Issue #78

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is $US1.70T, up (0.5%) from last week.

Below is the weekly performance of the top crypto assets. 

News Headline Highlights

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Polygon Labs will release a new solution called aggregation layer (or AggLayer) – aiming to connect blockchains with zero knowledge proofs. The first version of the solution is planned to be released in February, Polygon Labs said, enabling developers to connect blockchains to support unified liquidity. The objective will be to ensure uniform security across modular and monolithic chains, including those within the Polygon ecosystem.
• Debate amongst the Ethereum community got heated last week as concerns about the dominance of Geth, the most widely used execution client for processing transactions, raised a red flag among community members. The central concern is the risk of a potential ‘black swan event’ due to the concentration of Geth among Ethereum validators.

Regulation Station

• Canadian securities regulators proposed new rules aimed at providing greater clarity and risk mitigation measures for public investment funds dealing with crypto assets. The proposed changes to regulations would restrict what public investment funds can do regarding cryptocurrencies and set the standards for holding of crypto assets.
• The Bank of England and His Majesty’s Treasury released the responses and their commentary from the UK digital pound consultation paper that was issued in Feb 2023. The Bank and HM Treasury received over 50,000 responses to the Consultation Paper from a combination of individuals, private firms, industry representative organisations, civil society groups and academics.

The Weekly Deal Room

• Canaan, a crypto mining rig maker, raised >$50m through preferred shares financing from an undisclosed investor.
• Sygnum, a crypto banking group based in Switzerland, raised $40m at a $900m valuation in a Round led by Azimut Holdings.
• Polymer Labs, an Ethereum Layer 2 developer that employs the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol and Optimism Stack to serve as the Interoperability Hub for Ethereum, raised $23m in a Series A co-led by Blockchain Capital, Maven 11 and Distributed Global.
• Axiom, the developers of a ZK platform empowering smart contract developers to build data-rich, on-chain applications, raised $20m in a Round co-led by Paradigm and Standard Crypto.
• Ingonyama, a company building a broad range of software libraries and hardware for compute-intensive cryptography, raised $21m in a Seed Round co-led by IOSG Ventures, Walden Catalyst and Geometry.
• Dinari, a company developing issuing securities backed tokens, raised $10m in a Seed+ Round from 500 Global, Balaji Srinivasan, Alchemy and others.
• Masa, a zk-data marketplace and network, raised $5.4m in a Seed Round led by Anagram.
• Arcade2earn, a GameFi platform, raised $4.8m in a Private Round led by Crypto.com Capital. 
• Web3Intelligence, the builders of Dopamine dApp: gamified experience for investment in the decentralised finance (DeFi) world, raised $4.5m in a Private Round from DAO Maker, Shima Capital and Gate Ventures.
• Bagel, a decentralised data platform aiming to support machine learning models, raised $3.1m in a Pre-Seed Round led by CoinFund.