VC Mar Report, the number of fundraising projects increased by 24%

Author: WuBlockchain

According to RootData statistics, there were a total of 180 publicly announced investment projects in the cryptocurrency venture capital space in March, up 24.1% from February 2024 (which had 145 projects) and up 71.4% from March 2023 (which had 105 projects). Note: Not all financing is announced in the same month, so these numbers may increase in the future. The breakdown of investments in various sectors is as follows:

CeFi accounted for approximately 2.8%, DeFi approximately 10%, NFT/GameFi approximately 13.3%, L1/L2 approximately 8.9%, RWA/DePIN approximately 3.9%, and AI approximately 3.4%.

The total financing amount in March was $1.16 billion, up 52.6% from February 2024 ($760 million) and up 27.5% from March 2023 ($910 million). The top 10 funding rounds were as follows:

The Optimism Foundation sold 19.51 million OP tokens (equivalent to approximately $89 million) to 6 private investors this month. These OP tokens have a lock-up period of 2 years, but buyers can delegate the tokens to unrelated third parties for governance during this period.

Cryptographic company Zama completed a $73 million Series A financing round, led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, with participation from Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, and Stake Capital, among others. Zama’s total financing to date has exceeded $80 million, with the current valuation unknown. Angel investors include Filecoin founder Juan Benet, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood.

Layer1 Berachain completed a financing round of over $69 million, co-led by Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Ventures. The project raised funds by selling tokens, reaching a valuation of $1.5 billion. Previously, in April 2023, Berachain completed a $42 million financing round, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from OKX Ventures, among others.

Figure Technologies announced the establishment of an independent company called Figure Markets, raising over $60 million in a Series A financing round led by Jump Crypto, Pantera Capital, and Lightspeed Faction. Figure Markets will build blockchain-based trading platforms for various assets, currently developing decentralized cryptocurrency and securities markets based on the Provenance blockchain, and planning to develop a regulated stablecoin alternative.

Web3 infrastructure company Succinct announced a $55 million financing round led by Paradigm. Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Geometry, ZK Validator, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and Daniel Lubarov, and EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan also participated.

Modular developer Eclipse Labs announced the completion of a $50 million Series A financing round, jointly led by Placeholder and Hack VC, bringing its total funding to $65 million. The round also attracted participation from investors such as Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, and Fenbushi Capital, as well as strategic investments from Flow Traders, GSR, Global Management, and OKX Ventures. Eclipse Labs plans to use this funding to develop a Layer 2 solution for Ethereum using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), aiming to integrate SVM’s high performance with Ethereum’s deep liquidity, providing a new option different from existing Layer 2 solutions. The Eclipse team plans to launch its final mainnet version in the second quarter of this year and has already released developer network and testnet versions.

Web3 infrastructure company 0G Labs announced the completion of a $35 million Pre-Seed financing round, led by Hack VC, with participation from Alliance, Animoca Brands, Delphi Digital, Stanford Builders Fund, Symbolic Capital, and OKX Ventures, among others.

NFT card game Parallel completed a $35 million financing round, with participation from Solana Ventures, Distributed Global, OSS Capital, VanEck, Focus Labs, among others.

Game developer Gunzilla Games announced the completion of a $30 million financing round, co-led by CoinFund and Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund, totaling $30 million, including $10 million in strategic token financing, with participation from Republic Capital and Morningstar Ventures.

Solana ecosystem DePIN protocol io.net announced the completion of a $30 million Series A financing round, led by Hack VC, with participation from Multicoin Capital, Web3.com Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, M13, Delphi Digital, Solana Labs, Aptos Labs, Foresight Ventures, Longhash, SevenX, ArkStream, Animoca Brands, Continue Capital, MH Ventures, and OKX, as well as Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Aptos founders Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu and Perlone Capital’s Jin Kang, among others. The current valuation is $1 billion. The funds raised will be used to build its decentralized GPU network and address the shortage of AI computing.