Author: Nianqing, ChainCatcher

Is attention everything in crypto?

This year's narrative may belong solely to Memes, with their frenzy surging in waves, even overwhelming one another.

Bitcoin continues to set new records, while altcoins have not seen the expected rise; value investing has turned out to be in vain, and founders have raised their hands in surrender, self-mockingly stating, "We can also be Memes."

If Memes are a playground for adventurers, it is filled with stories of crossing classes and overnight wealth, laden with survivor bias. In the dark side of this playground, it ruthlessly washes away participants who go with the flow, with "diamond hands" seizing most of the wealth, while "paper hands" are left with nothing.

Perhaps we can view value investing as a game for honest people. It must be acknowledged that technology and application innovation are still underpinning the entire crypto industry.

Last week, during the "DeInsight 2024" annual summit held in Bangkok at Devcon, the Web3 data platform Rootdata officially announced the RootData List for 2024. The list includes five categories: Top 50 Projects (launched tokens), Top 50 Projects (unlaunched tokens), Crypto VC Top 50 Investment Institutions, Top 10 Angel Investors, and Top 20 Best CEOs.

We believe the most noteworthy category on the list is "Top 50 Projects (unlaunched tokens)," as these 50 projects may represent the most significant investment opportunities in the crypto market for the foreseeable future. This article will outline the fundamentals and recent developments of these 50 projects.

Overview

The median funding for projects selected for the "Top 50 Projects (unlaunched tokens)" list is $25.71 million, with an average of 2 funding rounds. Seven projects have reached a valuation of $1 billion or more, while four projects have not publicly disclosed their funding.

Most of the listed projects cover 26 sectors, with a significant proportion in modularization, DeFi, infrastructure, and AI. Over the past four quarters, although the GameFi, CeFi, and NFT sectors have stagnated, some projects continue to innovate and have made significant progress this year.

The 50 projects on the list:

Chains: Performance, Ecosystem, Community

Since the first half of 2023, emerging public chains and Layer 2 solutions have surged. The competition among public chains has gradually evolved into a battle for market liquidity, leading to an oversupply of infrastructure and the emergence of ghost towns among public chains, lacking real users and consumer applications. However, some new chains focusing on concepts like abstraction, privacy, intent, modularization, and parallelism have still managed to stand out in the fierce competition.

Anoma Network is a leading project in the intent sector, creating a privacy architecture centered around intent, introducing a new paradigm for building infrastructure layers and a new operating system for decentralized applications, allowing existing web2.5 dApps to be fully decentralized. Anoma's founders, Brink, Awa Sun Yin, and Christopher Goes, previously worked at the Cosmos development company All in Bits.

The Anoma Foundation has received recognition from institutions like Polychain and Coinbase, completing seed, Series A, and Series B funding rounds, with a total funding amount of $57.8 million. Recently, insiders revealed that Anoma is negotiating a new round of financing, with a valuation potentially reaching $1 billion.

Anoma has not yet launched its testnet, but its first fractal instance, the privacy public chain Namada, has announced its token economics and opened validator node applications in October, currently testing IBC asset transfers and shielding.

Espresso Systems is an EVM-compatible blockchain that provides scaling and privacy systems for Web 3 applications. By combining the PoS consensus protocol with zk Rollup mechanisms, it packages multiple transactions in a more resource-efficient manner. Its configurable asset privacy smart contract applications can provide users with customizable privacy regarding sender and receiver addresses and the quantity and type of assets held or transferred. These elements can be set to public, private, or transparent only to selected parties.

Espresso Systems announced on November 11 that the Espresso Network has launched on the mainnet, but the current mainnet is still in the initial (0) phase, with plans to launch mainnet 1 and mainnet 2 in the first quarter of next year, gradually integrating the new stack and transitioning to PoS next year.

In March of this year, Espresso Systems completed a $28 million Series B funding round. Previously disclosed funding includes a $32 million seed round completed in 2022. Its investors include a16z, Electric Capital, Graylock, and Coinbase Ventures.

Monad aims to be a high-performance blockchain capable of parallel processing within the EVM. Monad's goals extend beyond accelerating the consensus mechanism. It seeks to fundamentally change the execution environment, introducing parallel processing and improving data storage methods to build a truly fast EVM chain, giving EVM performance akin to Solana.

In April of this year, Monad Labs completed a funding round of up to $225 million, one of the largest crypto project financings of 2024, with participation from well-known institutions such as Paradigm, IOSG Ventures, SevenX Ventures, and Electric Capital. In addition to attracting capital interest, projects within the Monad ecosystem, such as Kintsu, Kuru, Monad Pad, and aPriori, have also received support from numerous institutions.

Monad has recently begun to phase in its testnet. In March, Monad launched its development network, achieving 10,000 transactions per second in internal testing.

Movement differs from other new public chains based on Move; its first Ethereum L2 based on the Move language shifts from being an "Ethereum killer" to a fusion solution that "joins Ethereum," aiming to leverage the execution performance and security advantages of Move while further integrating the ecological advantages of EVM, allowing developers to launch Solidity projects on M2 without writing Move code.

In April of this year, Movement completed a $38 million Series A funding round, with investment from Polychain Capital, Binance Labs, OKX Ventures, Hack VC, and others. At the end of July, Movement announced the launch of the public testnet Parthenon.

Berachain (Bear Chain) is a high-performance EVM-compatible public chain built on a liquidity proof consensus. Originating from a Rebase NFT project called Bong Bears, it was subsequently launched by several DeFi OGs. The name "Bera" pays homage to the classic crypto meme "HODL," thus rewriting Bear as Bera. The Berachain community has very distinct characteristics of Ponzi culture, Meme culture, and NFT culture.

Berachain innovatively proposes the PoL mechanism, aiming to attract liquidity by rewarding tokens for on-chain liquidity, avoiding the ghost town dilemma faced by existing public chains. In April of this year, Berachain announced the completion of a $100 million Series B funding round, co-led by the Abu Dhabi branch of Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Ventures, with participation from Polychain Capital, Hack VC, and Tribe Capital.

Berachain is currently still in the testnet phase, with plans to launch the mainnet and tokens by the end of 2024.

Sophon is an entertainment-centered ecosystem. Sophon is built on Validium, utilizing ZKsync's Elastic Chain as a modular aggregator. It provides the necessary infrastructure for high-throughput applications (such as social, AI, and gaming).

Sophon believes there is still significant room for innovation at the application level, and its goal is not to directly provide end products but to focus on creating platforms and products that support user self-expression. Therefore, Sophon emphasizes ecological construction, with its founders revealing in interviews that many new applications, such as NFT auctions for space seats and AI girlfriends, are being experimented with within the ecosystem.

In October of this year, Binance Labs announced an investment in Sophon, bringing its total funding to over $70 million. In March, Sophon completed a $10 million funding round, with participation from Paper Ventures, Maven 11, The Spartan Group, SevenX Ventures, OKX Ventures, and HTX Ventures. The Sophon mainnet is expected to launch in November, with tokens set to be deployed soon.

Particle Network is developing a modular L1 blockchain that enables each user to have a single, unified on-chain address and balance across all blockchains through chain abstraction. It also extracts gas and unifies liquidity, allowing existing L1 and L2 to collaborate seamlessly across ecosystems, addressing the issue of liquidity fragmentation in multi-chain ecosystems and eliminating manual multi-chain interactions in user experiences.

Particle's Universal Accounts are currently limited on the mainnet and are undergoing final testing. The team demonstrated its Universal Accounts for the first time at the recently concluded Devcon in Bangkok. Particle has also promoted the establishment of the Chain Abstraction Coalition, which has over 60 participants.

In June of this year, Particle Network announced the completion of a $15 million Series A funding round, with participation from Spartan Group, Gumi Cryptos Capital, SevenX Ventures, Morningstar Ventures, Flow Traders, HashKey Capital, and others. In August, Binance Labs announced an investment in Particle.

RISC Zero is building the next generation of scalable blockchains using zero-knowledge proof technology and RISC-V zkVM. RISC Zero allows developers accustomed to programming in Rust, Go, C++, and other standard programming languages to build ZK applications.

Recently, RISC Zero launched the universal ZK protocol and verifiable computing layer Boundless, providing decentralized ZK infrastructure capable of handling proof generation, aggregation, data availability, and settlement on any chain. This allows developers to use Steel to execute Solidity contracts off-chain, saving 99.99% of gas. Boundless has entered early testing and will open access to developers in the fourth quarter. RISC Zero also recently launched a hybrid architecture for Kailua OP Rollups, providing finality for OP chains within one hour without ongoing ZK proof costs.

RISC Zero has publicly disclosed three funding rounds, totaling $54 million. The most recent was a $40 million Series A funding round completed in July of last year, bringing its valuation to $300 million, with participation from Blockchain Capital, Galaxy Digital, IOSG, and others.

Succinct is building a decentralized prover network so that anyone can build trustless applications and infrastructure. Succinct unifies the proof supply chain, providing highly available proof generation infrastructure and top-tier pricing for Rollups, coprocessors, and other applications using zero-knowledge proofs.

In August of this year, Succinct launched SP1, a high-performance open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) for verifying the execution of arbitrary Rust (or any LLVM-compiled language) programs. Projects such as Polygon, Celestia, Avail, Hyperlane, Taiko, and Sovereign have adopted SP1. In September, Succinct also collaborated with the OP Labs team to combine the OP Stack and zkVM SP1 to create OP Succinct, enabling existing OP Stack chains to use ZKP, completing in just one hour.

Succinct has raised a total of $55 million, with participation from Paradigm, Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Geometry, ZK Validator, and others.

Base is an Ethereum L2 developed by Coinbase based on the open-source OP Stack from Optimism, aimed at bringing the next billion users into Web3, with plans to gradually decentralize over the next few years. In just one year, Base has rapidly grown into a significant on-chain player due to its integration with Coinbase, an active developer and user ecosystem, and key partnerships with major players like Stripe, even briefly surpassing Arbitrum to become the largest L2.

The Base ecosystem is very active, covering applications in DeFi, NFTs, and social, and its collaboration with Stripe to launch stablecoin services has made it a hub for launching Layer 3 (L3) solutions. Unlike other major L2 chains, Base has not yet launched a token and has not disclosed plans for a future token launch.

Additionally, Base has not conducted public financing. However, it has gained a reputation for its high yields as a sequencer, generating over $50 million so far this year, with expectations to reach around $60 million by the end of the year.

Eclipse is a customizable modular Rollup solution focused on providing developers with flexible blockchain scaling tools. Its technology allows for selection and combination across multiple execution environments (such as EVM, SVM, MoveVM) and data availability layers (such as Celestia, Polygon Avail). This enables Eclipse to adapt to various application scenarios, including DeFi, Web3 gaming, and on-chain asset management.

Eclipse has raised $65 million to date, completing a $50 million Series A funding round in March, led by Placeholder and Hack VC, with participation from OKX Ventures and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, among others. The Eclipse mainnet launched on November 7.

Initia is a full-chain Rollup network aimed at building an interwoven network for multi-chain interoperability to simplify users' cross-chain experiences. Initia has built an entirely new technology stack from scratch, developing both Layer 1 and Layer 2. Having a complete technology stack will enable Initia to implement chain-level mechanisms to coordinate the economic interests of users, developers, Layer 2 application chains, and Layer 1 itself.

In September, Initia completed a $14 million Series A funding round and a $2.5 million community funding round, bringing its total funding to $25 million. Theory Ventures, Hack VC, and others participated, and in October of last year, Initia completed a $7.5 million seed round with participation from Binance Labs, Delphi Ventures, and Hack VC.

Initia launched its public testnet in May of this year and plans to complete its mainnet launch and TGE in Q4.

MegaETH is a Layer 2 fully compatible with Ethereum, focusing on reducing execution redundancy through node specialization and improving performance by real-time compiling and parallel executing EVM. The goal is to achieve over 100,000 transactions per second, building "the first real-time blockchain" that allows DApp response speeds and functional logic to match those of ordinary Web2 applications.

In June, MegaETH completed a $20 million seed funding round, with participation from Dragonfly, Figment Capital, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, and angel investors including Vitalik, ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin, EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan, ETHGlobal co-founder Kartik Talwar, and Helius Labs co-founder Mert Mumtaz.

MegaETH's public testnet was originally planned to launch this fall, with the mainnet expected to go live by the end of this year or early 2025.

Consumer-Facing Applications: Prediction Markets and Meme Platforms

Polymarket is a blockchain-based prediction market platform founded in 2020 by Shayne Coplan, who was just 22 years old at the time. Its timely launch quickly attracted significant attention during the 2020 U.S. election cycle. Despite subsequent volatility in the crypto market, Polymarket has survived resiliently and is returning with even greater popularity during the 2024 U.S. election cycle.

In May of this year, Polymarket completed a $45 million Series B funding round, led by Founders Fund. It has raised a total of $70 million across two funding rounds (with $25 million in Series A), with supporters including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Additionally, there have been recent reports that Polymarket is negotiating to raise over $50 million in new funding and plans to launch a token.

In October, Polymarket's website traffic reached 35 million visits, double that of popular betting sites like FanDuel. The cumulative trading volume on the Polymarket platform for the U.S. presidential election surpassed $3.6 billion, and its predictions for the U.S. election have been frequently cited by mainstream media such as The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

Pump.Fun is a token issuance tool and community platform focused on Meme coins. It launched on Solana in January 2024 and shortly after the mainnet launch added support for Ethereum L2 Blast. Pump.fun simplifies the token issuance process and lowers the technical barriers, providing users with an easy and low-cost way to deploy and issue tokens. Users only need to pay a fee of 0.02 SOL and can easily use the platform without any development experience. This simplification and low-cost feature has made Pump.fun rapidly popular in a short time. Compared to traditional token issuance platforms, Pump.fun not only offers a fairer issuance model but also combines token issuance with social attributes, which is a significant innovation.

Pump.fun has attracted Meme traders rapidly due to its "godly charts" after launch, making it the largest money-making machine in this round of Meme frenzy and sparking imitation on other chains. As the fastest-growing application in the history of the crypto economy, it achieved $100 million in revenue in just 217 days.

Pump.fun has not yet had any public financing. Co-founder Sapijiju revealed future token and airdrop plans in October. In October, Pump.fun also supported video token issuance, allowing users to upload videos and create tokens, enabling other users to access them on the front end.

DeFi: A Severely Undervalued Track in This Cycle

DeFi experienced a summer in 2021, but as the hype and bubble faded, it began to decline in 2022. Over the past two years, DeFi has gradually matured and entered a new stage of productivity, preparing for long-term scalability. Arthur, the founder of DeFiance Capital, pointed out in a recent article that after two years of adjustment, key indicators such as the total locked value (TVL) of DeFi protocols are rebounding, and it is expected that the market capitalization share of DeFi will grow to 10% in the next two years. Specifically, in the subfields, DeFi infrastructure including MEV, Perps (decentralized perpetual contract exchanges), and DePIN may be among the few areas this year that are certain to have value and have many innovative projects emerging.

bloXroute is a DeFi trading acceleration tool that has built a blockchain distribution network (BDN) for DeFi traders, allowing users to bypass network congestion and instantly obtain key information, including buy and sell orders, pricing, positions, liquidations, and oracle updates. bloXroute's unique network architecture can increase block propagation speed by 2 seconds, transaction propagation speed by 1 second, and transaction detection speed by 50-400 milliseconds. By providing mempool services and transaction/block propagation facilities, these services help DeFi traders win more trades.

In 2022, bloXroute completed a $70 million Series B funding round, with a valuation of $410 million. Participating institutions include SoftBank Vision Fund II, Blindspot, Dragonfly, Flow Traders, Flybridge, GSR, Jane Street, and Lightspeed.

Flashbots is a research and development company focused on MEV, dedicated to mitigating the negative impacts of MEV and avoiding the risks it may pose to blockchains like Ethereum. Flashbots has three main focuses: Flashbots Auction, a private communication channel between miners and searchers for transparent and efficient MEV extraction; Flashbots Data, a set of tools to enhance MEV transparency and reduce information asymmetry; and Flashbots Research, aimed at addressing short-term and long-term research issues related to MEV.

In July of last year, Flashbots completed a $60 million Series B funding round with a valuation of $1 billion, with early investors including well-known institutions such as Paradigm, Pantera Capital, Dragonfly, and OKX Ventures.

Figure Markets combines the liquidity of traditional finance with decentralized asset control, providing investors with various blockchain-native assets, including cryptocurrencies, stocks, bonds, and credit. Figure Markets has launched a decentralized crypto asset custody market, Figure Markets Exchange, which utilizes decentralized multi-party computation (MPC) wallet custody and offers remote bankruptcy custody solutions, with users' dollar deposits held in FDIC-insured banks.

In March of this year, Figure Markets spun off from its parent company, Figure Technologies, and announced the completion of a $60 million Series A funding round, led by Jump Crypto, Pantera Capital, and Lightspeed Faction. Other participants include Distributed Global, Ribbit Capital, and CMT Digital.

Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual trading exchange operating on its own Layer 1, providing functionalities similar to traditional centralized exchanges. It primarily includes an order book exchange that trades with USDC as collateral. It features support for trading many long-tail assets and is one of the few projects that support leveraged or perpetual contract trading for specific assets on-chain.

The recent Memecoin craze has led players to prefer DEXs with higher odds and more diverse gameplay, making Perp DEXs like Hyperliquid the biggest beneficiaries of on-chain liquidity. Over the past three months, Hyperliquid has become the largest Perp DEX by market share and the most popular Perp DEX in the English-speaking region. In October, Hyperliquid announced the establishment of Hyper Foundation, with TGE approaching.

Hyperliquid has not disclosed any public financing yet and is one of the few well-known projects on the RootData List 2024 that is not VC-backed.

Infinex is a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform launched by Synthetix, which officially opened account creation and deposit channels in May of this year. The project's vision is to bridge the experiential gap between CeFi and DeFi through its own on-chain experience layer, and then provide users with more tokens, more derivatives, and more innovative yield products by integrating on-chain DeFi protocols, ultimately serving its customers more effectively.

In October of this year, Founders Fund invested in Infinex's new "sponsorship" fundraising model, which sold Patron NFTs to venture capitalists, angel investors, and the community, raising a total of $67.7 million. Participants in this investment include Wintermute Ventures, Framework Ventures, Solana Ventures, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and Aave founder Stani Kulechov.

Morpho is a lending protocol that combines the current liquidity pool model used in Compound or AAVE with the capital efficiency of a P2P matching engine used in order books. As a peer-to-peer (P2P) layer built on lending pools like Compound and Aave, Morpho allows users to borrow and lend at better rates by matching P2P and P2Pool, addressing the high borrowing rates and low supply rates caused by low utilization of lending pools, thus improving capital efficiency. At the same time, Morpho maintains the same liquidity and liquidation guarantees as the underlying protocols, allowing users to earn the annual percentage yield (APY) of the underlying pool or better P2P APY.

Morpho's core product, Morpho Markets, has surpassed $2 billion in total deposits. Recently, the governance token MORPHO for the Morpho protocol has completed its preparation work, and the token transfer function will be enabled on November 21.

In August of this year, Morpho completed a $50 million funding round, with participation from Ribbit Capital, Hack VC, IOSG, Rockaway, L1D, Mirana, Cherry, Semantic, Fenbushi, Leadblock Bitpanda, and Robot Ventures.

Solv Protocol is a decentralized Bitcoin staking protocol, a project built by well-known crypto KOL Meng Yan. It unlocks the full potential of Bitcoin assets through liquidity consensus infrastructure. By addressing the fragmentation, yield opportunities, and custody solutions of BTC assets, Solv provides Bitcoin holders with a gateway to BTCFi, continuously establishing pathways and confidence for traditional funds to enter the cryptocurrency world.

In October of this year, Solv Protocol completed a $11 million financing round at a valuation of $200 million, with participation from companies such as Laser Digital, Blockchain Capital, and OKX Ventures. Last August, Solv Protocol completed a $6 million financing round, with investors including Laser Digital and Bytetrade Labs.

Glow is establishing a Proof of Physical Work (PoPW) protocol for carbon credits, incentivizing the creation of carbon credits by rewarding solar panel operators with tokens and replacing unclean energy from the grid. Its ultimate goal is to build the world's largest solar network. Glow uses the GLW token and stablecoins (such as USDC) to reward the electricity output of solar power plants and verified carbon credits. Glow is one of the most profitable DePIN projects, generating over $5 million in revenue since its launch in 2023.

At the end of October this year, Glow completed a $30 million financing round, led by Framework and Union Square Ventures. This round of financing includes $6.5 million for the company and $23.5 million for solar investments. These funds will support its expansion into regions such as India, with Glow's infrastructure expected to meet the energy needs of 34,000 households in India.

AI+Web3

0G is the first modular artificial intelligence chain, featuring a scalable programmable DA layer suitable for AI dapps. Its modular technology will enable frictionless interoperability between chains while ensuring security, eliminating fragmentation, and maximizing connectivity to achieve a weightless and open metaverse.

On November 13, Zero Gravity Labs (0G Labs) announced a $40 million seed round financing led by Hack VC, Delphi Digital, OKX Ventures, Samsung Next, Bankless Ventures, and Animoca Brands, with the 0G Foundation (the independent governing body of the 0G protocol) receiving a $250 million token purchase commitment.

The funds will be used to develop the world's first decentralized AI operating system (dAIOS), which aims to reform big data usage scenarios, achieve GB-level on-chain data transmission per second, and support high-performance application scenarios such as AI model training, allowing Layer 2 and modular AI to seamlessly integrate into the Web3 ecosystem. On the same day as the financing announcement, 0G also opened public sales for nodes (a total of 175,000 nodes, with approximately half sold in the community presale).

Ritual is a distributed AI computing platform that brings together a network of distributed nodes, allowing access to computation and model creators, enabling creators to host their models on these nodes. Users can then access any model on the network using a universal API. Ritual's architecture is built on a set of sovereign modular execution layers called the Ritual Superchain. These layers are designed to handle various types of arbitrary computation, primarily focusing on AI models.

Ritual has a strong lineup of investors. In April, Ritual received a multi-million dollar investment from Polychain Capital. Last November, it completed a $25 million financing round, with participation from Archetype, Accomplice, Robot Ventures, and angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Worldcoin research engineer DC Builder, EigenLayer Chief Strategy Officer Calvin Liu, and Monad co-founder.

On November 19, Ritual launched the Ritual Chain testnet, which will provide a platform for building AI-native applications. The team also announced the establishment of an independent Ritual Foundation.

Sahara is a decentralized, privacy-centric AI network infrastructure. On this platform, contributors can receive fair compensation, maintain the sovereignty of data and models, and securely create, share, and trade AI assets while protecting privacy and promoting inclusivity. Its first two cornerstone products are the Sahara Knowledge Agent (KA) and Sahara Data. Sahara KA is an AI that far exceeds conversational capabilities, automatically analyzing external and internal proprietary data to provide reliable decisions based on specific needs. Sahara Data offers high-value data services for AI model training, addressing security and privacy issues in data processing.

Sahara is set to launch its testnet and AI marketplace soon, and the team also plans to launch the mainnet in Q4. In August of this year, Sahara announced the completion of a $43 million Series A financing round, led by Binance Labs, Pantera Capital, and Polychain Capital, with participation from Samsung, a16z, Thai Bank, dao5, Alumni Ventures, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, and Mirana Ventures.

Sentient is an AI research organization dedicated to building a new open AGI economy for AI builders and creators. It enables open-source AI developers to monetize their models, data, and other innovations, allowing AI platforms to collaborate openly and transcend the boundaries of traditional single and closed API-based AI platforms. Its core contributors include Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon.

Sentient completed a significant $85 million seed round financing in July of this year, co-led by Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures, with participation from notable institutions such as Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, LD Capital, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital, Canonical Crypto, and Foresight Ventures.

In September, Sentient released the OML (Open, Monetizable and Loyal) white paper and recently launched the OML 1.0 fingerprinting feature, which supports fingerprint recognition for AI models to verify the identity of AI model developers. Additionally, the team previously planned to launch the testnet this year.

Infrastructure and Tools

Chaos Labs is an automated economic security tool, initially focused on stress testing DeFi protocols and simulating worst-case scenarios through "chaos engineering." As the complexity of the security environment in the crypto space increases, Chaos Labs has also expanded its business types to include risk management, risk oracles, analytical tools, incentive optimization, and witch detection. It has served over 20 leading protocols, including Aave, GMX, Arbitrum, and Jupiter.

In August, Chaos Labs completed a $55 million Series A financing round, with investors including Haun Ventures, PayPal Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures. Chaos Labs also received support from angel investors such as Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana and Francesco Agosti of Phantom. In 2023, Chaos Labs secured $20 million in seed funding led by PayPal Ventures and Galaxy Digital. To date, the company has raised a total of $75 million.

Conduit is a Rollup-as-a-Service project that enables teams to quickly scale their dApps with Rollup characteristics by providing production-grade Rollup solutions based on the OP technology stack. Conduit has already supported over 300 Rollups covering mainnet and testnet. The total TVL of mainnet Rollups running on Conduit is approximately $1.2 billion.

In June of this year, Conduit completed a $37 million Series A financing round, co-led by Paradigm and Haun Ventures, with participation from Bankless Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and others. Conduit had previously completed a $7 million seed round in March of last year, led by Paradigm.

In August, Conduit launched the new Conduit Marketplace, aimed at providing a one-stop integration solution for Rollup teams, gathering tools from 48 partner companies. Recently, Conduit introduced the Conduit G2 sequencer, which performs 10 times better than existing sequencers and is 100% compatible with OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit.

Helius is a developer platform focused on the Solana ecosystem, regarded as a key tool for advancing the Solana ecosystem.

It aims to help developers quickly build high-performance crypto applications by simplifying the development process and optimizing the toolchain. Founded in 2022 by a team of former engineers from Coinbase and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Helius provides a range of tools to eliminate the complexities of developing Solana applications and enhance network performance.

In September, Helius completed a $21.75 million financing round, with participation from Haun Ventures, Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, 6th Man Ventures, Chapter One, and Spearhead.

Orbiter Finance is a decentralized cross-Rollup bridge for transferring native Ethereum assets, supporting the rapid transfer of assets across multiple Layer 2 networks (such as zkSync, Arbitrum, etc.). Earlier this year, Orbiter Finance rebranded to ZK-based Orbiter Rollup, considering the growing market demand for an Intent-Centric comprehensive Rollup solution, focusing on ultimate interoperability and improving capital efficiency.

Last year, Orbiter Finance completed a Series A financing round, the amount of which was not disclosed; in 2022, Orbiter Finance completed a $3.2 million seed round. Its investors include OKX Ventures, Tiger Global, and Matrixport Ventures. Orbiter has stated plans to launch a native token this year and will gradually announce the token economics and distribution plan. In June, it announced the O-Points ranking system and the latest rankings in preparation for an airdrop.

Zama is one of the most representative startups in the global FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) space, building open-source homomorphic encryption tools for developers. FHE is a technology that allows data to be processed without decryption, enabling the creation of privacy-preserving smart contracts on public, permissionless blockchains, where only specific users can see transaction data and contract states. Zama's founder, Pascal Paillier, is a renowned cryptographer and one of the inventors of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology, which is the core technology of Zama. Since its early research, Zama has achieved a 100-fold performance improvement, and its goal is to achieve another 1,000-fold performance improvement to support large applications.

In March of this year, Zama completed a $73 million Series A financing round, co-led by Multicoin Capital and Filecoin developer Protocol Labs, with participation from Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, and Stake Capital. Additionally, angel investors including Filecoin founder Juan Benet, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood also participated in this round of investment.

DeBank is a multi-chain asset management and data analysis platform that supports DeFi protocols across multiple chains, enabling users to manage their portfolios more efficiently, explore DeFi projects, and compare interest rates across different protocols.

In 2021, DeBank completed a $25 million equity financing round, achieving a valuation of $200 million. Sequoia China led the round, with other participants including Dragonfly Capital, Hash Global, Youbi Capital, as well as well-known institutions like Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com, and Ledger.

DEX Screener is a comprehensive analysis platform that aggregates information from over 80 blockchain networks, including Ethereum, BSC, Solana, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Polygon. DexScreener provides real-time data streams, allowing users to view data charts every five minutes. Additionally, the DexScreener iOS and Android applications can enable push notifications based on percentage changes, target prices, or price changes within a set time period, supporting users in real-time tracking and charting DEX data.

DefiLlama founder 0xngmi disclosed in August that by tracking DEX Screener's fees on DefiLlama, the platform earns between $150,000 to $250,000 daily by charging $300 for adding information to each token, such as TG links and images. Currently, DexScreener has not announced any financing or public token issuance plans due to its own profitable model.

In June of this year, DexScreener launched a Solana-based launch platform similar to pump.fun called Moonshot, which officially went live on July 18. In just four months, it became one of the biggest winners in this meme craze, even being dubbed the "Binance of the meme world," playing a key role in the rise of the big dog meme.

Bitcoin Ecosystem

Blockstream is a development platform for the Bitcoin ecosystem, established in 2014. Blockstream's core focus is on developing new infrastructure for the traditional financial system, with key developments revolving around Bitcoin sidechains and other blockchain-related applications. Core technologies include the Lightning protocol and the open-source sidechain blockchain platform Elements Project. Blockstream has launched Bitcoin's first sidechain, Liquid Network, and the Bitcoin wallet Blockstream Green, among other products, and also provides hosting services for Bitcoin mining operations.

Blockstream co-founder and CEO Dr. Adam Back is a British cryptographer and computer scientist known for inventing Hashcash in 1997, which later became the basis for Bitcoin's proof-of-work system. Back had communicated with Satoshi Nakamoto before Nakamoto wrote the groundbreaking white paper in 2008. Recently, a documentary released by HBO suggested that Nakamoto might be Back, but Back has repeatedly denied being Nakamoto, stating that it was just a joke.

In October, Blockstream completed a $210 million convertible note financing round, led by Fulgur Ventures. The financing will be used to accelerate the market adoption of its Bitcoin Layer 2 technology, expand its mining business, and increase its Bitcoin reserves. Blockstream recently opened a new R&D center in Lugano, Switzerland, aimed at promoting fintech innovation on the Bitcoin Liquid and Lightning networks. On November 21, Blockstream established an asset management department to bridge the gap between Bitcoin and mainstream finance.

Babylon is a protocol that leverages the security of Bitcoin to provide security guarantees for other PoS chains. Babylon can offer secure, non-cross-chain, non-custodial native staking solutions for PoS chains, including BTC layer 2, enhancing the security of PoS chains, shortening the staking period of PoS chains through Bitcoin's timestamp mechanism, and promoting cross-chain interoperability. It is often compared to Eigenlayer in the Ethereum ecosystem. Babylon was founded by Professor David Tse from Stanford University.

In May of this year, Babylon raised $70 million, led by Paradigm, with participation from Polychain Capital and the venture capital arm of cryptocurrency exchange Bullish; in December last year, Babylon completed an $18 million Series A financing round, led by Polychain Capital and Hack VC. Other participants included Framework Ventures, Polygon Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, and OKX Ventures.

Babylon launched its mainnet in August of this year, and after successfully launching the first phase Cap-2 mainnet and staking 24,000 Bitcoins in early October, the Cap-3 mainnet is planned to launch in early December, with a longer staking time window and higher limits for each staking transaction.

Wallets

Phantom is a multi-chain non-custodial crypto wallet originally designed for the Solana blockchain, now supporting Ethereum and Polygon networks, expanding its utility for users of decentralized applications (DApps), DeFi protocols, and NFTs. Launched in 2021, Phantom quickly gained attention for its elegant and smooth user experience, despite MetaMask already having a strong foothold in the wallet market, and its product optimization updates are relatively fast.

At the beginning of 2022, Phantom completed a $109 million Series B financing round at a valuation of $1.2 billion, with participation from Paradigm, a16z, Variant Fund, Jump Capital, DeFi Alliance, and Solana Ventures.

On November 20, Phantom acquired the Web3 firewall technology provider Blowfish. The Blowfish team will introduce new security features for Phantom, including intuitive transaction previews and real-time fraud insights. Phantom's ranking rose rapidly this month, reaching second place in the free utility app category in the Apple App Store in the U.S., only behind Google; Phantom also achieved a historic high, ranking ninth in the iOS free app rankings, surpassing WhatsApp and Instagram.

Backpack is a next-generation cryptocurrency exchange and multi-chain wallet that offers a self-custody solution integrated with multi-party computation (MPC) technology to ensure fund security. The team initially developed the wallet for its launched xNFT protocol, but Backpack is more like building a crypto ecosystem rather than just a "wallet." Rooted in the Solana ecosystem, Backpack has strong integration capabilities within it, making it one of the beneficiaries of the rise of the Solana ecosystem.

In April last year, Backpack launched the first xNFT series Mad Lads on the Solana ecosystem. This NFT project gained immense popularity, with its trading volume once ranking first across the entire network, even surpassing the blue-chip NFT project BAYC in the Ethereum ecosystem. In October last year, Backpack launched the Backpack Exchange and obtained a VASP license issued by the Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. This year, Backpack has begun to frequently expand into other popular ecosystems such as Base, Monad, and Polygon.

In February of this year, Backpack completed a $17 million Series A financing round at a valuation of $120 million, led by Placeholder VC, with participation from Wintermute, Robot Ventures, Selini Capital, Amber Group, and others.

Payments

Huma Finance has built the PayFi network, which is a leading use case in the Solana ecosystem, focusing on creating a Payment Financing Layer aimed at the multi-trillion-dollar commercial payments, trade financing, and remittance scenarios. Its current core application, Arf, addresses the issue of prepayments through blockchain and stablecoins, processing over $2 billion in on-chain transactions.

The Huma Finance team has backgrounds from Google, Meta, and other internet companies. Engineer Richard Liu worked at Google for nearly eight years and was involved in the founding of well-known products such as Google Trusted Stores and Google Fi. His startup Leap.ai was acquired by Facebook (now Meta).

In September, Huma Finance secured $38 million in financing led by Distributed Global, with participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, and the venture capital arm of Turkey's largest private bank, İşbank, TIBAS Ventures.

Bridge is building a stablecoin-driven liquidity platform aimed at helping businesses accept stablecoin payments. By providing a range of software tools (such as API interfaces), it offers seamless conversion between fiat currencies and stablecoins, supporting businesses in integrating stablecoin-based cross-border payments, exchanges, and even allowing businesses to issue their own stablecoins.

In August of this year, Bridge announced the completion of a $58 million financing round, with investors including Sequoia Capital, 1confirmation, Index, Haun Ventures, Ribbit Capital, and others, marking Bridge's first public appearance. Just two months later, the payment unicorn Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion, becoming the largest acquisition in crypto history and Stripe's largest acquisition to date.

Recently, Bridge acquired the Web3 wallet infrastructure platform Triangle. As part of the deal, the Triangle team will join Bridge to help build a scalable stablecoin system.

M^0 is a decentralized stablecoin issuance protocol designed to provide cryptocurrency issuance solutions based on high-quality collateral (such as U.S. Treasury bonds) for financial institutions and developers. Users of M^0 can earn yields from their held collateral while using dollar stablecoins. The protocol was initially launched on Ethereum and will expand to other L1 and L2 networks. The core team of M^0 comes from projects like MakerDAO and Circle. M^0 plans to issue a stablecoin, $M, that is compatible and composable with any DeFi service or architecture.

In June of this year, M^0 completed a $35 million Series A financing round, led by Bain Capital, with participation from Galaxy Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, GSR, and others. Earlier in 2023, M^0 raised $22.5 million in seed funding led by Pantera Capital.

CeFi

Deribit is currently the largest cryptocurrency options exchange, with over 80% of the market's total trading volume in Bitcoin options and over 90% in Ethereum options. Deribit officially launched in June 2016 as a fully dedicated BTC trading platform and gradually added other categories such as ETH contracts. Users can trade perpetual contracts, futures, and options contracts on Deribit. Additionally, data from the Deribit platform has become an important industry benchmark, such as Bitcoin options open interest, options expiration dates, and large transaction data.

In September 2022, Deribit completed a $40 million financing round, and in 2021, it completed a $100 million financing round. Its investors include Mechanism Capital, Zee Prime Capital, QCP Capital, and others.

Yesterday, Bitcoin futures contracts on the Deribit trading platform reached a historic milestone of $100,000, with trading prices exceeding spot prices.

Bitstamp was founded in 2011 and is considered one of the oldest cryptocurrency exchanges with high compliance standards, operating in Luxembourg, the UK, Slovenia, Singapore, and the U.S. It is not only one of the four crypto companies approved by the UK FCA in the past year but also the first European crypto exchange to receive in-principle approval in Singapore. It has also been the "go-to" exchange for Ethereum founder Vitalik on multiple occasions.

In June of this year, Robinhood acquired Bitstamp for $200 million to expand its international footprint. Recently, Bitstamp announced that it has obtained a MiFID MTF license issued by the Slovenian securities regulator, allowing Bitstamp to offer more complex products, including crypto derivatives, to institutional and retail investors.

Securitize was founded in 2017 and is a compliant RWA tokenization platform for issuing, managing, and trading digital asset securities that comply with existing U.S. regulatory frameworks, with a community of over 1.2 million investors and 3,000 companies. In simple terms, it helps businesses tokenize their assets, allowing real-world assets to be seamlessly converted into digital tokens.

Securitize's tokenized on-chain assets have exceeded $1 billion. In October, Securitize announced the launch of a conversion service between Circle's stablecoin (USDC) and the U.S. dollar, specifically for BlackRock's U.S. dollar institutional digital liquidity fund (BUIDL). It also recently launched a new fund management service, Securitize Fund Services, to simplify operations and compliance tasks related to creating new blockchain-based real-world asset products.

In May of this year, Securitize completed a $47 million strategic financing round, led by BlackRock, with participation from Hamilton Lane, ParaFi Capital, Tradeweb Markets, Aptos Labs, Circle, and Paxos.

Wintermute is a cryptocurrency market maker based in London, founded in 2017. Wintermute's primary business is to provide liquidity services for cryptocurrency trading platforms, institutions, and individuals, while also offering market-making services in some cryptocurrency derivatives markets.

After the collapse of Alameda, Wintermute began to emerge. In this bull market, Wintermute has been involved with almost all high market cap tokens, participating in market making for three of the four major tokens (OP / ARB / STRK), with ZK being the only one lacking clear data support. Additionally, Wintermute has become the second-largest market maker for Robinhood, with trading revenue accounting for as much as 10%.

Moreover, Wintermute did not miss out on the Meme craze, with recent data showing it holds 19 MEME tokens valued over $1 million each, with a total holding value exceeding $100 million. Most of these MEME tokens come from Ethereum and Solana, and many are from popular projects, most of which have already been listed on Binance.

Wintermute's most recent financing round was a $20 million Series B round completed in 2022, with investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Sino Global Capital, Hack VC, and others.

Recently, Wintermute launched a new prediction market called OutcomeMarket, which is now live on Ethereum, Base, and Arbitrum.

Social, NFT, and GameFi

Farcaster is a decentralized social media protocol focused on interoperability, user autonomy, and privacy protection. Unlike traditional social networks, Farcaster does not rely on central servers and aims to create a censorship-free environment where users have complete control over their social data and social graphs, interacting across different applications with a single ID. Farcaster is open-source and permissionless, allowing anyone to build applications through its API. Since its launch, Farcaster has attracted over 700,000 users. Warpcast is a major application on Farcaster and the first Farcaster client.

Farcaster has received multiple praises from Vitalik. In May of this year, Farcaster raised $150 million in a Series A round led by Paradigm at a valuation of $1 billion.

Farcaster today announced its work roadmap, with its 14-person team responsible for protocol, cryptocurrency, and social aspects. In terms of protocol, it will build and migrate to Snapchain to expand the protocol and provide a new FIP for FC Connect; in cryptocurrency, it is working to improve the trading user experience as part of Frames v2; and in social, it will continue to enhance application performance, channel iteration, and user experience.

Story Protocol is an on-chain IP ecosystem that aims to create, manage, and license on-chain IP in a completely new way. It provides a simplified framework to manage the entire lifecycle of IP development, supporting features such as source tracking, frictionless licensing, and revenue sharing. Applications built on Story Protocol are designed for creators of all media (prose, images, games, audio, etc.), enabling writers and artists to track the provenance of their works, allowing anyone to contribute and remix while capturing the value of their contributions.

In August of this year, Story Protocol developer PIP Labs completed an $80 million Series B financing round, led by a16z crypto, with participation from Polychain, Scott Trowbridge (SVP at Stability AI and board member), K11 founder Adrian Cheng, digital art collector Cozomo de'Medici, and No Capital.

Currently, Story Protocol has launched the IP-focused Layer 1 public testnet Iliad and the IP marketplace Color, where users can buy, sell, and discover IP assets and licenses. The co-founders of Story Protocol revealed in a recent interview that they are in discussions with many top NFT projects and are also engaging with some of Hollywood's most famous creators.

Magic Eden is a cross-chain NFT marketplace. Established in 2021, after three years of development, Magic Eden has evolved from a single NFT trading platform on the Solana chain into a comprehensive ecosystem that integrates NFT trading, wallet services, token swaps, and cross-chain functionalities. Currently, Magic Eden has integrated ecological assets from multiple chains, including Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, and ApeChain, supporting various NFTs, tokens, and other assets for trading on its platform.

In 2022, Magic Eden completed a $130 million Series B financing round at a valuation of $1.6 billion, co-led by Electric Capital and Greylock.

Recently, Magic Eden announced its ME token economics, with a total supply of 1 billion ME tokens, which will be distributed over four years, with 50.2% allocated to the community. The TGE will launch in a few weeks, and community-first features will be introduced to reward loyal users, allowing them to earn ME tokens through daily use of Magic Eden products.

Pudgy Penguins is a collection of 8,888 NFTs that accelerates Web3 innovation through IP utilization and community empowerment, providing each holder with exclusive experiences, events, and intellectual property licensing opportunities. The CEO of Pudgy Penguins is referred to by the community as a "marketing genius," and after being acquired for $2.5 million in 2022, Pudgy Penguins began its journey into IP.

Amid a backdrop of many NFT projects underperforming in the market, with the floor prices of Bored Apes and Crypto Punks continuing to decline and even being forgotten, Pudgy Penguins has been continuously innovating.

At the beginning of this year, Pudgy Penguins launched the beta version of its IP licensing platform OverpassIP; in May, Pudgy Penguins announced a partnership with game studio Mythical Games to develop an immersive mobile game set to launch in 2025. In the same month, its plush toys sold over 1 million units, and it plans to collaborate with retailers including Walmart, Target, Smiths, and Hot Topic; in June, Pudgy Penguins and its NFT licensing platform OverpassIP jointly established a parent company named Igloo; in July, it launched a consumer-focused Layer 2 called "Abstract" and went live on the testnet, with plans to launch the mainnet later this year; in September, it introduced the Pudgy Penguin Soulbound Token for the 1,000-day Penguin Club (Pengus Club); in October, Pudgy Penguins announced a collaboration with Mythical Games to launch a Web3 mobile game (iOS & Android) called Pudgy Party next year.

In July of this year, Pudgy Penguins' parent company Igloo announced the completion of a $11 million financing round, led by Founders Fund. Other participants included Distributed Capital, 1kx, Everest Ventures Group, and Selini Capital. This funding will primarily be used to build its Layer 2 network Abstract.

Azra Games is a blockchain gaming company aiming to create a mainstream collectible battle RPG. Its first game, Project Arcanas, is a fantasy collectible and fighting arena RPG. Azra Games began developing its flagship game, Project Legends, last year, and this game completed its first round of closed testing in early October.

Most of the core team members of Azra Games come from EA. Founder Mark Otero is a former general manager at the renowned American gaming company EA, where he led the development of Star Wars: Galaxy Heroes. Michael Noriega was the technical art director for Star Wars: Galaxy Heroes and now serves as the game director at Azra Games.

In October of this year, Azra Games completed a $42.7 million Series A financing round, with participation from Pantera Capital, a16z crypto, A16Z GAMES, and NFX, bringing Azra's total funding to $68.3 million.

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