Binance Labs raised $500 M, Utopia Labs raised $23 M Series A round

Overview of investments & funding activities Week 22

In the TOP 10 most famous investments & sponsorship deals in the past week, we have:

• 2 Investment funds: Binance Labs, Old Fashion Research.
• 2 NFT exchanges: Zora, Fan Tiger
• 2 assets management projects: Utopia Labs, Common Wealth
• 1 move-to-earn project: Walken
• 1 project about Web 3 gaming: Cantina Royale
• 1 project about payment: Merge
• 1 crypto wallet: Liminal

Company and Venture Capital fundraisings

Binance Labs raises $500 Million

What is Binance Labs?

Binance Labs is an investment arm of Binance - the leading exchange by Changpeng Zhao (CZ), supporting and developing blockchains, along with an ecological cryptocurrency system. The company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Hong Kong.

The main activity of Binance Labs is to continuously search, evaluate and invest in potential and valuable projects and ideas over the long term. Web3/ Gaming is the sector that is regularly funded by Binance Labs, many of which have gone viral and big, such as Star Sharks, My Neighbor Alice, The Sandbox…

Famous Venture Capitals participating in the funding round:

• Digital Sky Technologies (DST Global): Founded by Yuri Milner in 1999. It is a private and venture capital fund that mainly invests in mature technology companies. Currently, DST is managing up to $50 B worth of assets.
• Breyer Capital: Founded and run by the billionaire Jim Breyer. Breyer is an international venture capital fund, mainly focused in the US market. This fund targets people who excel in the fields of business, technology, artificial intelligence and media.

Goals after the funding round: This $500 M capital raised by Binance Labs from global investors will be used to invest in 3 main phases. The first will continue to provide a stable source of liquidity for projects that have been invested by Binance Labs, the rest will be divided to invest in companies at 2 stages: early-stage venture, and late-stage growth.

Old Fashion Research (OFR) raised $100 M

What is Old Fashion Research (OFR)?

Old Fashion Research is a venture capital, whose name is inspired by a classic cocktail. This fund was established at the end of 2021 by 2 members, Ling Zhang, former vice president of M&A and investment of Binance, and Wayne Fu, former head of development at Binance.

While at Binance, Ling Zhang was responsible for many major investments of Binance such as FTX, Multicoin Capital or CertiK.

Famous Venture Capitals participating in the funding round:

• WeMix: An online blockchain gaming platform with a large ecosystem.
• There are also many other angel investors, limited partners and VCs that remain anonymous.

Goals after the funding round: The capital will be used to focus on investing in the Metaverse market, bringing and popularizing crypto to the Latin American and African markets.

Projects with Tokens

Projects already have Tokens and still receive additional investments proves that they have new products, new segments, and need more money to develop. This news will greatly affect the nature and price of the tokens, so please refer to it for more investment perspectives.

Walken (WLKN) raised $4.7 M

What is Walken?

Walken is a move-to-earn and win-to-earn project built on Solana. Unlike current move-to-earn projects, users can use Walken without any cost.

Walken will give the user a Cathlete character and it will level up based on the distance the user has traveled. The higher the Cathlete level, the more attractive the rewards will be. In the past week, Walken has successfully raised $4.7 M.

Famous Venture Capitals participating in the funding round:

• Yield Guild Games and YGG Sea: 2 big gaming guilds on the market,
• Shima Capital: An investment fund founded by Yida Gao, a young trader who made it to the top of Forbes Under 30 2020. The fund focuses on investing and supporting projects in the blockchain field with nearly 90 capital investments.
• Moon Holdings: Thomas Vu's investment fund, runs Franchise Development at Riot Games.

Goals after the funding round: Funds will be used to prepare for the launch of Walken in the second half of June 2022.

Cantina Royale (CRT) raised $4.5 M 

What is Cantina Royale?

Cantina Royale is a play-to-earn game. Cantina Royale is built as a survival shooter, quite similar to Thetan Arena. This is the first mobile gaming blockchain developed on multiple platforms, without any 3rd party simulator.

A special feature of Cantina Royale is the ability to make transactions without gas fee, without connecting to a 3rd party wallet to enhance players’ experience.

Famous Venture Capitals participating in the funding round:

• Mechanism Capital: A crypto investment fund born in mid-2020. Mechanism mainly invests in the primary and secondary market in the field of Crypto.
• Animoca Brands: The leader in the blockchain gaming market. As a publisher for big, familiar games on blockchain such as REVV Racing, The Sandbox, Animoca Brands also regularly pours large capital into blockchain entertainment startups.

Goals after the funding round: The capital will be used by publisher Cantina Royale to accelerate the launch of the official gameplay.

Projects without tokens

Projects that do not have Tokens and are invested in may be able to develop and build their basic foundations.

For the project itself, the supporters in this phase are very meaningful to them, so the list below may not help you in investing, but it helps in choosing potential projects to learn about. You can look for opportunities such as participating in Testnets, IDOs,...

Zora raised $50 M

What is Zora?

Zora is an NFT exchange, a place to buy, sell, exchange and create NFTs. Unlike other NFT exchanges, Zora has the infrastructure for users to create NFTs, or even an entire NFT Collection. Zora is the place where historic auctions in the NFT market occurred such as Doge NFT ($4 M), TikTok NFT ($6 M).

Famous Venture Capitals participating in the funding round:

• Haun Ventures: Venture capital fund, founded by Kathryn Haun. She is the founder of Haun Ventures, on the board of Coinbase, OpenSea, autograph, previously taught business at Stanford University and worked as a General Partner at a16z.
• Coinbase Ventures: The investment arm of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

Goals after the funding round: The capital will be used to build and develop the infrastructure for its NFT exchange. Zora is expected to launch ZoraDAO soon.

Utopia Labs raised $23 M in Series A round

What is Utopia Labs?

Utopia Labs is a modern payment system built right on top of Gnosis. Utopia is built specifically for Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), helping users to easily administer DAO in payment of expenses, management, and financial analysis.

Utopia has helped administer more than 100 DAOs, such as OlympusDAO, Lido, Friends with Benefits, Yield Guild Games and many others.

Famous Venture Capitals participating in the funding round:

• Paradigm: An investment fund focused on supporting cryptocurrency projects, founded by Fred Ehrsam and Matt Huang The fund's investment method is flexible, long-term investment, multi-stage investment.
• Circle Ventures: The Venture capital arm of Circle company, creator of Metamask and the stablecoin USDC.

Goals after the funding round: The capital will be used for Utopia to recruit, expand its staff and launch many new features for its system.

Common Wealth raised $20 M in seed round

What is Common Wealth?

Common Wealth is an asset management protocol. Similar to Utopia above, Common is also built specifically for DAOs.

In addition to asset management and financial analysis, Common can also deploy governance contracts, crowdfund and assign roles to people in the DAO. Specially, Common Wealth has a chatting feature, helping administrators to communicate more easily.

Famous Venture Capitals participating in the funding round:

• Polychain Capital: One of the largest hedge funds in the cryptocurrency market, established in 2016, managing billions of dollars in assets.
• Mirana Ventures: The venture capital arm of BitDAO. This is a major DAO in the market, managing over $1.5B in total assets.

Goals after the funding round: The capital will be fully used for the construction and development of Common Wealth, creating momentum for Common to become the leading asset management platform for DAO in the market.

Merge raised $9.5 M seed round

What is Merge?

Merge is a project that provides a range of banking and payments solutions for large companies. Through only one API, Merge was able to provide a wide range of services to customers. Using Merge gives users the ability to quickly create a payment account to send money, and change funds between fiat and crypto.

Merge is very useful for companies that want to use crypto for payment, saving money and cost less time.

Famous Venture Capitals participating in the funding round:

• Hashed: A preeminent Blockchain investment company founded in 2017, from Seoul, Korea with a portfolio spanning the globe.
• Alameda Research: A leading investment fund that gathers individual investors to research and invest in potential projects in the field of cryptocurrencies and their derivatives products.

Goals after the funding round:The capital will be used to Merge to develop the system, thereby attracting more customers and larger companies to the crypto market.

Liminal raised $4.7 M in seed round

What is Liminal?

Liminal is an electronic wallet, founded by Mahin Gupta. He is also one of the 3 Zeb Pay’s CEOs , a large electronic exchange in India. The highlight of Liminal wallet is that it focuses on security for users.

According to Liminal, they are the first wallet to use MPC and multisignature architecture, requiring 2 or more different private keys to open the wallet. In the past week, Liminal has successfully raised $4.7 M in the seed round.

Famous Venture Capitals participating in the funding round:

• Elevation Capital: A Venture capital fund in India. It mainly invests in technology startups in the early stages. This is also the VCs leading the fundraising round for Liminal.
• CoinDCX: The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the Indian market.

Goals after the funding round: Liminal will use the capital to upgrade its infrastructure, attract more users. Liminal is trusted by many big companies such as Flitpay, Polytrade, Yapstone, …

FanTiger raised $5.5 M in seed round

What is FanTiger?

FanTiger is an Indian NFT music trading platform operated by Prashan Agarwal and Krishna Singh. Fans can buy NFTs of their favorite singers to participate in FanTiger's exclusive community, have the opportunity to receive valuable rewards, meet idols and many other interesting things.

Famous Venture Capitals participating in the funding round:

• Multicoin Capital: An investment fund based on “investment thesis” that specializes in investing in the crypto market in the form of investing in project tokens and shares in blockchain companies.
• Krafton: The famous game developer and creator, the father of the legendary survival shooter, PUBG and PUBG Mobile.

Goals after the funding round: The capital will be used to accelerate the development and expand the market for FanTiger.

Conclusion

This is the end of the TOP 10 most outstanding investment deals in the past week. Hopefully, through this article, you will have an overview of the projects that have raised capital during the week.

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