This Week's Highlights
Activity in the primary crypto market decreased somewhat last week, while on-chain trading and Web3 AI continued to attract capital. According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 9 investment and financing events in the global blockchain space last week (6.29-7.5), with a total funding scale exceeding $506 million. A summary is as follows:
- The DeFi sector announced 3 financing events. Among them, on-chain perpetual contract exchange Extended completed a $12.5 million strategic funding round, led by eToro.
- The Web3+AI field announced 3 financing events. Among them, privacy-first AI platform Venice AI completed a $65 million Series A funding round, with a post-money valuation of $1 billion.
- The prediction market sector announced 1 financing event. Prediction market index provider Adjacent completed a $2.5 million Pre-Seed round, with participation from VanEck, among others.
- The centralized finance field announced 1 financing event. Lion Group plans to invest up to $12 million in Indonesian stablecoin developer PT Nusantara Bumi Sangkara.
- In other aspects, 1 financing event was announced. Ionic Digital completed approximately $400 million in private financing, led by Attestor.
DeFi
On-chain Perpetual Contract Exchange Extended Completes $12.5M Strategic Funding Round, Led by eToro
Digital broker eToro announced it led a $12.5 million strategic funding round for on-chain perpetual contract exchange Extended, with participation from Jump Crypto and Alber Blanc. eToro plans to directly integrate Extended's perpetual contract engine into its self-custody wallet Zengo, which it previously acquired for $70 million. Users will be able to trade on-chain derivatives while retaining custody of their assets. In the future, it will also bring a wider range of DeFi products to its core platform. Extended is led by Ruslan Fakhrutdinov, former head of crypto at Revolut. As of June, it has processed over $245 billion in trading volume, supports over 100 perpetual markets, and plans to expand into spot trading, tokenized RWAs, and multi-asset collateral.
Blockchain-based Private Credit Platform Techdollar Completes $3M Pre-Seed Round
Blockchain-based private credit platform Techdollar announced the completion of a $3 million Pre-Seed funding round. Investors included NoLimit Holdings, Reforge VC, and individual investors such as Newmichwill, RoyLearner, and Ansem. According to reports, Techdollar is a blockchain-based private credit platform that allows founders, employees, venture capitalists, and family offices to obtain loans using equity in private tech companies as collateral, without having to sell their shares. The platform employs a stablecoin-like issuance mechanism and integrates with on-chain liquidity infrastructure to provide rapid capital access while maintaining private, off-chain custody and compliant underwriting processes.
Arcus, a DEX Developed by the dYdX Team, Goes Live on Robinhood Chain and Receives Investment from Robinhood Crypto
Arcus, a decentralized exchange developed by the dYdX team, has officially launched on Robinhood Chain, offering 24/7 trading of 95 tokenized stocks and perpetual contracts with zero fees. Arcus supports tokenized trading of stocks, commodities, indices, and crypto assets. All tokenized stocks are issued and redeemable by Robinhood Chain, can be self-custodied, and are accessible to the DeFi ecosystem. Robinhood Crypto has invested in Arcus. Arcus plans to support using tokenized stocks and crypto assets as collateral for perpetual contracts in the future and to offer Pre-IPO trading for hot private companies like OpenAI.
Web3+AI
Venice AI Secures $65M Series A Funding, Valuation Reaches $1B
Privacy-first AI platform Venice AI announced the completion of a $65 million Series A funding round, with a post-money valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, among others. Founded two years ago, Venice AI provides access to over 200 open-source and closed-source models, claims to be "uncensored," and emphasizes client-side encryption and not retaining user data. It currently has over 3 million monthly active users, about 1.7 million daily API calls, annualized revenue exceeding $70 million, and is already profitable. The company plans to use the new funds to purchase GPUs and build its own data centers to reduce reliance on leased GPUs and improve gross margins.
Predictive Behavior AI Network THEA Completes $8M Funding Round, Led by Maven 11 Capital, etc.
THEA, a predictive behavior AI network focused on risk markets, has completed an $8 million funding round to build its Solana-based coordination layer and expand its AI infrastructure. This round was led by Maven11 Capital, Spartan Group, Manifold Trading, Hack VC, and Fisher8 Capital.
THEA was founded in 2024 and is headquartered in the Cayman Islands. Its AI model is trained on over 35 billion real-world decision data points. Its core product is predictive behavior AI for risk markets. The company plans to launch THEA Network—a coordination layer that routes inference requests and settles transactions on Solana, while keeping heavy data processing off-chain. THEA also plans to introduce a utility token to tokenize access to its autonomous system.
Solana Ecosystem AI Data Marketplace Kled AI Receives $3M Investment from The Data Foundation
Solana ecosystem AI data marketplace Kled AI announced it has received a $3 million investment from The Data Foundation, bringing its total funding to $14 million. It is reported that Kled AI aims to build a human data marketplace where users upload files to contribute data through its consumer application. The platform has already collected over 12,000 structured datasets, covering egocentric data, medical data, urban travel data, etc., for AI labs and enterprises to purchase for model training.
Prediction Markets
Prediction Market Index Provider Adjacent Completes $2.5M Pre-Seed Round, VanEck and Others Participate
Prediction market index provider Adjacent announced the completion of a $2.5 million Pre-Seed funding round. Investors included Night Capital, VanEck, UFO Holdings, Maven11, and DCG. Adjacent is an independent third-party event contract and prediction market index provider. This week, it launched its US election index series RED and BLUE. Adjacent stated it is rapidly expanding its index products to cover global elections, finance, economics, and other fields.
Other
Bitcoin Miner Ionic Digital Completes $400M Private Financing
Ionic Digital completed approximately $400 million in private financing before its planned direct listing on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol IOND. The round was led by Attestor, Oaktree Capital Management, and Sachem Head Capital Management. The company sold approximately 7.55 million Series A convertible preferred shares at $53 per share, along with three tranches of warrants. Each tranche allows the purchase of approximately 1.01 million shares of Class A common stock, with exercise prices of $63.60, $74.20, and $87.45, respectively. The preferred shares will automatically convert into Class A common stock upon completion of the Nasdaq listing or another qualified public trading event. Investors have agreed not to transfer the preferred shares, the converted common shares, or related warrants and warrant shares at a price below $70 per share for six months after the listing, with only a few exceptions.
Centralized Finance
Lion Group Plans to Invest Up to $12M in Indonesian Stablecoin Developer PT Nusantara Bumi Sangkara
Nasdaq-listed company Lion Group Holding Ltd. plans to invest up to $12 million in Indonesian fintech company PT Nusantara Bumi Sangkara through Meili Capital Management Ltd., issuing common shares or equity-linked securities in exchange for a 10% indirect economic interest. The transaction does not involve cash payment. Nusantara Bumi Sangkara is developing the Indonesian Rupiah stablecoin NIDR, which is pegged 1:1 to the Indonesian Rupiah and backed by reserve assets. It aims to reduce cross-border payment costs and support blockchain financial services. The company has already obtained regulatory approval or confirmation from Indonesia's Financial Services Authority and is expected to become one of the country's first compliant stablecoin issuers.
Acquisition
Sunscreen Acquired by Fhenix, Team to Continue Advancing FHE Technology
Privacy computing project Sunscreen announced it will be acquired by Fhenix. Sunscreen stated that over the past 4 years, it has focused on applied cryptography R&D. It is optimistic about the Fhenix team's execution capabilities in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) infrastructure, believing they are better positioned to bring production-grade FHE to market. Following the acquisition, the Sunscreen team will join Fhenix, and the relevant code will continue to be provided under the AGPL open-source license.
