The total amount of funds raised in the crypto market has been on the decline over the past few months. In June 2024, the total funds raised dropped by approximately 53% compared to the amount raised in March 2024, which marked the local high, as reported by DeFiLlama.
A decrease in the funds raised can indicate several factors. It may suggest that investors are becoming more cautious or skeptical about crypto projects’ potential returns and viability. This caution could be due to past experiences with failed projects, market volatility, or concerns about regulatory crackdowns.
High-profile hacks, scams, or failures in the crypto space can erode trust and make investors more cautious, leading to a reduction in the amount of new funds entering the market.
Despite the drop in total funds raised, it does not necessarily mean that fewer high-quality or innovative projects are entering the market. In June, there were five notable funding rounds and a total of 5,333, amounting to an impressive $101.78 billion raised.
1. Avail
Avail, a Web3 infrastructure layer, raised $43 million in a Series A funding round on June 4, 2024. Avail comprises three primary components: Avail Nexus, Avail Data Availability, and Avail Fusion. Its objective is to address blockchain security, interoperability, and scalability concerns by enabling modular execution platforms to interoperate and scale in a trust-minimized manner.
2. Nexus Labs
Nexus Labs has developed an extensible, modular, open-source zkVM written in Rust, which is also contributor-friendly. The platform recently completed a $25 million Series A funding round on June 11.
The Nexus 1.0 process begins with the user generating a standard Rust program. Upon compilation, the Nexus zkVM executes the program and divides the executed trace into chunks. These chunks are then distributed to computers in the Nexus Network. Subsequently, the network merges these individual proofs to create a single proof as the final output.
3. M^0
M^0 is a platform that empowers multiple institutional actors to create a fungible crypto dollar. This is made possible by utilizing short-term US treasuries and other top-quality collateral.
The decentralized money middleware successfully raised $35 million in a Series A funding round on June 5th.
4. The Sandbox
The Sandbox, a virtual gaming world in which people can build and monetize their gaming experiences, raised $20 million on June 6. Despite this milestone, the ecosystem’s flagship token, SAND, has lost almost 30% of its value over the past month.
5. Ora
Ora is a blockchain project that raised $20 million in a Series A round on June 26. The project aims to incorporate AI into dApps and focuses on bringing artificial intelligence (AI) onto the blockchain, specifically the Ethereum blockchain.
Their main product is called the Onchain AI Oracle (OAO), which allows developers to integrate pre-trained AI models directly into their blockchain applications.
