Funding Wrap: A Quiet Q3 for Crypto VC Investment
Venture capital firms invested $5.5 billion into crypto startups this quarter, according to the latest Galaxy Digital report
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key takeaways
- Investments are still higher this year than the seven-year average
- Blockchain development platform Tatum received $41.5 million to scale its tooling system
Crypto venture capital funding dropped in the third quarter.
Only $5.5 billion was invested in crypto startups from July through September, according to a new Galaxy report — marking the lowest quarter for investments this year.
The figure is still higher than the seven-year quarterly average of $3.1 billion, which takes into account the significantly smaller investment universe in the early days of digital assets.
This week, the Celo ecosystem, a protocol which supports mobile-first DeFi payments infrastructure, revealed that projects on its platform have secured over $77 million in funding. Company valuations were not revealed.
Among them, blockchain development platform Tatum secured the most significant amount — $41.5 million — and will be using the latest fundraise to integrate their tooling system with Web3 projects.
Interchain communication protocol Hyperlane also raised a significant amount of capital — $18.5 million from venture capital fund Variant to promote cross-chain communication and interoperable security.
Regenerative finance project Loam, working to develop a data farming marketplace, raised $4 million.
“I am immensely proud of our ecosystem projects in raising over $77 million across various venture rounds,” Rene Reinsberg, Celo co-founder and Celo Foundation President, said. “This demonstrates how bullish investor sentiment is in driving mainstream adoption of Web3 and real-world use cases for real people.”
Other projects that received funding this week include Fun — a company building decentralized wallet and access control solutions on Odsy Network.
Fun raised a total of $3.9 million in its pre-seed funding round led by Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen’s JAM Fund with an unknown valuation.
Another pre-seed project which received venture capital interest this week was Web3 wallet Martian.
Martian, a wallet built on the Aptos blockchain, allows users to access decentralized applications on the network to buy, swap, swell tokens and collect NFTs.
The company secured $3 million in a funding round led by Race Capital, with participation from FTX Ventures, Superscrypt, Jump Capital and Aptos.
Other funding rounds this week include:
- Web3 powered newsletter Paragraph lands $1.7 million from Binance Labs.
- Singaporean based NFT wallet AWSt secures $1.7 million from early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator 500 Global.
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