Original Author: wesely
Unicorn companies generally refer to start-up companies with a valuation of more than US$1 billion. According to the latest report released by Blockchain Coinvestors, a blockchain investment platform, as of early December, the cumulative number of unicorn companies in the blockchain industry has reached 103, a record high, and more than half of the unicorns are in North America.
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2018-2022 blockchain encryption unicorn business growth curve data source: Blockchain Coinvestors
1. Matter Labs (zkSync)
As the development company of zkSync, Matter Labs completed a $200 million Series C financing led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly on November 16 this year. Although Matter Labs did not disclose the valuation, it can be compared with the financing valuation of its competitor StarkNet. Values can be compared.
In November last year, StarkWare completed a $50 million Series C financing led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of $2 billion, and has become the second unicorn company in the Layer 2 field (the first is Arbitrum). In May this year, StarkWare once again completed the D round of financing of 100 million US dollars at a valuation of 8 billion US dollars, becoming the player with the highest valuation in the Layer 2 field. However, zkSync is similar to StarkNet in terms of project development positioning, investment background, project popularity, etc. Even considering the impact of the bear market, zkSync’s C-round financing amount is twice that of StarkWare’s D-round financing, and zkSync’s valuation may be lower. higher.
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Matter Labs financing data source: crunchbase
2. Yuga Labs
Yuga Labs, as the current leading company in the NFT field, from the establishment of its BAYC project to the completion of financing of 450 million US dollars at a valuation of 4 billion US dollars on March 22, 2022, Yuga Labs only took 11 months, which can be called Miraculously, at the same time, this financing also set a record for the highest single financing amount in the NFT field, and made him one of the 2022 new unicorns.
In addition, Yuga Labs also owns BAYC, BAKC, Meebits, MAYC, CryptoPunks and other top IPs through acquisitions and derivative issuances. In the NFT market at the beginning of the year, the market value of these projects alone once accounted for Half of the entire NFT market is in the country. Afterwards, with the issuance of NFT Otherside and BAYC token APE again, a large amount of funds and popularity were gathered. There is no doubt that Yuga Labs can be called the "aircraft carrier" in the NFT field.
But under the bear market, Yuga Labs is also in trouble.
As the floor price of its NFT products continues to fall, the American law firm Scott+Scott previously launched a class action lawsuit against Yuga Labs, accusing Yuga Labs of driving up prices through celebrity endorsements, and celebrities such as Curry and Justin also because of promoting "Boring Ape" BAYC has been sued by some investors. Even so, compared to other well-known NFT issuers, Yuga Labs has significantly more abundant capital reserves in this cold winter.
3. Aptos (Aptos Labs)
Aptos is one of the representatives of the Move public chain. It was founded by former Meta (Facebook) employees. In March and July 2022, it won a $200 million investment led by a16z and a $150 million investment led by FTX Ventures/Jump Crypto. After financing in US dollars, its popularity soared, and it quickly squeezed into the top public chain circle, with a valuation of 2.75 billion US dollars, becoming the first public chain encryption unicorn promoted this year.
It is worth mentioning that in the US$150 million A round of financing led by FTX, according to the FTX investment details disclosed by the Financial Times (FT), FTX alone invested nearly 75 million yuan. Aptos issued a statement stating that FTX does not hold funds from Aptos Labs or Aptos Foundation, but FTX is still one of its core shareholders.
On October 18th, Aptos officially launched its own Token, and at the same time distributed a large amount of airdrops to testnet participants. As of writing, Aptos Liu has a circulation market value of about 57 million US dollars, ranking 63.
4. Immutable
In March 2022, Immutable completed a financing of US$200 million at a valuation of US$2.5 billion, becoming the fifth new crypto unicorn this year.
Immutable was established in 2018, originally named Fuel Game, and changed its name to Immutable in 2019. It has successively launched chain games "Gods Unchained", "Guild of Guardians" and NFT trading platform Immutable X and other products.
Among them, Immutable X is built based on the StarEx technology developed by the Starkware team, and has gradually become the exclusive Layer 2 of Ethereum NFT. According to its official website data, as of writing, by 2022, the total number of mint NFTs on the Immutable X platform will reach More than 55.7 million transactions have been made, and the number of transactions per year has reached more than 9.6 million.
5. Sui (Mysten Lab)
Sui and Aptos above belong to the same Move faction. The project was developed by Mysten Labs. In September this year, Sui completed a $300 million B round of financing at a valuation of over $2 billion, of which FTX led the investment of nearly 100 million In addition, there are more than 1 million Sui Tokens that promise FTX. Although Sui’s tokens are not yet online, judging from the proportion of assets raised in the last round of financing, it will inevitably be affected by FTX’s thunderstorm. As another representative of the Move public chain, especially under the stimulation of the Aptos airdrop, its community activity, project development, etc., compared with other new L1s, still maintain a good popularity in the bear market.
6. Optimism
As one of the four major Layer 2 projects, in March 2022, Optimism completed a financing of 150 million U.S. dollars at a valuation of 1.65 billion U.S. dollars, becoming the only Layer 2 project with a valuation of more than 1.5 billion after Arbitrum and StarkNet at that time. Although Optimism is not as valuable as the other three of the four major L2s in terms of valuation, it is the first L2 among them to issue Token and use it to build its own ecology.
The Optimism R&D team was developed from the former Ethereum sidechain solution research organization Plasma Group. On June 1, 2022, the network’s native token OP was officially launched. Through airdrops and liquidity incentives, the TVL on the chain quickly surpassed Aribitrum once became an active L2 on the chain, and the other two frequently mentioned L2 projects, Metis and Boba, also forked from Optimism.
However, under the impact of the FTX thunderstorm incident and the market turning, compared with the bright moment, the TVL on the Optimism chain was almost cut in half, while its competitor Aribitrum, relying on the dark horses of ecological projects GMX, TreasureDAO, The Beacon, etc., not only regained the The decline in TVL generated in the FTX thunderstorm has also achieved a slight increase. As of mid-December, the TVL on the chain of Optimism and Aribitrum were 550 million US dollars and 1.02 billion US dollars. From the current comparison, the resilience of the latter’s ecological development Significantly fuller.
7. Magic Eden
As the leading NFT trading platform on Solana, Magic Eden occupies the vast majority of the transaction volume on this chain. According to statistics released by Consensys, NFT transactions on the Magic Eden platform accounted for 85% of the entire Solana NFT transaction market in November, and the proportion was as high as 92% in June this year.
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SolanaFloor NFT Blue Chip Index data source: solanafloor
8. Aleo
In February of this year, Aleo, a well-known zero-knowledge ZK privacy public chain, completed a $200 million B round of financing at a valuation of $1.45 billion, co-led by Softbank Vision Fund II and the well-known US dollar hedge fund Kora Management. Aleo has also officially entered the family of crypto unicorns and is the first decentralized open source platform to support private and programmable applications.
With a well-known institutional investment background, a total financing of 228 million US dollars, and a project team gathered from Google, Amazon, Meta, etc., Aleo has quickly become a highly anticipated public chain project. Since Tokne has not yet been released, it has also become the target of many woolen troops, and the previous rounds of testing activities have also reached new heights.
9. Boba Network
Boba Network was launched by the OMG Foundation. In the past, the OMG Foundation focused on the plasma expansion solution. Later, with the rapid development of Optimistic Rollup, it shifted its research focus to this area, and launched its own Layer 2 expansion solution after forking Optimism. ——Boba Network, after that, there was a wave of airdrops for OMG holders.
On April 6th, Boba Network announced that it had completed the A-round financing of US$45 million at a valuation of US$1.5 billion. From the perspective of valuation, it has passed the threshold for judging unicorns, but it is worth noting that this round Financing 11 was completed in the form of selling Boba Network’s original Token (BOBA), and its token price dropped from $1.69 at the time of financing to $0.18 today.
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Boba’s daily on-chain transactions data source: dune: 0 xmax
10. 5 ireChain
In July this year, the L1 chain network 5 ire completed a US$100 million Series A round of financing led by British conglomerate SRAM & MRAM Group at a valuation of US$1.5 billion. But it is worth noting that 5 ire has been full of doubts from financing information to the authenticity of the project, but since the relevant reports of CB insight and Blockchain Coinvestors have included it in the ranks of new unicorns, we will rank it according to the valuation. Include it in the list of new crypto unicorns in 2022.
In August 2021, 5 ire was founded by several Indian entrepreneurs. They called 5 ireChain the "fifth generation blockchain", but the so-called fifth generation technical features are not detailed in their white paper. The introduction, on the contrary, is filled with a lot of popular science content, like putting together a white paper. In addition, various suspicious points such as the inconsistency of the project financing information picked up by the chain catcher, the wrong information displayed on the official website, and the push of the investor's white name application all put a dangerous risk on this unicorn project that suddenly emerged in the bear market. Label.
In the end, are unicorns necessarily safe from a bear market?
According to the statistics of Blockchain Coinvestors, in 2022, former encrypted unicorns Deribit, BlockFi, FTX, and Genesis Digital Assets have all fallen from their lists, as well as encrypted companies such as Opensea, Blockchain.com, Robinhood, and Gemini. Giants have also started multiple rounds of layoffs this year, and large encryption institutions such as Genies, Grayscale, and Babel Finance are at a critical moment.
In the continuous development of this cold winter, many encrypted unicorns will inevitably fall. The unicorns prove the past, but the future is still unknown, but at least those who can survive this cold winter will not be too bad.
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