Organized by: Cookie & Elvin, RootData
In December 2024, BTC reached a new high of $106,000, maintaining a high range oscillation between $92,000 and $100,000. The funding and investment data in the crypto field has shown signs of recovery, with total funding amounting to $741 million, a month-on-month increase of 62.8%. The number of funding rounds was 102, similar to data from the previous two months. This month's average funding amount was $11.769 million, with a median funding amount of $4.1 million.
Cryptocurrency funding trends over the past 2 years
In this article, we will focus on specific funding data, active investors, trending projects, and other aspects to present the changing trends in the crypto market.
1. Funding Data
This month's largest funding event came from Avalanche, which completed $250 million in OTC financing, led by Dragonfly, Galaxy Digital, and ParaFi Capital. Other popular projects that completed funding 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 securitization company Prometheum.
In terms of funding amounts and rounds, the $1-3 million range accounted for the highest number of funding rounds, with the seed round still being the most popular funding round, though its share has decreased, with a total of 17 projects completing seed round funding. 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, 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 actions last month and 8 actions this month. Investment records include decentralized privacy protection solution FLock, social trading platform XYRO, Web3 native social marketing platform Bounty Bay, decentralized lending protocol Neptune, PoA blockchain Haven1, AI computing economy layer GAIB, and more.
Following closely in terms of activity are Faction, Borderless Capital, GSR, Presto, Big Brain Holdings, and Blockchange, each with over 4 actions.
Additionally, Sreeram Kannan, Michael Heinrich, Zaki Manian, and Smokey are 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, including specific events:
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, raising $75 million. The fund will invest in cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence, decentralized networks, neurotechnology, aerospace, and robotics.
Semler Scientific raised an additional $50 million and has 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 $60 million in fundraising, targeting areas such as Web3 and AI. The fund plans to support 10 companies, with each investment ranging from $5 million to $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 intended for purchasing additional BTC and for general corporate purposes.
Crypto venture capital Dattice is currently raising funds for its third fund, with SEC filings not specifying the scale of the fund.
Bitcoin mining company IREN announced plans to raise $400 million through the issuance of convertible bonds (coupon rate 3.25%, conversion premium 30%).
3. Trending Projects
RootData's heat value is calculated through weighted processing of normalized data such as platform search volume, click frequency, 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 PSI (Parallelization, State Minimization Execution, Interoperability) issues without making any sacrifices.
vana
Vana is an AI identity generation application that allows users to create a digital character and supports usage across different applications, while maintaining 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 EVM-compatible chain centered on RWA, designed to simplify onboarding for all types of assets through native infrastructure and unified RWA-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 enough computational power.
Magic Eden
Magic Eden is a cross-chain NFT marketplace that has built a user-friendly platform powered by market-leading minting and trading solutions. Magic Eden brings dynamic cultural moments to the blockchain, allowing users to create, discover, and collect unique NFTs.
XION
XION is a Layer 1 blockchain designed for consumer applications, providing a tailored and seamless user experience for everyday users. With 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 of which do not compromise 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 features of the Move programming language without writing a line of Move code.
Virtuals Protocol
Virtuals Protocol is a decentralized factory that produces various AI characters for different virtual worlds (such as games or online spaces) which can respond through text, voice, and actions. The 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, creating AI agents that run in the game where users can play, train, and create their own on-chain economy.
BIO Protocol
The BIO protocol is the financial layer of DeSci, aimed at accelerating the flow of capital and talent into on-chain science. bioDAO can raise funds using the auction contracts of the BIO protocol and apply the funds directly to research programs, IP assets, and other biotechnology organizations.
Balance
Balance is a Web3 experience infrastructure designed for mass user adoption, created by the Epal team, aiming to provide Web2 users with a smooth transition experience to Web3. Balance leverages its user traffic pool to bring transformation to multiple industries (especially social and gaming) by combining blockchain and AI technologies.
Nodepay
Nodepay is a network infrastructure providing decentralized bandwidth for AI training. By connecting to the Nodepay network, users will be able to sell unused internet to AI companies, enabling efficient transmission of public training data, labeling, model sharing, and remote distributed training.
Usual
Usual is a stablecoin protocol, and its launched 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 future development of the network. 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 enables developers to deploy their own rollups powered by the Solana operating system, using any chain for security 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 aims to enable users to search the entire crypto space through platforms like Twitter, Discord, governance forums, Mirror, Medium, etc., with a one-click product.
ChainOpera
ChainOpera AI provides L1 blockchains 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 has proposed a research program called Federated Learning Blocks (abbreviated as FLocks), which uses blockchain as a coordination platform between data holders for machine learning, while keeping data local and private.
Berachain
Berachain is a high-performance EVM-compatible blockchain built on liquidity proof consensus. Liquidity proof is an innovative consensus mechanism designed to coordinate network incentives and establish strong synergies between Berachain validators and the project ecosystem.
4. Project Dynamics
In December, RootData also recorded many projects' mainnet launches, new token issuances, and other events, 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 recent to distant):
Source: RootData Market
