Original Author: MooMs, encrypted KOL

Original Compilation: Felix, PANews

Stop wasting time researching and follow "Smart Money". This article introduces 10 of the most promising projects recently invested by venture capital firms.

Alkimiya

Alkimiya is a decentralized protocol dedicated to the consensus capital market, which allows consensus producers (such as PoW miners and staking validators) to create financial contracts supported by underlying "consensus resources" (such as computing power).

Alkimiya completed a $7.2 million financing in November last year, led by 1kx and Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Dragonfly, Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and others. This funding will primarily be used to expand its team as it prepares to launch a comprehensive product suite in the first quarter of this year, including Vault products and ETH staking contracts on the Ethereum mainnet.

Maverick Protocol

Maverick pioneered the dynamic distributed AMM, which can automatically execute liquidity concentration and directional betting, thereby improving capital efficiency and market liquidity.

On June 12, Maverick Protocol raised $9 million in strategic round funding. The round was led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with participation from Pantera Capital, Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, and Apollo Crypto. Maverick also launched the liquidity incentive tool 'Boosted Positions (BP)'.

TapiocaDAO

Tapioca is the first fully-chain currency market utilizing LayerZero technology. Users will be able to lend and borrow assets on all chains. Additionally, users can mint USDO, a stablecoin issued by the protocol.

June 18th News, TapiocaDAO announced the completion of a $6 million seed round financing, with participation from Fisher 8 Capital, LayerZero Labs, PARC Capital, Jones DAO, Dewhales Capital, Magnus Capital, Capybara Capital, and individual investors Zoomer Oracle, Squirrel (Arrakis Finance), DCF GOD, redphone, vf.at, Captain Rational, hedgedhog, and others.

Renegade

Renegade is an on-chain dark pool DEX that provides users with complete trading privacy, preventing third-party tracking and copying of larger entity's trading strategies.

February 20th News, Renegade, a startup company that uses ZK dark pool technology to build a new decentralized exchange, completed a $3.4 million seed round financing. Dragonfly Capital and former AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant led the investment, with participation from Balaji Srinivasan and Lily Liu, Tarun Chitra from Robot Ventures, Marc Bhargava from Tagomi, and Lev Livnev from Symbolic Capital Partners.

Synthetix

Synthetix is a decentralized liquidity supply protocol that issues synthetic assets backed by collateralized SNX tokens.

Amount of financing: $41.3 million

Hourglass

Hourglass aims to provide additional rewards to users willing to lock assets in a smart contract for a certain period of time. It has launched the first ever Time-Bound Token (TBT) market, where users can obtain liquidity for locked assets by selling the rights to that time period.

May 17th news, time-bound token infrastructure company Hourglass announced the completion of a $4.2 million seed round of financing, led by Electric Capital, and participating investors include Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Tribe Capital, and Hack VC, etc.

Rocket Pool

Rocket Pool is the first truly decentralized Ethereum staking pool (TVL: $1.8 billion).

In February this year, the project completed a financing round with participation from Coinbase. The amount and details of this financing round have not been disclosed.

Related reading: Why is Rocket Pool crucial for the Ethereum ecosystem?

Catalyst

Catalyst, built by the Cata Labs team, is an open-source modular blockchain liquidity protocol. Any new modular blockchain can automatically connect liquidity and exchange with any chain, including Ethereum and Cosmos, etc. Founder @0x jim is also the initiator of PleasrDAO.

Financing amount: $4.2 million. Led by Spartan Group, participating investors include Robot Ventures, Maven 11, Polygon Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Hashkey, Circle Ventures, Superscrypt, etc.

EigenLayer

EigenLayer introduces realigning collateralization, a new concept in crypto-economic security. Users can choose to join EigenLayer to realign their ETH or LST and receive additional rewards.

Financing amount: $64.5 million

GammaSwap

GammaSwap is a decentralized perpetual exchange that allows users to trade any token and volatility with leverage, including hedging impermanent loss.

Financing amount: $1.7 million

The following projects are more interesting but carry higher risks.

Smilee Finance

Similar to GammaSwap, it allows users to engage in volatility trading through derivative contracts. Both projects have launched their mainnet, but the author believes that GammaSwap is a bit ahead and therefore carries higher risk.

Funding amount: $2 million

Tribe 3 & nfex_official

Both projects allow users to trade NFTs in the form of perpetual contracts, which is innovative. However, some other projects are building platforms where various types of assets can be traded. Nevertheless, these two platforms are likely to capture a certain market share before other protocols are launched.

NFEX: Funding amount of $3 million, led by ABCDE Capital, with participation from Amber Group and Firestone Ventures, among others.

Tribe 3: Funding amount of $2.1 million, with participation from Spartan Capital, Newman Capital, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Modular Capital, Cogitent Ventures, Blockbuilders, Founderheads, Lapin Digital, Blockhype, and others.