Fundraise Roundup: The Next Wave of Blockchain Startups

Blockchain is rapidly diversifying into numerous areas besides finance and DeFi. The philosophy of true and secure ownership has branched out into the artistic, video games and digital media through NFTs, but this is likely just the start.

The best thing about blockchain is its modular and decentralized structure, meaning that users and developers can contribute to making the environment more and more advanced by creating layers and integrations for the existing dApps.

In short, the crypto world is evolving at the speed of light as many new features and projects pop up each month to improve on some specific sector. Staying always updated or differentiating valuable news from the duds might be challenging.

Here we aim to collect the hottest startups that have raised within the last month that are poised to revolutionize the sector.

Colony Takes in $18.5M to Build Avalanche Accelerator

Highly anticipated Avalanche-based project, Colony, is probably the hottest name in the blockchain space today. Colony wants to support other players in the Avalanche ecosystem, and it raised a whopping $18.5M just to do that.

The round was led by The Avalanche Foundation and saw participation from Shima Capital, Hashkey, GBV Capital and Bixin Ventures.

Colony’s mission is that of incubating the growing Avalanche ecosystem by funding the most promising early-stage projects. They want to build an index to capture the Avalanche ecosystem in one token, which would open the door for the average investor to get into the Avalanche ecosystem as a whole. Through its concept of Ecosystem Farming, Colony will decentralize the fundraising process to let communities be the first in line to join exciting new opportunities. In addition, Colony is providing liquidity for DeFi protocols and validating the network.

With the rise of VC investment, this decentralizing force of crypto definitely fell to the sidelines. Not anymore with Colony.

Syndicate’s $7.6M Raise for SynCity, the First Free-2-Play-2-Earn Game

With crypto Play-2-Earn games exploding in 2021 (after building for over 3 years), the space is quickly filling up with projects looking to repeat this formula. Crypto play-to-earn games have changed some gamers’ lives, enabling them to earn a full monthly salary by playing online. Axie Infinity, probably the most popular game to date, counts 1.8 million daily users.

Today all kinds of crypto games exist, from strategy to fantasy worlds, but they all have one thing in common: you need to pay upwards of thousands of dollars to access the play-2-earn opportunity. This hardly helps with inclusivity.

Interestingly, Syndicate found a solution, launching the first play-to-earn game that doesn’t require any initial investment. The game, Syn City, is free to play AND play to earn, which is quite likely to generate higher engagement. Founded by veterans from Samsung, Disney, TRON and others, it attracted some remarkable investors raising a total of $8 million in a fundraising round closed this November. It was led by Justin Kan (co-founder of Twitch) and Robin Chan’s Goat Capital, Alex Pack’s Hack VC, Animoca Brands, Spartan Group and others.

NFT Platform Starly Raises $6.1M in its Pre-IDO Funding Round

Starly is a launchpad and marketplace for NFTs that connects artists and users in a unique, gamified experience.

The NFT market is growing enormously in 2021 due to its much higher attractiveness to the regular folk. Starly is different from all the others, offering a gamified experience that rewards with points for NFT collections and give users unique and valuable assets.

With its highly engaging strategy, Starly has emerged taking part in popular NFT events and raising a total of $6.125 million in its pre-IDO fundraising round, led by Spartan Group and joined by Dapper Labs, Animoca Brands and high-profile angels like Marat Kichikov, managing partner at BitFury Group , who is also going to figure as Starly’s advisor.

LUM Network Raises $4M to Launch Decentralized Review Platform on the Blockchain

Lum Network, an innovative project aiming to use blockchain immutability to build a decentralized review platform, has raised a $4 million Private Sale round led by a number of key crypto and technology investors.

The round included Cosmos ecosystem participants such as Peng Zhong, CEO of Tendermint, as well as other contributors to Osmosis, Cosmos and Tendermint like Cosmostation, SG1, Sentinel and Everstake. In addition, the round saw participation from Arcanum Capital, Klub and Ki Foundation, SwissBorg, and Djamel Agaoua, CEO of major instant messaging platform Viber.

NFT Decentralized Marketplace Solv Raises $4M in Series A Round

Solv, the marketplace that offers a decentralized solution to recognize NFTs as financial ownership, has raised a total of $4 million during its Series A funding round.

The platform, which facilitates users at minting and trading NFTs, has filled in the DeFi world’s gap of giving financial credit to NFT owners. Thanks to Solv’s “vouchers” (vNFT), NFTs are identified as quantitatively eligible for financial operations.

After having raised $1 million from Spartan Group shortly after its foundation in 2020, Solv has recently raised $4 million to keep building the future of vouchers. The funding round was led by Blockchain Capital, Sfermion and Gumi Cryptos Capital and has also involved DeFi Alliance, The LAO, CMS Holdings and others.

Multi-chain Identity Wallet Safle Collects Over $4M in a Private Funding Round

Safle is a self-sovereign identity protocol that aims to facilitate both users and developers to access the DeFi world. To do this, Safle provides a non-custodial wallet and different tools to develop new projects in the DeFi environment.

In October, Safle had successfully closed with $900,000 its seed funding round led by Draper Dragon Fund, Woodstock Fund and the founders of Polygon.

Being available as a browser extension, web and mobile application, the last private funding round has come right before the launch of Safle’s native token, SAFLE. The token is going to have a governance function, realizing Safle’s mission of boosting a safe decentralized world. Through SAFLE tokens, holders are going to manage the dApp by voting on future choices, and they are also going to benefit from innovative technologies, such as the SafeID decentralized identity system.

Several investors took part in the funding round that was led by MapleBlock, GSR, Sanctum and Ghaf Capital Partners together with a large number of angels.

Ambire, the DeFi-centered Crypto Wallet, Picks Up $2.5M in the Last Funding Round

Ambire (formerly AdEx), is a DeFi-focused crypto wallet that was created to provide a simple and seamless experience to both crypto newbies and veterans.

The wallet, which works on desktop and will soon be released also as a mobile App, consists of a combination of transactions’ batches, trading optimizations and flashbots that lower transaction fees and latency. Thanks to the easy-to-use crypto wallet, users are able to smoothly invest in several DeFi protocols while the entire process is controlled by the Ambire DAO.

Anyone who wants to take 100% advantage of Ambire’s services can stake WALLET, Ambire’s governance token, which distributes fee revenues generated by the system and give stakers vote rights over Ambire’s future plans.

In November, Ambire raised a total of $2.2 million in a funding round led by LAUNCHHub Ventures, with the participation of Ascensive Assets, Metacartel Ventures and Zee Prime. Also Danish Chaudhry, CEO of the Bitcoin.com exchange, has joined the round as an angel investor.

Photochromic, the Identity Verification System That Uses Blockchain Technology, Collected $1.3M

Privacy and identity verification are some of the most discussed topics in the blockchain world, due to the complex interaction between the privacy of a wallet address and the need to identify them as a unique human.

One possible solution to these issues comes from Photochromic, which enables crypto users to uniquely link their identity to a biometric-based and non-transferable NFT.

The NFT appears as a unique artwork that, based on some traits of the owner, can be shared to be identified as a single person, without knowing who.

Developed by crypto veterans, Photochromic seems to be an outstanding technology, useful for average crypto users but also digital artists and celebrities who would like to keep their online identity private.

The protocol has recently raised $1.3 million, led by Spores Capital. Magnus Capital, Lupa X Capital, Lan To Capital, XO Investments and others.

Manta Collects a Whole $28.8M With Its “Squad Game” Token Generation Event

In the case of Manta, its biggest achievement doesn’t come from a fundraising round but from its “Squad Game” TGE (Token Generation Event), which as you may expect was a community event inspired by Squid Game.

The community raise sets the project up for success just as it’s competing to win a parachain slot on Polkadot.

The token sale occurred on Tokensoft, where eighty million MANTA tokens (8% of the fixed supply) have been sold to Manta’s Community members.

MANTA tokens, which are periodically burned, both serve as governance and utility tokens, enabling users to spend them for fees when trading on MantaSwap and MantaPay. These exchange and payment platforms have a fundamental role in Manta’s ecosystem, which aims to create a protocol for private token transfers and DeFi in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Manta Network uses zero knowledge proofs to facilitate privacy, so it’s at the forefront of this amazingly powerful technology.

Not to forget that Manta had recently closed two funding rounds, raising a total of $6.6 million from lead investors Polychain Capital, CoinFund and ParaFi Capital, with the participation of Alameda Research, DeFiance Capital, LongHash Ventures, SkyVision Capital, Zee Prime Capital, The Spartan Group and others.

Alephium, the Sharding-based Blockchain Sells $3.6M Worth of Tokens to 80 Contributors

Alephium, the first ever sharded blockchain built for scalability, ETH-compatible smart contracts and functionality which leverages Bitcoin technology, while promising a more energy efficient and faster performance, has successfully raised $3.6 million by pre-selling its tokens to over 80 investors.

Alephium’s unique chain architecture is based on UTXO transactions, which spreads the transaction load among a network of distributed nodes, and it is this that makes it functionally faster than many other peer main chains.

The pre-sale was led by Alphemy Capital, White Paper Capital and Archery Blockchain, and a major portion through individual investors, many of whom were residents of Switzerland.

Play-to-Earn NFT Metaverse MMORPG Realms of Ethernity Raises Over $5M in Public Pre-sale

Realms of Ethernity is a blockchain metaverse MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) that utilizes NFTs, cryptocurrency, and other decentralized technology. This title, produced by Blue Monster Games, is a true metaverse that will feature many different gaming users inside of it in one seamless experience.

The team recently conducted a public pre-sale that generated over $5 million in revenue from selling the game’s governance cryptocurrency called $RETH.

The team is planning for a public sale RETH starting on December 20 this year. The team plans to use these proceeds to finish the development of the game, market the project heavily, and invest in other gaming companies and projects to integrate them into the Realms of Ethernity metaverse.

Hubble Protocol Nets $3.6M Seed Funding to Develop Solana’s DeFi and Stablecoin Hub

Hubble Protocol, a decentralized finance (DeFi) and stablecoin project referred to as a supercharged “MakerDAO of Solana,”.

This initial round will support the continued development of Hubble’s zero-interest DeFi borrowing platform and the minting of Hubble’s Solana-native stablecoin, $USDH.This funding round will enable Hubble to build momentum towards the IDO launch of $HBB set for mid-January.

Hubble’s seed round has been supported by some of the biggest names in crypto including Delphi Digital, Jump Capital, CMS, Spartan, Mechanism Capital, Three Arrows / DeFiance Capital, DeFi Alliance, Decentral Park Capital, and Digital Strategies.

Hubble Protocol plans three initial phases of development as the project works to expand the number of DeFi 2.0 services on Solana. Hubble’s first phase centers on zero-interest multi-asset borrowing and the minting of USDH, a Solana-native 100% decentralized crypto-backed stablecoin. Phase 2 focuses on structured products; with Phase 3 on undercollateralized lending.