ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, Bitcoin ecosystem stablecoin developer Yala has completed an $8 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital and Ethereal Ventures, with participation from Galaxy, Anagram, ABCDE, Amber Group, HashKey Capital, Satoshi Lab, and UTXO Management.The funds from this financing will primarily be used for team expansion, product development, and security enhancements, as well as preparations for the mainnet launch. Additionally, investors have committed to collateralizing over 2,000 bitcoins to Yala.It is reported that Yala's mission is to connect Bitcoin with major ecosystems through stablecoins as a medium, enhancing Bitcoin's liquidity. Its modular architecture allows Yala to deploy across EVM-compatible platforms (such as Ethereum) and non-EVM systems (such as Solana), thereby enhancing Bitcoin's composability and promoting the development of an open Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem. According to official sources, Yala's testnet will be launched next week.

ChainCatcher news, Bitcoin Layer2 project Bitlayer has completed a $9 million A+ round financing with a valuation of $300 million. This round was led by Polychain Capital, with Franklin Templeton co-leading, and participation from SCB Limited, Selini Capital, G-20 Group, and other investors.Bitlayer co-founder Charlie Hu revealed that this round of financing started in early August and concluded last week. Just three months ago, the company had completed a $11 million Series A financing.Like the previous Series A financing, Bitlayer's A+ financing uses a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) structure, accompanied by token warrants, with a valuation of $300 million, which includes both equity valuation and fully diluted token valuation. The latest round of financing brings Bitlayer's total funding to $25 million.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, blockchain development and research company Peregrine Exploration has completed a $3.6 million financing round, led by Polychain Capital and Dragonfly, with participation from Robot Ventures, Pier Two, EIV, and Global Coin Research, as well as angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Jeff Fang, Julian Koh, and Sidney Powell.It is reported that the new funds will be used to develop a stablecoin protocol called Level.

ChainCatcher news, the Solana ecosystem re-staking protocol Solayer has completed a $12 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Big Brain Holdings, Hack VC, Nomad Capital, Race Capital, ABCDE, and the Arthur Hayes family office Maelstrom, resulting in a post-money valuation of $80 million.Co-founder Rachel Chu revealed that the financing round ended in May, structured as a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) plus token warrants. The new funding will be used to expand the team, integrate new protocols, and prepare for the second phase of the platform, with plans to hire more employees in functions such as growth, institutional partnerships, and engineering. Solayer also plans to launch its native token in the future, which is currently "in design."It is reported that earlier this month, Binance Labs stated that it has invested in Solayer, which is part of the same $12 million seed round financing. Last month, Solayer also announced an undisclosed amount of Pre-Seed financing, with angel investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.

ChainCatcher news, Polychain Capital announced a $6.7 million investment in Corn, a new yield network centered around Bitcoin. The protocol also received investments from Binance Labs, Framework Ventures, OKX Ventures, HTX, Ventures, and Relayer Capital.Chris Spadafora, founder of Corn and BadgerDAO, stated that Corn launched on August 19, aiming to enhance the utility of the world's first cryptocurrency and introduce new yield generation opportunities.It is reported that Corn is a new Ethereum L2 network that uses a tokenized Bitcoin as the network's gas fees and economic incentives, codenamed BTCN. Corn launched without fixed yields. The yield percentage will primarily depend on the growth of the ecosystem and the number of protocol participants achieved through Corn's flywheel mechanism.

According to ChainCatcher news, the open AI cloud service provider Hyperbolic has completed a $7 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Chapter One, LongHash, Bankless Ventures, Republic Digital, Nomad Capital, CoinSummer Labs, and Third Earth Capital. The funds will be used to advance the development of Hyperbolic's open AI cloud platform, including hiring key engineers and creating a supportive ecosystem for developers.Hyperbolic plans to integrate global GPU computing resources and leverage blockchain technology to provide verifiable and secure AI services, addressing the industry's bottleneck issues related to the cost and allocation of computing resources. Hyperbolic's first product is an AI inference service that promises high performance at a lower cost. Its innovative approach utilizes "heterogeneous computing" technology to optimize tensor operations across various hardware, allowing developers to access powerful open-source AI models through simple API calls. Additionally, Hyperbolic is building a GPU marketplace that offers an intuitive and automated interface for users to rent and supply GPUs, supported by its decentralized orchestration layer Hyper-dOS (Hyperbolic Distributed Operating System).

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, Pi Squared, a company that utilizes zero-knowledge technology to achieve verifiable computation, announced that it has raised $12.5 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital. Other participants in this round include ABCDE, Bloccelerate, Generative Ventures, Robot Ventures, and Samsung Next, as well as angel investors including Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation and Sreeram Kanaan, founder of EigenLayer.It is reported that Pi Squared is led by Grigore Rosu, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its products. Pi Squared's first product is the "Universal Settlement Layer," which can settle blockchain transactions in any programming language. Rosu stated that the company is also developing "Universal Zero-Knowledge Circuits," which will enable "trustless remote computation, AI, and interoperable smart contracts for any blockchain or dApp" through zero-knowledge technology. The project is expected to enter the testnet phase by the end of 2024.Additionally, the Web3 asset data platform RootData shows that 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.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, the Bitcoin re-staking protocol Lombard has completed a $16 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital.Lombard will use this funding to expand its Bitcoin re-staking ecosystem and develop alongside the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon. Lombard releases liquidity by issuing a liquidity and yield-generating staked Bitcoin token, LBTC.Additionally, the Web3 asset data platform RootData shows that Lombard was established in April 2024, dedicated to unlocking 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.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, blockchain company OpenLedger has raised $8 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital and Borderless Capital. Other participants include HashKey Capital, Finality Capital, Hash3, STIX, MH Ventures, Sreeram Kannan from EigenLayer, Sandeep Nailwal from Polygon, and Kenny Li from Manta.It is reported that OpenLedger focuses on building decentralized and data-driven artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company plans to use the funds to expand its team and strengthen its data pipeline infrastructure, with the mainnet expected to launch in the next quarter. The OpenLedger team stated that as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly prevalent, the importance of data continues to grow, and they are committed to bridging the gap between data and decentralization to drive the development of higher-quality AI models.

ChainCatcher news, Bitcoin data availability layer project Nubit has completed a $8 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Nomad Capital, Spartan Group, L2IV, Big Brain Holdings, GCR, Protagonist, Gate Ventures, Animoca, Mask Network, and others. The latest round of financing brings Nubit's total funding to $12 million. Nubit aims to develop the most secure and scalable data availability (DA) layer for multi-chain ecosystems, supporting limitless applications including AI, SocialFi, and GameFi. The team will launch the Alpha testnet in June, marking the final phase before the mainnet launch later this year.Additionally, the Web3 asset data platform RootData shows that Nubit is a scalable Bitcoin-native data availability layer, protected by Bitcoin. Nubit is capable of expanding Bitcoin's data capacity without compromise, empowering applications such as Ordinals, Layer 2s, price oracles, and indexers, thereby broadening the scope and efficiency of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

According to ChainCatcher, The Block reports that the DeFi protocol Shogun's developer, Intensity Labs, has completed a $6.9 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital and DAO5, with participation from Arrington Capital, Arthur Hayes' family office Maelstrom, and Build-a-Bera. Additionally, angel investors such as Cobie, Ansem, Ser Shokunin, and Meltem Demirors also participated in this round of financing. Co-founder Rahul Patel stated that this round of financing brings Shogun's fully diluted token valuation to $69 million.It is reported that Shogun is incubated by Binance Labs. In March of this year, Binance Labs invested in a total of 7 startups, including Shogun, during its sixth incubation program.Additionally, the Web3 asset data platform RootData shows that Shogun is an order flow aggregator and a smart liquidity router for modular networks, initially launched on Cosmos.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, the Bitcoin-focused startup Botanix Labs announced today that it has completed a total financing of $11.5 million. This round of financing was led by Polychain Capital, Placeholder Capital, Valor Equity Partners, ABCDE, and notable angel investors Andrew Kang, Fiskantes, Dan Held, The Crypto Dog, Charlie Spears, Altcoin Sherpa, Dovey Wan, Jebus, Icebergy, Crypto ISO, Davis (also known as "KarbonBased"), Walt Smith, and Domo, the creator of the BRC-20 token standard, among others, participating in the $8.5 million seed round financing that ended in April.In addition, Edessa Capital, Curiosity Capital, UTXO Management, XBTO Ventures, Blocmates, Eric Wall, and other investors participated in last year's pre-seed round financing.It is reported that the funds will be used to build Spiderchain, the first Layer 2 network on Bitcoin with full EVM equivalence. Since 2022, Botanix Labs has been dedicated to creating a decentralized financial system native to Bitcoin. They launched an early testnet version of the EVM Layer 2 protocol in November 2023, attracting over 200,000 active addresses and 10,000 experimental token releases. The first mainnet version of Spiderchain is expected to be released in early summer 2024.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, the Celestia ecosystem's liquid staking protocol MilkyWay has completed a $5 million financing round, led by Binance Labs and Polychain Capital, with participation from Hack VC, Crypto.com Capital, and LongHash Ventures. It is reported that the financing structure consists of a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) and token warrants for the lead investors, as well as a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT) for the participating investors.Additionally, the Web3 asset data platform RootData shows that MilkyWay is a liquid staking solution within the Celestia ecosystem, initially deployed and operated on Osmosis, with a long-term plan to migrate to Celestia's rollkit for native milkTIA issuance. When users stake TIA tokens on MilkyWay, they receive an on-chain representation of their TIA staking status, called milkTIA. This allows Celestia token holders to gain liquidity on their staked assets, enabling them to trade or use them as collateral for various DeFi products.

ChainCatcher news, according to Fortune magazine, the blockchain development team Movement Labs has completed a $38 million Series A funding round, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Hack VC, Foresight Ventures, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5, and Aptos Labs. This funding will support the company in bringing Facebook's Move virtual machine to Ethereum, addressing smart contract vulnerabilities and improving transaction throughput.According to the Web3 asset data platform RootData, Movement Labs was established in 2023 and previously completed a $3.4 million seed funding round in September 2023. In addition to its flagship product Movement L2, Movement Labs will also launch Move Stack, an execution layer framework compatible with rollup frameworks such as Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, the Web3 social protocol Tomo announced the completion of a $3.5 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Consensys, Symbolic Capital, OKX Ventures, Nomad Capital, Story Protocol, dao5, KuCoin Ventures, and HTX Ventures.It is reported that the platform has also launched a new TomoID wallet feature and plans to revamp its points reward system.

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, the decentralized AI network project Ritual has received millions of dollars in investment from Polychain Capital, which declined to disclose the specific investment amount.According to the crypto data platform RootData, Ritual announced the completion of a $25 million financing round in November 2023, led by Archetype, with participation from Accomplice and Robot Ventures.