Venture Trotter Weekly Review: Week Ending 2/24/23

Ruceto tracked over $260 million in institutional investments into crypto or web3 companies last week. Links to the target company website, investment announcement, and token info are provided via hyperlinks on the Target Name, $ Raised, and Token columns respectively.

Target Name $ Raised Lead Investors Description Token
Morgan Creek Digital
Blockchain and privacy hardware company
a16z
Web3 communication platform for online communities that offers a complete system for community builders
DWF Labs
A private Web3 ecosystem building decentralized privacy-preserving applications that help protect user data and identity online
BDX
Accel
Web3 gaming studio
Galaxy, Paypal Ventures
Automated, on-chain economic security system enabling crypto protocols to optimize risk management and capital efficiency while protecting user funds
Pantera
Metaverse game developer
Binance Labs, Polychain
Zero-knowledge infrastructure company
a16z
Web3 game developer
In-game
Race Capital, Distributed Capital
Income backed Defi
TBD
Lightspeed
End-to-end observability platform to help you gain insights, secure assets and troubleshoot transactions for your dApps
Sequoia, Multicoin
Send crypto to anyone with TipLink, even if they don't have a wallet
Makers Fund, Fabric Ventures
Collaborative game platform
TBD
Dragonfly Capital
AI-powered search engine for crypto
Jump Crypto, Hack VC
Invest and save in cross-chain assets
PrimeXM
Web3 incubator and market maker
Lemniscap
Web3 infrastructure company
Blockchain Capital
Open index protocol for developers building on web3
TBD
3RM
Distributed Global
Sales tools for web3
Dragonfly Capital, Naval Ravikant
DEX that serves as an on-chain dark pool
Coinbase Ventures
NFT lending platform
Bain Capital Crypto
Web3 game developers
IDEO CoLab Ventures
Provides a self-custodial, multi-signature wallet for onchain organizations
6th Man Ventures
A privacy preserving decentralized database, built on zk-STARKs
CoinFund
Protocol that allows users to create self-sovereign, recoverable, and decentralized web3 accounts
Mark Cuban, 500 Global
Cross-chain crypto wallet
BLT

Affine Protocol enables users to earn crypto market returns by holding baskets of diversified assets. Affine provides a set of preset strategies to choose from, and baskets can include simple coins like BTC, or they can include DeFi lending protocols. The company prides itself on its low transaction fees thanks to it’s efficient use of L2 protocols. In order to participate, users currently need crypto to make initial deposits into Affine, but the company is working on a solution to allow users to deposit fiat if that is preferred.

Beldex provides a network of privacy preserving, interoperable dApps. The company’s ecosystem includes BChat, a private messaging app, BelNet, a decentralized VPN service, the Beldex browser, an ad-free Web3 browser and the Beldex privacy protocol, a cross-chain asset anonymizer. BDX masternodes power the Beldex network, which offer passive BDX rewards which can be claimed daily, weekly, and monthly. The minimum lockup period for masternodes is 30 days. BDX is currently available on multiple exchanges.

Blocto is a cross-chain crypto wallet that makes crypto adoption easier for the non tech savvy. Users can log in with their email addresses instead of relying on seed phrases, and they can manage crypto assets across multiple chains with a single wallet. The Blocto ecosystem supports dApps, cryptos, and NFT assets on Flow, Solana, BNB, Polygon, Avalanche, Ethereum, Tron and Aptos. BLT is the utility and governance token of Blocto, and it is currently available for trading.

Huma Finance is a lending protocol that uses receivables (future invoices, transactions, subscription revenue, paychecks, royalties etc.) as collateral. Borrowers are part of lending pools, which are underwritten by evaluation agents (“EAs”). EAs must have skin in the game, and are required to contribute to liquidity pools. In return for their contributions, EAs and other liquidity providers are entitled to a portion of the pool income. To make underwriting possible, borrowers voluntarily share certain on and off-chain data about their income, assets and liabilities. This data is encrypted, and the rights of the data remains with the borrowers.

PaprMeme is an NFT lending platform that is centered around the trading of the token PAPR (read “paper,” stands for perpetual APR). Borrowers mint the token and transfer collateral to a smart contract. This newly minted PAPR can be exchanged for other assets on Uniswap. Interest rates are programmatically updated based on the trading price of PAPR on Uniswap, with a lower price leading to higher interest rates. Borrowers repay the exact amount of PAPR that they minted when a loan is closed, and PAPR holders expect the value of PAPR to increase over time due to borrower incentives and interest rate movements.

Superchain is building a decentralized blockchain data protocol for developers. The company brands itself as “The Open Index Protocol,” and says that developers will be able to “build applications faster through immediate and personal connection to data, free of centralised intermediaries.” Factors contributing to a negative developer experience from existing solutions include high latency when making queries, cumbersome data that is only useful for single use cases over short time horizons, and fixed APIs that are overly limiting. Superchain seeks to solve these problems by creating a protocol that is designed specifically for decentralized blockchain data. Superchain is offering early access for market makers, quant traders, data scientists, Defi and dApp developers. Per the company, “Superchain will ultimately be powered by a utility token and become a fully decentralised Web3 data platform.”

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Disclaimer: The content presented is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, legal, or professional advice. The content is provided ‘as is’ without any representations or warranties, express or implied.

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