整理：饼干 & Elvin，RootData
In December 2024, BTC reached a new high of $106,000, maintaining an overall high-level fluctuation between $92,000 and $100,000. The crypto domain's investment and financing data warmed up, with total financing amount reaching $741 million, an increase of 62.8% month-on-month. The number of financing events was 102, similar to data from the previous two months. This month's average financing amount was $11.769 million, with a median financing amount of $4.1 million.
Financing trends in the crypto domain over the past 2 years
In this article, we will focus on specific financing data, active investors, hot search projects, and other aspects to present the changing trends in the crypto market.
1. Financing Data
The largest financing event this month came from Avalanche, which completed $250 million in OTC financing, led by Dragonfly, Galaxy Digital, and ParaFi Capital. Other popular projects that completed financing include crypto banking services and payment solutions BVNK, decentralized open social graph Lens Protocol, global virtual asset service provider Klickl, modular public chain Plume Network, and blockchain asset securities firm Prometheum.
In terms of financing amounts and rounds, the $1-3 million range accounts for the largest quantity ratio, with the seed round still being the hottest financing stage, although its proportion has decreased. A total of 17 projects completed seed round financing. Notable projects include the AI L1 blockchain ChainOpera AI ($17 million), decentralized AI infrastructure Exabits ($15 million), cryptocurrency credit card KAST ($10 million), and ZK verification network Fiamma ($4 million).
Additionally, 15 merger and acquisition events occurred in December, which is above the monthly average (10 events), indicating that leaders in the crypto industry are accelerating integration and layout. Yuga Labs acquired the token proof protocol tokenproof; Synthetix acquired the leveraged token platform TLX; NFTGo acquired the crypto portfolio management project Mest; Gate.io announced the acquisition of the crypto asset exchange Coin Master, officially entering the Japanese market.
2. Active Investors
Animoca Brands has consecutively become the venture capital institution with the highest investment frequency in November and December, with 5 transactions last month and 8 this month, including investments in decentralized privacy protection solutions FLock, social trading platform XYRO, Web3-native social marketing platform Bounty Bay, decentralized lending protocol Neptune, PoA blockchain Haven1, AI computing economy layer GAIB, etc.
The activity level is closely followed by Faction, Borderless Capital, GSR, Presto, Big Brain Holdings, and Blockchange, each with more than 4 transactions.
Additionally, Sreeram Kannan, Michael Heinrich, Zaki Manian, and Smokey were the most active Web3 angel investors in December, each investing in at least 3 projects.
In terms of fundraising for new crypto funds, December showed more positive signals, with MicroStrategy's model gaining market recognition. Specific events include:
Sora Ventures launched a $150 million fund, using Bitcoin as the main reserve asset to optimize financial strategy and enhance shareholder value.
Bitcoin mining company MARA disclosed that it raised $1.925 billion through convertible notes in November and December, purchasing 15,574 BTC at an average price of $98,529.
Former Google engineer Casey Caruso founded the venture capital fund Topology Ventures, which has raised $75 million. The fund will invest in frontier technologies including artificial intelligence, decentralized networks, neural technology, aerospace, and robotics.
Semler Scientific raised an additional $50 million, having purchased 2,084 BTC at a price of $168.6 million, with an average price of about $81,000.
Venture capital fund Swish Ventures completed a $60 million fundraising round, aimed at Web3, AI, and other fields. The fund plans to support 10 companies, with each deal investing between $5 million and $7 million.
NASDAQ-listed Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms announced plans to raise $500 million through the issuance of convertible preferred notes, with the net proceeds from this issuance intended to purchase additional BTC and for general corporate purposes.
Crypto venture Dattice is raising funds for its third fund, with SEC filings not specifying the size of the fund.
Bitcoin mining company IREN announced plans to raise $400 million through the issuance of convertible bonds (with a coupon rate of 3.25% and a conversion premium of 30%).
3. Hot Projects
RootData's heat value is calculated through normalized processing of data such as platform search volume, click volume, user votes, and Twitter heat index. The projects with the highest heat value in December include:
Fuel
Fuel is an operating system built specifically for Ethereum Rollups. Fuel allows Rollups to solve the PSI (Parallelization, State Minimal Execution, Interoperability) problem without making any compromises.
vana
Vana is an AI identity generation application that allows users to create a digital persona, supporting use across different applications, while this digital persona maintains privacy, controlled only by the user who created it and their authorized accounts.
Plume Network
Plume is a fully integrated modular chain focused on RWAfi. They have built the first modular, composable RWA-focused EVM-compatible chain, aiming to simplify the onboarding of all types of assets and streamline capital onboarding through native infrastructure and unified RWAfi-specific features across the chain.
Nexus
Nexus Network is a massively parallel proof mining network. It is a world-class instantiation of Nexus zkVM, designed to operate at a speed of one trillion CPU cycles per second, provided it connects sufficient computing power.
Magic Eden
Magic Eden is a cross-chain NFT marketplace, built on a user-friendly platform supported by market-leading minting and trading solutions. Magic Eden brings dynamic cultural moments to the blockchain, enabling users to create, discover, and collect unique NFTs.
XION
XION is a Layer 1 blockchain designed for consumer applications, providing a tailored seamless user experience for everyday users. Through its innovative Chain Abstraction infrastructure, XION simplifies complex crypto interactions and offers protocol-level account abstraction, gasless transactions, signature abstraction, cross-device usage, and fiat pricing.
Hyperliquid
Hyperliquid is a high-performance L1 platform. Its vision is a fully on-chain open financial system where user-built applications connect with high-performance native components, all without impacting the end-user experience.
Thena
Thena is an automated market maker based on BNB Chain, inspired by Solidly, creating a simpler liquidity acquisition process for new and existing protocols through capital-efficient liquidity guidance.
Movement
Movement is a modular framework for building and deploying Move-based infrastructure, applications, and blockchains in any distributed environment. The team is building a suite of products and services that allow non-Move protocols to leverage the powerful capabilities of the Move programming language without writing a line of Move code.
Virtuals Protocol
Virtuals Protocol is a decentralized factory for creating various artificial intelligence characters for different virtual worlds (such as games or online spaces) that can react through text, voice, and actions. Virtual Protocol provides incentives for the decentralized creation and monetization of AI characters for every virtual interaction (games, metaverse, online interactions, or others).
Blade Games
Blade Games is an on-chain game + AI agent ecosystem built around the zkVM stack, aiming to create AI agents that run within games, allowing users to play games, train, and create their own on-chain economy.
BIO Protocol
The BIO Protocol is the financial layer of DeSci, aimed at accelerating the inflow of capital and talent into on-chain science. bioDAO can use the auction contracts of the BIO protocol to raise funds and directly allocate them to research programs, IP assets, and other biotechnology organizations.
Balance
Balance is a Web3 experience infrastructure created by the Epal team aimed at large-scale user adoption, dedicated to providing a smooth transition experience from Web2 to Web3 for users. Balance leverages its user traffic pool, combining blockchain and AI technologies to bring transformation to multiple industries, especially in social and gaming sectors.
Nodepay
Nodepay is a network infrastructure that provides decentralized bandwidth for training artificial intelligence. By connecting to the Nodepay network, users will be able to sell unused internet to AI companies, enabling efficient transmission of public training data, labels, model sharing, and remote distributed training.
Usual
Usual is a stablecoin protocol whose USD is a permissionless and fully compliant stablecoin backed 1:1 by real-world assets (RWA). USUAL is a governance token that allows the community to guide the network's future development. Usual addresses current stablecoin market issues by redistributing profits to the community and rewarding token holders with actual earnings generated from RWA.
Eclipse
Eclipse is a customizable rollup provider compatible with multiple Layer 1 blockchains. The platform allows developers to deploy their own rollup powered by the Solana operating system, using any chain for secure or data storage.
Kaito
Kaito is an AI-driven digital asset research platform that aims to revolutionize cryptocurrency research and investment through AI. Kaito's MetaSearch allows users to search the entire crypto space through one-click products across platforms like Twitter, Discord, governance forums, Mirror, Medium, etc.
ChainOpera
ChainOpera AI provides L1 blockchain and protocols for co-owning and co-creating decentralized AI apps and agents, powered by a Federated AI operating system and platform.
FLock
FLock aims to build a decentralized privacy protection solution for artificial intelligence. FLock proposes a research plan called Federated Learning Blocks (abbreviated as FLocks), which uses blockchain as a coordination platform between data holders to perform machine learning while keeping data local and private.
Berachain
Berachain is a high-performance EVM-compatible blockchain built on a liquidity proof consensus. Liquidity proof is a novel consensus mechanism designed to coordinate network incentives, establishing strong synergies between Berachain validators and the project ecosystem.
4. Project Dynamics
In December, RootData also recorded many events related to mainnet launches and new token issuances, helping users understand important project dynamics in the market and grasp earlier alpha opportunities.
Source: RootData Project Dynamics
Projects that launched tokens in December include (sorted by date from nearest to furthest):
Source: RootData Market Information
Due to space limitations, the above is a partial list of mainnet and token information. For more complete and timely data, please visit the RootData official website (https://www.rootdata.com/zh/) for more information.
