Hotcoin Investment and Financing Weekly Report (8.17–8.23) | A total of 28 public investment and financing events, with financing data showing significant growth compared to last week

From August 17 to August 23, the cryptocurrency market saw a total of 28 financing events, including 7 in infrastructure, 6 in DeFi, 3 in gaming, 2 in CeFi, 2 in privacy, and 8 in other areas (including software development, artificial intelligence, mining, crypto media, tools, creator economy, security solutions, Launchpad, etc.).

This week, there were 3 financing events exceeding ten million dollars:

Bitcoin mining company Stronghold completed a $175 million acquisition financing round, with Bitfarms as the investor.

The on-chain IP ecosystem Story Protocol completed an $80 million Series B financing round, with investors including a16z and Polychain.

Fabric Cryptography, which builds hardware for next-generation cryptography, completed a $33 million Series A financing round, with investors including Blockchain Capital and 1kx.

This week, the investment and financing activity in the cryptocurrency market increased by 40% compared to last week, with infrastructure and DeFi remaining the most active investment sectors, and the investment landscape beginning to diversify. Bitcoin mining company Stronghold secured the largest financing amount of the week, totaling $175 million.

The investment and financing projects of this week sorted by financing amount are shown in the figure below:

Infrastructure

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-22, Ark completed a $2.5 million Pre-seed financing round, with investors including Draper Dragon and Tim Draper. Ark is a Bitcoin Layer 2 scaling solution designed to provide a more streamlined user experience while retaining self-custody. Unlike the Lightning Network, users can make payments without managing payment channels or inbound/outbound liquidity.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-22, Stork completed a $4 million seed financing round, with investors including Faction and CMS Holdings. Stork is a Web3 oracle provider aimed at creating simpler, cheaper, and more flexible on-chain data options for decentralized protocols. It connects data publishers with protocols, decentralized applications, and other data consumers through composite oracle services.
3. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-21, TMRW completed a $1.3 million Pre-seed financing round, with investors including Maple VC and Brad Mills. TMRW is a social payment application supported by the Bitcoin Lightning Network, enabling cross-border peer-to-peer payments through Lightspark and ZeroHash. The application uses the open payment standard Universal Money Addresses built on the Lightning Network to send fiat currency and Bitcoin instantly across borders.
4. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-21, Skyfire completed an $8.5 million seed financing round, with investors including Arrington Capital and Sfermion. Skyfire is a financial stack for the AI economy, providing an instant, global, and open payment system for AI agents to conduct fully autonomous transactions among AI agents, legal masters, data platforms, service providers, and other goods and services.
5. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-20, GenLayer completed a $7.5 million seed financing round, with investors including North Island Ventures and Arrington Capital. GenLayer is a blockchain that breaks the boundaries of smart contracts by making them intelligent and connecting them to the internet. GenLayer's AI smart contracts, called "Intelligent Contracts," can process natural language and interact with the web, unlocking a multitude of new use cases.
6. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-20, Corn completed a $6.7 million seed financing round, with investors including Polychain and Binance Labs. Corn is an Ethereum Layer 2 that uses Bitcoin as a gas token. BTCN is its hybrid tokenized Bitcoin, backed 1:1 by native BTC.
7. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-19, Fabric Cryptography completed a $33 million Series A financing round, with investors including Blockchain Capital and 1kx. Fabric Cryptography is a startup focused on developing advanced cryptographic algorithm hardware, particularly dedicated computer chips for zero-knowledge proof technology.

DeFi

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-22, Ducat completed a $1.25 million Pre-seed financing round, with investors including UTXO Management and CMS Holdings. Ducat is a decentralized stablecoin protocol native to Bitcoin L1, with its governance token DUCAT being a Bitcoin native governance token in the form of Bitcoin Runes. Governance will be achieved through zero-knowledge proof circuits recorded on Bitcoin ordinal inscriptions.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-22, SatLayer completed an $8 million Pre-seed financing round, with investors including Hack VC and Castle Island Ventures. SatLayer is a Bitcoin staking platform built on Babylon. With SatLayer, users can now reclaim their Bitcoin and Bitcoin liquidity staking tokens from platforms like Solv Protocol, Lombard, Bedrock, pStake, and PumpBTC, which are used to secure BVS (Bitcoin Validated Service).
3. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-22, Credbull completed a $5.2 million financing round, with investors including Gnosis and LucidBlue Ventures. Credbull is a licensed private credit DeFi platform offering structured high fixed income. With the support of Polygon, Credbull provides stable, high fixed income that is independent of market volatility as part of a balanced investment portfolio.
4. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-21, BIO Protocol completed a $6.2 million public financing round, with unknown investors. The BIO Protocol is the financial layer of DeSci, aimed at accelerating the influx of capital and talent into on-chain science. bioDAO can use the auction contracts of the BIO Protocol to raise funds and directly allocate them to research programs, IP assets, and other biotechnology organizations.
5. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-21, BSX completed a $4 million seed financing round, with investors including Blockchain Capital and Maelstrom Capital. BSX is building a decentralized limit order book for users to leverage long and short positions. BSX combines the best CeFi trading experience (such as cross-collateralization, robust cross-margining, improved front-end, limit orders) with the best DeFi (such as self-custody directly on Base).
6. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-20, Sorella completed a $7.5 million seed financing round, with investors including Paradigm and Bankless Ventures. Sorella Labs is developing tools to address Ethereum's maximum extractable value (MEV) problem. To help prevent such MEV losses, Sorella Labs is developing two tools: Brontes and Angstrom. Brontes is an open-source blockchain analysis tool that processes Ethereum blocks, classifies transaction operations, and identifies MEV through pattern matching and analysis.

Gaming

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-21, Fanton completed a $1 million seed financing round, with investors including Animoca Brands and Delphi Digital. Fanton is a fantasy football game integrated into Telegram. It features collectible cards of top football players, earning points based on their real-life performance. These cards are issued as NFTs on the blockchain and can be easily traded among players.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-21, GAMEE completed a financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Pantera Capital. GAMEE is a play-to-earn gaming platform where users can complete game tasks, participate in tournaments, and win prizes. The GAMEE entertainment platform includes: Arc8 App, a virtual arcade where people play mobile games and earn rewards; G-Bots Metaverse, game characters and collectibles on the blockchain; and a prize application, a free gaming app.
3. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-20, Nexus Interactive completed a $2 million seed financing round, with investors including Animoca Brands and SkyVision Capital. Nexus Interactive is a diverse and scalable ecosystem where numerous users, builders, and creators come together to drive mutual development and create groundbreaking experiences in gaming and digital entertainment. Currently, Nexus Interactive has three projects: the internally developed studio Nexus Play, the Web3 game publishing service Nexus Build, and the content and community growth project Nexus Share.

CeFi

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-22, Arch completed a $5 million seed financing round, with investors including Castle Island Ventures and Morgan Creek Digital. Arch is a single lending platform for multiple cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Users can obtain instant credit on a platform with top-notch security and liquidation prevention, without having to sell their assets. Customer assets are always held 1:1 by the custodial partner BitGo.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-19, ETC Group completed an acquisition financing round, with Bitwise as the investor. ETC Group is a Europe-based cryptocurrency ETP provider focused on offering institutional-grade products that meet the stringent requirements of traditional financial markets, allowing clients to invest in digital assets with confidence. ETC Group provides investors with a secure, regulated way to access the rapidly evolving digital asset and blockchain ecosystem.

Privacy

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-20, zkMe completed a $4 million seed financing round, with investors including Multicoin Capital and OKX Ventures. zkMe is a decentralized Web3 credential network that leverages the power of zero-knowledge proofs to enable secure and private credential issuance and verification. zkMe allows users to selectively disclose their credentials to authorized parties without compromising their privacy, granting them complete control over their digital identity. Users can create and manage their digital identities without worrying about their personal information being leaked. The protocol has potential use cases across various industries, including anti-witch protection for fair airdrops, anonymous network data proofs for GameFi integration, and private KYC compliance for DeFi.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-17, Holonym completed a $5.5 million seed financing round, with investors including Finality Capital Partners and Paper Ventures. Holonym is a privacy-preserving passport for Web3. It allows users to conduct anonymous "KYC" and prevents witch attacks. It is also building the necessary infrastructure for decentralized wallet recovery.

Others

1. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-22, Starfish Technologies completed an acquisition financing round, with Humans.ai as the investor. Starfish Technologies is a blockchain engineering studio that builds the web3 space by designing, implementing, securing, and deploying Solidity smart contracts on EVM-based blockchains.
2. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-21, Reflection completed a seed financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including CatcherVC and Cryptogram Venture (CGV). Reflection is a Web3 virtual persona platform that breaks free from existing concepts of virtual digital humans and virtual identities. On this platform, users will achieve a perfect user AI simulated identity clone that can communicate, learn, and grow independently on the platform. After a period of growth, this AI digital persona clone may become stronger and smarter than the original user while still fully reflecting the user's personality and characteristics.
3. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-21, Stronghold completed a $175 million acquisition financing round, with Bitfarms as the investor. Stronghold is a vertically integrated Bitcoin mining company focused on environmentally friendly operations. Stronghold places miners at its wholly-owned and operated Scrubgrass and Panther Creek plants, both of which are low-cost, environmentally friendly coal refuse power facilities located in Pennsylvania.
4. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-20, Chain Debrief completed an acquisition financing round, with PEXX as the investor. Chain Debrief is a blockchain media platform aimed at providing information, education, and connections to the global investment community through crypto guides, news, analysis, and opinion articles.
5. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-20, DIN completed a $4 million financing round, with investors including Manta Network and Moonbeam. DIN is a data intelligence network that provides a suite of AI-native digital asset tools and real-time data infrastructure. The network will enable users to produce various AI-native digital assets, including trading information streams, trading strategies, trading support bots, entertainment, education, and social intelligence assistants. By verifying asset ownership on the blockchain, DIN offers creators a fair, self-custodied, and trustless ecosystem.
6. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-21, Story Protocol completed an $80 million Series B financing round, with investors including a16z and Polychain. Story Protocol is building web3 technology to fundamentally change the way narratives are created. Its mission is to unleash a new way to create, manage, and license on-chain IP, ultimately forming a "story Lego block" ecosystem that can be remixed and recombined. Story Protocol provides a streamlined framework to manage the entire lifecycle of IP development, supporting features such as provenance tracking, frictionless licensing, and revenue sharing.
7. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-22, Code4rena completed an acquisition financing round, with Zellic as the investor. Code4rena is a web3 security audit alliance. Security audit competitions differ from traditional audits and bug bounties by providing participants with broader protocol coverage and guaranteed payments. Its model involves three main participants: administrators who protect the DeFi ecosystem from threats by reviewing code; sponsors who create prize pools to attract administrators to audit their projects; and judges who determine the severity, validity, and quality of findings and score administrators' performance.
8. According to ROOTDATA financing data from 08-22, g8keep completed a $1.25 million Pre-seed financing round, with investors including Robot Ventures and Base Ecosystem Fund. g8keep is a token launch platform based on the Base network, aimed at addressing issues such as malicious deployers, flawed fair launch curves, and bots in token issuance.