Source: cryptoslate

Compiled by: Blockchain Knight

According to DefiLlama, venture capital funds (VCs) invested $527 million in Crypto startups in July, up 14.5% year-over-year.

The blockchain infrastructure sector raised $420.7 million last month, with startups contributing the largest amount, accounting for nearly 80% of the total.

Artificial intelligence (AI) protocol Sentient has raised $85 million in a funding round led by Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures, making it the most successful funding round for a blockchain infrastructure project.

Blockchain payment network Partior raised a massive $60 million in funding from traditional banking giants JPMorgan and Standard Chartered. As a result, only 2 rounds accounted for about 34% of the 41 rounds related to infrastructure.

DeFi protocols received $86 million in investment in July. BTC reboot protocol Lombard raised $16 million, the largest amount raised by a DeFi project last month.

ZAP, a community-driven token distribution protocol built on Blast, has raised $15 million from prominent crypto luminaries including Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, and economist Alex Krüger.

Notably, the DeFi ecosystem of Layer-1 blockchain Monad received significant attention from venture capital in July.

Kintsu and aPriori, two liquid staking protocols, raised $4 million and $10 million respectively, and Kuru received $2 million to build a decentralized order book on top of Monad infrastructure.

Last month, the blockchain gaming ecosystem also received funding from venture capital funds, closing its July round with $20.5 million.

Cambria, a Runescape-inspired game on the Blast Network, has received $2.5 million in investment from Bitkraft and 1kx.

In addition, Pantera Capital, Mantle Ecosystem Fund and other well-known companies have also allocated $18 million to NPCLabs, a protocol company building a blockchain ecosystem.

Venture capital has shown more interest in crypto assets this year than last year. From January to July last year, crypto startups raised $4.22 billion from funds, while crypto projects raised nearly $5 billion during the same period this year.