infrastructure

Solana infrastructure company Helius announced the acquisition of Light Protocol, whose team will refocus on the development of Solana privacy solutions. Light Protocol was established in 2021, initially focusing on zero-knowledge proof-based Solana privacy tools, and later shifted to co-developing ZK Compression with Helius. This solution is set to launch in 2024, aiming to reduce data storage costs on the Solana chain through zero-knowledge proofs, supporting large-scale consumer and enterprise applications.This acquisition will drive Light back to its original mission, combining its cryptographic capabilities with Helius's infrastructure and distribution advantages to develop ZK privacy protocols for Solana, covering scenarios such as private payments and private DeFi. Helius plans to open the relevant privacy infrastructure to developers in the coming months. This transaction occurs against the backdrop of accelerated consolidation in the crypto industry and a tightening financing environment, while also reflecting the rising demand for on-chain privacy. Helius founder Mert Mumtaz stated that privacy will become an important foundation for blockchain scaling, just as HTTPS did for the internet.

According to The Block, Ripple announced a toolkit for developers to build "proxy payment" applications on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), supporting AI agents to execute automated financial transactions.Ripple stated that AI agents are no longer a concept of the future but are actively participating in paying computational costs, settling invoices, and completing transactions without human intervention. As the application of AI agents expands, the market is accelerating the construction of payment infrastructure for machines, including wallets and stablecoin payment channels, enabling AI to autonomously complete service payments and asset transactions.This week, Robinhood also launched related plans, allowing users to try stock trading executed by AI agents, with plans to expand into the cryptocurrency space in the future; MetaMask also released a non-custodial wallet solution for AI agents.Ripple pointed out that traditional payment systems mainly serve human-initiated and approval processes, while AI agents require infrastructure that enables fast settlement, predictable outcomes, and no human approval. It emphasized that its new toolkit also supports payment capabilities based on the x402 protocol, allowing settlements using XRP and Ripple USD (RLUSD).Meanwhile, the IC3 team, composed of researchers from several universities, stated that although AI combined with blockchain can achieve automated trading, AI agents still heavily rely on humans and underlying infrastructure, lacking complete independence.

According to official news, the crypto financial infrastructure company TVL Capital announced the completion of a $5 million financing round, led by Framework Ventures, with participation from institutions such as Flow Traders.The company's co-founder Lars previously served as the Head of Market Research at The Block. Its products are comparable to traditional exchange-traded products, creating compliant and composable derivatives and diversified yield structures, primarily targeting institutional investors to meet various structured investment and yield management needs.

According to Globenewswire, the Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin mining company Keel Infrastructure (formerly Bitfarms) has completed the issuance of $458 million in convertible preferred notes, with a coupon rate of 1.25%, maturing in 2032, and an initial conversion price of approximately $7.41 (a 25% premium over the closing price on June 4). Part of the raised funds will be used to purchase capped call options to hedge against dilution risk at the time of note conversion.Keel stated that the existing liquidity is expected to be sufficient to develop the Panther Creek, Sharon, and Moses Lake projects through leasing, and this fundraising will enhance the company's flexibility for general corporate purposes such as long-term equipment deposits or collateral for data center project letters of credit.

According to the latest weekly report from Gate Ventures, the market has shown a significant cooling of risk appetite under the influence of strong economic data and ongoing inflationary pressures, with global growth assets generally under pressure.The cryptocurrency market has also pulled back, with BTC down 14.4% for the week and ETH down 15.7%. The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies has decreased by 12.5%, and market sentiment has dropped to the "extreme fear" range. In terms of capital flow, the spot BTC ETF saw a net outflow of $1.72 billion in a single week, setting a record for the largest weekly outflow in history; the spot ETH ETF experienced a net outflow of $168.2 million during the same period, indicating that institutional funds are becoming more cautious in the short term.In terms of industry development, Mastercard announced the expansion of stablecoin settlement applications in its global payment network, supporting various compliant stablecoins for round-the-clock settlements in payment scenarios, further promoting the integration of stablecoins into mainstream financial infrastructure.In terms of investment and financing, three financing transactions were disclosed last week, with the infrastructure sector continuing to dominate. Among them, the digital asset derivatives infrastructure project SignalPlus completed a $50 million financing, demonstrating that market funds are still focused on underlying infrastructure and long-term application scenario development.Overall, the market is temporarily disturbed by macro factors, but stablecoin payments and infrastructure development remain important directions for industry growth.

According to a report by Fortune, the DeFi lending protocol Morpho has completed a $175 million financing round at a valuation of $2 billion, led by a16z crypto, Paradigm, and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Apollo Funds, Circle Ventures, VanEck, IOSG Ventures, Variant, and others.Morpho allows institutions to customize lending markets and risk parameters on-chain, and has already attracted users such as Coinbase, Kraken, Anchorage Digital, and Galaxy Digital. The protocol has a total locked value of approximately $6.6 billion and is accelerating its competition with traditional DeFi lending protocols like Aave, while planning to further expand into high-yield DeFi asset allocations sought by traditional financial institutions.

According to Bloomberg, Bitcoin fell below $60,000 last week, with a market value evaporating by about $235 billion within seven days, nearly halving from last year's peak. The market value of altcoins has shrunk from a peak of $431 billion in November 2021 to about $170 billion, with less than 1,700 of the tens of millions of tokens created in recent years still having substantial trading activity. However, in stark contrast to the price trends, the most commercially valuable businesses in the crypto industry are accelerating growth.The annual trading volume of stablecoins reached about $390 billion, with total trading volume soaring 72% to $33 trillion by 2025. Over $30 billion in assets have been tokenized, and BlackRock's tokenized money market fund BUIDL has an asset size of $2.4 billion. Visa and Mastercard are expanding stablecoin settlement capabilities, and Nasdaq is collaborating with Kraken to offer tokenized stocks.Bloomberg Intelligence's Mike McGlone stated that the most important technology is stablecoins; when you have stablecoins, you don't need XRP or Bitcoin to store value. We are experiencing a cleansing, and this has only just begun. EMJ Capital founder Eric Jackson pointed out that "the Bitcoin price chart used to be the entire crypto story, but it is no longer."

According to Forbes, although the trading volume of stablecoins has exceeded $1 trillion in the past year, most activities are still concentrated in the crypto-native space (trading, arbitrage, and inter-protocol settlement), with limited applications in everyday commercial payments. WasabiCard CEO Ray Yang pointed out that the transfer of funds is no longer the core issue; licensing, compliance, risk management, and banking capabilities are the key foundations for achieving widespread adoption.Forbes noted that while stablecoin settlement can significantly enhance cross-border payment efficiency, each market has different compliance standards, licensing requirements, and banking relationships, making the construction of localized compliance in each market both slow and expensive, which contradicts the instant global settlement that stablecoins advocate. Currently, the stablecoin market has surpassed $320 billion, and industry discussions are shifting from whether stablecoins can replace existing networks to how they can be integrated into existing networks.Forbes believes that the challenge of the last decade was to get funds flowing, while the challenge of this decade is to ensure that global payments operate in compliance and at scale within a fragmented regulatory environment.

According to PR Newswire, the prediction market infrastructure company EDGE Markets announced the completion of a $29.2 million Series A financing round, led by CoinFund, with participation from Indicator Ventures, Mantis VC, Stepstone Group, and Bullpen Capital. This round of financing will be used to launch the banking platform EDGE Pro for prediction market market makers, as well as the payment network EDGE Connect designed specifically for entertainment and prediction markets.Among them, EDGE Pro will provide market makers with high-throughput deposit accounts, supporting real-time fund transfers and settlements between trading platforms regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The company is applying for Introducing Broker (IB) and Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) licenses from the National Futures Association (NFA) to enhance capital efficiency and support margin management.EDGE Connect is positioned as a payment network dedicated to the prediction market industry, enabling 24/7 real-time payments (RTP) and reducing transaction costs through a model that only charges for new net deposits. The company stated that compared to traditional payment channels, this system can reduce payment processing costs by more than 70%, while also decreasing refunds and user churn.

According to PR Newswire, AI-driven anti-fraud infrastructure InfoHawk announced the completion of a $2.25 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from former Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Jon Leibowitz, AppNexus founder Brian O'Kelley, former head of advertising at Meta Rob Goldman, GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov, and others.The new funds are intended to support its efforts to help businesses detect, analyze, and combat large-scale online fraud, phishing sites, brand impersonation, and deepfake attacks through AI content recognition and deep infrastructure analysis technology.

Four.meme announced the launch of OpenFour, planning to upgrade from a single Meme coin Launchpad platform to an open modular token issuance infrastructure on the BNB Chain. The core idea is not to build all mechanisms independently but to allow everyone to build their own issuance mechanisms.OpenFour introduces four founding mechanisms: GoPlus creator incentives, GoPlus skill royalties, Likwid Dex long and short on-chain trading, and the issuance model Cubepeg created by Cubus based on PancakeSwap Infinity Hook.

The AI aggregation platform B.AI announced that its platform user count has surpassed 1.9 million, reaching 1,900,086 users.The official statement indicated that, in addition to providing mainstream model aggregation services, B.AI is currently focused on developing underlying financial and identity infrastructure for AI agents. This foundation aims to grant agents independent economic sovereignty, primarily to address the needs of autonomous payments, asset management, and on-chain credit verification for agents.

According to official news, Feixiaohao has invested in the AI Agent infrastructure project AMIKO and has reached a strategic cooperation with AMIKO. The two parties will collaborate on capital support, content dissemination, live events, media promotion, AI search content development, product scenario integration, and multilingual market promotion, aiming to establish a clearer project recognition for AMIKO in the Chinese and international Web3 markets.AMIKO is positioned as a digital identity and social infrastructure for the AI Agent era, attempting to integrate identity, productivity, social interaction, and economic capability within the same system, allowing users to have AI Twins, Companions, Assistants, and Experts that represent their actions, communication, and collaboration. Its technical path involves OpenHermit hosting runtime and OpenClaw BYOA scenarios, focusing on AI digital avatars, social continuity, Agent native identity layers, and economic circulation within the platform.Feixiaohao (Feixiaohao.ai) stated that this investment and strategic cooperation will leverage its Web3 data platform, industry media, live events, and global ecological communication capabilities to help AMIKO reach a broader audience of Web3 users, media, and AI search content scenarios. Previously, AMIKO had received strategic investment from the American AI investment firm High Ridge Holdings for product development, ecological expansion, and international growth.

According to The Block, the Web3 asset management platform XEFFY announced the completion of a $20 million financing round, which includes $5 million in angel funding and $15 million in a private round supported by early strategic investors.The funds will be used to develop its Vault management platform, expand the on-chain real-world asset (RWA) infrastructure, and support early RWA projects through the XEFFY fund to expand the global ecosystem. The platform combines market-neutral Vault strategies with dedicated on-chain RWA infrastructure built for retail and institutional users.Currently, the tokenized RWA market is expected to exceed $30 billion by 2025, with institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity already deploying related products. The XEFFY platform has approximately 200,000 community members on X, Telegram, and Discord, and its Asia-Pacific ambassador program has about 200 contributors.

According to Globenewswire, Blockchain Digital Infrastructure, a developer and operator of digital infrastructure listed on the US stock market, announced plans to issue 33,333,334 shares of common stock, priced at $1.65 per share, raising approximately $55,000,000 in total.The funds will be used to support the construction of AI hosting and high-performance computing digital infrastructure, capital expenditures, and general corporate purposes to support business growth.

B.AI announced a partnership with Chainbase to jointly build underlying infrastructure. B.AI promotes a financial infrastructure centered around intelligent agents, while Chainbase constructs the access layer AgentKey (AgentKey.app) for unified access to web, social, and on-chain data. B.AI understands that the biggest bottleneck for AI intelligent agents is not intelligence, but access permissions. The two will work together to open a complete channel for web, social, on-chain data, and financial services, allowing intelligent agents to operate freely in the real world, truly possessing greater access permissions and stronger autonomy, becoming more capable AI intelligent agents.

On-chain capital and prediction market infrastructure project Nova Markets announced the completion of a new round of financing, with participation from Wintermute Ventures, Robot Ventures, Big Brain VC, Cumberland, GSR, Greenfield Capital, Hash3, Bodhi Ventures, and Kairos Research.This round of financing will be used to migrate more perpetual contracts and prediction markets on-chain.Nova stated that the actual number of existing on-chain capital markets is far below the expected level, and the financing will be used to migrate more perpetual contracts and prediction markets on-chain, reshaping the generation and trading structure of related markets.

AI infrastructure startup Nscale has disclosed that it has completed nearly $4 billion in financing, with a valuation of $14.6 billion following its latest $2 billion Series C round. Nscale, formerly a cryptocurrency mining company spun off from Arkon Energy, is currently focused on building and operating AI data centers and leasing computing power resources to enterprises. Its investors include technology companies such as Nvidia, Dell, and Nokia.Since 2026, Nscale has also secured $1.4 billion in GPU collateral loans and a $790 million financing line to support its AI infrastructure expansion plans. Nscale participated in OpenAI's "Stargate" infrastructure project, deploying AI computing facilities in the UK and Norway, but as OpenAI adjusted its related plans, some projects have been taken over by Microsoft and Google.