RootData March Crypto Data Summary: Market in Extreme Panic, Industry Accelerating Consolidation
The total financing amount for investment and financing reached 2.88 billion USD, an increase of nearly 200% month-on-month. The significant rise in financing amount is mainly due to Binance securing 2 billion USD in funding; the number of financing events was 74, a decrease of about 18% month-on-month, reflecting a reduction in the number of actions taken by VCs. Additionally, there were 12 merger and acquisition events this month, marking the fifth consecutive month with more than 10 M&A events.整理：Darren，RootData
In March 2025, BTC consolidated at a low range of $80,000 to $90,000, representing an overall decline of 17% to 26.6% from this year's first-quarter peak of $109,000. The cryptocurrency fear and greed index fluctuated between 20 and 30 in March, even dropping below 20 to a low of 15 on March 11, marking the lowest level since July 2023, indicating extreme fear in the market.
In March, the total financing amount in the cryptocurrency sector reached $2.88 billion, a nearly 200% increase month-on-month. The significant rise in financing is mainly due to Binance securing $2 billion in funding; the number of financing rounds was 74, a decrease of about 18% month-on-month, showing a reduction in the frequency of investments by institutions; the average financing amount this month was $44.3565 million, with a median financing amount of $5 million.
Financing trends in the cryptocurrency sector over the past two years
In this article, we will focus on specific financing data, active investors, trending projects, and other aspects to present the changing trends in the cryptocurrency market.
I. Financing Data
This month saw 2 financing & acquisition events exceeding $1 billion, with a total of 3 financing rounds greater than $100 million and 22 financing rounds exceeding $10 million. The highest single financing amount was from Binance, one of the world's largest digital asset exchanges, which received a $2 billion investment from MGX ; and the futures trading platform NinjaTrader was acquired by Kraken for $1.5 billion. Other popular projects that completed financing include the decentralized storage and data availability protocol Walrus, which raised $140 million; and the BTC reserve asset company Metaplanet, which completed $87 million in financing, among others.
In terms of financing amounts and rounds, the $1-5 million range accounted for the largest proportion of financing (36.4%), with seed rounds being the most popular financing stage, as 13 projects completed seed round financing. Notable projects include the decentralized oracle solution Chronicle Protocol ($12 million), the decentralized AI model protocol Pluralis AI ($7.6 million), the proof-of-work L1 Ambient ($7.2 million), and the Web3 mini-game SDK and platform PlaysOut ($7 million), among others.
Additionally, 12 acquisition events occurred in the cryptocurrency market in March, marking the fifth consecutive month with over 10 acquisitions. The consistent occurrence of multiple acquisitions over several months indicates that the industry is entering a consolidation phase, with leading projects expanding market share and acquiring resources or technology through mergers; it also suggests that some small and medium-sized projects may struggle to survive independently in the current market environment and choose to exit.
II. Active Investors
Robot Ventures and Dragonfly were the most active venture capital firms in March, each participating in 5 investments:
- Robot Ventures: FastLane ($6 million), August ($10 million), Rakurai ($3 million), Templar Protocol ($4 million), Fragmetric ($5 million).
- Dragonfly: DoubleZero ($28 million), August ($10 million), Slingshot ($16 million), Yeet ($7.75 million), Level ($2.6 million).
Following closely are Amber Group, IBC Group, and Coinbase Ventures, each participating in 4 investments.
III. Personnel Dynamics
RootData has also recorded the career dynamics of thousands of well-known figures and executives in the cryptocurrency industry. Here are some noteworthy personnel changes:
Dan Chen has been appointed as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the cryptocurrency trading platform Gemini, previously serving as Vice President of Capital Markets at Affirm;
Matt Russ has been appointed as the Director of Business Development and Strategy at CoinFund, primarily responsible for adjusting business strategies based on market trends;
Brett Shear has become a General Partner at 1confirmation, and he is also a Managing Partner at PTC Crypto;
Raymond Lee is a Co-founder of Quivr and also a Co-founder of Daisy;
Justin Nolan is the Chief Executive Officer of Argo Blockchain, having previously served as the CEO of Arkon Energy.
Akshay Naheta is the Co-CEO of Bakkt and also the Founder and CEO of DTR, previously serving as a Senior Vice President at SoftBank.
Amanda Tuminelli has been appointed as the Executive Director of the DeFi Education Fund;
For more personnel information, please refer to: https://www.rootdata.com/zh/people
IV. Trending Projects
RootData's heat index is calculated based on normalized data from platform search volume, click volume, user votes, and Twitter heat index. The projects with the highest heat index in March include:
Particle Network is a chain-abstracted infrastructure provider 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.
Nillion is a decentralized public network based on a new cryptographic primitive called Nil Message Compute (NMC), allowing nodes in a decentralized network to operate in a unique, non-blockchain manner. Nillion unlocks important new utilities in Web3 by enabling decentralized credit scoring, decentralized trusted execution environments, private NFTs, and decentralized secure storage services.
Walrus is a decentralized storage and data availability protocol. Walrus focuses on providing robust and cost-effective solutions for storing unstructured content on decentralized storage nodes while ensuring high availability and reliability even in the presence of Byzantine faults.
KiloEx is a user-friendly perpetual contract DEX focused on risk management and capital efficiency, supporting asset types including cryptocurrencies, forex, and stocks.
Bedrock is a multi-asset liquidity re-staking protocol that brings re-staking yields and institutional-level security to the community through uniBTC based on Babylon, uniETH based on Eigenlayer, uniIOTX based on IoTeX, and brBTC based on composite re-staking protocols (Babylon, Kernel, Symbiotic, Pell, etc.).
Plume is a fully integrated modular chain focused on RWAfi. They have built the first modular, composable EVM-compatible chain with a focus on RWA, aimed at simplifying onboarding for all types of assets through native infrastructure and unified RWAfi-specific features. Plume is building a composable DeFi ecosystem around RWAfis with an integrated end-to-end tokenization engine and a network of financial infrastructure partners for builders to plug and play.
RedStone is a cross-chain data oracle technology that provides fast and cost-effective data access, complete historical audit trails, and an insurance-backed decentralized dispute mechanism, offering users recourse in case of inaccurate data provision. The Arweave blockchain project is used to store data and track reputation.
Binance is one of the largest digital asset exchanges in the world, aiming to be the infrastructure service provider for the blockchain ecosystem. Binance offers a range of cryptocurrency products and services, including trading and finance, education, data and research, social good, investment and incubation, and decentralized and infrastructure solutions.
Sonic is a Layer-1 platform with an Ethereum security gateway, providing the fastest settlement layer for digital assets, with a TPS exceeding 10,000 and a transaction confirmation time of one second.
Solana is a high-performance underlying blockchain protocol designed to provide scalable, user-friendly applications globally.
Coinbase is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, founded in June 2012 by former Airbnb engineer Brian Armstrong. As of July 2022, approximately 98 million verified users, 13,000 institutions, and 230,000 ecosystem partners in over 100 countries trust Coinbase to easily and securely invest, spend, save, earn, and use cryptocurrency. Coinbase's mission is to increase economic freedom in the world.
MyShell is a decentralized AI consumer layer that allows creators to build AI agents or bots that consumers or users can utilize. Its ecosystem includes robots like OpenVoice (an instant voice cloning program); MeloTTS, a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) library; and Alice, an AI agent capable of performing various tasks, including topic research, coding, and literature reviews.
V. Project Dynamics
In March, RootData also recorded many projects' mainnet launches, recent airdrops, and other events, helping users understand important project dynamics in the market and grasp earlier alpha opportunities.
Due to space limitations, the above is a selection 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.
