financing

According to The Block, London-based crypto startup OpenTrade has completed a $17 million strategic financing round, led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital, with participation from a16z crypto, AlbionVC, CMCC Global, and others, bringing its total funding to over $30 million.OpenTrade offers on-chain and real-world asset collateralized lending and stablecoin yield products aimed at institutions, planning to use this round of funding to expand its infrastructure in both regulated and unregulated scenarios. Its products include a permissionless protocol layer and a yield vault composition framework called Curation+, which can design yield strategies across RWA and on-chain assets for fintech companies, digital banks, vaults, and asset issuers. OpenTrade claims its total locked value has surpassed $200 million, with a projected transaction volume exceeding $250 million in 2025, and is expected to accumulate over $1 billion by the end of 2026.

According to statistics from the Web3 asset data platform RootData, the total disclosed financing amount in the crypto primary market in April 2026 is approximately $860 million. This month, a total of 55 financing events were disclosed (along with 5 mergers and acquisitions), which is similar to last month's 62 events, indicating stable overall activity.CeFi, infrastructure, and DeFi are the top three sectors in terms of financing amounts, with approximately $606 million (8 events), $105 million (14 events), and $90 million (19 events) respectively. Infrastructure had the highest frequency of activity this month with 14 events, as institutional attention continues to focus on foundational construction.The top three projects by financing amount are the Vietnamese CEX CAEX ($380 million, with investments from OKX Ventures and HashKey Capital), the global leading exchange Kraken ($200 million, strategic investment from Deutsche Bank), and the Layer1 project Pharos Network ($44 million in Series A). CAEX and Kraken together raised $580 million, accounting for about 67% of the total disclosed amount this month, indicating a continued significant concentration effect in the CeFi sector.The narrative of the prediction market continues to evolve, but the form is changing. This month, 8 prediction market-related projects received funding, all in angel or seed rounds ([XO Market](https://www.rootdata.com/zh/Projects/detail/XO Market?k=MTczOTA= "decentralized prediction market") $6 million, PUMPCADE multiple rounds totaling $6 million, [Atlasx Protocol](https://www.rootdata.com/zh/Projects/detail/Atlasx Protocol?k=MjQyNTA= "prediction market") $2 million, etc.). After last month's capital ignited the narrative of the prediction market, this sector is evolving from "single giant financing-driven" to "multi-project ecosystem construction."Kraken's "dual positioning" is the most noteworthy chain action this month: In the same month, Kraken acted both as a financing party (receiving a $200 million strategic investment from Deutsche Bank) and acquired the CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange Bitnomial for $550 million.In addition, 8 AI-related projects received funding in April, covering AI agents (Nava $8.3 million in seed round, AIW3.ai $2 million), AI infrastructure ([Cluster Protocol](https://www.rootdata.com/zh/Projects/detail/Cluster Protocol?k=MTIwMjc= "decentralized AI model computation verification protocol") $5 million), AI content creation (Oh $7.5 million in Series A), among other sub-directions. The narrative of AI and crypto integration has entered a stage of blossoming in multiple areas.GSR, Coinbase Ventures, L1D, Tether, Kosmos Ventures, and Animoca Brands are tied as the most active investors in April, each disclosing 3 investments.

According to official news, the AI-driven stock and cryptocurrency futures trading platform Stockcoin.ai has completed its seed round financing, led by Amber Group, with participation from angel investors in both the crypto and traditional finance sectors. The platform focuses on bridging on-chain data with the stock market.According to the disclosure, Stockcoin.ai will subsequently launch Hong Kong IPO subscription and US Pre-IPO features.

After previously announcing the completion of a $200 million Series B financing, Shenzhen Zhongqing Robot Technology Co., Ltd. has now completed a Series B+ financing, with the specific scale and investors yet to be disclosed.According to official sources, after the completion of the Series B financing, Zhongqing Robot's valuation exceeded 10 billion yuan, placing it in the top tier of valuations in the domestic humanoid robot sector. Recently, the foreign investor representative of Zhongqing Robot, REDA NIDHAKOU, has resigned from the board of directors of Zhongqing Robot.

According to LatePost, Kimi (Dark Side of the Moon) is about to complete a new round of $2 billion financing, with a post-investment valuation exceeding $20 billion. This round of financing is led by Meituan Longzhu, with participation from China Mobile, CPE (CITIC Industrial Fund), and others, with Longzhu alone contributing over $200 million. In January and February of this year, Kimi had just completed three rounds of financing, raising $500 million, $700 million, and $700 million, respectively. Including this latest financing, Kimi has raised over $3.9 billion in less than six months, with the latest valuation more than quadrupling from about $4.3 billion in November of last year.So far, Kimi's total financing has exceeded 37.6 billion RMB, making it the company with the highest cumulative financing among large model startups. Including IPO fundraising, MiniMax has raised about 15 billion RMB, and Zhipu has raised about 13 billion RMB. As of today’s midday market close, MiniMax's market capitalization is approximately 210 billion RMB, while Zhipu's is about 347 billion RMB.

According to Reuters, China's largest state-supported semiconductor investment institution—the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (Big Fund)—is negotiating to lead the first round of financing for DeepSeek, which may value the cutting-edge AI laboratory at around $45 billion. The report cites four informed sources indicating that negotiations are still ongoing.

According to official news, the AI predictive market operating system Elastics has completed a $2 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Frst, with participation from ElevenLabs, XBTO, RedStone, and a16z.

According to SolanaFloor, the on-chain reinsurance company OnRe Finance has completed a $5 million financing round, led by Forward and Rockaway. The funds will be used to accelerate the development of on-chain reinsurance business on the Solana network.Forward plans to deploy up to $25 million in OnRe's ONyc token to gain exposure to tokenized reinsurance returns.

According to Techfundingnews, quantum chip development company QuantWare announced the completion of a $178 million Series B financing round, making it one of the largest financings in the field of quantum processors to date. This round was participated in by Intel Capital, IQT, and others.The company plans to use the funds to build the world's largest dedicated quantum chip factory and to increase the scale of quantum processors by about 10 times compared to current commercial products, with a long-term goal of achieving a hundredfold expansion. Founded in 2021 and originating from QuTech, QuantWare focuses on the design and manufacturing of quantum processing units (QPUs) and has supplied over 50 customers in more than 20 countries, making it one of the largest commercial QPU suppliers in the world. Unlike IBM, Google, and others that follow a self-research and self-use model, QuantWare positions itself as a neutral supplier, with its VIO platform supporting a modular "chiplet" architecture to help third-party companies scale quantum chips.The company stated that it will break through the scaling bottlenecks in packaging, wiring, and manufacturing of quantum computing through modular design and a dedicated factory with an approximately 20-fold increase in capacity, accelerating the development of the global quantum industry chain.

According to Fortune, the AI agent platform Nova Intelligence announced the completion of a $31.5 million Series A funding round, led by Chemistry, with participation from Accel, Conviction, and SAP's venture capital arm SAP.io.The AI platform built by Nova is used to analyze, modernize, and generate custom code that operates the payroll, supply chain, and financial functions of Fortune 500 companies.

According to CNBC, Sierra, an enterprise AI startup co-founded by OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor and former Google executive Clay Bavor, has completed a $950 million Series E funding round, with a post-money valuation of $15.8 billion.This round of financing was led by Tiger Global and GV, a venture capital firm under Alphabet, with participation from existing investors such as Benchmark, Sequoia, and Greenoaks.Sierra primarily provides AI customer service agent products, automatically handling customer service and support scenarios for enterprise clients. It is reported that Sierra's annual recurring revenue has surpassed $150 million over the past eight quarters.Bret Taylor stated that Sierra operates using a "model cluster" approach, combined with its own fine-tuning layer, to provide AI agent services for enterprise clients. Previously, Sierra completed a $175 million financing round in October 2024, at which time its valuation was $4.5 billion.

According to Globenewswire, the Nasdaq-listed Solana treasury company DeFi Development announced the launch of a $200 million ATM financing plan.The company stated that the raised funds will primarily be used to continue executing its Solana reserve strategy and that shares will only be issued when there is a positive effect on the value of each shareholder's SOL holdings, ensuring that the financing has a "accretive" nature.

Bitcoin mining company and energy infrastructure platform Hut 8 announced that its subsidiary has reached a $200 million Bitcoin collateralized credit agreement with FalconX, replacing the previous financing arrangement from Coinbase Credit. The new financing has an annual fixed interest rate of 7.0%, a decrease of 200 basis points from the previous 9.0% financing from Coinbase; during the period from December 2023 to March 2025, the financing cost was as high as 10.5%–11.5%, with a cumulative reduction of up to 450 basis points, demonstrating progress in continuously optimizing debt costs.After this refinancing, Hut 8 has approximately 3,300 BTC converted to an uncollateralized state, valued at about $260 million based on the market value as of May 1, 2026, significantly enhancing its balance sheet flexibility and liquidity. Meanwhile, the credit structure maintains key risk control terms, including a limited recourse structure, a no-rehypothecation clause, and a fixed LTV threshold design, preventing additional margin calls triggered by a decline in Bitcoin prices.Hut 8's management stated that this financing not only reduces financing costs but also releases more uncollateralized Bitcoin assets, helping to enhance capital allocation flexibility across different market cycles; FalconX emphasized that this transaction reflects its ongoing expansion capabilities in institutional-level Bitcoin credit solutions.

According to TechFundingNews, the blockchain trading platform Ekiden announced the completion of a $2 million seed round financing, with the company's valuation reaching $20 million.This round of financing was led by Unicorn Factory Ventures and P2 Ventures, and also attracted angel investors who have previously invested in projects such as GSR, Pyth, Aptos, LayerZero, and Cube Exchange.It is reported that Ekiden is committed to bringing institutional-level trading on-chain, providing efficient and secure trading solutions through blockchain technology.

Bitcoin reserve company Capital B announced the completion of a €1.1 million financing, with the funds subscribed by Blockstream CEO Adam Back for the BSA 2026-02 equity warrant.At the same time, the company has lowered the conversion price of the OCA B-04 convertible bonds from €5.174 per share to €2.59, and added a two-year equity warrant (BSA OC) for each converted bond. This move aims to optimize the capital structure and accelerate the advancement of the Bitcoin reserve strategy.

The stablecoin financial services platform UnblockPay announced the completion of a $4.5 million seed round financing, led by Prelude, with participation from Plug and Play, Wintermute, Reverie, Signature Ventures, Triaxis Capital, Crescera Capital, and a group of angel investors. The new funds will support its development of regulated financial products, helping businesses integrate stablecoins into their daily financial operations and enabling enterprise users to seamlessly exchange between fiat currency and mainstream stablecoins like USDC and USDT.

According to Cointelegraph, the amount of venture capital funding in the crypto sector dropped to $659 million in April, the lowest monthly total since July 2024.

According to Cointelegraph, the venture capital market in the cryptocurrency industry significantly cooled down in April, with the total amount of cryptocurrency VC financing dropping to $659 million, completing 63 rounds of financing, a sharp decline of 74% compared to March's $2.6 billion (84 rounds), marking the lowest monthly financing level since 2024.As of 2026, the cumulative financing amount in the cryptocurrency industry has reached $5.64 billion. Since peaking at $3.84 billion in October 2025, cryptocurrency VC financing has continued to decline, during which the total market capitalization of the global cryptocurrency market has also fallen by about 37%. In terms of sectors, DeFi protocols led with 12 rounds of financing, while blockchain services and AI-related cryptocurrency projects each completed 8 rounds. The venture capital department of market maker GSR became the most active investor in April, participating in 4 financing deals; institutions such as Tether, Animoca Brands, and Coinbase Ventures also participated in 3 transactions each.

Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund is investing approximately $624 million in Anduril's latest funding round, making it one of the largest investors in this round.It is reported that Anduril's funding round is approximately $4 billion, with a valuation expected to reach $60 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Thrive Capital. Anduril is a U.S. AI military startup, and its founder Palmer Luckey previously launched a digital bank called Erebor with Peter Thiel, specifically designed for cryptocurrency and tech startups.

The Solana-based yield trading platform Exponent Finance announced the completion of a $5 million seed round financing, led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Solana Ventures, RockawayX, L1D, Prelude, and Theia Blockchain, as well as several key figures from the Solana ecosystem as angel investors.It is reported that this round of financing started in May last year and was completed in August, bringing Exponent's total financing to $7.1 million. Exponent stated that the funds will be used to expand its yield trading platform and upgrade to a more complete on-chain yield infrastructure, covering the active yield management needs of the Solana ecosystem.