What Bear Market? Crypto Startups Raised $115M Last Week

More than $115 million was raised last week alone across a number of crypto startups.

The largest raise of the week was blockchain game studio Proof of Play which netted $33 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The firm will use the funding to fuel the growth of its invite-only, on-chain pirate role-playing game, Pirate Nation. Its ambition is to create a decentralized “Forever Game” that does not rely on creator intervention or external servers to continue to operate.

Crypto VC Still Healthy

Bastion, an enterprise-focused crypto custody, wallet management, and digital asset trading firm, raised $25 million. The Web3 startup was launched by two former executives from a16z’s crypto division.

The aim is to enable companies to integrate Web3 infrastructure into their existing enterprise technologies.

Jiritsu raised $10.2 million to further its mission of revolutionizing blockchain solutions with the firm’s groundbreaking Unlimited Verifiable Compute (UVC) technology. It also unveiled its flagship product, a revolutionary asset tokenization platform called Tomei RWA.

Crypto Startups raised $115 million across various verticals last week :

♦️ Proof of Playan, an on-chain game studio, raised $33 million.

♦️ Bastion raised $25 million,which is aiming to offer crypto custody, wallet management and digital asset trading mostly to corporations… pic.twitter.com/QnSrz06302

— Hercules | DeFi (@Hercules_Defi) September 24, 2023

Fuse Finance raised $14 million last week for a service to allow financial institutions the ability to offer regulated digital asset products to customers.

Briya secured $11.5 million for a blockchain-based healthcare data exchange platform. Furthermore, CoinScan raised $6.3 million for a crypto data and analytics platform,

Other notable funding rounds over the past week include Orb, Essential, BeWater, Freatic, GRVT, and Bubblemaps.

The total raised so far in September is $277 million, according to DeFiLlama. However, it should be noted that the overall trend for crypto venture funding is down, having been in decline since late 2021 at the peak of the last bull market.

Crypto Market Outlook

Venture firms are still on the hunt for lucrative investments in the crypto sector, but that bullishness is not being reflected in markets.

Total capitalization has declined around $10 billion over the weekend. As a result, it had fallen to $1.04 trillion by Monday morning in Asia.

Bitcoin had slid 2% on the day in a fall to a 12-day low of $26,000, while Ethereum was down 1% to $1,580 earlier today.

Moreover, crypto social media had grown increasingly bearish, with plenty of predictions of a big October flush-out.

October, the most feared month of the year with the Bank Panic of 1907, Stock Market Crash of 1929, and Black Monday 1987 all during October

Economic data
Currency crisis
Russia / Ukraine escalation
China economy
FSB report proposing global rules on crypto
SEC LBRY case decision https://t.co/uxK8byrlgy pic.twitter.com/LYg0TMx9su

— Seq (@CryptoSeq) September 25, 2022