RootData February encrypted data summary: M&A boom is surging, VC fundraising falls
Reprinted from chaincatcher
03/04/2025·2MCompiled by: Gu Yu & Cookies & Elvin, RootData
At the end of February 2025, BTC fell sharply to $78,000, down more than 29% from its previous month high ( $109,000 ). The Cryptocurrency Fear and Greed Index has fallen below 20, the lowest level since September 2024, and the market is in a state of extreme fear.
After the closer Spring Festival and Christmas holidays , the crypto-investment investment and financing market continues to recover. In February, the total amount of investment and financing in the crypto sector reached US$950 million, with the number of financing starting from 99, both rising by about 18% month-on-month. The average financing amount this month was US$12.258 million, with a median financing amount of US$4.75 million.
Financing trends in the crypto field in the past two years
In this article, we will focus on specific financing data, active investors, hot search projects and other aspects to present the changing trends of the crypto market for everyone.
1. Financing data
This month, there were 2 financing events exceeding US$100 million, with 19 financings exceeding US$10 million. The largest amount was that blockchain financial services companyFigure completed a financing of US$200 million, and Sixth Street participated in the investment. Delta's neutral stablecoin agreement Ethena completed a US$100 million strategic financing, with Franklin Templeton and F-Prime Capital participating. Other popular projects that have completed financing include crypto asset management company Bitwise completing US$70 million in financing, gift card encryption platform Raise completing US$63 million in financing, and Web3 security tool Blockaid completing US$50 million in financing.
In terms of financing amount and rounds, US$1-3 million is the financing range with the largest proportion (34.2%), and the seed round is the hottest financing round, with a total of 23 projects completing seed rounds . Well-known projects include RWA fixed income agreement Mansa Finance (US$10 million), institutional-level on-chain financial asset management and custody platform Surus (US$8 million), Solana's native liquid re-staking agreement Fragmetric (US$7 million), and fixed-interest rate lending agreement Tenor Finance (US$2.5 million), etc.
Cryptocurrency M &A data since 2013 ( monthly )
In addition, there were 15 mergers and acquisitions in the crypto market in February, and the number of mergers and acquisitions exceeded 10 for four consecutive months , which reflects the overall sluggish investment and financing market, making more and more projects exit through mergers and acquisitions, and the top projects are more willing to optimize the industrial layout and expand their influence through mergers and acquisitions in a reasonable valuation range . Typical cases include Phantom's acquisition of NFT data tool SimpleHash , Coinbase's acquisition of on-chain advertising and attribution platform Spindl , thirdweb's acquisition of Web3 social network Yup , and Forte's acquisition of decentralized cryptocurrency trust platform Sealance .
2. Active investors
MH Ventures , Framework Ventures and Bitscale Capital are the venture capital institutions with the highest investment frequency in February, with four shots:
- MH Ventures : Shaga ($4 million), Imua ($5 million), Infinity Ground ($2 million), Fluent ($8 million)
- Framework Ventures : Plasma ($24 million), Reservoir ($14 million), henlo ($3 million), GOAT Gaming ($4 million)
- Bitscale Capital : Blum ($5 million), partnr ($4 million), Fragmetric ($7 million), GOAT Gaming ($4 million)
The activity level is closely followed by Zee Prime Capital, Haun Ventures, No Limit Holdings, Big Brain Holdings and other institutions, with three shots. In addition, Will Price, Raj Gokal, Balaji Srinivasan are the most active Web3 angel investors in February, each investing in at least 3 projects.
It is also worth noting that the amount of fundraising for crypto venture capital funds has continued to be at a historical low. No fund has disclosed the fundraising so far this year. The situation is also different among the three crypto venture capital funds disclosed in November-December last year. For example, Accolade Partners raised US$200 million for its "Fund of Fund" parent fund, Sora Ventures raised US$150 million for its Bitcoin strategy fund, and only Tioga Capital raised 40 million euros for its project fund.
Still, new crypto funds are emerging. Many former Inception Capital executives and investors ( Lucas He and Calvin Du ) jointly founded tmr Ventures , focusing on investing and promoting cryptocurrency projects in the real world.
3. Character dynamics
RootData also records the career trends of tens of thousands of well-known crypto industry personnel and executives. Here are some of the career trends of people worth noting:
Hsin-Ju C. no longer serves as Fhenix’s growth director and begins as Hack VC partner and platform director;
Shawn Chong no longer serves as Zerobase co-founder, Salus co-founder and chief operating officer;
Jack Purdy no longer served as Director of Sales at Messari and began serving as Vice President of Sales at Flipside;
Brett Li no longer serves as Chief Growth Officer of Obol Network and begins as Vice President of Marketing at Flipside;
Brian Trunzo no longer serves as Vice President and BD Director of Polygon Labs and begins as Chief Growth Officer of Mantle Network;
William Fang no longer served as Senior Assistant at Sora Ventures and began working as Director of Strategy at BIO Protocol;
Sina Nader no longer serves as the Director of Strategy at Mysten Labs;
Yiwei no longer serves as director of ecosystem development at BNB Chain;
Jim Chang began to serve as head of product at LI.FI after the acquisition of Catalyst, which he founded;
Antonio Garcia-Martinez began serving as Coinbase’s Base advertising director after the acquisition of Spindl, which he founded.
Ben Gray began to serve as Chief Legal Officer of Kraken, and Marco Santori no longer holds the position.
Constance Wang, former chief operating officer of FTX, began to create a new project [Pacifica](https://www.rootdata.com/zh/Projects/detail/Pacifica?k=MTY0NTY= "Decentralized trading platform") .
For more information about people, please see: https://www.rootdata.com/zh/people
4. Popular projects
RootData popularity value is calculated by normalizing the platform search volume, click volume, user voting and Twitter popularity index. The most popular items in February include:
Story Protocol is building web3 technology to revolutionize the way narrative world is created. Its mission is to unleash a completely new way to create, manage and license on-chain IPs, ultimately forming a “Story Lego” ecosystem that can be remixed and combined. Story Protocol provides a simplified framework to manage the entire life cycle of IP development, supporting features such as source tracking, frictionless licensing and revenue sharing. The application built on Story Protocol is designed for creators in all media (prose, images, games, audio, etc.), allowing writers and artists to track the source of their work, allowing anyone to contribute and remix while capturing the value of their contributions.
Kaito is a crypto-based information, attention and capital distribution center, and is building an interoperable InfoFi layer that connects creators, users and brands in a completely new way. By indexing thousands of sources including social media, governance forums, research, news, podcasts, conference records, and combining them with proprietary search algorithms, semantic LLM capabilities, and real-time analytics, Kaito Pro simplifies access to high-quality, actionable insights in the field of encryption. Kaito Yaps uses advanced AI algorithms to extract and interpret rich signals such as social graphs and semantic understanding to quantify attention. Kaito Connect is an InfoFi network powered by artificial intelligence that enables the market to distribute attention and capital in a more equitable, transparent and efficient way while rewarding all participants.
Bybit is a cryptocurrency exchange founded in March 2018, it provides a professional platform where crypto traders can find ultra-fast matching engines, excellent customer service and multilingual community support. The company provides innovative online spot and derivatives trading services, mining and staking products, NFT markets, and API support to retail and institutional clients around the world, and strives to be the most reliable exchange in emerging digital asset classes.
Monad is building high-performance layer 1 blockchains for the next generation of decentralized applications, with the mission to accelerate the destructive power of decentralization by building blockchains 100 to 1,000 times faster than its closest competitors, alleviate the serious bottlenecks of existing blockchains, and enable more complex applications and wider adoption.
Succinct is building a decentralized network of provers so that anyone can build blockchain applications and infrastructure protected by cryptographic facts (rather than trust). Succinct unifies the proof supply chain, providing highly available proof generation infrastructure and best-in-class pricing for rollups, coprocessors and other applications using zero-knowledge proofs.
Four.meme is a BSC Meme startup platform for launching meme tokens on the BSC chain. Four.meme is a simplified, low-cost approach that brings more meme tokens into the world.
0G is a modular AI blockchain with a scalable programmable DA layer suitable for AI dapps. Its modular technology will enable frictionless interoperability between chains while ensuring security, eliminating debris and maximizing connectivity for weightless and open meta-universe.
Launched in 2018 by Nicolas Kokkalis and Chengdiao Fan, Pi crypto aims to simplify accessibility of cryptocurrencies and introduce cryptocurrencies to more people through simple crypto mining and management systems. The most attractive feature of Pi cryptocurrency when it was released is its mobile mining capabilities. Using the Pi mobile app, users can mine Pi coins on their mobile devices.
Safe is a leading multi-signal wallet provider and digital asset management platform. Its smart contract wallet enables businesses to manage funds through predefined access control schemes with multiple private keys and other access modules.
time.fun is a time tokenization platform that allows time holders to connect with their fans. As time holders provide more value to fans, their time value will naturally increase due to market demand. Time holders can earn ETH from transaction fees and redemptions whenever someone trades their time.
SoSoValue is a one-stop financial research platform for cryptocurrency investors, providing investors with real and high-quality macro market information and assisting investors in conducting more effective investment research. It also provides classification systems based on artificial intelligence and connects macroeconomic data with cryptocurrency markets.
Infini is a cryptocurrency payment solution. With the Infini Encryption Card, users can make instant crypto payments anywhere while earning daily interest.
RedStone is a cross-chain data oracle technology that provides fast and cost-effective data access, complete historical audit trails and insurance-backed decentralized dispute mechanisms, providing users with recourse when data provision is inaccurate. Arweave blockchain project is used to save data and track reputation.
Super Exchange is an on-chain trading platform that unifies the issuance and trading of tokens through a joint curve – eliminating the need for liquidity providers and ensuring adequate liquidity at each price.
Berachain is a high-performance EVM-compatible blockchain built on the liquidity proof consensus. Liquidity Proof is a novel consensus mechanism designed to coordinate network incentives to establish strong synergy between Berachain validators and the project ecosystem. Berachain’s technology is built on Polaris, a high-performance blockchain framework for building EVM-compatible chains on the CometBFT consensus engine.
MegaETH is building ultra-high throughput and low latency EVM-compatible L2s to accelerate the scalability end of Ethereum.
Created by the Base/Coinbase alumni and OG ETH contributor team, B3 is a scaled-out gaming ecosystem built on Base. Its development company is NPC Labs.
Solayer is building infiniSVM to extend Solana, a hardware-accelerated SVM that expands infinitely through a multi-execution cluster architecture connected by SDN and RDMA, achieving 100 Gbps while maintaining atomic state.
OpenSea is a well-known NFT marketplace for discovering, collecting and selling NFTs.
Fragmetric is Solana's native liquid restaking agreement with the vision to enhance the security and economic potential of the Solana ecosystem. By leveraging Solana's token expansion, Fragmetric effectively implements NCN reward allocation. In addition, Fragmetric has designed a practical solution, a standardized token plan, to leverage various LSTs in the restake platform. Fragmetric’s mission is to build a secure, transparent and efficient restaking infrastructure that empowers and supports the stability of the Solana restaking ecosystem.
5. Project News
In February, RootData also recorded many main network online and recent airdrop events of many projects to help users understand important project dynamics in the market and master earlier alpha opportunities.
Due to space limitations, the above is some main network and token information. For more complete and timely data information, please visit the official website of RootData ( https://www.rootdata.com/zh/ ) to view and learn about it.
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