Crypto Venture Capital Booms: 80 Crypto Projects Raise Capital, Here's The Top 10

According to DeFi Llama, 80 crypto projects raised capital in February, up 29% month over month compared to January and almost 400% from December 2022’s 21 projects). The total capital raised month over month also increased, with $814.5 million in February compared to $569.9 million in January.

This indicates that crypto Venture Capital firms are again more open to investing in the crypto space. From the 80 deals, VCs seemed more geared towards Pre-Seed and Seed rounds because these projects were a breath of fresh air in the space. It’s always valuable to look at fundraisers as they show early crypto market trends. The sectors that got a capital inflow this month were DeFi Primitives, Cross Chain Markets, NFT Finance Primitives and DEXes. This article highlights our top 10 projects that raised capital in February.

Read our latest article on crypto venture capital here.

NFEX

NFEX is a decentralized derivatives exchange that offers perpetual swaps trading across popular blue chip NFTs. This platform allows traders to take positions in NFTs at low entry costs, with leverage up to 10X. Unlike traditional NFT marketplaces, NFEX offers users the ability to go long or short on NFTs without actually holding them, which opens up a variety of trading strategies, including hedging, speculation, and arbitrage. One of the features of NFEX is its ability to lower the entry barrier for investors, allowing them to utilize their capital with up to 10X leverage to trade a minimum of 0.01% of the underlying assets.

Another differentiation of NFEX from traditional NFT marketplaces is its significantly lower trading fees. While most NFT marketplaces charge a royalty fee of up to 10% and transaction fees of up to 2.5%, NFEX reduces transaction fees to the lowest level across the industry. Additionally, NFEX is stepping up the NFT trading game by instituting reward incentives for market makers, becoming the first mover to pay back a high percentage of trading fees to benefit from increased liquidity. By offering leverage and long/short trading capabilities, NFEX expands limitations and boosts liquidity compared to traditional NFT marketplaces. This is because it opens up a variety of trading strategies for NFT traders, including hedging, speculation, and arbitrage. With secure, professional, and user-friendly products and services, NFEX is committed to building the best NFT derivatives trading platform around the globe. Furthermore, NFEX aims to bring reform to the growing NFT industry by providing greater liquidity at affordable costs. With its cutting-edge innovations, NFEX believes it can help reshape the NFT industry by offering traders greater liquidity and access to a broader range of investment opportunities.

NFEX has completed a $3 Million seed round led by ABCDE Capital, including investments from well-known institutions such as Amber Group and Firestone Ventures. NFEX strives to build the best derivative NFT market, creating new opportunities to attract greater liquidity to the NFT marketplace.

C3

C3 is breaking down the barriers between traditional centralized and decentralized exchanges, offering a new type of exchange that combines the best of both worlds. With C3, users can trade cryptocurrencies on a platform that provides the same performance, reliability and sophistication as centralized exchanges without sacrificing control over their funds.

C3's approach to self-custody ensures that users always maintain control over their assets, even when trading. Instead of depositing funds into the exchange's custody, users retain control over their private keys. Users can choose to keep their funds in their preferred wallet, whether a hardware wallet, a software wallet, or a custodial wallet.

C3's model also ensures that the exchange resists insolvency risks plaguing the industry. By separating the custody of funds from the trading venue, C3 avoids the risks associated with centralization. Instead, it provides a more secure and transparent marketplace.

In addition to its self-custodial model, C3 offers a range of features designed to make trading cryptocurrencies more accessible and intuitive. The exchange supports all networks, meaning users can trade various cryptocurrencies on a single platform without switching between different exchanges. C3 also offers instant execution, high throughput, advanced order types, REST APIs and Websocket connectivity, making it easy for institutions and individual traders to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.

C3 raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Two Sigma Ventures, the investment arm of traditional quantitative finance trading firm Two Sigma. Other backers in the round included a mix of traditional investors, quant firms and liquidity providers, including Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Flow Traders, Jump Crypto, Cumberland DRW, Golden Tree, CMS Holdings, AlphaLab Capital and C² Ventures.

Cenoa

Cenoa is a super wallet designed to provide easy access to dollar-based products for billions suffering from inflation in emerging markets. The company's first product is focused on making it easy for people to buy digital dollars and earn a fair yield, all while ensuring that the process is easy, secure, and free of fees.

Inflation is one of the biggest and most acute problems. Inflation rates are at their highest in 40 years, and billions face currency meltdowns. Many people in these markets are forced to store their savings in US dollars because their currency is so volatile. However, many countries' existing financial systems make buying dollars difficult and expensive, and they offer a minimum yield. This leaves people with limited options, and needing help to keep up with rising prices.

This is where Cenoa comes in. Cenoa is not a bank or a licensed financial institution. Instead, it is a software and technology company that provides people with a super wallet that helps them fight inflation. The Cenoa Super Wallet is a borderless and non-bureaucratic way to access a digital dollar product without fees and earn an inflation-resistant yield. This is a huge improvement over traditional banks, which often offer less than one percent yield and require paperwork for simple currency exchanges.

Cenoa's super wallet is built on blockchain technology, which ensures that transactions are secure, transparent, and tamper-proof. This technology also allows instant money transfers and U.S. Dollar-based debit cards to be added to the product offering in the future.

Cenoa announced it had raised $7 million in Seed funding. The fundraising was led by San Francisco-based venture capital firm Quiet Capital, and Underscore VC, a Boston-based firm focused on backing the next generation of iconic companies at their earliest stages. Further investors include Human Capital, Ulu Ventures, Acrew Capital, and Collective Spark.

Cedro Finance

Cedro Finance is a decentralized liquidity protocol that enables users to lend and borrow assets across multiple chains with affordable transaction fees. The platform allows lenders to deposit their assets and contribute to their liquidity. At the same time, borrowers can access liquidity by borrowing assets in an overcollateralized manner.

One of the primary goals of Cedro Finance is to act as a cross-chain Liquidity Layer over time. This means that builders and developers can use Cedro's liquidity and codebase to build their applications without worrying about liquidity on their platform. This will help to simplify the development process and make it easier for developers to create new applications in the DeFi ecosystem. Cedro Finance will provide a simple and secure way for builders to access liquidity across multiple chains, allowing them to focus on building innovative products and services.

The Cedro Finance platform is built on a cross-chain infrastructure that allows users to access liquidity across multiple chains. This is achieved through smart contracts that facilitate the lending and borrowing of assets in a decentralized and trustless manner. Users can access the platform using popular wallets such as Metamask, Ledger, and Trezor. They can easily swap between different assets without leaving the platform.

Cedro Finance also offers users a range of features designed to enhance their experience on the platform. For example, the platform has an intuitive user interface that makes it easy to navigate and use, even for those new to DeFi. Additionally, the platform provides users with real-time data and analytics, which can inform investment decisions and monitor the performance of their assets.

-Cedro Finance announced that they had raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed fundraising round led by Shima Capital. Infinity Ventures Crypto (IVC), Mask Network, and Sam Thapaliya also participated in the round.

NeoSwap AI

NeoSwap is a crypto AI platform that seeks to transform the world economy through personalized, accessible, and efficient trade discovery. The platform's innovative approach combines the power of artificial intelligence (AI) with web3 technology to provide users with an unprecedented trading experience.

At its core, NeoSwap aims to address the centralized bottleneck within traditional liquidity mechanisms. NeoSwap’s vision is of a new, more sustainable form of commerce in which historically illiquid assets move as freely as cash. The platform's solution involves intelligently reassigning ownership of assets and currency, allowing historically illiquid assets to move as freely as cash. By doing so, NeoSwap enables users to trade assets with minimal transaction fees and reduced currency usage.

To achieve its vision, NeoSwap leverages the power of AI to provide users with personalized trade discovery. The platform analyzes user data and market trends through advanced algorithms and machine learning models to provide real-time trade recommendations. This approach ensures users access the most relevant and profitable trading opportunities.

NeoSwap is also building a cross-chain infrastructure that enables users to trade across multiple blockchains seamlessly. This approach ensures that users have access to a broader range of assets, increasing their trading opportunities and overall profitability.

In addition, NeoSwap aims to provide web3 projects and marketplaces with a comprehensive liquidity solution. By leveraging the platform's AI-powered trading engine, developers can build applications without worrying about liquidity on their platform.

NeoSwap AI raised $2M in their pre-seed led by DACM.io and Gossamer Capital. NeoSwap will open its seed round later this year.

VRRB Labs

VRRB Labs is a blockchain startup developing a new proprietary consensus mechanism called "Proof of Claim." According to the company, this mechanism will help to solve some of the biggest challenges facing the blockchain industry, including scalability, security, and decentralization. VRRB labs is looking to solve the Blockchain trilemma with their solution. The scalability trilemma stands in the way of blockchain fulfilling its potential as a technology to change the world. If blockchain networks can only handle a small number of transactions per second in order to maintain decentralization and security, then it will be difficult to reach mass adoption.

VRRB Labs is also building a language-agnostic platform enabling developers to build, ship, and run applications faster.The proposed system is a scalable, decentralized ledger with smart contract capabilities. It combines both vertical and horizontal scalability with partial to full synchronization using a convergence direct acyclic graph ("DAG"). This approach enhances decentralization through modular, layered components. It maintains security and attacks resilience through a credit/reputation, a message rate controlling model, Masternode staking requirements, and other mechanisms.

The system aims to achieve maximum bandwidth efficiency using a dual-transport data transfer model over QUIC in some scenarios and UDT in others, with RaptorQ encoding. An innovative aspect of the VRRB Protocol is its unique monetary policy/reward system for node operators. This system ensures that node operation remains profitable as the network matures without requiring dramatic, relative price increases of the reward token. This is an important feature that helps ensure the network's sustainability and longevity.

VRRB Labs announced that it had raised $1.4 million in pre-seed funding to support its development. Investors in VRRB include Jump Crypto, Taureon, and Big Brain Holdings.

Webacy

Webacy is part of a movement to help bring consumers and businesses the power to protect themselves using decentralized tools. The company has built a series of products called the Safety Suite that allows users to monitor their assets through an alert system, backup their wallets in case they lose their keys, trigger a panic button if they believe they're being compromised, and even set up their directives for when the inevitable comes, such as a will that is genuinely self-administering.

Webacy's products are built on smart contract technology, and the user administers their assets and wallets. The company believes a strong combination of software and hardware solutions, such as Webacy's smart contract protection and a hardware wallet, is the best "starter kit" for safety. While a hardware wallet is an important first step, a software component is required to help roll back or thwart issues as they happen, and this is where Webacy comes in.

As Webacy grows, the company will build its brand as the go-to solution for securing users' digital legacies. Webacy believes most assets will eventually be represented on the blockchain or blockchain-adjacent technologies.

Ultimately, Webacy's mission is to protect users' digital legacies and protect their assets. By offering a range of innovative products and solutions, Webacy is helping to usher in a new era of safety and security in the blockchain and Web3 space.

Webacy has closed a $4 million seed funding round led by Web3-focused investment firm gmjp with entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, his brother AJ Vaynerchuk and Mozilla Ventures among the backers.

Caldera

Caldera is a company that specializes in building high-performance, customizable, and application-specific layer-two blockchains. These custom-built blockchains, known as Caldera Chains, offer high throughput, low latency, and customizable features for optimizing decentralized applications' performance and user experience. With the ability to process hundreds of transactions per second and sub-second confirmation times, Caldera Chains are an attractive option for developers looking to build complex projects across various verticals.

Caldera aims to help Web3 projects launch customizable layer-2 blockchains on the Ethereum blockchain to scale the ecosystem. Caldera's no-code Web3 infrastructure platform sets it apart, which allows anyone to create a blockchain without requiring coding knowledge. While the platform is accessible to anyone, Caldera targets Web3 developers who know how to write Ethereum smart contracts but may not understand how the underlying blockchain works.

Caldera aims to provide an easy-to-use platform that allows developers to build complex decentralized applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. With the help of its customizable layer-two blockchains, Caldera aims to revolutionize the Web3 space and unlock its full potential.

Caldera has raised $9 million in funding across two rounds to grow its team, build new partnerships and integrations, and support developers. The funding rounds were led by Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire and Dragonfly Capital investment partner Ani Pai, with participation from Neo, 1kx, and Ethereal Ventures.

Renegade

Renegade is a new decentralized exchange (DEX) designed to provide users with universal trade privacy. The exchange operates as an on-chain dark pool, meaning that all trading activity is completely obscured from third parties both before and after a trade is filled. Current DEXes are completely transparent and allow anyone to view user balances and trading histories.

Renegade offers many benefits over traditional DEXes. Users can avoid the counterparty risk in centralized exchanges and over-the-counter (OTC) desks by providing universal trade privacy. The platform also solves many problems in current DeFi (decentralized finance) spot markets, ultimately giving users better prices and optimal execution.

One of the benefits of Renegade is pre-trade privacy. Before a trade is matched, no one can see any details of the order. This allows larger trades that generally move the market when rested on an order book or detected in the mempool to be filled privately. Post-trade privacy is also ensured, meaning that only the counterparty learns what assets were swapped after an order is filled. This prevents third parties from tracking and copying trading strategies.

Renegade also minimizes MEV (maximal-extractable value). Since validators only ever see zero-knowledge proofs of valid trades, there is no ability for block producers to front-run, back-run, or sandwich trades. By default, trades on Renegade are anonymous crosses that trade at the theoretically-optimal midpoint price, with no market makers taking a spread. However, Renegade implements indications of interest optionally to allow for full-price discovery and better liquidity provision.

Renegade just raised a $3.4 million seed round, led by Dragonfly Capital and former AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant.

GammaSwap

GammaSwap is a protocol that lets you borrow liquidity from popular constant function market makers (CFMM) for long gamma exposure.

If you provide liquidity to a CFMM, you'll take on a short gamma position. To get a long gamma position, you can borrow liquidity from the CFMM and hold onto the reserve tokens it represents. This will turn any potential loss (impermanent loss) into a gain (impermanent gain). Of course, the borrower will also have to pay any trading fees that come with borrowing the liquidity.

GammaSwap is a protocol that lets you borrow liquidity from famous exchanges like Uniswap, Pancakeswap, and Sushiswap to get a long gamma exposure. It works by taking out reserve tokens from these CFMMs and holding them in a smart contract as collateral. GammaSwap keeps track of how much the reserve tokens are worth and how much the borrower owes. Borrowers will have to pay interest on their loans plus any trading fees that come with borrowing the liquidity. To ensure enough money to repay the loans, borrowers will have more collateral than the amount of liquidity they borrow. GammaSwap can offer long gamma exposure to all cryptocurrencies, not just a few, without needing a third party to verify prices. This is different from Aave and Compound.

This means that even new, untested projects can offer long volatility exposure to increase the returns for people who provide liquidity in their tokens and reduce the risk for people who participate in these projects.

Gammeswap has raised $1.7 million in a seed round to develop its product. Skycatcher Crypto, Dialectic, Space Whale Capital and more led the funding rounds.