Overview of Fundraisings of the Week
Gunzilla Games Raises $46M to Redefine the Battle Royale Genre By Letting Players Trade Their In-Game Items in “Off The Grid”
DEX Protocol Injective Raises $40M From Jump Crypto, Brevan Howard Unit
Multi-Blockchain Platform Geeq Receives $25M Capital Commitment From Investment Group GEM
$22.5M Seed Funding Announced by Web3 Infrastructure Firm Fortress Blockchain Technologies
CreatorDAO Raises $20M Seed Round from a16z crypto and Initialized Capital to Invest in Creators
Blockchain Analytics Platform Merkle Science Raises $19M to Take on Bridge Exploits
Pinata raised $21.5M to scale NFT media infrastructure
Unstoppable Finance Raises $12.8M to Build DeFi Wallet
RISC Zero announces a $12M Seed Round
Gaming Startup Lysto Raises $12 Mn To Offer Digital Certification To Pro Gamers
Fundraising Trend Since the Beginning of the Year
DeFi
Weekly TVL
Gross: ⬆️$85.45B
Top 3 Apps: MakerDAO ⬆️($8.95B), Lido ⬆️($8.37B), AAVE ⬆️($7.4B)
Top 3 Chains: ETH ⬇️($38.89B), TRON ⬆️($5.89B), BSC ⬇️($5.79B)
Top 7D Change 📈: One-stop management solution for decentralized finance- DeFiSaver (+26.67%, $167.02m)
[Tornado Cash Sanctioned] The US Treasury barred Tornado Cash’s use as a matter of national security because North Korean hackers allegedly use the mixer to launder stolen crypto funds. Meanwhile, USDC issuer Circle has blacklisted addresses on the sanction list and froze USDC belonging to Tornado users.
[Merge TTD Confirmed] Ethereum core developers have discussed tentative dates for The Merge to take place. The Merge will happen when the network reaches a certain total terminal difficulty (TTD) as shared by Tim Beiko, and the number will be reached around Sept. 15–16.
[Arbitrum Nova Live] Arbitrum opens Nova, an L2 optimized for gaming & social dApps, to the public. Arbitrum also announces partnerships with leading web2/web3 projects including Sushiswap, Maker, Reddit, FTX, etc. to support the Nova chain.
NFT
7D SALES: $152,016,292
7D CHANGE IN SALES: +4.53%
7D NUMBER OF SALES: 1,023,985
NFT News
Aug. 13, OpenSea changes stolen NFT policy after user complaints.
Aug. 10, New EU law aims to regulate NFT collections as cryptocurrencies.
Aug. 8, Rarible launches custom NFT marketplaces product.
Aug. 8, New NFT privacy proposal gets attention from Vitalik Buterin.
GameFi & Metaverse
[GameFi company Murasaki closes €1.5M seed round led by Japanese incubate fund] Murasaki, a game studio building decentralized games on the blockchain, has closed a €1.5 million seed round led by Incubate Fund, one of the largest Japanese venture capital firms specializing in seed stage investing. Murasaki aims to harness the power of community and make a future game engine available to anyone wanting to build blockchain titles.
[Exobots GameFi Alpha lands on BNB chain] Exobots, a PlayAndEarn blockchain game developed by Metron City Games, is built on BNB Chain network. The project, currently in its Alpha stage, hosted a tournament in partnership with BiSwap. The tournament had a prize pool worth $1,110, where the first place winner won $500 in $EXOS, the game’s native token. The event got the attention of 500 Alpha players that played around 1,200 games.
[Avocado DAO and Pro Gamer DAO to grow GameFi space] The metaverse gaming community, Avocado DAO announced its strategic partnership with the Korea-based web3 gaming community, Pro Gamer DAO to create a “Mega” Web 3.0 gaming community and boost the GameFi space. The partnership will allow players from both communities to play the fastest-growing and first massively multiplayer online real-time (MMORTS) strategy game, League of Kingdoms.
[VisionsDao exits stealth mode and presents a modular stack for GameFi] A GameFi infrastructure startup, VisionsDAO has been building for more than a year what could become a foundational primitive for game developers. VisionsDAO has raised $2.2m in their seed round from industry giants Animoca Brands, Spartan, trailblazing founders, and angels like Trent McConaughy, Bruce Pon, and John Lilic, in addition to receiving tremendous support from accelerators and strategic partners such as Alliance DAO and Kilonova Ventures.
[Game Space sees 400% user growth since the launch of its Steam event in July] Game Space, the first GameFi as a Service platform in the whole industry opened a Genesis NFT AirDrop event for one billion Steam players. At present, Game Space has joined forces with more than ten institutions such as ByBit, Gate.io, Huobi, KuCoin Wallet, BitKeep, DAOs and Gaming Guilds to AirDrop NFTs to Steam users.
[Pioneering multi-chain game Monsterra ready for IDO & mainnet launch this August] Deployed on both BNB, Avalanche, and Terra, Monsterra is the hidden germ in the blockchain game industry this 2022. Monsterra offers gaming enthusiasts a fun and high-profit playground with no initial investment. This August, Monsterra is accelerating and ready to launch innovative risk-free IDOs on three launchpads including GameFi, Red Kite and Poolz in the upcoming weeks.
[Metaverse coin Tamadoge raises $1 million midway through its beta sale] Tamadoge, the play-to-earn Metaverse meme coin, has raised $1 million after just 12 days of its beta sale. The beta sale began on July 25 and is scheduled to run until August 31, but will finish before then when the $2 million hard cap is reached. A mobile “battle” beta version of the app is scheduled for release in Q4 2022.
[Everdome secures $10 million investment commitment from GEM Digital Limited] Everdome, the most hyper-realistic Metaverse, has announced that GEM Digital Limited (GEM), a Bahamian-based, digital asset investment firm, that sources, structures and invests in utility tokens listed on over 30 CEXs (centralized exchanges) and DEXs (decentralized exchanges) globally, has agreed to an investment commitment of $10 million into the UAE-based Metaverse company, through a structured token subscription agreement.
DAO
[Ethereum POS merge live on testnet goerli] Goerli is the last testnet went through the merge and The transition on mainnet is expected to be happened on TTD of 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000.
[AAVE companies is requesting retroactive funding for the cost incurred for developing AAVE V3] Aave companies is proposing retroactive funding floowing the successful launch of Aave V3 of total $16.6 to cover of cost of work and third-party audit. This also amounts to about 7.5% of the total treasury.
[Alchemy stats shows that there are over 37000+ Dapp built on Polygon] Polygon’s ecosystem is growing relentlessly and shown a 3x increase in Dapps since January 2022, of which 74% of Dapps are exclusively built on Polygon.
[Magic Eden proposed to build a NFT marketplace for ApeDAO ] Magic Eden is looking for gurther drive the value of the Apecoin community and create a value sharing partnership with them. The BYAC collection has incurred over $2.3B in trade and with the self-build NFT marketplace proposed by Magic Eden, not only the $APE hodlers and NFT hodlers entitled to discount on transaction, but also part of the revenue stream of the marketplace will be shared with the community.
Regulation & Adoption
Aug 8 (🇺🇸) The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) under the US Department of the Treasury santioned crypto mixer Tornado Cash for laundering $7Billion USD.
Aug 9 (🇮🇷) Iran, for the first time, makes a $10 million import order using crypto.
Aug 9(🇨🇳) The China Cyberspace Administration introduced new measures on August 9 to clean up illegal information, accounts and websites that have constituted so-called “publicity stunts” regarding crypto
Aug 10 (🌍) ADA flips BUSD to become 7th largest crypto.
Aug 10 (🇺🇸) Coinbase posts $1.1 billion loss, revenue drops 60% in Q2.
Aug 10 (🇩🇪) German crypto bank “NURI” files for insolvency.
Aug 11 (🇺🇿) Uzbekistan blocks almost all popular crypto exchanges.
Aug 11 (🇺🇸) Blackrock launches Bitcoin private trust.
Aug 12 (🇷🇺) Russia to start connecting banks to digital ruble in 2024.
Macro
- Russia will allow Russian banks under sanctions to halt FX operations.
- EUR/USD jumps on dollar weakness.
- UK economy contracts in Q2 by 0.1%, less than the 0.3% expected.
Privacy App Tornado. cash sanctioned by the U.S Treasury
Launched in 2019, The privacy app Tornado.cash allegedly related to many notorious hacking events. According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, it has been used to launder over $7B of crypto currency since it’s creation. According the Chainanalysis, in 2022, 25% of funds in the protocol can be identified as illicit.On August 8, U.S Treasury announced to ban all Americans to use the protocol or they will be listed on OFAC SDN list and face criminal penalties.
This is not the first time that U.S put sanction on privacy apps, The OFAC sactioned mixer Blender.io and raised issues regarding the AML on May.6th 2022. The exchange giant, Binance, also step out and block the use of Litecoin’s Mimble Wimble Extension Blocks. However, due to the larger adoption and user base that Tornado.cash has, this sanction has offcially raised awareness between compliances and user-privacy. Following the incident, many centralized companies and dapps are working towards the compliances and prohibited addresses that interacted with the Tornado.Cash.
- Circle and Coinbase restricted the movement of USDC funds in the sanctioned addresses;
- Centralized API and Node infrastructure are blocking Ethereum API access for Tornado.Cash;
- Security company Chainalysis and Elliptic labelled all sanctioned address;
- Dydx and Aave disabled sanction addresses.
Meanwhile the founder of Uniswap, Hayden expressed the law enforcement should concentrated on hackers or malicous individual rather than sanctioning an “immutable smart contract”.
In reponse with Circle’s sanction, the decentralized stablecoin protocol, MakerDAO is consider to converting all USDC collateral to ETH, however this is opposed by Vitalik, who has raised doubt about how to maintain the stability of DAI as ETH entailed larger volatilities. However, the decenralized Dapps are heavily rely on centralized infrastructure.
To date since the sanction, there are $91M ETH withdrawn from the protocol and 1,007 unique recipient addresses. Trolls have dusting out micro amount of ETH to celebrities and KOLs.
Not only it is crucial to the users, the offcial github and related team’s personal github has been banned. Authorites in Netherlands also reveiled that they have arrested Alexey Pertsev, a Tornado Developer. The Fiscal Information and Investigation Service has started an investigation in June 2022, and it hasn’t rule out multiple arrest associated with the case.
Following the arrest, The Tornado.Cash DAO pushed a proposal to adding DAO governance as a signatory of the treasury. One proposal also posted in regard to raise extra funding to hire legal team to against the sanction.
However, in Aug 14, the Tornado team member admitted that the Tornado.Cash DAO has been dismissed, the mutisig fund has send back to the governance contracts.
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