Organized by: Cookies & Elvin, RootData
I. Financing Data
The largest financing event this month came from Avalanche, which completed a $250 million OTC financing, led by Dragonfly, Galaxy Digital, and ParaFi Capital. Other popular projects that completed financing include the crypto banking service and payment solution BVNK, the decentralized open-source social graph Lens Protocol, the global virtual asset service provider Klickl, the modular public chain Plume Network, and the blockchain asset securities company Prometheum.
The $1-3 million financing range is the most common, and seed rounds remain the most popular financing stage, but the proportion has decreased, with 17 projects completing seed rounds. Well-known projects include the AI L1 blockchain ChainOpera AI ($17 million), the decentralized AI infrastructure Exabits ($15 million), the crypto credit card KAST ($10 million), and the ZK verification network Fiamma ($4 million).
II. Active Investors
Animoca Brands has consistently been the venture capital firm with the highest investment frequency in November and December, with 5 investments last month and 8 this month, including investments in the decentralized privacy protection solution FLock, the social trading platform XYRO, the Web3 native social marketing platform Bounty Bay, the decentralized lending protocol Neptune, the PoA blockchain Haven1, and the AI computing power economy layer GAIB.
Following closely in activity are Faction, Borderless Capital, GSR, Presto, Big Brain Holdings, and Blockchange, each with more than 4 investments.
In terms of new crypto fund raising, December showed more positive signals, with MicroStrategy's model gaining market recognition. Specific events include:
- Sora Ventures launched a $150 million fund, using Bitcoin as the primary reserve asset to optimize financial strategy and increase shareholder value.
The Bitcoin mining company MARA disclosed that it had raised $1.925 billion through convertible notes in November and December and bought 15,574 BTC at an average price of $98,529.
- Former Google engineer Casey Caruso founded the venture capital fund Topology Ventures, which has raised $75 million. The fund will invest in frontier technologies, including artificial intelligence, decentralized networks, neurotechnology, aerospace, and robotics.
- Semler Scientific raised an additional $50 million and has purchased 2,084 BTC at an average price of approximately $81,000 for a total of $168.6 million.
- Venture capital fund Swish Ventures completed a $60 million fundraise, which will be invested in areas such as Web3 and AI. The fund plans to support 10 companies, with each transaction investing $5 million to $7 million.
- Nasdaq-listed bitcoin miner Riot Platforms announced plans to raise $500 million through the issuance of convertible preferred notes, with the net proceeds to be used to purchase additional BTC and for general corporate purposes.
- Crypto venture capital firm Dattice is currently fundraising for its third fund, but the SEC filing does not specify the fund's size.
- Bitcoin miner IREN announced plans to raise $400 million through the issuance of convertible bonds (3.25% coupon, 30% conversion premium).
III. Popular Projects
RootData's popularity score is calculated by normalizing and weighting data such as platform search volume, click-through rate, user votes, and Twitter engagement index. The projects with the highest popularity scores in December are:
Fuel is an operating system built for Ethereum Rollups. Fuel allows Rollups to solve the PSI (Parallelization, State Minimization Execution, Interoperability) problem without any sacrifices.
Vana is an AI-powered digital identity generation application that allows users to create a digital character and use it across different applications, with the digital character being private and only controllable by the creator and their authorized accounts.
Plume is a fully integrated, modular chain focused on RWAfi. They have built the first modular, composable, RWA-centric EVM-compatible chain, aiming to simplify onboarding of all asset types through native infrastructure and unified RWAfi-specific functionalities across the entire chain.
Nexus Network is a massively parallelized proof-of-stake mining network. It is a world-class instantiation of the Nexus zkVM, designed to run at a trillion CPU cycles per second, provided it is connected to sufficient computing power.
Magic Eden is a cross-chain NFT marketplace that has built a user-friendly platform supported by leading minting and trading solutions. Magic Eden brings dynamic cultural moments onto the blockchain, enabling users to create, discover, and collect unique NFTs.
XION is a Layer 1 blockchain designed for consumer applications, providing a tailored seamless user experience for everyday users. Through its innovative Chain Abstraction infrastructure, XION simplifies complex crypto interactions and offers protocol-level account abstraction, gas-free transactions, signature abstraction, cross-device usage, and regulatory-compliant pricing.
Hyperliquid is a high-performance L1 platform. Its vision is a fully on-chain open finance system, where user-built applications connect with high-performance native components, all without impacting the end-user experience.
Thena is an automated market maker based on the BNB Chain, inspired by Solidly, creating a simpler liquidity acquisition process for new and existing protocols through capital-efficient liquidity guidance.
Movement is a modular framework for building and deploying Move-based infrastructure, applications, and blockchains in any distributed environment. The team is building a suite of products and services that enable non-Move protocols to leverage the powerful capabilities of the Move programming language without writing a single line of Move code.
Virtuals Protocol is a decentralized factory that manufactures various AI characters (capable of text, voice, and action responses) for different virtual worlds (such as games or online spaces). Virtuals Protocol provides incentives for the decentralized creation and monetization of AI characters for each virtual interaction (game, metaverse, online interaction, or other).
Blade Games is a chain-based gaming + AI agent ecosystem built around the zkVM stack, building AI agents running within games where users can play, train, and create their own on-chain economies.
BIO Protocol is the financial layer for DeSci, aiming to accelerate capital and talent inflow into on-chain science. bioDAs can use BIO Protocol's auction contracts to raise funds and directly allocate them to research programs, IP assets, and other biotech organizations.
Balance is a Web3 experience infrastructure built by the Epal team, dedicated to providing a smooth Web3 transition experience for Web2 users. Balance leverages its user traffic pool and combines blockchain and AI technologies to bring transformations to multiple industries, especially social and gaming.
Nodepay is a decentralized bandwidth network infrastructure for AI training. By connecting to the Nodepay network, users will be able to sell their unused internet bandwidth to AI companies, enabling efficient transfer of public training data, labels, models, and remote distributed training.
Usual is a stablecoin protocol that has launched USD, a 1:1 collateralized, permissionless, and fully compliant stablecoin backed by real-world assets (RWA). USUAL is a governance token that allows the community to guide the network's future development. Usual solves current stablecoin market issues by redistributing profits to the community and rewarding token holders with actual earnings generated from RWA.
Eclipse is a customizable rollup provider compatible with multiple Layer 1 blockchains. The platform enables developers to deploy their own Solana OS-backed rollups, using any chain for security or data storage.
Kaito is an AI-driven digital asset research platform that aims to revolutionize cryptocurrency research and investment through AI. Kaito's MetaSearch aims to enable users to search the entire crypto domain through a one-click product using platforms such as Twitter, Discord, governance forums, Mirror, and Medium.
ChainOpera AI provides L1 blockchains and protocols for the co-ownership and co-creation of decentralized AI APPs and Agents, supported by a Federated AI operating system and platform.
FLock aims to build a decentralized privacy protection solution for artificial intelligence. FLock has proposed a research initiative called Federated Learning Blocks (FLocks), which uses blockchain as a coordination platform between data holders to conduct machine learning while keeping the data local and private.
Berachain is a high-performance EVM-compatible blockchain built on a Liquidity Proof-of-Stake consensus. Liquidity Proof-of-Stake is a novel consensus mechanism that aims to coordinate network incentives and establish a strong synergy between Berachain validators and the project ecosystem.
IV. Project Dynamics
In December, RootData also recorded the mainnet launches and new token issuances of many projects, helping users understand the important project dynamics in the market and grasp earlier alpha opportunities.
Source: RootData Project Dynamics
The projects that launched tokens in December (in chronological order):
Source: RootData Market
Due to space constraints, the above is only partial information on mainnet launches and tokens. For more complete and timely data information, please visit the RootData official website (https://www.rootdata.com/zh/) to learn more.
