Financing Weekly | 17 public financing events; cross-chain agreement Across completed US$41 million financing, led by Paradigm
Reprinted from panewslab
03/10/2025·2MWhat's the highlight of this issue
According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 17 investment and financing events in global blockchain last week (3.3-3.9); the total funding scale exceeded US$257 million, an increase compared with the previous week. The overview is as follows:
- DeFi announced three investment and financing events, among which Berachain's current pledge agreement Infrared completed a US$14 million Series A financing, led by Framework Ventures;
- Web3 Game Track announced two investment and financing events, among which the AI-powered gaming solution iAgent Protocol completed a $3 million financing;
- Three investment and financing events were announced in the Web3+AI field, including Validation Cloud's US$15 million Series A financing, led by True Global Ventures;
- Six investment and financing events were announced in the field of infrastructure and tools , among which DoubleZero Foundation completed a $28 million financing with a valuation of US$400 million, led by Dragonfly and Multicoin Capital;
- Other categories have announced one investment and financing event, and Web3Labs, an accelerator focused on the Web3 field, completed a new round of strategic financing;
- Centralized finance announced two investment and financing events, including French crypto trading company Flowdesk, which completed a US$102 million financing, led by HV Capital.
DeFi
Berachain liquid pledge agreement Infrared completed a US$14 million Series A financing led by Framework Ventures, with Citizen X, Halo Capital, No Limit Holdings, NGC Ventures and Selini Capital participating. This round of financing is carried out using the SAFT (Future Token Simple Agreement) model. After a $2.25 million strategic round and a $2.5 million seed round led by Binance Labs , Infrared's cumulative total financing amount reached US$18.75 million. Infrared was incubated by the Berachain Foundation and launched two liquid pledged tokens: iBGT and iBERA, which correspond to Berachain's governance token BGT and Gas token BERA. Currently, the agreement TVL exceeds US$1.7 billion, making it the largest agreement for the Berachain ecosystem. The Berachain main network was officially launched in February, but due to controversy over the proportion of investors and internal holdings, the BERA token has fallen 57% since its issuance on February 6.
Derivatives Trading Agreement MYX Finance announced the completion of a strategic round of financing, which was invested by leading institutions such as FL Foundation, Woyong, D11 Labs, HashKey Capital, and Metalpha. Among them, D11 Labs, HashKey Capital and other institutions previously participated in MYX Finance's seed round financing.
According to Coral Finance official news, the project has completed a US$3 million angel round of financing, and investors include Taisu Ventures, Gate Ventures, KuCoin Ventures, Web3Port Fund, Mask Network, Formless Capital, etc. In addition, strategic investors GoPlus Security, UFLY Labs and ecosystem supporter Movement Foundation are also involved. Currently, Coral plans to build a DeFi portfolio solution on the Movement main network. Coral Finance mainly builds a pre-market asset trading mechanism to help users trade before the project TGE (token generation event). In the future, Coral will also introduce AI to empower AlphaVault products to increase revenue and trading opportunities.
Web3 Games
AI-powered gaming solution iAgent Protocol raises $3 million
AI-powered gaming solution iAgent Protocol announced a $3 million financing, with Alpha Liquid Terminal, Lydian Labs, double jump.tokyo Inc., Cointribune, Alliance, Frekaz Group, Expert Dojo, IBC Group Official, PG, and Q42 participating. According to reports, iAgent enables gamers to create, own and monetize game AI agents, allowing gamers to train their own AI agents through game screens, powered by DePIN, and create a new digital asset class on the blockchain by leveraging decentralized GPU computing.
Mysten Labs acquires game development platform Parasol
Sui development company Mysten Labs acquires game development platform Parasol, but the acquisition amount is not disclosed. Parasol is an end-to-end platform composed of Japanese and American game experts, which allows game developers to seamlessly integrate blockchain infrastructure into their games.
AI
Validation Cloud, a crypto infrastructure company that utilizes artificial intelligence, announced a $15 million Series A financing led by True Global Ventures, and Cadenza, Blockchain Founders Fund, Side Door Ventures and AP Capital participated. The valuation of this round of financing has not been disclosed. According to reports, this is Validation Cloud's third round of financing. Since its establishment in 2017, its total financing amount has reached US$30.8 million. Validation Cloud offers three main products to support blockchain based on Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Validation Cloud's products include token staking capabilities, software that connects computers to a proof of stake network, and access to data analyzed by artificial intelligence. The company offers its products on several popular blockchains, including Solana, Ethereum, Base, Aptos and Binance Chain. Validation Cloud's revenue comes from commissions awarded by customers to stake tokens using their services, as well as subscription fees for using their software.
Decentralized AI protocol Prime Intellect completes $15 million in financing, led by Founders Fund
Prime Intellect announced that it has completed a $15 million financing round, led by Founders Fund, led by Menlo Ventures, Andrej Karpathy (EurekaAI, Tesla, OpenAI), Clem Delangue (Hugging Face), Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis), Tri Dao (Together.AI), Balaji Srinivasan (Network School), Emad Mostaque (Stability AI, Intelligent Internet), Jake Medwell (co-founder of 8VC), Brendan McCord (Cosmos Institute), Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon) and others participated in the investment. This brings its total financing to more than $20 million. According to reports, Prime Intellect is building a peer-to-peer protocol for computing and intelligence, which will enable collective creation, ownership and access of sovereign open source AI. The Prime Intellect protocol is already running on the testnet, which builds a trustless, community-driven ecosystem where contributors will benefit from the models they help create.
Fortytwo completes a $2.3 million Pre-Seed round of financing for decentralized AI network
Decentralized AI network Fortytwo announced the completion of a $2.3 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Big Brain Holdings, and participated by CMT Digital, Escape Velocity, Chorus One and mentatgroup. According to reports, Fortytwo is a decentralized AI network that utilizes group intelligence by connecting consumer devices running small AI models. This approach enables scalable and cost-effective AI reasoning without relying on a centralized data center. By installing nodes on personal computers, users can contribute to the global AI infrastructure, and each additional node enhances the intelligence of the network.
Infrastructure & Tools
Cross-chain protocol Across completes US$41 million financing, led by Paradigm
Across Protocol, which focuses on cross-chain interoperability, completed a US$41 million token financing, led by Paradigm, with Bain Capital Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital and angel investor Sina Habinian. This round of financing was carried out in two phases, completed in Q2 and Q4 in 2024, with a total financing amount of US$51 million. Across focuses on intention-driven cross-chain transactions, and supports users to transfer cross-chain assets through a single request, with an average transaction time of less than 5 seconds. Its technology is based on the ERC-7683 standard, which has been adopted by more than 50 protocols such as Base, Arbitrum, Polygon and Optimism, and is used for the cross-chain bridging function of Uniswap. As of now, Across has processed a cumulative transaction volume of US$19 billion, of which the monthly transaction volume in January 2025 exceeded US$1 billion.
Startup DoubleZero Foundation completed a $28 million financing with a valuation of $400 million, led by Dragonfly and Multicoin Capital, with Foundation Capital, Reciprocal Ventures, DBA, Borderless Capital, Superscrypt and Frictionless participating. People familiar with the matter said that DoubleZero Foundation is currently looking for "strategic partners" to seek more strategic financing at a valuation of $600 million, and the strategic financing is not over yet.
According to reports, DoubleZero is building a "new type of Internet" to improve blockchain performance, with its vision to build a global private optical cable network and then use these optical cables to enable blockchains to transmit data more efficiently than on the public Internet. The project is seen as a key technology for Solana to implement plans to process 1 million transactions per second. DoubleZero is opening its licensed testnet to Solana validators and RPC, and plans to gradually expand to other chains. Its optical cable network is connected to dedicated lines operated by Jump Crypto, RockawayX, Distributed Global, Latitude and Terraswitch, and is accepting more contributors. DoubleZero also today announced the launch of its licensed testnet, making the DoubleZero network available for Solana validators and RPCs.
Seismic, a16z crypto, completed a seed round of $7 million
Seismic announced the completion of a $7 million seed round of financing led by a16z crypto, with Polychain, NGC Ventures, dao5 and 1kx participating, and the funds will be used to develop crypto blockchain. Seismic aims to solve the transaction transparency problem faced by the current L1 blockchain. Through end-to-end encryption, transaction data on all chains are privatized and user data is avoided. The team members come from well-known companies such as Wintermute and have deep experience in cryptography, compilers and distributed systems. Seismic said that this financing will accelerate the construction of Seismic's ecosystem and make it an important infrastructure for the future privacy blockchain.
According to the official announcement of Acki Nacki, its network node pre-sale has been successfully completed, with a financing amount of more than US$6 million. Investors include Kingsway Capital, K5 Global, Blockchain.com, Original Capital and Hack VC. Acki Nacki adopts the "Bitcoin for Proof of Stake" design, without pre-mining, airdrop, and token allocation, and the $NACKL token will be released within 60 years. Its Gossip Ignite decentralized launch protocol was launched on January 29, 2025, and the main network will be officially launched after 75% of validators join. Currently, the network test network has more than 5 million users, with the goal of promoting a truly decentralized "world computer" vision.
MEV infrastructure FastLane Labs completes $6 million financing, led by Figment Capital and others
MEV infrastructure FastLane Labs announced that it had completed a $6 million financing, led by Figment Capital and DBA, and participated by Coinbase Ventures, Robot Ventures, Hashkey Capital, CHORUS ONE and others. The new funds will be used to create all-round liquid staking tokens on Monad. According to reports, FastLane Labs is committed to building a long-term MEV ecosystem on Monad, so that users, dApps and stakeholders can benefit from it. Previously, in May 2023 , FastLane Labs completed a US$2.3 million financing, led by Multicoin Capital.
Endless Web3 Chuangshi Cloud completes strategic round of financing, with Foresight Ventures and others participating in the investment
Distributed intelligent component protocol Endless Web3 Chuangshi Cloud announced the completion of a strategic round of financing. The investors in this round are mainly from many institutions and well-known investors including Foresight Ventures. The financing plan is used to accelerate the development of Endless's component development platform, AI Agent tool chain and ecological construction, as well as project product development, ecological development support, long-term development reserves, market and strategic cooperation and other key aspects of project development, promoting Endless to become a super connector from Web2 to Web3, AI and Web3.
Endless is a distributed intelligent component protocol designed to lower the threshold for Web2 applications to transform into Web3, provide developers with a one-stop Web3 application development platform, and provide users with a Web2-level experience. Endless is equipped with a public chain that supports the Move language, and integrates a variety of AI big model capabilities and plug-ins. It is committed to becoming the best connector for AI and Crypto, allowing developers to build Crypto AI applications more easily and quickly.
other
Web3Labs completes a new round of strategic financing
Web3Labs, an accelerator focused on the Web3 field, recently completed a new round of strategic financing, jointly invested by the new investment group Avenir Group, Mirana Ventures, OSL Group, and Gaofeng Innovation and Venture Capital Fund. This round of financing will focus on strengthening the construction of a global ecosystem, deepening the ecological docking of mainstream international exchanges, and relying on professional financial service capabilities to inject new momentum into the Web3 ecosystem. After completing the financing, Web3Labs will comprehensively upgrade its ecological service system: on the one hand, it will link with leading exchange partners to create a full-cycle acceleration platform covering project acceleration and primary market investment; on the other hand, it will actively explore the integration path with traditional markets. In addition, Web3Labs has started cooperation negotiations with many international securities companies to discuss the listing plan in 2025, and strive to open up a two-way empowerment channel between Web3 and the traditional capital market.
Centralized Finance
Flowdesk completes $102 million in financing to expand trading and liquidity operations
French crypto trading company Flowdesk completed a US$102 million financing, of which 90% were equity financing and 10% were debt financing. This round of financing was led by HV Capital, with existing investors Eurazeo, Cathay Innovation and ISAI VC participating, and the debt financing was partly provided by funds managed by BlackRock. Flowdesk plans to use the funds to expand its OTC derivatives trading business, launch a crypto credit division and set up a new office in the UAE. The company also plans to double the number of employees in the next 12 months, strengthen regulatory compliance, and actively respond to the implementation of EU MiCA regulations.
Cryptocurrency broker August completes $10 million Series A funding, led by Dragonfly Ventures
Cryptocurrency broker August completed a $10 million Series A financing round, led by Dragonfly Ventures, and participated by SCB Limited, 6th Man Ventures and Foresight Ventures. The valuation in this round was not disclosed. August will use the latest funding raised to develop marketing strategies, recruit more employees and continue to develop new technologies.
August is a cryptocurrency brokerage firm that helps them get the benefits and returns of cryptocurrency investment through borrowing and trading through lending and trading. Most of August's revenue comes from transaction spreads and charges clients transaction fees on each transaction. The company previously raised $6 million in its seed round in 2023.
Investment institutions
Foundation Capital announced the launch of its 11th flagship fund with a scale of US$600 million, aiming to find the so-called "billion dollar market" in the fields of artificial intelligence, financial technology and cryptocurrency. It is reported that Foundation Capital is an investor in AI chip company Cerebras and the first institutional investor in blockchain platform Solana. The latest fund is expected to adopt multi-stage, multi-region, and multi-strategy, but will continue to look for investment opportunities in the early stages.
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