financing

The European Central Bank (ECB) rejected the proposal to relax regulations on euro stablecoins, believing that such measures are too risky and could undermine financial stability and the transmission of monetary policy.Bruegel suggested at the informal meeting of EU finance ministers held in Nicosia, Cyprus, that liquidity requirements for stablecoin issuers should be lowered and that they should be allowed to access ECB funding support when necessary to combat a market dominated by dollar stablecoins and to avoid "digital dollarization." However, officials, including central bank president Lagarde, strongly opposed this, arguing that stablecoins could destabilize bank deposits, increase banks' funding costs, weaken lending capacity, and interfere with interest rate control.Although some finance ministers had mixed feelings about the proposal, several central bank officials questioned the idea of making the ECB the "lender of last resort" for stablecoin issuers. The EU is currently implementing strict regulations on stablecoins under the MiCAR framework, while the GENIUS Act passed in the U.S. in 2025 adopts more lenient rules. Currently, euro stablecoins account for only 0.3% of the global stablecoin supply, while Europe is advancing the digital euro project to enhance payment sovereignty.

Japanese yen stablecoin issuer JPYC announced that its Series B round of financing is about to be completed, with a total financing amount expected to reach approximately 5 billion yen. New investors in this round include Life Design Fund, IHD STRATEGY FUND, a fund under Awa Bank, and Meiji Yasuda Future Co-Creation Fund, among others.JPYC stated that the new financing will mainly be used for system and application development, recruitment of business expansion talent, promotion of stablecoin payment and management business, as well as the construction of M2M (machine-to-machine) payment scenarios for AI Agents. JPYC obtained a license for Japanese money transfer operators in 2025 and began issuing the stablecoin JPYC, which is pegged to the yen at a 1:1 ratio, in the same year. The company reported that within about 7 months of issuance, the number of accounts reached 18,000, with a cumulative issuance exceeding 2.5 billion yen and a total transaction volume exceeding 35 billion yen. Currently, JPYC has been deployed on four chains: Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, and Kaia, and has integrated with the LINE ecosystem Web3 wallet Unifi, aiming to promote the adoption of stablecoins among ordinary users in Japan.

Two informed sources revealed that CATL plans to participate in the financing activities of the domestic artificial intelligence company DeepSeek. DeepSeek's first round of financing aims for approximately 50 billion yuan, which may be completed as early as next month, and after the transaction, the company's valuation may exceed 350 billion yuan. JD.com and NetEase have also been reported to be in talks to invest, but the final investors and amounts may still be adjusted.In recent years, CATL has been accelerating its layout in the AI data center infrastructure business. In addition to power batteries, it also provides backup power batteries and energy storage systems for data centers. Earlier this month, a CATL affiliate invested $942 million in GDS Holdings and invested in the power supply system manufacturer Zhongheng Electric.Reports indicate that DeepSeek has built its own data center in Inner Mongolia and is currently recruiting data center operations and maintenance personnel in Inner Mongolia. Due to the rapid growth in AI computing power demand, the demand for energy storage and stable power supply in data centers has also increased, allowing CATL to further enter the AI infrastructure track.Previous reports stated that DeepSeek's current round of financing has attracted attention from several Chinese capital sources, including the national AI investment fund and technology giants. DeepSeek has not yet achieved large-scale revenue, but its low-cost open-source model has already created competitive pressure on companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The cross-chain infrastructure platform Squid has completed a $6 million strategic financing round, led by North Island Ventures, with participation from Ripple, Dialectic, Borderless, and others.It is reported that Squid was initially incubated within the Axelar ecosystem and later developed into an independent platform. Since its launch in 2023, Squid claims to have processed over $6 billion in cross-chain transaction volume, covering more than 100 blockchains, with a total of over 4 million transactions and more than 1 million users. After this round of financing, Squid's total funding amount has reached $13.5 million. The company plans to use the new funds to launch new consumer-facing products, further simplifying the process for users to access, manage, and use crypto assets across chains.

The new generation Perp DEX PopDEX has announced the completion of a $30 million financing round, led by Foresight Ventures. PopDEX is a trader-centric decentralized perpetual contract trading platform that focuses on capital efficiency, trading experience, and value distribution mechanisms, aiming to build an on-chain derivatives trading platform driven by contributions from real trading.

Web3 fintech startup Jia announced the completion of a $3 million seed round financing, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, A100x Ventures, TCG, and Hashed Emergent. So far, Jia has raised a total of $7.3 million.Jia currently operates multiple decentralized lending pools and introduces liquidity through networks such as Base, Stellar, Arbitrum, and Polygon, while using stablecoins for cross-border settlements to reduce the cost and time of cross-border remittances. The new funding will be used to expand features such as business bank accounts and cash flow management.

AI startup Hark announced the completion of a $700 million financing round, with a post-money valuation of $6 billion. This round is Series A financing, led by Parkway Venture Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and others.Hark stated that it will use the funds to expand GPU infrastructure, accelerate the development of large models, grow its team from about 70 people to 200 engineers, and develop next-generation AI hardware, aiming to create a personal intelligent system capable of voice interaction, visual understanding, persistent memory, and high personalization.

According to The Block, the RWA yield protocol TownSquare announced the completion of its Pre-A round financing, bringing its total financing to approximately $16.25 million. The funds will be used to advance yield products based on institutional strategies and cross-chain brokerage services.The protocol focuses on bringing yield from institution-backed on-chain assets to ordinary users. Currently, the scale of institution-backed assets on-chain is approximately $36 billion, with yields exceeding the traditional 3%-5% level of U.S. Treasury bonds. TownSquare will build yield vaults around stablecoin USD1, tokenized gold, USDC, cbBTC, and other RWA, and will work with partners like World Liberty Financial to advance a USD1 pipeline plan with a scale of about $100 million.

According to The Block, Bitcoin hardware wallet manufacturer Foundation has completed a new round of financing of $6.4 million, led by Fulgur Ventures with participation from Arche Capital and others, aimed at expanding from Bitcoin self-custody wallets to scenarios such as identity, multi-factor authentication, and AI agent authorization. This round of financing brings the company's total funding to $16.5 million, with valuation and round structure undisclosed.Foundation also announced that its flagship device, Passport Prime, is now available for sale to all users, integrating a Bitcoin hardware wallet, FIDO security key, 2FA storage, confidential information vault, and 50 GB of encrypted storage, emphasizing "human authorization" through dedicated hardware. In addition, the company is expanding the scope of the KeyOS developer platform and plans to launch the KeyOS app store by the end of the second quarter, with initial partners including Cake Wallet.

Crypto financial infrastructure Cycles announced the completion of a $6.4 million seed round financing, led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Compound VC, Primitive Ventures, and others. After this round of financing, the total amount raised has reached $8.7 million.The company aims to build a private clearing network for the crypto market and seeks to enhance capital utilization through a "clearing network" mechanism, achieving multi-party net settlement through zero-knowledge proofs and trusted execution environments, thereby reducing counterparty risk and minimizing liquidity consumption.

The digital asset trading platform Temple Digital Group has completed a private fundraising round, with SBI Group as the lead investor. The specific amount of financing has not been disclosed. Temple is expanding its product portfolio by introducing new capital and is preparing to go public in a regulated market in the second half of 2026.Previously, it was reported that Temple Digital Group completed a $5 million seed round of financing last October, led by Paper Ventures.

According to BBX data, yesterday the layout of traditional payment institutions in the cryptocurrency infrastructure showed divergence, with institutions having clear differences in their views on ETH and the altcoin sector. The core dynamics are as follows:Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE: $MA) signed an acquisition agreement for the UK stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK on March 17 for a maximum of $1.8 billion (including $300 million in performance-based payments), which directly led Mastercard to abandon its previously pursued strategic investment plan in Zerohash (a privately held company). According to CoinDesk on May 19, Mastercard exited negotiations with Zerohash after the completion of the BVNK acquisition, and Zerohash is currently seeking to initiate a new financing round with a valuation of over $1.5 billion (higher than the $1 billion valuation established during the D-2 round of financing of $104 million in September 2025); the strategic logic behind Mastercard's acquisition of BVNK is that BVNK has a stablecoin payment infrastructure covering over 130 countries and a difficult-to-replicate combination of multi-country payment licenses; Mastercard's Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert stated that the goal is to integrate stablecoins into the core network of Mastercard Move cross-border payments, rather than treating them as a peripheral experiment.JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: $JPM) analysts cited by CoinDesk on May 19 released the latest research report indicating that in the current market environment, Ethereum and the broader altcoin sector will continue to lag behind Bitcoin, primarily due to three structural weaknesses: weak network activity, stagnation in DeFi ecosystem growth (Solana's TVL has dropped from a peak of $13.1 billion in 2025 to about $5.5 billion), and limited real-world adoption scenarios; analysts believe that for the altcoin sector to catch up with Bitcoin's performance, a "significant network activity explosion" is a prerequisite, and this condition currently lacks visible short-term catalysts.

According to Bloomberg, informed sources revealed that the prediction market Kalshi has raised an additional $200 million from two new investors, Baillie Gifford and Layer Global, expanding the previous $1 billion financing led by Coatue Management, with the company's valuation remaining unchanged at $22 billion.Earlier, Kalshi announced at the beginning of this month the completion of a $1 billion Series F financing led by Coatue Management, with a valuation of $22 billion. Other participants included Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley, and ARK Invest. Kalshi's monthly trading volume in April exceeded $14 billion, with an annualized revenue of over $1.5 billion.

According to WSJ, Anthropic's revenue is expected to reach $10.9 billion in the second quarter, more than doubling from $4.8 billion in the first quarter, and it will achieve profitability at the operational level for the first time. Due to its enormous computing power requirements, the company may not be able to maintain profitability throughout the year; the operational profits have already accounted for the costs of training new models but do not include equity incentive expenses.As part of an ongoing financing round, Anthropic disclosed this data to investors, and this round of financing is likely to raise its valuation above that of OpenAI. Last summer, Anthropic shared financial data with investors, which indicated that the company might not achieve full-year profitability until at least 2028.

According to CNBC, fintech company Mercury announced the completion of a new round of financing of $200 million, led by TCV, with participation from institutions such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and Coatue Management.Mercury primarily provides banking services for startups, currently serving over 300,000 clients and achieving approximately $650 million in annualized revenue. The company stated that the recent AI startup boom has significantly driven the demand for new company registrations and account openings, becoming an important driver of its growth.At the same time, Mercury also announced that it has received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and plans to apply for a federal banking license to expand its lending and payment network (such as Zelle) access capabilities, while reducing reliance on partner banks. The company's founder stated that the future goal remains to go public rather than being acquired.

According to Fortune, the decentralized derivatives trading platform Variational announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto and Coinbase Ventures.The company is headquartered in the Cayman Islands and is dedicated to building an on-chain derivatives protocol for institutional and traditional financial traders. By aggregating liquidity from traditional finance and the crypto market, it aims to provide an on-chain market for real assets such as oil and commodities that can be traded instantly. Its core product, the Omni platform, adopts a zero-fee model and combines a liquidity pool mechanism to enhance market depth and execution efficiency.Variational stated that its goal is not to compete directly with centralized exchanges but to connect multi-source liquidity through a "brokerage-style" model, including traditional financial market makers and mainstream crypto trading platforms, to address the "liquidity cold start" problem in on-chain markets.

According to Bloomberg, AI search startup Exa Labs has completed a new round of financing of $250 million, led by a16z, with a post-investment valuation rising to $2.2 billion.The company focuses on building the infrastructure for search engines in the AI era. After this round of financing, its valuation has increased more than three times compared to about $700 million last fall. Industry insiders believe that with the accelerated popularization of artificial intelligence, the traditional search industry landscape dominated by Google may undergo a reshaping.