Last Week’s Crypto Investment Highlights
Ruceto tracked over $470 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 |
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Polychain Capital |
Protocol for trading and automated liquidity provision on Ethereum |
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Quadrille Capital, Headline |
Platform for creating and publishing mobile games, expanding into web3 |
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Evolution Equity Partners |
Platform for developers to turn their blockchain ideas into reality |
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Paradigm |
Real-time, flexible blockchain data APIs |
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Accel, Quona Capital |
Platform that seeks to simplify DeFi by removing technical, security, and strategy concerns |
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Molten Ventures |
Low-code web3 and blockchain development platform |
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A16z crypto |
Web3 ecommerce infrastructure |
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Metaplanet, 8090 Partners |
Crypto hardware developer |
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Wintermute Ventures |
Smart & Social Web3 Wallet |
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Dragonfly Capital, Nascent, Ethereal Ventures, Fintech Collective, DCG, TheLAO, Focus Labs, Mirana Ventures, Metaversal, Opensea Ventures, Ledgerprime, Meta4, Flying Falcon |
Liquidity scaling protocol for NFT credit markets |
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Polychain Capital |
Build secure and scalable enterprise wallet software |
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General Catalyst |
0% interest loans on your bitcoin with no payback period |
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Coinbase Ventures, Defiance Capital, Saison Capital |
Gateway for apps, dApps and services to bring the best of native Web3 experiences to users securely and seamlessly |
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Griffin Gaming Partners |
Bringing together the best minds in fashion, gaming and web3 to create fashion experiences spanning mobile games, entertainment and digital collectibles |
TBD |
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True Ventures |
Valory's mission is to enable radically greater personal and economic autonomy by putting open autonomous systems into everyone’s daily activities. |
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Binance, Republic Capital, Crypto.com |
Community driven crypto app store |
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Electric Capital, Pantera |
A prediction market-esque trading and pricing protocol for NFTs |
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Cherry Crypto, Inflection |
Otterspace’s non-transferable badge protocol helps DAOs create better incentive systems, automate permissions and enable non-financialized governance |
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CoinFund, Cadenza Ventures |
Crypto backed Mortgages |
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Lucas von Cranach, Sebastian Borget, Dominic Thiem |
Platform where fans can invest in athletes |
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Vgames |
Web3 game development |
Various |
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Play Ventures Future Fund |
Web3 game development |
Various |
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Play Ventures, Sisu Games Ventures, Joakim Achrén |
Web3 game development |
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Elyzio is a free-to-play web3 gaming multiverse developer that prioritizes game quality rather than overemphasizing the earning aspect to create a sustainable player base. Their first game is a roguelike action RPG called Warden’s Will, and is planned for release in 2024.
FANtium enables fans to financially support and invest in athletes, and receive a share of prize money or sponsorship deal income in return. A portion of future earnings are tokenized into NFTs which can be sold on third party marketplaces. This is an interesting web3 use case that addresses a major challenge for young athletes. For example, in an individual sport like tennis, athletes pay for their travel, equipment, and coaching. Sponsors help, but money is tight early on while grinding through low-level tournaments. This platform would essentially provide bridge financing until they are winning enough in tour-level matches to land sizeable sponsorship deals.
Flowstate Games is the creator of the web3 game Smash Stars Thunderdome. The game features car combat on Smash Bros.-like 2D levels and is planned for an alpha test launch in Q1 2023.
Magic Square is an app store for crypto apps that is governed by a DAO. Users can access their apps on a personalized dashboard called “Magic Spaces.” Creators use Magic SDK to integrate various functionalities. Magic Square’s token is SQR, which cannot be bought yet. SQR’s utilities include governance, user access packages, app advertisement, and app referral rewards.
MetaStreet is a liquidity scaling protocol that’s working to improve the efficiency of NFT credit markets by acting as an aggregator. The protocol includes multiple user types: 1) Note originators rely on their own work and capital to buy notes from P2P promissory note markets and sell those notes to MetaStreet Vaults to earn a spread. 2) Capital depositors deposit approved capital, such as ETH or stable coins, into MetaStreet Vaults to earn yield in return for providing the capital necessary to buy promissory notes. The protocol is governed by MetaStreetDAO, which has a dedicated section of their whitepaper that’s not yet live.
Tribo is a free-to-play web3 multiplayer game developer. Founders worked in studios such as King, PopCap, Kopla, Wooga, Flaregames, InnoGames, Square Enix, and Creative Assembly. The startup recently minted 2,000 NFTs called Flamys, and they are currently available for trading.
Uniswap is the top DEX by trading volume, having supported $1.2 trillion in trading volume to date. The company’s recent $165M Series B came in at a $1.66 billion valuation. It is not profitable, but it intends to use this massive Series B to become more financially sustainable and to make web3 more accessible to non-technical people. Uniswap’s governance token is UNI. Per Uniswap, “the Uniswap Protocol is a public good owned and governed by UNI token holders.”
Institutional Investors of Crypto
Blocktower Capital, an institutional investor focused on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, announced a new $150 million fund that began operating in stealth in December, 2021. Backers for this fund include BPI France and Mass Mutual. The fund will primarily invest in DeFi and crypto infrastructure, and check-sizes will be between $500k and $6,000,000 for 5% to 10% equity ownership and 2% to 5% token ownership. As an RIA, it can invest in liquid tokens, illiquid tokens and secondary shares.
What’s happening at Ruceto
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