Summary of crypto industry investment and financing in November: The number of transactions in a single month hit a new low this year, with a total financing of approximately US$1.272 billion

链捕手ChainCatcher · 2022-12-06T08:23:09.000Z
Author: Gu Yu, Xi Xianxiang This past November was the most volatile period for the crypto market this year. Affected by the FTX incident, many mainstream venture capital institutions suffered huge losses, which cast a shadow on the already volatile crypto industry. According to Rootdata statistics, throughout November, there were 94 public financing events in the encryption primary market, involving an amount of approximately US$1.272 billion. This is the first time this year that the number of monthly investments and financings has fallen below 100. This downward trend is expected to become more pronounced in the coming months due to the lag in the release of financing news for most projects.
Author: Gu Yu, Xi Xiangxiang
 
November just passed was the most turbulent period in the crypto market this year. Affected by the FTX incident, many mainstream venture capital institutions suffered huge losses, which cast a shadow on the already volatile and downward crypto industry.
According to Rootdata statistics, throughout November, there were 94 public financing events in the primary crypto market, involving approximately $1.272 billion. This is the first time this year that the number of monthly financings has fallen below 100. Since most projects release financing news with a lag, this downward trend is expected to become more pronounced in the coming months.
Compared with October, the number of investment and financing in November decreased by 19 and the amount involved increased by US$119 million, that is, the number of investment and financing decreased by 16% and the amount involved increased by about 12%. The main reason is that there were many large financings in that month, which offset the impact of the reduction in financing events.
According to statistics, there were five projects with financing amounts exceeding US$50 million in November, namely Keyrock, TRM Labs, Ramp, Fenix ​​Games, and Matter Labs, while there were only three in October.
From the perspective of specific tracks, infrastructure, CeFi, and games are the areas most favored by venture capital institutions, with financing amounts reaching US$379 million, US$302 million, and US$206 million, respectively.
In addition, there were 5 mergers and acquisitions in the crypto market this month, 4 of which occurred in the CeFi field, involving well-known companies such as Binance, CrossTower, and Bakkt, and the other one was the Helium Foundation's acquisition of the Solana NFT protocol Strata Protocol at the beginning of the month.
Below, this article will provide a detailed review of the investment and financing market in November based on various tracks in the crypto industry.
 
infrastructure
 
The infrastructure track includes Layer1, Layer2, developer platform, wallets and many other fields. It has always been an area where venture capital institutions have invested heavily. This month, a total of 20 infrastructure projects received financing, involving a total amount of US$404 million.
Among them, zkSync development company Matter Labs announced the completion of a $200 million Series C financing round, and venture capital institutions such as Dragonfly, a16z, and Lightspeed Venture once again added to the zk narrative. Just one month ago, zkSync announced the launch of version 2.0 of the mainnet, but it is expected to be open to external projects in December. According to statistics from the zkSync ecosystem official website, more than 100 projects have been deployed on the test network, including Aave V3, Uniswap V3, etc. The development of the zk ecosystem is worth paying attention to.
In the recent popular MPC wallet field, Fordefi stood out and received $18 million in seed round financing from well-known institutions such as Lightspeed Venture and Electric Capital. According to the introduction, Fordefi's MPC wallet platform and web3 gateway can help institutional users get more DeFi opportunities, connect to dApps on various chains while ensuring the security of assets, and safely trade, trade, borrow, invest and vote in DeFi.
In terms of privacy, the multi-signature solution Nucleo has completed a $4 million seed round of financing. The project supports users to shield and transfer assets in a private manner while using multi-signatures. It is worth noting that in addition to receiving investment from Bain Capital Crypto, the project has also received investment from multiple privacy expansion solutions such as Aztec Network, Aleo and Espresso Systems. It is expected that the project will be one of the first ecological projects of these privacy networks.
In addition, the smart contract hosting platform T3rn is also worthy of attention. It provides innovative solutions for interoperable smart contract execution and has a built-in fail-safe mechanism. Smart contracts stored in the t3rn registry are available to anyone, and developers who contribute smart contracts to open source repositories can choose to be paid when their code is executed, which not only provides a new vision for open source development, but also rewards developers fairly.
 
CeFi
 
Although CeFi is the field most affected by the FTX bankruptcy incident and many CeFi projects have fallen into a major crisis this month, the amount of CeFi financing in November still ranked second among the nine major tracks, raising approximately US$301 million in 14 financings.
On the one hand, compliant CeFi projects are still favored. Most of the CeFi projects that completed financing this month have different types of licenses. For example, Archax has obtained the UK FCA license, ADDX has obtained the digital securities issuance, custody and secondary trading licenses from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and Coinmetro is regulated by the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit.
On the other hand, the lag in financing news is still obvious. Cryptocurrency market maker Keyrock and cryptocurrency exchange Lemon Cash have stated in news announcements that financing was completed several months ago, and the decision to announce it now is mainly out of consideration for maintaining market and user confidence.
Specifically, Ejara, Apex Crypto, Ramp, etc. are worth paying attention to. Ejara is a Cameroonian fintech company that provides an investment application that allows users to buy cryptocurrencies and save through decentralized wallets. The company has attracted $8 million in investment from many well-known institutions such as Dragonfly, CoinShares, Circle Ventures, and HashKey Capital, reflecting that emerging markets are still attractive to venture capital institutions.
Apex Crypto is a crypto investment solution that was acquired by Bakkt for $200 million in early November, which is the second highest M&A case this year. It is understood that the platform provides execution, clearing, custody, cost basis and tax service solutions for more than 30 tokens, and any company can use its easy-to-integrate API to launch cryptocurrency products for customers.
Ramp is similar to the "PayPal" of the crypto world. It has launched cryptocurrency trading services in the United States and Canada. Local residents can use legal currency, debit cards, credit cards, bank transfers, and Apple Pay to purchase cryptocurrencies such as BTC and ETH. The latest round of $70 million in Series B financing has increased its valuation to $450 million.
 
DeFi 
 
In November, there were 13 DeFi financings, raising a total of approximately US$42 million, ranking fifth among the nine major tracks.
From the perspective of public chain ecosystem distribution, Near ecosystem is the most active this month, with decentralized derivatives trading protocol Veax, decentralized trading protocol Jumbo Exchange and Orderly Network completing financing. In addition, projects such as Solana, Cardano, and Optimism have completed financing.
From the perspective of projects, Veax, Lyra, Avault, etc. are worth paying attention to. Veax is a high-level unilateral liquidity management DEX native to the Near blockchain. The planned features include hybrid AMM DEX, adaptive liquidity pool, real margin leverage trading, over-the-counter trading based on smart contracts, and non-liquidity token auctions based on smart contracts.
Lyra is an options liquidity protocol built on Optimism, combining a first-class dynamic volatility model and risk management framework to provide a reasonably priced two-way options market in DeFi. Avault is a one-stop full-chain yield platform based on the Layerzero ecosystem, aiming to lower the threshold for users to use Web 3.0 DeFi Dapps. Users holding an asset on one chain will be able to interact with Dapps on other chains with one click to complete cross-chain compounding, staking, lending, copy trading, etc.
 
NFT
 
In November, there were 10 NFT financings, raising a total of approximately US$32 million.
There are a variety of innovations emerging in the NFT space. Among the projects funded in November, the smart contract system NiftyApes can help NFT owners pledge NFTs to obtain instant liquidity, the NFT fraud detection network Yakoa can identify and track intellectual property infringements on the chain, and the NFT perpetual contract exchange nftperp can track the lowest price of NFT collections, allowing users to go long and short NFTs.
There is also a project that combines offline life - Buk, which focuses on enabling hotels to create, manage and distribute their rooms as NFTs. After the reservation is completed, the guest will receive an NFT representing each room night. The token can be traded for room reservations in the secondary market (distributors and guests) while maintaining price control and full visibility of distribution channels.
 
other
 
Daylight is a wallet information tracking platform where users can discover everything a wallet can do: minting, airdropping, unlocking, voting, etc. The project is supported by Framework Ventures, Chapter One and other institutions.
Sepana is a Web3 indexing infrastructure that supports easy discovery of content, transactions, NFTs, DAOs, and people across blockchains and Web3, hoping to expand people's cognition by making Web3 content easy to discover and access. Currently, Sepana has developed products such as Ask Mirror, Lens Search, and Cloutavista to help users easily query the content of protocols such as Mirror and Lens Protool. The project has received support from investors such as Hack VC, Protocol Labs, and Balaji Srinivasan.
In addition, in view of the frequent security incidents and compliance issues, related companies such as Beosin and TRM Labs have also completed a new round of financing. Beosin is a blockchain security service provider, whose business covers smart contract auditing, stolen cryptocurrency recovery, risk monitoring and alerts, etc. TRM Labs is a blockchain analysis company that mainly helps financial institutions, cryptocurrency companies and public institutions investigate fraud and financial crimes related to encryption, and has received investment from well-known institutions such as Goldman Sachs and PayPal Ventures.