Messari report: VC crypto investments down 35% in August

The new report from Messari revealed that venture investments in the crypto sector were down 35% over last month and up 22% since August 2021, with leading The Infrastructure track, accounting for 24%. Total funding for this August was $1.37 billion — down 29% since July and down 32% year-over-year.

In August, there were 104 public investments by crypto VCs a new report from Messari said, down 35% month-over-month (160 projects in July 2022) and up 22% year-over-year (85 rounds in August 2021). 

The industry-level breakdown looks like this. The Infrastructure track had the highest number of 24% funding rounds, while the CeFi, DeFi, and NFT/GameFi segments each accounted for approximately 6%, 11%, and 20%, respectively.

This month, total funding was $1.37 billion against $1.91 billion in July 2022 (down 29%) and down 32% year-over-year ($2 billion last August).

Excluding CeFi, the top 10 funding rounds are as follows.

The highest amount of funding announced this month was for Limit Break, at $200 million. However, the current funding closed last year, so it is not included in this month’s statistics. Limit Break, the company that launched the NFT series DigiDaigaku, pioneered the “Free-to-Own” model. The funding round was led by Paradigm, Josh Buckley, and Standard Crypto, with participation from FTX, Coinbase, Positive Sum, Shervinator, and Anthos Capital. DigiDaigaku’s floor price rose to around 18 ETH at one point after the funding announcement.

OrangeDAO, a decentralized VC organization, closed $80 million in funding from Algorand and NEAR, with the rest coming from DAO members who are limited partners in the fund and a number of institutional investors. OrangeDAO was founded in September 2021 and is built on NEAR with a portfolio that includes Liquifi, Goldfinch, and Spritz.

Ready Player Me, a company focused on bringing avatars to VR and others, led this round of funding with a16z. The company’s core revenue strategy is to include fashion brands, including Adidas, New Balance, Dior, Pull&Bear, and others, as well as Dune movie costumes from Warner Bros.

Inworld AI is a metaverse development company focused on creating AI-powered avatars in the metaverse and video games, with this funding led by Section 32 and Intel Capital. Since closing its seed round in March 2022, Inworld has released its beta product, hired Academy Award winner Gaeta as Chief Creative Officer, and been selected as one of six companies to join the 2022 Disney Accelerator.

PROOF is the parent company of the NFT series Moonbirds and the funding was led by a16z. PROOF announced that it is creating Moonbirds DAO as well as a third NFT series, Moonbirds Mythics. PROOF also revealed early plans to launch PROOF tokens, with more details expected in 2023.

Gunzilla Games is a AAA game studio and this round was led by Republic Capital with participation from Griffin Gaming Partners, Animoca Brands, Jump Crypto, and others. The funding will be used to build its game platform GunZ, a new AAA Battle Royale 2.0 third-person shooter.

Injective Protocol is a decentralized trading protocol that allows users to create and trade any derivatives market by simply providing a feed system. The funding round was led by Jump Crypto with participation from BH Digital, the digital assets division of hedge fund firm Brevan Howard. The Terra eco-application Aperture is currently being migrated to Injective.

Xterio is a game development company currently valued at $300 million. This round was led by FunPlus, Makers Fund, FTX Ventures, XPLA, with participation from Animoca Brands, HashKey, and others.

Thirdweb is a startup infrastructure development company focused on developing toolkits to make it easier for developers to build and launch Web3 products. This round was led by Haun Ventures, with strategic participation from Coinbase Ventures and Shopify.

Spectral Finance is a decentralized credit scoring platform that proposes a paradigm shift to the DeFi lending ecosystem by introducing a credit risk infrastructure based on users’ on-chain activity and behavior, and has now built a multi-asset credit risk scoring system, MACRO. The financing was led by General Catalyst and Social Capital, with participation from Samsung, Gradient, Section 32, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures, and Jump Capital.

Fractional, an NFT fragmentation platform, rebranded this month as Tessera, led by Paradigm, with participation from Uniswap Labs, E Girl Capital, and Focus Labs.

Last month, Messari’s Fundraising Report revealed that the market pullback in the year’s first half did not shake investors’ confidence in the growing crypto industry. Per the report, the overall amount of money raised in the first six months already exceeds the $30.2 billion raised in 1313 rounds throughout the entire 2021 year.