Venture Trotter Weekly Review: The EVM-compatible L1 omnichain that connects everything, even Bitcoin and Dogecoin

A company is building an EVM-compatible L1 with built-in connectivity to all blockchains, even non-smart contract chains like Bitcoin and Dogecoin. ZetaChain raised $27 million in a round that included Blockchain.com, Jane Street Capital, VistaLabs, and more. With ZetaChain, users can access all of their assets and data from one wallet on a single platform without bridges or wrapped tokens. This comes with multiple advantages.

1. Interchain dApps have greater speed, more accessibility, reduced steps, slippage, fees, and susceptibility to race conditions.

2. Removing fragmentation from Web3 would enable a much larger audience to easily participate.

3. A single contract can be managed for all chains, this reducing the attach surface.

4. Developers can implement Bitcoin smart contracts, enabling the use of Bitcoin on the broader DeFi ecosystem.

The native token for this project is ZETA. ZETA can be used to pay gas fees and to secure PoS validation. The token can be transferred to and from any chain. ZetaChain’s mainnet is not live and a specific date has not been referenced yet.  ZetaChain’s ecosystem contains over 47,000 dApp contracts and their ongoing testnet has included over 13 million transactions from 1.7 million users.

Asia’s largest Web2 metaverse, Zepeto, is expanding into Web3 with the launch of ZTX. The company raised $13 million in a Seed round led by Jump Crypto. ZTX will allow for in-game ownership in its 4 Genesis Districts: Fashion, Games, Financial and Arts. The ZTX token will be released in the future. It will serve as a primary currency in the in-game economy, and it will include governance functionality. The presale for the ZTX Genesis Mint, 4,000 homes that are usable inside of ZTX and unlock game perks, lasts until August 25, 2023.

This will be interesting to watch because Zepeto is valued at over $1 billion, and it attracted more than 400 million users since its 2018 launch. If they can successfully onboard a major portion of their current Web2 user base to ZTX, it could serve as a very bullish signal to general Web 3metaverse adoption.

A protocol is bringing Web3 technology to TradFi, enabling exposure to US securities like Apple and Google equity shares. Dinari raised $7.5 million in a Seed Round that included investors such as Balaji Srinivasan. Per the company’s whitepaper, the goal here is to “enable a more accessible, transparent, and efficient system for the world’s quadrillions of dollars in spot and derivatives trading” and “to maximize interoperability with decentralized finance while maintaining security.”

Dinari’s dShares are ERC-20 tokens on Arbitrum One that are backed 1:1 by US securities. These tokens are minted when underlying shares are purchased from the stock exchange, and they can be purchased with stablecoins. The company will soon add functionality for dShares holders to receive dividends in USDC. Trading will come with some fees, including order fees of $1 + 0.5% and a network fee of approximately $0.28 on Arbitrum One. The service will not be available in the US.

List of VC Investments into Crypto Projects

The full list of the institutional investments that Ruceto tracked last week is below. Links to the target company website, investment announcement, and token info are provided via hyperlinks on the Target Name, $ Raised, and Token columns respectively.