financing

The on-chain derivatives protocol MYX has announced the completion of a strategic financing round led by Consensys, with participation from Consensys Mesh and Systemic Ventures. Following this round of financing, Consensys officially becomes MYX's largest investor, and the funds will be used to support the release of MYX V2 and the deployment of a modular derivatives settlement engine.MYX V2 marks the platform's transition from a vertically integrated DApp to a modular settlement layer, allowing other products and platforms to build on top of it. This design aims to prevent the fragmentation of derivatives liquidity across chains and promote the industry's evolution from isolated DEXs to shared clearing and settlement primitives. At the protocol level, MYX V2 integrates account abstraction based on EIP-4337 and EIP-7702, combined with Chainlink's latest permissionless oracle stack, to address long-standing pain points such as slow onboarding of long-tail assets, low capital utilization efficiency, and complex trading processes.

According to official news, the sports prediction trading platform PRED has completed a $2.5 million seed round financing led by Accel, with other participants including Coinbase Ventures' Base Ecosystem Fund (BEF) and Reverie.Pred is built on Base and claims an execution speed of only 200 milliseconds, which brings it closer to the standards of financial exchanges than any service offered in the traditional sports prediction field. Pred is currently in an internal testing phase and uses an invite-only registration process.

According to reports, in a round of financing expansion that Alibaba (09988.HK) and Tencent Holdings (00700.HK) have participated in, the artificial intelligence startup Dark Side of the Moon is seeking to raise its valuation to $10 billion, hoping to capitalize on investors' strong interest in Chinese AI model startups.According to informed sources, the company that developed the Kimi chatbot initiated discussions for additional financing in late January to meet investor demand. Just about a month ago, the company completed a $500 million financing round at a valuation of $4.3 billion. Sources said that existing investors, including Alibaba, Tencent, and Five Sources Capital, have already committed over $700 million in the first phase of the latest financing round.

The founder of Openclaw, Peter Steinberger, recently confirmed in an interview with Lex Fridman that Openclaw has received acquisition offers from multiple companies. Regarding potential funding in the hundreds of millions or even billions, Steinberger stated, "I am not interested at all. I have been a CEO once, and that path would consume all my time and lead to conflicts of interest, such as prioritizing the enterprise version or modifying the open-source license, which would harm the community. What I want is completely free and open-source without any conditions. Moreover, relying on donations is simply not sustainable; even popular projects like Tailwind are laying off staff."Additionally, Steinberger mentioned that Openclaw is currently losing money. Monthly revenue is between $10,000 and $20,000, but it subsidizes personal maintenance of dependency projects. Companies like OpenAI provide some support, but it is still not sustainable. Regarding the option to collaborate with large labs, Steinberger stated that the core condition is that the project must remain open-source, similar to Chrome and Chromium. "This matter is too important to be left entirely to one company. Moreover, the community atmosphere of ClawCon is particularly precious; it embodies the enthusiasm that was present in the early days of the internet. I want to spread it to more people; this year is the year of personal agents, and collaborating with labs is the fastest way. I have never worked at a large company, and I want to experience that."

AI giant Anthropic announced this morning that it has completed a $30 billion financing round at a valuation of $380 billion, led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue Management, with other investors including large tech companies like Nvidia and Microsoft.Musk angrily criticized Anthropic in his announcement, stating that it "hates white people and Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals, and men. This is a misanthropic evil that must be corrected." Musk claimed that "Anthropic cannot avoid the inevitable irony of 'humanism' ultimately evolving into 'misanthropy.' When you chose this name, you sealed that fate."Previously, some AI users reported that Anthropic's large language model exhibits bias in its responses to certain specific questions. For example, the model assigns significantly lower value scores to white lives compared to Black, South Asian, and East Asian lives in extreme moral dilemma questions like "whose life is more valuable."

According to official news, YOAKE entertainment, the company behind Record Protocol, announced today the completion of a $3.2 million (approximately 500 million yen) financing round, exclusively led by the Sony Innovation Fund (SIF). At the same time, Record is further deepening its partnership with Sony Block Solutions Labs Pte. Ltd. (SBSL), acting as a significant contributor to the ecosystem, accelerating its role as the core intellectual property financial (IPFi) infrastructure of Soneium, and promoting widespread implementation in fields such as music, film and television, gaming, and anime.This strategic cooperation marks an important advancement in the integration of traditional IP with blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies, creating new possibilities for Record to build an open infrastructure for global entertainment fans.

According to Bloomberg, MicroStrategy CEO Phong Le stated in an interview that the company will gradually shift from relying on issuing common stock to raising funds through the issuance of preferred stock for subsequent Bitcoin purchases.

Strategy CEO Phong Le stated in a Bloomberg live broadcast that Strategy will begin to shift from equity financing to preferred stock financing to raise funds for purchasing BTC.

Cango releases the latest company updates, covering institutional financing and management shareholding, with key points including:Management and institutional investment: The company has completed a $10.5 million investment closing from EWCL; at the same time, Chairman Mr. Xin Jin and Director Mr. Chang-Wei Chiu have signed an agreement to plan an additional total personal investment of $65 million.EcoHash U.S. subsidiary established: The company has established a wholly-owned subsidiary, EcoHash Technology LLC, in Dallas, serving as the global engine for AI business. Meanwhile, former Zoom infrastructure head Jack Jin has been appointed as CTO, responsible for building the technical foundation for managing ultra-large-scale GPU clusters.De-leveraging and building strength: By adjusting part of the BTC holdings to repay loans, the balance sheet has been significantly strengthened.Ensuring transformation ammunition: Converting some static assets into liquid funds, along with this new financing, ensures the funding sustainability during the transformation period, fully supporting the R&D of AI computing power infrastructure and software orchestration platforms.

AI quantitative trading company Inference Research announced the completion of a $20 million seed round financing, led by Avenir Group. The funds will be used to expand the company's self-developed infrastructure to integrate traditional finance and digital assets, while accelerating talent recruitment. It is reported that the company is forming a team of quantitative analysts, engineers, and researchers.

According to Techfundingnews, Superset, a unified liquidity execution layer aimed at stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and on-chain foreign exchange, has completed a $4 million seed round of financing. This round of investment was led by 7RIDGE and Exponential Science Capital.Currently, Superset is collaborating with liquidity providers, market makers, stablecoin issuers, aggregators, and wallets to prepare for a larger-scale product launch. When discussing the core challenges that Superset aims to address, the team stated that the stablecoin market is vast and growing rapidly, but is structurally highly fragmented. This is precisely the problem that Superset seeks to solve.

According to on-site reports from Foresight News, the Chief Executive Officer of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), Ashley Alder, stated at the Consensus 2026 conference that the SFC is committed to establishing a comprehensive regulatory ecosystem for virtual assets and announced three new initiatives:Guaranteed Financing: Allow brokers to provide financing services to clients with good credit backgrounds, with collateral that may include securities and virtual assets. Initially, this will only be open to Bitcoin and Ethereum, and a prudent haircut will be required in accordance with traditional financial standards.Perpetual Contracts: A high-level regulatory framework will be announced, allowing licensed platforms to offer perpetual contract products. This service is currently limited to "professional investors" and requires platforms to have extremely high transparency and the ability to manage volatility fees and automatic liquidation risks.Associated Market Makers: Regulations will be relaxed to allow licensed platforms to provide liquidity through their affiliated market-making units, provided they can demonstrate functional independence and strict management of conflicts of interest.Alder pointed out that tokenized assets have developed rapidly over the past year, with the asset management scale of tokenized gold reaching $400 million, doubling in the past six months. Currently, the SFC has authorized 11 tokenized money market funds. In addition, Project Ensemble is piloting the use of tokenized deposit settlement money market funds. Regarding the regulatory roadmap, the SFC has published a consultation summary on virtual asset trading and custody and plans to collaborate with the SAR government to submit relevant legislative proposals within this year.

Stablecoin infrastructure startup Levl announced the completion of a $7 million seed funding round, led by Galaxy Ventures, with participation from Protagonist, Deus X, Blockchain Builders Fund, and others.The company is dedicated to providing stablecoin payment infrastructure for digital wallets and fintech companies, having served over 20 clients with an annual transaction volume exceeding $1 billion. The founder stated that its platform can help clients achieve cross-border instant payments at a lower cost without the need to build complex systems. Levl plans to double its team size and focus on expanding into the Latin American and African markets.

AI regulatory compliance startup Bretton AI announced the completion of a $75 million Series B funding round, led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from Greylock, Thomson Reuters Ventures, and Citi Ventures.The company was founded by Will Lawrence, a former employee of the compliance team at stablecoin infrastructure company Paxos. Its clients are primarily focused on fintech service companies, including fintech startups such as Mercury, Ramp, Robinhood, and Coinbase, as well as some community regional banks, helping them achieve anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance operations.

Venture capital firm a16z announced it is leading the seed round financing for Shizuku AI, marking the fund's first investment in a Japanese AI startup. Shizuku AI was founded by Berkeley PhD Akio Kodaira and focuses on developing AI companions and characters, combining cutting-edge AI technology with uniquely Japanese character design.

According to Axios, sources say that Backpack Exchange, a centralized crypto trading platform created by former FTX and Alameda executives, is in talks for a new round of financing, with a pre-money valuation of around $1 billion.

According to PR Newswire, the privacy stablecoin project Zoth announced the completion of a new round of strategic financing, with the specific amount not disclosed. Taisu Ventures led the round, with participation from Luca Netz, CEO and owner of the NFT project "Fat Penguin" Pudgy Penguins, and JLabs Digital.The new funding will support its development of stablecoin infrastructure based on a "privacy-first" framework.

According to RootData, last week (February 2-6), there were a total of 14 financing events and 4 mergers and acquisitions in the cryptocurrency market, involving nearly $300 million.Among the 14 financing events, cryptocurrency custody platform Anchorage received $100 million in strategic financing from Tether; compliance and risk management solution provider TRM Labs secured $70 million in Series C funding from institutions including Blockchain Capital, Goldman Sachs, and Citibank, with a post-money valuation of $1 billion; DEX aggregator Jupiter obtained $35 million in strategic financing from ParaFi Capital.

Financial technology company Ruvo has completed a $4.6 million financing round, led by 1confirmation, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Rebel Fund, Blast, Neer Ventures, First Check Ventures, and Mission Street Capital.Ruvo integrates Pix, stablecoins, bank transfers (ACH/wire), and Visa into a single application.

Singapore cryptocurrency company Penguin Securities announced the completion of approximately 2.8 billion yen (about 18 million USD) in financing, with investors including mint, Tokyo University of Science Investment Management Company, and several other Japanese investment institutions.The company was co-founded in 2023 by Japanese entrepreneurs Yuya Kuratomi, Kentaro Kawabe, and Shogo Setoguchi, and has obtained a Capital Markets Services License from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in 2025.