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Ethereum Layer 2 Startup Optimism Raises $150m in Series B Round

Ethereum scaling startup Optimism has secured a $150 million Series B round, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm.

After this financing, the company was valued at $1.65 billion.

Since NFT and Defi products are closely linked to the Ethereum network, the Ethereum network has found transactions becomes slow and expensive for paying gas fees, pushing drive users to Layer 2 look for solutions like Optimism.

Layer 2 (L2) solutions are reported to have saved users of the Ethereum network more than $1 billion in gas fees. This “Total value locked” (TVL) on the L2 platform has exploded over the past year, with about $5.75 billion currently held on these blockchains, according to tracker L2Beat.

Optimism CEO Jinglan Wang said:

“We made a commitment to the public that we would not take profit from operating centralized parts of the system, so we wanted to remove the financial incentive for ourselves to remain centralized. While we are making revenue, we’re giving all of that revenue back toward funding public goods on Ethereum … We don’t just want to say that we want to be decentralized, we also want to show the community that we’re setting up our own incentives to be compatible with that.”

As reported by blockchain.News on September 1, Ethereum Layer-2 Off-chain Labs raised $120 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in its Series B financing, aiming to expand Ethereum contracts to meet the growing demand for Ethereum transactions.

Qualcomm Announces $100m Metaverse Investment Fund

Qualcomm has announced a $100 million investment fund for crypto companies.

The San Diego-based chip supplier’s fund will go to companies building the metaverse using augmented reality, mixed reality or virtual reality.

The Qualcomm Chief Financial Officer said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the company aims to broaden the market for its chips through this new Snapdragon Metaverse Fund.

He added that the fund would begin accepting applications in June.

On its website, Qualcomm said that the “Snapdragon XR1 and XR2 platforms are purpose-built to meet the particular demands and requirements of today’s virtual reality and augmented reality devices.”

The company added that it has planned to “deploy capital through a combination of venture investments in leading XR companies by Qualcomm Ventures and a grant program by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. for developer ecosystem funding in XR experiences.” The XR experiences include gaming, health and wellness, media, entertainment, education and enterprise.

Among other notable achievements, Qualcomm’s portfolio includes chips for virtual reality headsets and a partnership with Microsoft for creating chips engineered for augmented reality. The deal generates 17% of its $10.7 billion revenue from selling chips related to the metaverse.

A growing number of startups have received funding to support the creation of virtual world initiatives; for example, firm Space Runner had raised $10 million to create fashion and other wearables as digital assets.

Popular entertainment conglomerate Disney has also made a move to grow its metaverse reach. While there is also an increasing number of firms that are filing trademarks related to trading items in many virtual spaces.

MoneyBox Raises £35m with Plans to Launch ‘Crypto-Investing’

MoneyBox, a UK-based, rapidly emerging mobile savings and investment app, announced Monday that it had raised £35 million in a Series D funding round led by Fidelity International Strategic Ventures.

Existing investors and new investors like Polar Capital also participated in the funding round. MoneyBox disclosed that it would use the fresh funding to establish financial planning services and an investment product that focuses on “long-term wealth generation”.

Ben Stanway, the co-founder and co-CEO at MoneyBox, said that the firm would also develop “crypto-investing” options, like adding a small amount of Bitcoin to a larger portfolio.

Stanway mentioned that the company would expand into crypto trading services “through the lens of diversification, not through the lens of speculation”.

“This new round of investment enables us to create even better services to help our customers succeed across their home-buying, retirement, savings and investing missions. By focusing on the large and under-served mass market, we believe we are on a path to create the UK’s category-defining wealth platform,” Stanway elaborated.

Helping Everyone Save and Invest for Their Future

In March last year, MoneyBox launched an in-app mortgage advice service to help customers purchase a home or remortgage and help them find the mortgage that is best suited to their individual needs. The mortgage service brought Moneybox closer to offering an end-to-end home-buyingg solution, enhancing its value addition among customers.

Launched in 2016 and headquartered in London, Moneybox has acquired more than 500,000 savers and has more than £1 billion in assets under management. The mobile savings and investment app provides a wide range of saving and investment products, including Lifetime ISAs and Pensions.

Since it raised its £30 million in Series C funding in July 2020, MoneyBox’s revenue has risen by 340%. The company currently employs about 300 people and recently expanded its leadership team with a series of new hires.

NFT Gaming Platform Fractal Raises $35m, Co-Led by Paradigm Capital

Fractal, a marketplace for gamers to discover, buy and sell digital collectables and gaming Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), has announced the successful raise of a seed round of $35 million from prominent investors.

As announced by the platform through a Blog Post, the seed round was co-led by Paradigm and Multicoin Capital, with the participation of multiple investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Solana Labs, Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, Play Ventures, Position Ventures, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Crossover, Shrug Capital and TerraForm Labs CEO Do Kwon. Goat Capital previously led Fractal’s seed round in January.

Fractal’s emergence in the digital currency ecosystem was one that was inspired by the growing utilities of NFTs which are projected to extend into the gaming ecosystem.

According to Justin Kan, one of the brains behind the project, also credited as one of the main developers behind Twitch, an American video live streaming service that focuses on video games and esports streaming. The launch of Fractal is solely hinged on helping game developers get the best out of their ambitions to bring innovative solutions to the blockchain gaming world.

Fractal Milestones Thus Far

Since its inception, Fractal has floated its Launchpad to help games release their NFT collections to the public. Fractal is administering this launchpad with the sole mission of partnering only with blockchain game developers who have been vetted to complete their roadmaps and fulfil their promises to their users and investors.

As a result, Fractal has only accepted 5% of all the applications it has received to date, and its new partners include House of Sparta, Tiny Colony, Yaku Corp, Cinder, Nekoverse, Metawana, MetaOps, and Psyker.

With more projects set to make their debut on the Fractal Launchpad, Justin affirmed that the accrued seed round will be used to build out its engineering team and in making the best product possible for gaming companies who want to build around blockchain and turn their games into truly open economies.

The funding generally trails other notable funding that NFTs, gaming, and metaverse protocols have received in recent times, with one of the latest being the $23 million pulled by CoWDAO as reported earlier by Blockchain.News.

Image source: Blockchain.News

Security Compliance Firm Seon Pulls $93m from Investors Backed by IVP

Seon, a United Kingdom-based fintech security and compliance platform, has pulled over $93 million in a Series B funding round from investors led by IVP, a Silicon Valley-based investment firm.

In this round of financing, the sterling record of IVP involves early backing of platforms, including Netflix and Twitter, other investors include Creandum and PortfoLion. Angel investors, on the other hand, involve Coinbase’s Chief Operating Officer Emilie Choi and UiPath Chief Executive Daniel Dines, who also backed the startup as it pushed its valuation to $500 million.

Relieving Fintech and Crypto Firms From Compliance Burdens

Seon is a startup founded in Budapest, Hungary in 2017 by Kadar Tamar and Bence Jendruszak. The startup caters primarily to fintech firms with an extension to digital currency startups.

The company develops software that analyzes a platform user’s biodata, email address, and phone numbers and determines whether they are genuine or not. When fintech and crypto platforms are under scrutiny by regulators to block transactions emanating from and to Russia in the wake of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, the Seon solution may come in very handy.

Seon boasts of Revolut, Afterpay, and crypto-friendly Nubank as clients. With the newly injected capital, it hopes to support its customers fighting to keep up with the requirements of cracking down against money laundering and sanctions evasion.

Seon is also working on building tools to verify a company’s shareholders and see if they are on any sanctioned individual’s list. According to Kadar, these kinds of tools can give insights into whether these shareholders are “just creating shell companies to launder money,” or “as a fake identity to hide their assets,” Kadar said. Seon has “prioritized this feature to be added in the next quarter,” he added.

Fighting Crime as a Motto

With general fraud prevention as its motto, Seon will also be hiring more staff to boost its global expansion plans, especially in regions like the U.S. where digital fraud is more prevalent. The Seon crime-fighting business model also has a point of convergence with solutions from startups like CertiK which also received some funding to boost its business earlier this month.

Flipside Crypto Pulls $50m from Investors, Led by Republic Capital

Flipside Crypto – which provides blockchain analytics, and business intelligence to crypto firms – has raised $50 million in new funding round to increase its valuation tenfold to $350 million.

Through the new funding, Flipside wants to increase its workforce from the current 66 people to more than 85 by the end of the year while also scaling its abilities to conduct more bounties to hundreds of thousands in the coming months. The startup said it enlisted as many as 19,000 analysts in March and paid out over $2 million in bounty rewards last year.

Flipside plans to continue “to build solutions to scale and process bounties into the many hundreds of thousands each month,” said Dave Balter, CEO of Flipside Crypto.

The funding round was led by Republic Capital with participation from True Ventures, Galaxy, Terra, Dapper Labs, M13, and Blockchain Coinvestors.

Flipside crypto occupies a unique position in the blockchain ecosystem and offers a unique solution that helps startups organise bounties to foster protocol efficiency. Flipside Crypto’s solution encompasses both Layer-1 and Layer-2 blockchain networks, and its ultimate goal remains to continually deploy its products on both types of networks.

Through its uniquely designed process called Chainwalking, Flipside analyses blockchain protocols to gain insights into the actions of off-chain and on-chain transactions related to coin holders, voters in a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), and miners amongst others. It makes these data freely available to ‘analysts’.

These analysts help in the bounty program that Flipside organises for protocols in the space. In one of such bounties, these analysts pre-onboarded on the platform were asked to track the top 20 wallets in terms of sales volume on Magic Eden since March. Each of these analysts was paid 1.29 SOL as a reward for their efforts.

The metrics for blockchain fundraising continue to grow and are on track to surpass the more than the $33 billion pulled in 2021.

Irreverent Labs Raises $40m in Funding, Led by a16z

Seattle-based startup Irreverent Labs has once again raised $40 million in funding led by Silicon Valley heavyweight investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Irreverent Labs is building games and entertainment in which all the characters are AI-powered NPCs.

The financing will lead to the development of a blockchain-based fighting game called MechaFightClub, which pits chicken-style fighting games against each other.

The platform will integrate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and NFTs to run on the Solana blockchain, allowing players to trade fighter jets called “mechanical robots” and play “cruelty-free” fighting games at any time.

The game is Play-to-earn (P2E) mode or GameFi. P2E is a popular business model that exists in the blockchain gaming world that integrates Web3 and blockchain, which corresponds to the F2P (Free to Play) model commonly seen in the real world of the gaming industry.

Players can use their blockchain currency, gold nuggets, to make in-game purchases or withdraw them for use on the wider Solana blockchain.

Investors including Solana Ventures, the venture capital arm of Solana Labs; Michael Ovitz, founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), participated in this round of financing. Rahul Sood, co-founder of Irreverent Labs said that:

“Gamers will soon realize that having ownership of the characters within the game and building a relationship with that character over time is actually a really good thing,”

Irreverent Labs has raised a total of $5M in funding over 1 round. The seed round was raised on Oct 29, 2021. a16z also contributed to emerging blockchain startup Irreverent Labs which raised a record $25.2 billion last year, up 713% year-over-year.

KuCoin Pulls $150m Funding in Pre-Series B, Hitting $10bn Valuation

KuCoin Exchange, the world’s fifth-largest brokerage platform by trading volume, has announced a pre-Series B funding round in which it pulled $150 million.

The trading platform said it would use the raised funds to expand its current centralised service offerings to take a foothold in the broader Web3.0 ecosystem. The exchange said it would continue to develop its crypto wallet services and deepen its involvement in gaming, Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) through its investment arms like KuCoin Labs and KuCoin Ventures.

“The vote of confidence from prominent investors, including Jump Crypto and Circle Ventures, solidifies our vision that one day everyone will be with crypto. KuCoin is built for all classes of investors, and we believe these new investors and partners will contribute to making KuCoin synonymous with a reliable and trustworthy gateway into (the) crypto space,” said Johnny Lyu, CEO of KuCoin.

Jump Crypto led this round of funding round, others participating parties include Circle Ventures, IDG Capital, and Matrix Partners.

The recent funding brings the total capital raised by the firm to $170 million after completing its Series A round back in November 2018. With the excess liquidity, the exchange said it is committed to building out its platform to make it ten times more efficient than it currently is at the moment.

As described by Tak Fujishima, Head of Asia, Jump Crypto, the exchange’s backing is predicated upon the company’s strides in offering crypto services with years of track record.

“We are pleased to support the company as it continues to grow and expand its offerings in futures and margin trading, lending, staking, and passive yield generation to support the growth of Web 3.0 and the crypto markets,” said Tak Fujishima, Head of Asia, Jump Crypto.

KuCoin has now joined the list of other trading platforms like FTX Derivatives Exchanges and Coinbase which is currently valued at above $10 billion.

Singapore-based ADDX Raises $58m in Pre-Series B Round

Digital securities token exchange ADDX raised $58 million in a Pre-Series B round on Tuesday.

The Singapore-based blockchain and smart contract-driven FinTech company said the latest funding would allow ADDX to scale its operations as the company entrenches its position as Asia’s largest private market exchange, adding that several strategic initiatives will also benefit from the fresh capital.

Oi-Yee Choo, CEO of ADDX, commented on the latest round of funding and welcomed new investors:

“The sizeable investment from SET, UOB, Hamilton Lane and Krungsri serves as a ringing endorsement for ADDX’s business model, the team we have assembled and the broader vision we have for transforming the capital markets and the wealth management industry.”

Choo believes that this funding round would make the company more vital for long-term success and adding new shareholders are more than capital partners and strategic partners.

New investors include SET Venture Holding, a subsidiary of the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET), Singapore-based bank UOB, Hamilton Lane (NASDAQ: HLNE) and Krungsri Finnovate, the corporate venture capital arm of Krungsri (Bank of Ayudhya PCL).

According to the statement, the latest investment brings total funds raised by ADDX to around $120 million since the company’s inception in 2017.

“This investment will further strengthen Krungsri’s ecosystem and partnerships,” said Sam Tanskul, Managing Director, Krungsri Finnovate Co., Ltd.; “The partnership with ADDX complements our footprint in our home region of Southeast Asia and Greater China,” said Leong Yung Chee, Head of Group Corporate Banking, UOB.

Crypto has become one of the most rapidly developing industries in Singapore as financial regulators aim to keep the industry’s development on the right track.

Previously, the city-state’s watchdog said regulation on crypto should be tight but clear and the balance between nurturing the rapidly growing industry and taming its potential risks should be well-considered.

In January, the Singapore government prohibited all outdoor advertisements for all cryptocurrencies or digital payment tokens (DPT) service providers.

StarkWare Valued $8bn in New $100m Funding Round

StarkWare, an Ethereum-based Layer-2 protocol, has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round to bring its valuation to $8 billion.

The latest funding round, which succeeds the $100 million Series C round that valued it at around $2 billion about 6 months ago, was led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue. The Series D also saw participation from Tiger Global, but the remaining investors remain undisclosed.

According to the protocols co-founder and President Eli Ben-Sasson, the funding round was closed just at the time when the LUNA and UST crash was just making the rounds. Amidst the turmoil the industry has faced in recent times, the backing of StarkWare is evident that investors are typically concerned about long-term builders, other than quick gains.

“To a large extent, this valuation is a boat of confidence of this larger ecosystem,” Ben-Sasson said. “We’re part of this greater [layer 2] ecosystem alongside Arbitrum, Optimism, Solana, Polygon, and a bunch of others doing amazing work that we’re very enthusiastic about.”

To date, StarkWare has raised a total of $260 million. Its primary focus is to inject additional funds into developing its product while also increasing the staff number to achieve this goal. StarkWare introduces a new protocol that compresses data before sending them to the Ethereum blockchain.

It primarily helps in cutting transaction costs and processing time with its feature. The pivotal role StarkWare is playing as a layer-2 protocol on the Ethereum blockchain has resulted in over $500 billion in transactions facilitated by StarkEx since its inception back in 2017. The drivers of the protocol believe there is more work ahead, and they are glad to have the backing of some of the industry’s best venture capital firms. The funding round was first teased by Calcalistech back in March, as reported by Blockchain.News at the time.