A look at Circle’s 15 investment projects this year: leaning towards DeFi and infrastructure

Original author: MooMs, crypto researcher
Original translation: Leo, BlockBeats
Circle, the issuer of USDC, is one of the largest companies in the crypto industry. Coingecko data shows that the current market value of USDC is approximately US$28.4 billion, and its investment department Circle Ventures currently holds a large amount of funds available for investment. Crypto researcher MooMs wrote an article about "Circle 2023 Investment Projects".
Circle is valued at $9 billion and is one of the largest companies in the crypto industry. Here is a full list of Circle Ventures’ investments from 2023 to date:
 Alkimiya
Alkimiya is a decentralized protocol dedicated to the blockchain consensus capital market, which enables consensus producers (PoW miners, staking validators) to create contracts supported by underlying "consensus resources" (such as hash power).
Funding: More than $7.2 million, including from Dragonfly and others.
 Hourglass
Hourglass is a trading time-bound token market. Through TBT (Time-Bound Token), the market will allow users to obtain liquidity for their locked assets by selling time-bound rights on the secondary market, enabling users to gain rewards through long-term consistency and agreement to find promised liquidity.
Funding: $4.2 million from Eletric Capital and others
 LI.FI Protocol
LiFi Protocol is a cross-bridge and DEX aggregator. LiFi can cross any asset on any chain to the desired asset on the selected chain, providing an excellent user experience.
Amount of funding: $23 million. Other investors include 6MV, Coinbase Ventures, etc.
 DFlow
DFlow is a decentralized order flow market, powered by the DFlow protocol's Payment for Order Flow (PFOF) model, designed to support order flow from various L1 chains and Rollups. Brokerage firms create, manage, monitor, and analyze order flow auctions on one hand, while market makers submit bids to the auctions on the other hand, and the winner of the auction obtains the exclusive right to execute the relevant orders.
Funding: $7.5 million (total of $7.5 million in two rounds, with Circle Ventures participating in a $5.5 million round), with other investors including The Spartan Group, Multicoin Capital, etc.
 Affine DeFi
Affine is an investment platform that allows users to purchase a basket of assets (rebalancing vaults) to invest in multiple strategies simultaneously.
Funding: $6.9 million from The Spartan Group, Jump Crypto, and others.
 Term Labs
Term is a scalable, fixed-rate DeFi liquidity solution featuring a single market liquidation rate that is fair and transparent, determined by participants through a weekly auction.
Funding: $2.5 million from Robot Ventures, Eletric Capital, and others
 Catalyst
Catalyst is an open source protocol that also acts as a permissionless liquidity layer for the future of modular blockchains. With Catalyst, any new modular chain can automatically connect to liquidity and exchange with any chain - including liquidity hubs such as Ethereum and Cosmos. Enable seamless liquidity connection and asset exchange between blockchains.
Funding: $4.2 million from Robot Ventures, The Spartan Group, and others
 Architect
Architect is an infrastructure solution that provides traders with low latency trading, designed for institutions and large traders seeking secure, robust, customizable trading tools.
Funding amount: US$5 million, investors also include Coinbase Ventures and others.
 They are Finance
Huma Finance is a DeFi project that allows users to borrow against future income streams without collateral. Similarly, users can contribute to liquidity pools and earn rewards on idle funds while supporting the community.
Amount raised: $8.3 million, with investors including ParaFi Capital and others.
 OpenTrade
OpenTrade provides the Web3 financial management space with access to on-chain structured financial products backed by investing in real-world assets (RWA), acquiring short-term, RWA investments through a global network of financial institutions, asset managers, and b2b networks and structuring them into yield-generating on-chain financial products.
Funding: $1.5 million from Polygon Labs and others
 Fractal
Fractal allows all on-chain assets — from cryptocurrencies to real-world assets — to interact and be collateralized through a universal margin account.
Funding: $6 million, from investors including The Spartan Group and others.
In addition to Circle’s recent DeFi investments, I also listed their recent investments related to blockchain services and infrastructure, as follows:
TipLink: TipLink is a lightweight wallet designed to make transferring digital assets as easy as sending a link. Someone with cryptocurrency can create a TipLink and send that link to anyone through any platform (text, Discord, email, etc.). Once a user connects their wallet to TipLink, they can deposit funds and then transfer ownership through a shared link. Each transaction also creates a new wallet, so the recipient doesn't have to download a new browser extension or app to use the money. And if the recipient doesn't claim the funds, the sender can still recover them.
zkME: Zero-knowledge identity oracle provider zkMe, zkMe allows users to encrypt their data and use ZKP to prove it on their own devices to efficiently verify user qualifications while protecting their privacy.
Msafe: It is the first and only multi-signature, non-custodial digital asset management solution on Aptos to date.
Rarimo: Rarimo is a multi-chain protocol that aims to solve liquidity, access, and interoperability issues between non-fungible and fungible use cases. Rarimo makes it easier to work across different chains, allowing users to perform operations such as transfer tokens, stake tokens, and provide proof of ownership across chains. Rarify Labs behind it serves Rarimo's service providers and community members.
Among them, TipLink is my favorite and very creative project.
Finally, in 2023, Circle was also one of the investors participating in LayerZero Labs' $120 million Series B financing round. LayerZero is also a full-chain interoperability protocol that everyone is optimistic about. I hope that L0 will have a bright future.