. All funds in zkSync are held by smart contracts on the main chain, while computation and storage are executed off-chain. For each Rollup block, a state transition zero-knowledge proof (SNARK) is generated and verified by the main chain contract. This SNARK includes validity proofs for each transaction in the Rollup block.
Grass is the flagship product of Wynd Network, allowing users to profit from internet connections by selling unused network resources. For individuals, it will appear as a network extension that is downloaded, retained, and forgotten. It will work behind the scenes to help others access public network data in exchange for payments in the protocol's native tokens.
Sui is a permissionless layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that meet the needs of the next billion users in Web3. Sui features horizontal scalability, supporting a wide range of application development at unparalleled speed and low cost.
Fuel is a UTXO-based modular execution layer that brings globally accessible scale to Ethereum. As a modular execution layer, Fuel can achieve global throughput in ways that a monolithic chain cannot, while inheriting Ethereum's security.
Berachain is a high-performance EVM-compatible blockchain built on liquidity proof consensus. Liquidity proof is a novel consensus mechanism designed to coordinate network incentives, establishing strong synergies between Berachain validators and project ecosystems. Berachain's technology is built on Polaris, a high-performance blockchain framework for building EVM-compatible chains on top of the CometBFT consensus engine.
Particle Network is a modular L1 blockchain that powers chain abstraction by creating universal accounts, providing users with a single address and interaction point across chains while extracting gas and unifying liquidity. This enables existing L1 and L2 to coordinate seamlessly across ecosystems.
Polymarket is a decentralized information market platform that allows users to trade on the most controversial topics in the world (such as coronavirus, politics, current events, etc.). On Polymarket, users build portfolios based on their predictions and can earn rewards if they are correct. When users decide to buy shares in the market, they are weighing their knowledge, research, and views on the future. Market prices reflect the likelihood that traders believe future events will occur, turning trading activity into actionable insights that help people make better decisions. Thus, Polymarket is a primary source of unbiased real-time data on future events.
4. Project Updates
In August, RootData also recorded many events such as mainnet launches and new token issuances, helping users understand important project dynamics in the market and grasp earlier alpha opportunities.
Projects that launched mainnets in August include (sorted by date from recent to distant, not exhaustive):
Ethervista is a decentralized trading platform that supports a 5-day lock on initial liquidity provided by pool creators. Ethervista also offers smart contract customization, allowing creators to manage fees and integrate various DeFi applications such as staking or automated purchases.
Kaia is formed from the merger of Klaytn and Finschia blockchains originally developed by Kakao and LINE, respectively, featuring the lowest transaction latency in EVM L1, with a block time of 1 second and instant finality, enabling a smooth user experience and opening possibilities for use cases that require near real-time responses.
Creditcoin is an L1 blockchain designed to match and record credit transactions, creating a public distributed ledger of credit history and loan performance, connecting Web3 capital with real-world credit investment opportunities.
Matchain is changing the interaction between AI and user data. By introducing the first AI layer 2 rollup on the BNB chain, Matchain brings AI products and users on-chain, focusing on decentralized identity and data sovereignty.
Reservoir is a decentralized stablecoin protocol on Blast, providing users with widely available next-generation stablecoins, liquidity yield assets rUSD, term yield assets srUSD, trUSD, and permissionless lending markets. The protocol is backed by various digital and real-world assets - providing the most scalable stablecoins through DeFi applications and real-world asset integration.
Intuition is a decentralized identity infrastructure that allows users to create proofs on any topic, storing information in a way that is easy to navigate, query, and utilize by other applications. Intuition's protocols and middleware allow developers to easily integrate company proofs and knowledge graphs into their own applications. Intuition provides decentralized infrastructure, developer tools, and applications that support the creation of open, flexible knowledge graphs, thereby improving the quality and availability of social knowledge.
Babylon is a layer1 blockchain founded by Stanford University Professor David Tse. The project's mission is to bring Bitcoin's unparalleled security to all PoS blockchains without any additional energy costs. The team consists of researchers from Stanford University, experienced developers, and seasoned business advisors.
Gravity is a Layer-1 blockchain designed for mass adoption and a full-chain future, developed by Galxe. Gravity abstracts the technical complexities of multi-chain interactions by integrating advanced technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and state-of-the-art consensus mechanisms, ensuring high performance, enhanced security, and cost-effectiveness.
FILLiquid is a decentralized liquidity pool on Filecoin that optimizes staking, earning, and empowering storage through lending solutions.
XNET is a fully functional next-generation mobile network that provides carrier-grade secure access to phone numbers, voice, SMS, and emergency services (e911). XNET's fast, reliable, and secure cellular services will be deployed by a dedicated community of node operators. Node operators will receive cryptocurrency mining rewards and free mobile services in exchange for filling coverage gaps and expanding existing network capacity.
ELFi Protocol is a decentralized derivatives trading platform with isolated and cross-margin modes, USDT/USDC zero-risk high yields, and super combination LSD assets.
NEBRA is building a proof aggregation service on Ethereum that uses a universal ZK-ZK proof aggregation structure to aggregate ZKPs from various applications, including but not limited to privacy-preserving identities, storage proofs, ZKML, and zkEVM proofs.
Lore Finance is a lending and staking platform on Scroll, with Lore being a decentralized non-custodial liquidity market protocol on Scroll, allowing users to participate as depositors or borrowers.
Drop is a cross-chain liquid staking protocol that aims to enhance the economic viability of inter-chain economies by transforming stagnant, frozen resources into liquid opportunities.
15. defi.money
defi.money is a stablecoin liquidity layer. It is an authorized reconstruction of crvUSD but natively cross-chain, focusing on L2s. The protocol can essentially interoperate with any EVM, allowing users to move $MONEY across any chain and lock weighted tokens.
16. The Arena
Arena is a leveraged trading protocol on Solana, allowing users to take leveraged long and short positions on any asset (such as memecoins, celebrity coins, major market cap tokens) and create their own isolated banks for any token using any collateral without permission.
17. Vessel
Vessel is an integrated on-chain trading platform dedicated to providing premium services for spot trading, perpetual trading, and enhanced AMM DEX, ensuring an unparalleled trading experience for users.
18. ForumAI
ForumAI is a DePIN x AI network aimed at bringing decentralized AI agents into web3 gaming through NPCs and more.
Projects that launched testnets in August include (sorted by date from recent to distant, not exhaustive):
Soneium is an Ethereum layer 2 blockchain ecosystem launched by Sony, connecting blockchain technology (Web3) with everyday internet services (Web2). Soneium aims to simplify the blockchain experience while empowering developers, creators, and communities. It is built on accessibility, scalability, and efficiency, aiming to solve real-world problems across various industries.
Story Protocol is building web3 technology to fundamentally change the way narratives are created. Its mission is to unleash a new way to create, manage, and license on-chain IP, ultimately forming a "story Lego block" ecosystem that can be remixed and recombined. Story Protocol provides a simplified framework to manage the entire lifecycle of IP development, supporting features such as source tracking, frictionless licensing, and revenue sharing. Applications built on Story Protocol are designed for creators across all media (prose, images, games, audio, etc.), enabling writers and artists to track the provenance of their works, allowing anyone to contribute and remix while capturing the value of their contributions.
Curvance is a decentralized stablecoin lending protocol initially focused on LPs from the Curve, Convex, Aura, and Frax ecosystems. Curvance aims to optimize yields for users while maximizing capital efficiency through peer-to-peer lending. Assets like cvxCRV, auraBAL, and yCRV can earn similar or higher APRs than they would on their original platforms, with the added capability of collateralizing deposits for secure stablecoin loans. The interest rates on these loans are based on several factors, including pool APR, price volatility, token liquidity, and loan-to-value ratios.
Fractal Bitcoin is a Bitcoin scaling solution that gradually extends the Bitcoin blockchain into a scalable computing system without compromising consistency with the Bitcoin main chain.
In terms of token market trends, the number of new tokens issued in August showed an overall downward trend, with RootData recording a total of 22 new tokens issued, a month-on-month decrease of over 30%. The decision by project parties to delay token issuance is largely related to the sluggish overall market conditions.
Ethervista is a decentralized trading platform that supports a 5-day lock on initial liquidity provided by pool creators. Ethervista also offers smart contract customization, allowing creators to manage fees and integrate various DeFi applications such as staking or automated purchases.
Self Chain is a modular intent-centered access layer 1 blockchain and keyless wallet infrastructure service, using MPCTSS/AA for multi-chain Web3 access. This innovative system simplifies the user experience through its intent-centered approach, using LLM to interpret user intent and discover the most effective paths.
Reform is a decentralized market maker focused on making project market making easier, more transparent, and fair. The Reform ecosystem introduces a community-driven platform that enhances liquidity through Bonding Treasury via a unique circular economy. Additionally, Reform collaborates with projects to manage their token market-making operations.
Posemesh is a decentralized machine perception and spatial computing network that can provide low-latency networks for collaborative spatial computing and XR.
Sharpe is an integrated crypto super application for institutional and professional traders. From AI-driven advanced crypto analytics to enterprise-grade DeFi automation and execution environments, Sharpe is the simplest and safest way to analyze, track, invest in, and automate digital assets.
Fautor is a Web 3.0 creator-fan economy ecosystem that redefines NFTs as Neo Fan Trackers, maximizing the new fan community experience that blockchain technology offers to creators and fans.
DOGS is a meme coin in the spirit of Telegram, inspired by the mascot Spotty created by TON founder Pavel Durov.
Kollectiv combines an exclusive membership platform with a comprehensive rewards system. This combination creates a vibrant ecosystem where engagement and loyalty directly translate into digital, physical, and intellectual rewards.
CoinPays is a payment infrastructure that helps users pay for goods and services directly using cryptocurrency or withdraw fiat currency from crypto assets.
Devour is a gamified food platform that integrates food orders into users' favorite games and streaming structures. The $FUELX token earns, spends, and unlocks rewards through each transaction.
Due to space limitations, the above is a partial list of mainnet and token information. For more complete and timely data, please visit the RootData official website (https://www.rootdata.com/zh/) for more information.
