Hotcoin Investment and Financing Weekly Report (10.12–10.18) | A total of 23 public events, financing data shows an increase compared to last week

From October 12 to October 18, there were 23 investment and financing events in the crypto market, including 8 in infrastructure, 7 in DeFi, 3 in gaming, 2 in CeFi, 1 in social, 1 in mining, and 1 in tools.

This week, there were 8 financing events exceeding ten million dollars:

• Blockchain development company Blockstream completed a $210 million financing round, with Fulgur Ventures as the investor.
• Blockchain gaming company Azra Games completed a $42 million Series A financing round, with investors including Pantera Capital and a16z.
• Cryptocurrency exchange Yellow Card completed a $33 million Series C financing round, with investors including Blockchain Capital and Castle Island Ventures.
• Bitcoin derivatives exchange Bitnomial completed a $25 million financing round, with Ripple as the investor.
• Privacy data oracle protocol zkPass completed a $12.5 million Series A financing round, with investors including dao5 and Animoca Brands.
• ZKP protocol Opacity Network completed a $12 million seed round financing, with investors including Archetype and Breyer Capital.
• Decentralized Bitcoin staking protocol Solv Protocol completed an $11 million strategic financing round, with investors including Blockchain Capital and OKX Ventures.
• Decentralized stablecoin protocol Mento completed a $10 million financing round, with investors including HashKey Capital and No Limit Holdings.

This week, the investment and financing enthusiasm in the crypto market has increased compared to last week, with 8 deals in infrastructure and 7 in DeFi, and the financing amounts have significantly increased. Blockchain development company Blockstream received the largest financing of the week, with a financing amount of $210 million.

The investment and financing projects this week are sorted by financing amount as shown in the following chart:

Infrastructure

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–17, zkPass completed a $12.5 million Series A financing round, with investors including dao5 and Animoca Brands. zkPass is a privacy data protocol utilizing 3P-TLS and hybrid ZK technology, providing tools and applications for secure, verifiable data sharing from any HTTPS website without Oauth API, offering privacy and integrity guarantees.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–17, Surge completed a $1.8 million Pre-seed financing round, with investors including Double Peak Group and Gerstenbrot Capital. Surge is a modular Rollup as a Service (RaaS) platform for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Surge provides a platform for launching high-performance, customizable, general-purpose or application-specific Rollups on Bitcoin, significantly reducing their time to market.
3. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–17, Hyve completed a $1.85 million Seed financing round, with investors including Lemniscap and Paper Ventures. Hyve is an ultra-high throughput data availability layer.
4. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–17, Marketnode completed a strategic financing round of an undisclosed amount, with Euroclear as the investor. Marketnode, founded by SGX Group and Temasek, is a DLT-driven financial market infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region. Marketnode operates two flagship platforms: Gateway and Fundnode. Gateway is a one-stop, end-to-end platform that enables market participants to accelerate workflows, shorten time-to-market, and fully leverage the transformative potential of tokenization. Fundnode is Singapore’s blockchain investment fund infrastructure, providing a single platform for transaction management, fund handling, and record-keeping for the fund ecosystem.
5. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–16, Vue Protocol completed a $6 million Seed financing round, with investors including PAKA and Eureka Partners. Vue Protocol is a decentralized platform mapping multi-chain relationships, aiming to connect Web3 native developers, empower users with ownership of their data, and enable community participation in collaboration.
6. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–16, Opacity Network completed a $12 million Seed financing round, with investors including Archetype and Breyer Capital. Opacity is a ZKP protocol used to prove anything without revealing details. Opacity’s zero-knowledge proof protocol connects provers and verifiers to share and verify information trustlessly within minutes.
7. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–15, Predicate completed a $7 million financing round, with investors including 1kx and Tribe Capital. Predicate is a blockchain financial services application founded by two former employees of the Celo blockchain, aiming to connect blockchain applications with the financial world.
8. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–15, Blockcast completed a $2.85 million Seed financing round, with investors including Lattice Capital and Protocol Labs. Blockcast is a decentralized content delivery network and marketplace designed to help broadcasters gain more traffic and reach a wider audience. The platform aims to help broadcasters bridge the gap between television and online streaming by delivering content through tokenized unused TV spectrum. The cost of streaming a 4K movie to 10,000 viewers through servers like Cloudflare typically costs around $1,000, but using Blockcast can reduce the cost by 96%.

DeFi

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–17, Drop completed a $4 million Seed financing round, with investors including CoinFund and CMS Holdings. Drop is a cross-chain liquid staking protocol whose mission is to enhance the economic viability of inter-chain economies by transforming stagnant, frozen resources into a flow of liquid opportunities.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–17, Mento completed a $10 million financing round, with investors including HashKey Capital and No Limit Holdings. Mento Labs is a stablecoin and digital asset innovation laboratory spun off from cLabs (Celo). The lab provides the Mento basket of cryptocurrency asset platform, with all Mento stablecoins (cEUR, cREAL, cUSD) fully backed by USDC and DAI. Additionally, Mento offers support for loyalty and engagement, regenerative finance, as well as risk management, monitoring, and maintenance.
3. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–16, Lombard completed a $1 million strategic financing round, with Binance Labs as the investor. Founded in April 2024, Lombard is dedicated to unlocking Bitcoin’s potential as a dynamic financial tool by connecting Bitcoin with DeFi. Lombard enables yield-generating BTC to move cross-chain without fragmenting liquidity, paving the way to become the largest catalyst for bringing net new capital into DeFi. Its flagship product, LBTC, is a yield-bearing, cross-chain, liquid Bitcoin backed 1:1 by BTC.
4. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–16, Hermetica completed a $1.7 million Seed financing round, with investors including UTXO Management and CMS Holdings. Hermetica Finance is a non-custodial structured products protocol for Bitcoin. Hermetica vaults use automated options yield strategies to generate risk-adjusted yields in Bitcoin and stablecoins.
5. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–15, Pell Network completed a $3 million Pre-seed financing round, with investors including Mirana Ventures and Paper Ventures. Pell Network aims to create a decentralized token economic security leasing platform for the Bitcoin ecosystem. By building a network that aggregates native BTC Stake and LSD re-staking services, it allows stake holders to choose to validate new software modules built on the Pell Network ecosystem. Stakers opt-in by granting Pell Network smart contracts the ability to impose additional reduction conditions on their staked assets, thus allowing for the extension of cryptoeconomic security.
6. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–14, Solv Protocol completed an $11 million strategic financing round, with investors including Blockchain Capital and OKX Ventures. Solv is a decentralized Bitcoin staking protocol that unlocks the full potential of Bitcoin assets through liquidity consensus infrastructure. By addressing the fragmentation, yield opportunities, and custody solutions for BTC assets, Solv provides Bitcoin holders with a gateway to BTCFi, continuously building pathways and confidence for traditional funds to enter the cryptocurrency world.
7. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–12, Fission Labs completed a $1.6 million Pre-seed financing round, with investors including SALT Fund and Kraynos Capital. Fission is a DeFi application built for VC products on Ethereum, integrating tokenization, trading, lending, and automated liquidity allocation into a simple, intuitive end-to-end solution.

Games

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–15, Azra Games completed a $42 million Series A financing round, with investors including Pantera Capital and a16z. Azra Games is a blockchain gaming company aimed at creating mainstream collectible battle RPGs. Their first game, Project Arcanas, is a fantasy collectible and fighting arena RPG where players can not only obtain NFT collectibles but also build legions for combat.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–14, World of Dypians completed a financing round of an undisclosed amount, with IBC Group as the investor. World of Dypians is a metaverse sandbox and virtual game created by Dypius. WoD features a vast virtual world of 2,000 square kilometers with AI, NFT functionality, and high-resolution graphics. In the WoD metaverse, players and users can explore endless maps, engage in thrilling activities such as hunting wildlife, earning rewards, and purchasing NFTs. WoD stands out among similar games with five key game elements: campaign mode, multiplayer mode, open world, sandbox, and play-to-earn.
3. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–14, Flappy Bird completed a $2 million financing round, with investors including Kenetic Capital and Scytale Digital. Flappy Bird is a Telegram-based game originally launched in 2013. After a group of dedicated fans acquired the legal rights to the game, the Flappy Bird Foundation was created to integrate Web3 functionality. The game allows players to mine points to earn native tokens for future airdrops. These points are earned based on active time in the mini-program and successful dodging and diving between those famous green pipes.

CeFi

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–16, Yellow Card completed a $33 million Series C financing round, with investors including Blockchain Capital and Castle Island Ventures. Yellow Card is a cryptocurrency exchange that offers the safest way to buy and sell Bitcoin with various payment options, and also allows users to send, receive, and store their cryptocurrencies using the Bitcoin wallet on Yellow Card.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–16, Bitnomial completed a $25 million financing round, with Ripple as the investor. Founded in 2014, Bitnomial aims to create a market connecting native digital asset hedgers and institutional traders. Bitnomial offers improved derivatives trading technology and new digital asset settlement systems.

Others

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–16, The Arena completed a $2 million Pre-seed financing round, with investors including D1 Ventures and Avalanche. The Arena is a new generation SocialFi application that redefines how creators connect, engage, and monetize through content.
2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–16, CCData completed a merger and acquisition financing round of an undisclosed amount, with CoinDesk as the investor. Founded in 2014, CCData is a global cryptocurrency market data provider offering real-time, high-quality, reliable market and pricing data for over 5,300 tokens and more than 240,000 currency pairs to institutional and retail investors. By aggregating and analyzing quote data from globally recognized exchanges and seamlessly integrating different datasets in cryptocurrency prices, CCData provides a comprehensive, holistic market overview.
3. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 10–15, Blockstream completed a $210 million financing round, with Fulgur Ventures as the investor. Blockstream is a leading blockchain development company founded in 2014. Blockstream’s core focus is on developing new infrastructure for traditional financial systems, with key developments revolving around Bitcoin sidechains and other blockchain-related applications. Their flagship technologies include their own implementation of the Lightning protocol and the Elements Project, a blockchain platform supporting open-source sidechains. Blockstream has launched many products such as Liquid (a Bitcoin-based inter-exchange settlement network), Blockstream Green (a secure Bitcoin wallet), as well as other products providing real-time and historical cryptocurrency transaction data, and hosting services for Bitcoin mining operations.