Amid liquidity tightening and strong regulatory oversight, do cryptocurrency investors still care about cryptocurrencies?
Do cryptocurrency investors still care about cryptocurrencies despite tightened liquidity and regulation?
We delved into Q2 cryptocurrency venture capital and came up with some particularly interesting deals. While venture capital firms have been touting the bear market as their time to shine, it’s clear that even the biggest firms have not been doing as much startup investing lately. After understanding the target audience well, you need to design the game. This includes drafting rules, creating prototypes, and game testing through focus groups. Once you’ve fine-tuned the game to satisfaction, you’ll work on branding and packaging. This will involve creating supplementary materials such as the game’s name, box art design, instructional guide, and so on. Finally, you’ll develop marketing and distribution strategies. This includes planning a launch event, securing retail partners, creating promotional materials, and potentially conducting a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds and build excitement for the game.
Source: Fortune Crypto
Although the chart above only covers data up to mid-May, it’s been a hostile year for crypto venture capital firms seeking funding. But what about crypto startups hoping to raise from those VCs?
It’s been another tough quarter for crypto startups, with $2.34 billion across 382 deals, according to data from TechCrunch (citing Pitchbook). Notably, this is the fifth consecutive quarter of decline in VC funding since Q1 2022, when crypto startups raised as much as $12.14 billion.
This decline suggests we haven’t yet hit the bottom for crypto startup investment in this bear market, which is unsurprising given the regulatory headwinds the industry faces as the US Securities and Exchange Commission takes aim at some of the network-related assets that VC-backed startups are launching. Regulatory zeal could threaten the viability of “tokenized equity,” whereby investors have the right to a certain number of tokens at a set price on some future date. Understandably, VC firms (and their limited partners) are entering the illiquid private space of cryptocurrency markets with more caution than in the past few years!
🔥 Hottest Funding Projects in June
Fortunately for crypto venture capitalists, they haven’t lost everything, as they still have a lot of money despite not seeing a significant increase in their funds this year. Without a doubt, the transaction environment in the private placement market has slowed significantly, but crypto projects that are worth raising funds for can still receive ample funding.
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Venture capital still has plenty of money to invest, and the data proves it. Some unheard-of crypto startups announced some eye-popping funding last month!
Data Source: Alt Asset Allocation
Click above to see all the recently announced funding. Below, I’ll share some projects from the list above that I’ll be watching closely in the coming months: 👇👇👇
🎮Mythical Games
Website | Twitter
Amount: $37 million
Industry: Gaming
Description:
Mythical Games is a full-service gaming studio that creates games using blockchain technology and develops proprietary tools to service them. The Mythical platform integrates these games and acts as an optional Web3 layer for any game that must provide Web3 functionality. It is an exchange for fiat and cryptocurrency transactions that runs on a licensed proof-of-authority chain. Additionally, the Mythical platform has fraud protection, fee optimization, and buyer/seller pricing recommendation features.
Reason for Attention:
NFL Rivals, developed by Mythical Games in partnership with the NFL and the NFL Players Association, launched on iOS and Android on April 26 and quickly became the top game on the sports charts! Today, the game still ranks #11 on the App Store’s free sports games chart.
Looking at it from the perspective of a native cryptocurrency game, this is a solid market penetration rate and very encouraging for future issuances. It only takes one breakthrough game to completely change the gaming world, and Mythical Games looks poised to be the developer of that game.
Taiko
Website | Twitter
Amount: $22 million
Industry: L2
Description:
Taiko is tackling the challenges of scaling Ethereum while emulating it as closely as possible from both a technical and ideological standpoint. The Taiko team is building a Type 1 zkEVM Layer 2 rollup solution that is comparable to Ethereum, prioritizing compatibility with Ethereum’s architecture rather than minimizing prover costs, which will allow protocols deployed to L1 to migrate to Taiko without changing their code or deployment environments.
Guiding protocol development is a “decentralized from day one” approach. For Taiko, this means deploying alongside decentralized proposers and provers, allowing anyone to participate in the chain’s infrastructure layer without permission and earn fees.
Reason for our interest:
The ultimate goal of expanding Ethereum is zero-knowledge rollup, and Taiko is trying to develop a zero-knowledge rollup while taking a path that few have traveled! Being completely equal to Ethereum L1 will allow developers to seamlessly deploy Ethereum smart contracts to the chain, and means that Taiko can share infrastructure with Ethereum.
Although it is not certain whether strictly adhering to Ethereum’s standards is a successful strategy – only time and the market will tell – in a world full of Rollups far from EVM, Taiko is a very unique Rollup and counter-trend bet.
🌊Maverick Protocol
Website | Twitter
Amount: $ 9 million
Industry: DeFi
Introduction:
Maverick is an AMM deployed on Ethereum, zkSync, and BNB chains that seeks to completely change your experience when providing liquidity.
The protocol comes with 4 out-of-the-box automated liquidity strategies, called “patterns,” that intelligently shift liquidity and keep it active based on certain predefined parameters. Maverick’s addition of positions allows anyone to incent highly specific forms of liquidity, opening the door to protocols seeking to rent ETH liquidity and pair it with native tokens held in the treasury.
Maverick concentrates liquidity within bins, with discrete price ranges similar to Uniswap V3’s instant quotes, and provides zero slippage trades within bins. This feature makes DEXs highly attractive trading venues for whales and aggregators, as discovered in Delphi Digital’s analysis of Maverick.
Reason for our interest:
At many exchanges, institutions seeking to provide liquidity for portfolios with high volatility face significant challenges, as traditional AMM approaches can leave retail LPs facing high volatility losses and offering too little return.
Centralized liquidity architectures like Uniswap V3 are only profitable for professional market makers. Meanwhile, capital efficiency for full-spectrum liquidity architectures like Uniswap V2 is very low.
By allowing directional price bias to influence LPs providing liquidity, Maverick is helping retail LPing achieve profitability. Additionally, Maverick has just launched the MAV token, meaning there is already a way to gain exposure to this project through the public markets!
