Sfermion's Collider #46

Sfermion is an investment firm focused on backing the founders building the metaverse.

Hello 👋

Welcome to the 46th edition of Sfermion’s Collider where we highlight the latest & greatest news in the world of crypto, gaming & entertainment, AR/VR, AI, macro, and more!

Bi-weekly, we aim to drop a curated list of the most exciting stories & updates that we believe are enabling the future of tech and the emergence of the metaverse.

If you're looking forward to reading this edition of Sfermion’s Collider, please don't forget to subscribe below, share within your network, and follow Sfermion on Twitter to get the latest! Check out our Seam (💰) bio here :)

Crypto Updates

Polygon unveils 1B $POL token program to boost developer engagement (link)

Terraform to Pay $4.47B to Settle SEC Fraud Case (link)

MicroStrategy Buys 11,931 Bitcoin for $786M (link)

Fox Corporation to Upgrade Verify Beta to Dedicated L2 Built with Polygon CDK, Announces TIME as First Publishing Partner (link)

Fidelity International Tokenizes Money Market Fund on JPMorgan’s Blockchain (link)

OneFootball adopts Mocaverse’s Realm Network to offer Football ID to over 200M football fans (link)

Friend.tech collaborates with Conduit, launches Friendchain (link)

Empowering the Solana Ecosystem: Circle's Web3 Services is Now Available on Solana (link)

Biggest Bank in the World Says Ethereum Is ‘Digital Oil,’ Bitcoin ‘Digital Gold’: Report (link)

Joe Biden’s Administration Sues Coinbase Yet Needs It For Crypto Donations (link)

Coinbase International announces support for pre-launch market (link)

Binance reaches 200M users with $100B in assets under custody (link)

Gaming Updates

Uniswap Labs is Acquiring Crypto: The Game (link)

Introducing: Ronin ZkEVM (link)

Baby Shark Universe X Immutable (💰) Partnership Announcement (link)

Ethereum Network Ronin Launches ‘Forge’ Program to Onboard More Games (link)

Ethereum Wallet MetaMask Now Lets You Launch Crypto Games—Here’s How (link)

VG Insights: Fallout TV Series generated over $80M in Incremental Revenue for Bethesda (link)

Next-Gen Xbox Preview: Everything You Need to Know About the Console and Crypto Plans (link)

AI Updates

Apple announces iOS 18 with new AI features and more customizable homescreen (link)

OpenAI and Apple announce partnership to integrate ChatGPT into Apple experiences (link)

Apple to “Pay” OpenAI for ChatGPT through distribution, not cash (link)

Musk threatens to ban employees from using iPhones (link)

Oracle Stock Jumps to Record High on Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google Deals (link)

OpenAI Names Ex-Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar as CFO, Kevin Weil as CPO (link)

Other Updates

Photo-sharing app BeReal acquired by Voodoo for €500M (link)

Queen Catalog to Be Acquired by Sony Music for £1B (link)

Tesla shareholders vote to reinstate Elon Musk’s $56B pay package (link)

US sues Adobe for ‘deceiving’ subscriptions that are too hard to cancel (link)

The Big Loser in Tesla’s Shareholder Vote Is Delaware (link)

India pulls in tech giants for its AI ambitions (link)

Apple discontinues short-lived BNPL offering (link)

Starlink Mini brings space internet to backpackers (link)

VTuber Gawr Gura will sing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” at the Dodgers’ “hololive night” (link)

Research & Interesting Reads

Pantera | Newsflash, Crypto Owners Vote (link)

Konvoy | Voodoo Gets Real (link)

Accel | Our Investment in KGeN (💰): Ushering in a New Era of Gaming and Data Sovereignty (link)

Notable Raises

Paradigm completes $850M fund to invest in early-stage crypto projects (link)

Mistral secures €600M funding as valuation soars to almost €6B (link)

CMT Digital looks to raise $150M for fourth crypto fund: report (link)

Blockchain engineering group Equilibrium launches venture unit, raising over $30M for first fund (link)

Nexus Laboratories raises $25M from Pantera and Lightspeed to expand ‘zero-knowledge’ privacy tools (link)

Renzo Capitalizes on Restaking Frenzy to Raise $17M From Galaxy, Brevan Howard (link)

Layer3 raises $15M Series A ahead of token launch and airdrop (link)

Polkadot Parachain Moonbeam Launches $13M Gaming & RWA Fund (link)

Nuffle Labs Raises $13M to Expand Modular Infrastructure for Blockchain Layers (link)

Solana gaming Layer 2 Sonic raises $12M round ld by Bitkraft (link)

Ava Protocol lands $10M funding to develop 'super transactions' (link)

Solana-based multisig protocol Squads raises $10M, launches retail wallet app Fuse (link)

Irys raises a total of $8.9M in Lemniscap-led funding round (link)

Hypersonic Laboratories raises $7M for modding platform Helix (link)

Telegram tap-to-earn crypto game Pixelverse raises $5.5M from Delphi, Merit Circle, and others (link)

Verida raises $5M to protect user data amid rise in generative AI (link)

SCRYPT raises $5M to expand crypto asset services (link)

Gudchain Closes $5M Investment Round (link)

Yuliverse Secures $4M in Pre-A Funding Round (link)

Memecoin leverage trading protocol Wasabi raises $3M led by Electric Capital (link)

Tether to Invest More Than $1B in Deals Over Next Year (link)

Mo & Andrew's Curated

Crypto

Consensys

@Consensys

ETHEREUM SURVIVES THE SEC.

Today we’re happy to announce a major win for Ethereum developers, technology providers, and industry participants: the Enforcement Division of the SEC has notified us that it is closing its investigation into Ethereum 2.0.

This means that the SEC…

Tyler Winklevoss

@tyler

I just donated $1 million in bitcoin (15.47 BTC) to @realDonaldTrump and will be voting for him in November. Here’s why:

Over the past few years, the Biden Administration has openly declared war against crypto. It has weaponized multiple government agencies to bully, harass, and…

Phantom

@phantom

gmonad

Optimism

@Optimism

FAULT PROOFS & STAGE 1 HAVE ARRIVED

Open source, permissionless fault proofs are live on OP Mainnet, and with them the OP Stack arrives at Stage 1 decentralization.

This is a major step forward for the Superchain!

Zapper ⚡️

@zapper_fi

1/ Introducing Zapper Protocol

An open protocol incentivizing the interpretation and contextualization of onchain information

Powered by $ZAP

samczsun

@samczsun

sending my thoughts and prayers to the investment partners that have to explain why their portco hacked an american exchange, stole 3m dollars, and laundered it through an ofac-sanctioned protocol

Sandeep | AggLayer 👿

@sandeepnailwal

Fam, as I said yesterday, Two big things announced today

1. Web3 gaming pioneers @Ronin_Network building a zkEVM using @0xPolygon CDK and exploring Agglayer. Bullish for $RON as people can stake RON and run gaming chains

2. @FoxNews, one of the largest media networks in the…

Jason Choi

@mrjasonchoi

Welcome to Bear Town (?)

My primary focus for @tangent_xyz is two things:

1) Investing and working with founders long term on the venture side, and

2) Spotting inflection points on the liquid side to help founders weather them better

This thread is about the latter.…

Delphi Digital

@Delphi_Digital

The Flippening CT ignores

TON's quiet growth, fueled by Telegram's 900M user base, has driven its daily active addresses above Ethereum.

At its core, TON is a bet on Telegram's distribution. Though the ecosystem is nascent, its early growth is promising. But is it enough?

Franklin Templeton Digital Assets

@FTI_DA

DePIN: Traction in Supply & Early Signs of Increasing Demand

Ansem 🐂🀄️

@blknoiz06

I've been working on @BullpenFi with @salxyz in stealth for 6 months now, have been in crypto since 2017 but never done anything more outside of trading, & schizo-tweeting on this app.

Bullpen is one of the ways that I feel I can leverage my platform to provide value back to…

Sal Qadir

@salxyz

Introducing @BullpenFi's first product — the most advanced Telegram trading bot in the world

From the very beginning, @blknoiz06 and I have been obsessed with building a one-stop shop for retail to trade onchain.

What exactly is Bullpen and how are we different?

Jarry Xiao 🐦‍🔥

@jarxiao

Sandwich bots extracted over 150k SOL from retail memecoin traders last month.

Most of this flow is on coins originating from @pumpdotfun

This market is fundamentally broken: when retail users trade, sophisticated actors should compete to lower their slippage, not maximize it.

NFTs

Base

@base

Coming soon…

@adidas is based

doodles

@doodles

Doodles is coming home

The Stoodio is officially migrating to @Base this July

learn more about our vision for the future on Ethereum & EVM

Waabam 🧨

@Waabam_eth

The Banana Bill is a 100M $APE proposal with 2 initiatives:

(1) A Commercial Agreements Initiative, to negotiate commercial agreements with projects, companies & protocols committed to building on ApeChain

(2) A User Incentives Initiative, to provide rewards for ApeChain users

Azuki

@Azuki

We're excited to announce that Steve Chung is joining the Azuki team as our new COO.

@stevewchung brings deep expertise from his roles as Chief Global Officer of CJ ENM, CEO of CJ ENM USA, and Chief Growth Officer at FOX. His talent for taking Korean content global and driving…

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy!

Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river.

Lex Fridman

@lexfridman

Here's my conversation with Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas), CEO of Perplexity. We talk about the history & future of AI, web search, and the Internet. Plus, lots of great advice on how to start and run a company. I met Aravind many years ago at Berkeley, and it was a bit…

Haseeb ＞|＜

@hosseeb

My talk @ Consensus on Decentralized AI Inference!

If you want a brief overview of crypto x AI and why it's such a thorny intersection, give it a watch (20 min)

Alec Stapp

@AlecStapp

If we want the future of artificial intelligence to be built in the United States, then we're gonna need to produce a lot more electricity...

Gaming

Revolving Games

@Revolving_Games

Ecosystem Expansion

Following the Nexian Gems' power-up to Nexus Nodes, it was time for an ecosystem revamp.

Goal: Simplify the RG ecosystem & enhance community rewards.

Let's dive in: medium.com/@RevolvingGame…

1/4

medium.com

Ecosystem Expansion

RCADE Foundation x Revolving Games x Starlings Partnerships

MapleStory Universe

@MaplestoryU

WE’RE GETTING IN GEAR. Starting with the end of “Wen discord?", our official Discord is finally open: discord.gg/MaplestoryUniv…. Come join our playground!

P.S. Told ya Tuner has his ways, also catch the hints at what's coming next?

GOAT Gaming

@playgoatgaming

Fortune favors the

Let the games begin.

premint.xyz/goat-gaming/

Matthew Ball

@ballmatthew

1/ After only 5.5 months, the video game industry has set a tragic new record for in-year layoffs (10,900 versus the prior record of 10,500 in 2023, and the record before that, 8,500 in 2022).

These layoffs span games that were canceled and scaled back, as well as studios that…

SHRAPNEL 🔺 STX3.1 June 24-28

@playSHRAPNEL

✦ The Lunatics ✦

We are super excited to announce the Public Beta launch of “The Lunatics” - an all-new strategy game developed by the amazing @play_alchemy team, exclusively available on Discord! And massive shoutout to the super talented team at @GrowStudioHQ who produced…

Echelon

@EchelonFND

The Echelon Foundation is making adjustments at the request of the founders of Parallel Studios to the "Founder $PRIME" token emission unlock schedule. This adjustment is to signal, in no uncertain terms, alignment between the Parallel Studios team, the $PRIME community, and the…

Other

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

Massive increase in likes after they were made private!

Sam Ro 📈

@SamRo

who owns the stock market

Pomp 🌪

@APompliano

This is insane.

Historically you get a better return over time by investing in the S&P at all-time highs compared to any other day.

(H/t @MikeZaccardi)

💰 = Sfermion Portfolio Company

Curated by @mopat1214 + @AndrewSteinwold

If you enjoyed reading this edition of Sfermion’s Collider, please subscribe below, share within your network, and follow Sfermion on Twitter to get the latest! Check out our Seam (💰) bio here :)

Note: All information in this Newsletter regarding any company or investment is the sole responsibility of the company providing the information. Sfermion, and its affiliates, makes no representation or guarantee to the accuracy or completeness of the information presented. Sfermion is not responsible for any information contained in any links outside our websites and official social accounts.

Sfermion does not offer investment advice/analysis and makes no recommendations on how to act. Information regarding any company or investment in this Newsletter, including any links to information on our website, should not be viewed as an endorsement or recommendation of that company or investment for any purpose whatsoever. Any person receiving this Newsletter is encouraged to consult with their own financial advisor, or relevant personnel, before making any investment decision.

Sfermion's Collider #46

Sfermion's Collider

Sfermion's Collider #46

Sfermion's Collider #46

Curated news from the world of crypto, gaming & entertainment, AR/VR, AI, macro, and more

Hello 👋

Crypto Updates

Gaming Updates

AI Updates

Other Updates

Research & Interesting Reads

Notable Raises

Mo & Andrew's Curated

Ecosystem Expansion