TLDR:
• Venture capitalists are increasing liquidity for alternative funding methods for crypto startups, such as grants and node sales.
• Investment in crypto firms rose by 38% in the first quarter of 2024, with over $1.1 billion invested in March alone.
This edition of Cointelegraph’s VC Roundup highlights several crypto startups that have recently secured funding:
Venture capitalists are back in crypto, bringing with them liquidity for alternative funding methods for startups, such as grants and node sales. Base-native lending platform Seamless, for instance, has announced a co-sponsored initiative with layer-3 Degen Chain and semi-fungible token protocol Pandora that will distribute nearly $600,000 in grants to creators and developers building on Base. While Degen focuses on developers interested in building within Farcaster and Degen Chain, Pandora seeks creators interested in ERC-404 technology for their collections and memecoins. New grant submissions are available through the Community Governance forum. Another grant round is just around the corner, this time from the SingularityNET ecosystem. The Deep Funding Round 4, which will provide over $1 million in capital for decentralized artificial intelligence initiatives, is expected to be unveiled in early May.
Investment in crypto firms rose by 38% during the first quarter of 2024, with the number of projects receiving funding growing by 49% — the highest since the fourth quarter of 2021. In March alone, over $1.1 billion was invested across 180 crypto-related projects, a 52.5% month-on-month increase, with funds primarily directed toward infrastructure and decentralized finance projects. Among April’s highlights to date, Paradigm led a $225 million round on layer-1 protocol Monad Labs, while Auradine, a crypto mining hardware provider, completed a Series B funding worth $80 million. Other startups featured in this edition of Cointelegraph’s VC Roundup include Sapien, Alpen Labs, HYCHAIN, and Web3Firewall, highlighting the diverse range of funding models fueling crypto startups.
