July 10, 2023

1. Last Monday, Bitkub completed a financing of US$17.8 million, mainly funded by Asphere Innovations, a Southeast Asian entertainment giant headquartered in Bangkok. It is worth noting that Asphere’s current market value on the Stock Exchange of Thailand BKK is only RMB 1.2 billion, or about US$170 million. If the investment amount is not inflated, it is really optimistic about this new exchange startup.

Their CEO was the founder and CEO of Coin.co.th, the largest exchange in Thailand at that time, in 2014. Later, he started Bitkub in 2018. I went to CMC to take a look when writing this article. The current daily trading volume is 13 million US dollars, accounting for 95% of the local market in Thailand. As early as November 21, it sold 51% of its shares to SCB, a Thai bank. This round of financing seems to be just a game between chaebols.

2. On the same day, it was announced that Ola received US$3 million in financing led by Web3.com Venture, and the following investors included familiar faces such as Foresight, LD, and CatcherVC.

After seeing the financing news, I checked the relevant information of this project and noticed that Mr. Maxlion had been strongly promoting this team that was doing zkVM+zkEVN last September. He really had a keen eye for talent.

Ola founder is from Huawei, CTO is from zkspace and 360, and chief scientist is the chief scientist of the old Chinese public chain Qtum. Both the team composition and the articles on the official medium are full of technology-oriented shadows. I saw in their white paper that they should have chosen to use a Rust-like development language. Maybe Solana's developer community will have a higher acceptance before? Looking forward to third-party evaluation after opening.

3. Last Wednesday, Web3Go completed a $4 million financing, led by binance labs, followed by Hashkey, NGC, Shima and other investors. When they first joined the BNB chain most valuable project, they should have had dinner with their founder in Hangzhou. Mr. Ding should have worked in the Suzhou AI Laboratory of Jiaotong University before, and later served as VP of a top 500 encryption project. After being selected as the most valuable builder of BNB chain, he was also fed a lot of data service orders, and he is one of the most well-off project parties.

Before announcing this round of financing, they also changed their logo on the spot and announced their roadmap of combining data services with AI, which should be a professional match. However, this entrepreneurial direction is not only Dune RSS3, but also supersight, which was raised a few days later, is also working in the same direction. It seems that there is no explanation for the time being whether it is based on knowledge base or fine-tuning or trained on 64 8✖️40GB A100s for 53 days like bloogbergGPT. Currently, eight steps of verification are required to sign up for the early bird internal test. I will wait until it is officially launched before talking about it.

4. On the same day, Aspecta also announced their strategic round of financing, but the amount and valuation were not announced. They should have raised 3.5 million seed rounds in rounds A and B. The first round in April last year was participated by Qiji Chuangtan and the founder’s former employer ZhenFund, and the second round in November was participated by Hashkey Foresight SNZ. This round was also participated by the top overseas VC Spartan. This is also the advantage of VC startup teams.

What they mainly do is to let users link to websites such as github, twitter, linkedin, quora and on-chain wallets such as metamask, and then use AI to simply generate a summary profile, and use it as an intermediate analysis layer to block other information you don’t want to disclose, perhaps expecting to play the role of a recommender. What’s more interesting is that their chief scientist comes from tinder, which may be one of the companies with the most experience in researching portrait generation.

5. Shardeum announced last Friday that it had raised $5.4 million at a valuation of $248 million, which is not at the level of a public chain, led by Amber. They had a round of financing of $18.2 million in October last year, which should have been led by Jane Street and participated by Balaji. Shardeum should be one of the furthest along in the exploration of sharding L1. The underlying technology has been working on shardus since 2017. In fact, it has already issued a coin. It was not until April 2022, half a year before the re-shelling and financing, that it went on alphanet. Then in August, it tested the 2.0 version testnet and implemented the sharding mode.

During the Hong Kong conference in April, I talked to a friend about their willingness to lead the investment, but it seemed that they failed to do so due to team relationship issues. Their founder CEO is also the co-founder of WazirX, the top 1 exchange in India. In August last year, he was investigated by the Indian authorities for suspected money laundering and violation of foreign exchange regulations. During this period, he also broke out in a Twitter war with Binance, which also made VCs suspicious. What's more interesting is that the 18.2 million round of financing in October last year seemed to have sold all 18% of the $SHM in the token distribution, 91.44M. I don't know whose share was sold in this round of 5.4 million financing.

6. In addition to the above mentioned

One of the data websites I use most frequently, Crypto Quant, is supported by Atinum Investment, a veteran investment company with a market value of 86 million. The exchange leverage rate on their platform is an indicator that I have been referring to frequently.

Jack's bluesky completed $8 million in financing. Except for NEO and Protocol labs, it seems that only a group of geeks participated.

Magic Square has completed a strategic round of financing with the participation of EMURGO. The seed round was also led by binance and participated by gate crypto.com kucoin. Later, it also officially announced a round of strategic investment with houbi. The coin issuance expectation is 100%. Maybe you can give it a try to see if there are any unexpected surprises.

Finally, DWF labs mentioned last week invested in another round of Crust network, which currently has a fully diluted market value of 20 million, which is -99% away from the peak of the 21-year bull market. The most outrageous thing is that a startup project I recently contacted has Crust's CTO, CMO, and chief engineer in their team. DWF is becoming more and more like a ghoul.

Powered by Blogger

Theme image created by Veronica Olson

Batman

May Persia give me nightingales, may Rome give me swords