Although the crypto bear market brings a long winter, it also brings the opportunity to get into "quality bids" at relatively low prices, and it also helps ordinary users to ambush potential projects that have not yet issued passes. The crypto world is like a dark jungle, and the first question for users is how to screen potential bids. In this article, PANews takes a look at the investment maps of 6 leading VCs in the crypto world, including a16z, Multicoin, Paradigm, Alameda Research, Binance Labs and Coinbase Ventures, and compares the projects with co-investments that have not yet issued passes, so as to provide a reference for users to choose their bids.
Four institutional investments
Fractal: A Trading Platform for Gaming NFT Fractal is a trading platform deployed in the Solana ecosystem focused on gaming NFT to support the free exchange of in-game assets in a secure and open marketplace. fractal was founded by Justin Khan, co-founder of Twitch, and closed a $35 million seed round in April with Paradigm and Multicoin Capital led the round, with participation from a16z, Coinbase Ventures, Solana Labs, Animoca Brands and others.
In order to support users to experience games seamlessly, Fractal has launched Fractal Wallet, which allows the use of existing Google accounts for easy registration and login. fractal divides games into 4 category sections, namely Mints, Tournaments, Trending and Play Now, where Mints shows the game projects that are being or will be open for casting, and users can click into the projects in different categories to see the information about the projects, such as NFT transaction data, project profiles, social media links, etc.
In addition to the traditional "Paly to Earn", the platform also features tournament events where players can compete for prizes by playing in tournaments, currently the sandbox chain game Earth From Another Sun (EFAS), which received a $10,000 prize round in June from Solana Ventures, Alameda Research and Lightspeed, among others, raised $4.5 million in funding for a $10,000 bonus round. As of Aug. 2, the games in the playable category range on Fractal's platform are the shooter ev.io and the tank battle game Panzerdogs.
In addition, Fractal also launched Launchpad in January, allowing game developers to raise funds by selling digital assets in their games, while Fractal will guarantee the quality of Launchpad projects through a strict vetting mechanism. It is understood that in addition to providing NFT trading services, Fractal is also committed to unlocking more examples of NFT applications, such as NFT lending and NFT pledging.
Aptos: a new public chain built by the former Facebook tech team
Aptos is a new public chain focused on security, scalability and upgradability, founded in 2021 by members of the original team responsible for the Diem project at Meta (formerly Facebook), using the Move language originally developed for Diem. Compared with Solidity, one of the most commonly used development languages, Move is more prominent in terms of security.
With the aura of "famous" team members, Aptos is favored by many top VCs in the industry, including a16z, Multicoin Capital, Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, FTX Ventures, Tiger Global, PayPal Ventures, and others.
On August 1, Aptos released Incentive Test Network 2 highlights and updates with a total of 225 nodes participating in 110 cities in 44 countries around the world. In addition, Aptos will award tokens to participants in Incentive Test Network 2 who meet certain criteria. In addition, Aptos Incentive Test Network 3 will open for registration on August 19 and end on September 9, followed by the main network release in the fall.
To promote the development and construction of the entire ecosystem, in addition to the hackathon that will take place (which has already taken place once), Aptos is also launching an ecosystem funding program with funding categories including.
-Developer tools, SDKs, libraries, documentation, guides and tutorials.
-Tools and frameworks for development, governance, DeFi, NFT.
-Core protocol contributions: Token standards, libraries, protocol upgrades, etc.
-Open source and public products.
-Education programs.
-Applications (e.g. DeFi, DAO, Gaming, etc.).
Aptos is known to have about 100 projects already built on the network, in the fields of DeFi, NFT, Gaming, etc., such as PontemNetwork, which built the first DEX Liquidswap of the ecosystem, Zaptos, which provides liquidity pledging services, Paymagic, which aims to solve the DAO payment problem, Build Wallet Martian Wallet and NFT market Curiosity's Martian DAO, decentralized asset management and investment protocol Solrise Finance, wallet Fewcha Wallet, etc. PANews has also introduced the Aptos ecosystem in detail.
LayerZero: Interoperability protocol has cross-chain bridge application Stargate Finance LayerZero is a full-chain interoperability protocol to solve the problem of information interoperability between different blockchain networks, that is, the current functions on a single chain can also be realized in the form of cross-chain, such as cross-chain lending, cross-chain pledging, etc. LayerZero is developed by the Canadian team LayerZero Labs, which completed $135 million Series A+ financing in late March, with investment institutions including a16z, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, FTX Ventures, Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, etc. In September 2021, Multicoin Capital and Binance Labs co-led LayerZero's $6 million Series A financing.
As a cross-chain underlying protocol, LayerZero has launched its first cross-chain bridge app, Stargate Finance, which had surpassed $2 billion in lockups a week after launch and had a TVL of approximately $480 million as of August 2. Through Stargate Finance, users can transfer or exchange cross-chain assets (non-encapsulated assets), provide stablecoins (USDC, USDT, BUSD) and ETH unilateral liquidity, and pledge native STG for veSTG (for governance voting). PANews has also previously detailed the benefits of the cross-chain bridge Stargate Finance.
Three institutional investments (including Vitalik)
StarkWare: Ethernet Layer 2 Scaling Solution StarkWare is one of the "Big Four" Ethernet Layer 2 scaling solutions (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync), focusing on building ZK-Rollup-based solutions. The protocols built on StarkEx include dYdX, ImmutableX, Sorare, etc. Compared to StarkEx, StarkNet is more versatile and is a license-free, combinable network with support.
Like zkSync, StarkWare's ecosystem is still in its early stages, and users can currently interact with projects on the StarkNet test network to experience its ecosystem, such as the wallet Argent, the decentralized exchange StarkSwap, the asset management protocol Magnety, etc. StarkWare closed a $100 million Series D funding round in May, led by Greenoaks and Coatue, with previous funding rounds from Paradigm, Alameda Research, Coinbase Ventures, IOSG, Sequoia Capital, etc. On July 13, StarkWare announced a token offering in September, and PANews also detailed the StarkNet token economic model.
Royal: Music Tokenization Platform Royal is a music Tokenization platform launched by artists 3LAU and JD Ross, which means that artists sell the ownership of songs to fans through the platform in the form of NFTs with different copyright weights, which contain different rights and interests and have different values. By purchasing this type of NFT, fans can share the income from royalties with the creator. Of course, users can also sell NFTs on the OpenSea marketplace, and the purchaser will receive the royalties and additional revenue that comes with them.
Royal aims to break the traditional model of centralized platform control by Tokenizing song royalties to enable economic sharing between fans and creators. in November 2021, Royal closed $5,500 in funding from investors including a16z, Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures and others.
Jambo: African Webe3 Application Jambo is a Webe3 application development company based in the African continent, aiming to serve as a traffic portal through the Paly to Earn model of chain tours in order to attract users to the Web3 world and lay the foundation for further experience with Web3 products, such as the DeFi service. In addition, Jambo is also pursuing the JamboAcademy campaign, which aims to help African users enter Web3 through training and education.
It is understood that Jambo aims to be a one-stop application with integrated multi-functionality and to be an important Web3 user acquisition portal on the continent to bridge the gap between Africa and applications around the world seeking to enter the African market. In addition to closing a $30 million Series A round led by Paradigm in May, Jambo also closed a $7.5 million seed round in February with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Tiger Global and others.
Spruce: Digital Identity for Decentralized Identities (DID) Spruce is a digital identity company focused on decentralized identity (DID), aiming to give users their own identity and interoperability. spruce has launched two products, SpruceID, a centralized identity toolkit that provides signature, sharing and verification of trusted information, and Kepler, an autonomous storage that gives users control over their data in terms of storage, sharing and access. giving users control over their data.
In September 2021, Spruce won a joint project sponsored by the Ether Foundation (EF) and Ether Name Service (ENS), which allows users to log in to third-party applications through their Ether accounts and use their wallets to control their digital identities. spruce closed a $34 million Series A round of funding in April, led by a16z, and raised $7.5 million in November 2021. Investors include Alameda Research, Coinbase Ventures, A. Capital Ventures and others.
Aztec: Privacy Layer2 Solution Aztec Network is a privacy-focused ethereum Layer 2 solution that guarantees both scalability and privacy through zkSNARK, a zero-knowledge proof technology. aztec Network closed a $17 million Series A round led by Paradigm in December 2021, and other investors (including other funding rounds) are Coinbase Ventures, IOSG Ventures, V God, and others.
Aztec Network officially went live on July 7 with Aztec Connect, a bridge to provide privacy protection for DeFi transactions. Aztec Connect will allow anyone to connect their applications to Aztec's underlying Rollup technology via bridge contracts (the interface that connects Ethernet smart contracts to Aztec's underlying Rollup technology) or allow developers to integrate their applications with Connect. A software development kit (SDK) that integrates with Connect to add privacy to Ether applications. Currently the Aztec Network ecosystem is only live with the zk.Money app, which allows users to encrypt transfer data using zk.Money.
