financing

According to CoinDesk, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse stated in an interview with CNBC that he remains optimistic about Bitcoin but believes that Strategy's model of financing Bitcoin purchases through preferred stock has harmed the crypto market.Garlinghouse said, "Financial engineering will not drive long-term value." He believes that the long-term value of any digital asset comes from its utility and stated, "Michael Saylor's team is not focused on the right things, which harms the overall market."The focus of Garlinghouse's criticism is the financing mechanism used by Strategy to accumulate Bitcoin. For about the past year, Strategy has raised funds through the issuance of preferred stock to continue purchasing Bitcoin. Its STRC stock has an annual dividend yield of 11.5%, designed to trade close to $100.Garlinghouse pointed out that STRC is currently about 25% below that level, which is a "harsh denial" of the strategy. STRC hit an all-time low on Thursday, at one point trading about 26% below par value. Meanwhile, Strategy's common stock fell to its lowest level since February 2024, closing around $82 on Friday; Bitcoin dropped below $59,000.This week, Strategy's financing model is facing more pressure. CryptoQuant stated that Strategy should pause Bitcoin purchases and rebuild cash reserves. The coverage period for STRC dividend payments has shrunk from over 7 years to about 14 months. When STRC falls below $100, the mechanism of issuing stock and purchasing Bitcoin will stall, which is also the reason for the company to pause this mechanism.Benchmark-StoneX analyst Mark Palmer believes that Strategy's financing engine has simply become "less efficient," rather than having failed, and opposes comparing STRC to assets that have completely collapsed.

According to official news, AI-assisted development of the Web3 infrastructure layer Canopy has completed a $8.5 million seed round financing, with participation from Arrington Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Borderless Capital, and SNZ Capital.The raised funds will be used to support its mainnet launch, expansion of the engineering team, and the development of native AI development tools.

Stablecoin native payment company Daya has completed a $2.4 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Hivemind Capital, with participation from Lattice, Alliance, Globelink, and the Aptos Foundation. Daya was co-founded by Nigerian entrepreneurs Aleph L and Paul Joe, who previously co-founded Helicarrier (an early African crypto exchange and stablecoin remittance platform) and have worked at Circle, Microsoft, and Lyrik Ventures. It is reported that Daya aims to build a financial operating layer for cross-border businesses in Africa, integrating local banks, foreign exchange, crypto withdrawals and deposits, and payment processors through a single dashboard to achieve automated routing of optimal payment paths.

Former Ren Protocol founder Loong Wang announced the launch of the tokenized financial product settlement network Metal and completed a seed round financing co-led by Airwallex and Capital49, with Airwallex also joining as the first design partner. Metal was co-founded by Loong Wang and former Libra project partner lead Catherine Porter, aiming to build an institutional-grade full-stack infrastructure for tokenized financial products, natively supporting AI agents, authentication, and authorization, while providing global withdrawal and recharge channels covering 200 countries and 90 currencies.

The AI infrastructure project Orthogonal announced the completion of a $4.3 million financing round, led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, and other institutions.

According to PR Newswire, the AI Agent infrastructure project Orthogonal announced the completion of a $4.3 million seed round financing, led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, Blast, Outbound, Surreal, and others.Orthogonal positions itself as the underlying infrastructure for internet discovery, orchestration, and payment aimed at AI agents, providing a full suite of capabilities for service retrieval, cross-tool task automation, and on-chain instant payments.It is reported that the funds raised in this round will be used for core platform iterative development, expanding the engineering and marketing teams, continuously increasing the scale of platform developers, and improving the interconnectivity ecosystem for AI agents.

According to PR Newswire, AI Agent infrastructure company Sail Research announced the completion of $80 million in seed and Series A financing, led by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Redpoint Ventures, CRV, Theory Ventures, and others.Sail Research focuses on building infrastructure for AI Agents, aiming to address the computational power, cost, and operational limitations of current artificial intelligence systems in long-duration, multi-step tasks. Its API is compatible with OpenAI interfaces and supports mainstream open-source models such as DeepSeek and Gemma.

According to PR Newswire, AI infrastructure company Neurometric AI announced the completion of a $4 million financing round, with participation from Betaworks, ex-Ante, Everywhere.vc, and others.The company disclosed that it has officially launched an automated Token engineering platform to optimize the cost and performance management of AI Agent workloads, and the new funds will be used to expand the engineering and AI research teams.

According to Bloomberg, SK Hynix is expected to issue American Depositary Receipts on Nasdaq on July 10. This listing plan aims to raise nearly $30 billion and is expected to become one of the largest ADR issuances in history. The market generally believes that this move will significantly expand its global investor base and may drive a revaluation.Several asset management companies expect that if its valuation aligns with Micron, there is a 30% upside potential for the stock price in the coming year. A fund manager pointed out that SK Hynix should at least trade at a valuation level comparable to Micron, as demand for memory chips may continue to exceed supply in the coming years. This listing occurs during a rare boom period in the memory chip industry. The stock prices of Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung Electronics have all risen over 200% this year, marking the best annual performance in decades. The demand for HBM from AI servers is widely seen as a driving force behind a structural "memory supercycle."

AI company Mirendil announced the completion of a $200 million seed round financing, led by a16z and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from institutions like NVIDIA.The founding team consists of 20 researchers and engineers from leading institutions such as Anthropic, xAI, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI. a16z stated that Mirendil is building a system that can assist anyone in AI research and development, training models with expertise in cutting-edge AI research fields, and creating products around it to form a self-sustaining system that can autonomously address engineering problems and continuously advance without human intervention.

The predictive market analysis platform Polysights announced the completion of a $1.5 million financing round, with investors including YZi Labs S3, Maven 11 Capital, Varys Capital, Contribution Capital, and Edge Ventures.Polysights is building an automated and intelligent infrastructure for predictive markets. According to reports, Polysights is based on artificial intelligence technology and is aimed at individual traders and various institutions, enabling wallet-associated cluster screening, market anomaly detection, and the ability to analyze various trading strategies in predictive markets.

According to the Financial Times, the prediction market platform Kalshi is in talks with investors for a new round of financing, aiming for a valuation of approximately $40 billion, which could be completed as early as the third quarter of this year. Previously, Kalshi just completed a $1 billion financing last month, reaching a valuation of $22 billion, with investors including Coatue, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Morgan Stanley.Data shows that Kalshi's trading volume exceeded $17 billion last month, a significant increase from less than $5 billion a year ago, with about 65% of the trading volume coming from sports event-related prediction contracts.

On-chain yield infrastructure startup Ground announced the completion of a $3.6 million Pre-seed financing round, led by Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi, with participation from Nascent, Robot Ventures, Chapter One, Consonant Ventures, and others.It is reported that Ground primarily provides APIs for fintech companies and asset management institutions, enabling them to integrate on-chain yield products into existing applications without the need to build blockchain integration themselves. Its target customers include fintech platforms, digital banks, wealth management institutions, exchanges, and asset management companies for building yield, savings, and investment products.

Blockchain data infrastructure startup Cambrian has completed a $6 million seed round financing, led by Franklin Templeton and Polychain Capital, with participation from Flow Traders, Selini Capital, Paper Ventures, Nomad Capital, and others.Cambrian also previously secured $5.9 million in pre-seed financing led by a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, bringing the total funding to $11.9 million. It is reported that Cambrian was established in 2024 and currently provides APIs for institutions and AI Agents, covering real-time and historical on-chain data such as yield, risk, lending rates, trading activity, liquidity positions, and market sentiment, helping users allocate capital on-chain.The company plans to expand its existing APIs into a verifiable blockchain data oracle network, serving institutional financial clients, AI Agent builders, and protocols that need reliable data to control the flow of funds. Unlike traditional oracles that mainly provide price data, Cambrian aims to aggregate lending protocol data, DEX liquidity, social sentiment, developer activity, and historical market data.According to Cambrian, its platform has processed millions of API calls, currently indexing approximately $4.5 billion TVL across four major lending protocols, tracking 1,789 vaults under 895 curators, and monitoring over 320,000 DEX liquidity pools on Base and Solana. The company also plans to expand trading data support, adding Hyperliquid and richer perpetual contract data.

According to official news, the computing power market infrastructure company Ornn announced the completion of a $33 million seed round financing, led by a16z Crypto, with participation from Galaxy Ventures, Nordstar, and SV Angel, while Vine Ventures, Crucible Capital, Link Ventures, and Box Group continue to support.Ornn stated that a mature commodity market first requires reliable pricing data, which leads to price discovery, and price discovery then supports risk transfer, which in turn enables more efficient capacity allocation. The OCPI it launched is a transaction-based computing power index aimed at providing a unified and trustworthy price benchmark for settlement in the computing power market. Partners like ICE can promote risk transfer by directly referencing OCPI's futures and options contracts.Additionally, Ornn announced the launch of Ornn Compute, a physical capacity layer for the computing power market that can aggregate dedicated GPU capacity from multiple neoclouds onto a single platform, providing a unified access process, a secondary transfer market, and on-demand subleasing capabilities. Operators can obtain diversified demand from multiple tenants through a single underwriting contract, while buyers can view the sites, hardware configurations, and terms of the reserved clusters. This platform will make dedicated GPU capacity a liquid asset and allow previously idle capacity to be utilized.

According to Axios, the sports prediction market Onyx Odds has completed a $20 million financing round, led by Payward, the parent company of Kraken, with a post-financing valuation of $220 million.The company's CEO Leul Dadi stated that they are planning to expand into other trading products.

South Korean memory chip giant SK Hynix plans to raise up to 45 trillion won (approximately 29 billion USD) by issuing American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) in New York, with the related transaction set to start in July. If successful, this financing scale will surpass Alibaba's 25 billion USD IPO in 2014, becoming one of the largest overseas equity financing projects in the history of South Korean companies, and approaching historical records in the global capital market.According to the plan, SK Hynix will first issue shares in South Korea, then deposit the relevant shares into a South Korean securities depository as the underlying securities for the ADRs. South Korean regulators are expected to complete the review by July 3. The raised funds will primarily be used for the construction of the Yongin semiconductor cluster in South Korea and a factory in Indiana, USA, as well as the purchase of EUV extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment to support the expansion of advanced storage capacity related to AI. Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America have been selected as the lead underwriters.SK Hynix's confidence in this U.S. financing stems from its strong position in the AI industry chain. As a leading company in the global high bandwidth memory (HBM) sector, the company is a core supplier of AI accelerator chips for NVIDIA. Driven by AI demand, its stock price has increased by over 300% this year. CEO Lee Seok-hee stated that the company hopes to leverage the U.S. capital market to enhance its global influence and achieve a valuation level comparable to other AI hardware companies.

According to official news, the decentralized all-asset trading platform Vanta has completed a multi-million dollar seed round financing. This round of financing was led by the top TradFi platform Vantage and supported by several strategic investors, including the Co-Founder of Orderly. Vanta was founded by a core executive team from Binance, OKX, and Bitget, aiming to build an on-chain trading platform covering multiple asset classes such as crypto assets, stocks, commodities, indices, and foreign exchange.In terms of products, Vanta has launched Smart Trading and AI trading assistance features to enhance the on-chain trading experience. Currently, its public beta has started, and users participating in trading and activities during the public beta can earn double points rewards.