Dove Mountain Weekly #6

Fundraising for Bitcoin-Focused Companies

Hello world, and welcome to Dove Mountain Weekly #6!

Today, we are digging into the fundraising market for bitcoin-related projects.

In Dove Mountain Weekly #4, we mentioned BadgerDAO’s recent $21M treasury diversification deal. BadgerDAO is now among the hottest projects in the growing sector of people bridging Bitcoin to DeFi.

Projects building around Bitcoin have raised $372M so far in 2021 — 6 times as much as comparable companies received in funding last year at the same date. A large part of this increase is driven by the $200M round completed by Marathon Patent Group in January 2021.

Three main categories stand out:

• Mining: from hardware to equipment hosting solutions, $238M has been invested in Bitcoin mining companies since 2020. Luxor, Compass, and VBit are some of them.

• CeFi: financial services company offering loans to Bitcoin holders and building Bitcoin-centric devices such as advanced wallets, have attracted more than $50M over the last few months. Foundation Devices, Unchained Capital, and Zap Solutions are part of the CeFi vertical.

• DeFi: enabling Bitcoin holders to put their capital to work and earn high APYs on other blockchains is a complex challenge some protocols decided to tackle. Sovryn, BadgerDAO, Keep, and some others received a total of $43M+.

Even if the number of Bitcoins at work has been increasing steadily since July 2020, Bitcoin-based DeFi protocols seem to be struggling to catch investors’ eyes as the fundraising environment remains tiny compared to DeFi. Recently, Mintlayer — a Bitcoin sidechain that offers several features to tap into both traditional financial markets as well as the DeFi market, completed a $5.2M seed round led by Alphabit, Moonwhale, 4SV, X21 Digital, Iconomy Partners, and AU21 Capital.

Two other differences we’ve noticed with this sector compared to DeFi overall:

• Non-crypto native funds are more likely to participate in Bitcoin-based projects fundraising processes,

• Bitcoin loyal investors like NYDIG and Morgan Creek Digital are deploying large amounts of capital to a diversified portfolio of Bitcoin-friendly companies.

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Feel free to have a look at Dove Mountain Data, the richest dataset ever publicly released on crypto fundraising rounds.

We have included last week’s 17 fundraising rounds:

• Orion Money ($1.7M) — with participation from Accomplice, SkyVision Capital, Hashed, and Delphi Ventures.

• Decentral Games ($5M) — with participation from Collab+Currency, Metaverse Ventures (a DCG company), GBV Capital, Bitscale Capital, Cluster Capital, ID Theory, and AU21 Capital.

• TRM Labs ($14M) — with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Jump Capital, Salesforce Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Initialized Capital, Operator Partners, and Blockchain Capital.

• Integritee ($2M) — with participation from LD Capital, AU21 Capital, FBG Capital, DFG (Dynamic Fintech Group), and OKEx BlockDream Fund.

• Goldfinch ($11M) — with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Mercy Corps Ventures, A.capital, SVAngel, Access Ventures, Divergence Ventures, DeFi Alliance, Draft Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Ryan Selkis, Regan Bozman, Jason Choi, Josh Hannah, Wale Ayeni, Viktor Bunin, and Lisa Cuesta.

• Yield Guild Games ($4M) — with participation from BITKRAFT Ventures, A.capital, Atelier Ventures, Fabric Ventures, Greenfield One, IDEO Colab Ventures, Mechanism Capital, ParaFi Capital, Animoca Brands, Ascensive Assets, Bitscale Capital, Dialectic Capital, Free Company, SevenX Ventures, Sfermion, Dennis Fong, Carlos Rodriguez, Jiho Zirlin, Trung Nguyen, Darren Lau, Mai Fujimoto, Tracheopteryx, Bam Aquino, Ignite Group, RedCave Ventures, CoinGecko, Morningstar Ventures, and Third Prime.

• Trace Network ($1.6M) — with participation from AU21 Capital, NGC Ventures, OKEx BlockDream Fund, LD Capital, Spark Digital Capital, Morningstar Ventures, Inclusion Capital, Lotus Capital, Spark Capital, Moonrock Capital, Blocksync Ventures, 18.ventures, DAO Maker, Acheron Trading, ETHDesign, Genblock Capital, Master Ventures, GBV Capital, Black Edge Capital, Moonwhale Ventures, and Sandeep Nailwal.

• XVERSE ($2.7M) — with participation from Vestigium, Animoca Brands, GBV Capital, Momentum 6, CMS Holdings, and Blocore.

• SynFutures ($14M) — with participation from Polychain Capital, Framework Ventures, Pantera Capital, Bybit, Wintermute, CMS Holdings, Kronos Research, and IOSG Ventures.

• BitDAO ($230M) — with participation from Peter Thiel, Alan Howard, Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Jump Capital, Spartan Group, Fenbushi Capital, and Kain Warwick.

• dYdX ($65M) — with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Wintermute, StarkWare, Hashkey Capital, Electric Capital, Delphi Ventures, QCP Capital, CMS Holdings, CMT Digital, Finlink, Sixtant, Mgnr, Kronos Research, and Menai Financial Group.

• Umee ($6.3M) — with participation from Polychain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, IDEO Colab Ventures, Alameda Research, ConsenSys Ventures, Tendermint, Brian Kelly Capital Management, CMS Holdings, Argonautic Ventures, and Ethereal Ventures.

• PARSIQ ($3M) — with participation from Axia8 Ventures, Solana Foundation, Kryptial Group, Evan Cheng, CoinUnited Capital, Mindworks Capital, Elevate Ventures, and Sanctum Ventures.

• Bitwise ($70M) — with participation from Ranjana Clark, Rebecca Macieira-Kaufmann, Robert Leshner, Stani Kulechov, Third Point Ventures, Tom Schmidt, Tracey Warson, Vetamer Capital, Willoughby Capital, Elad Gil, Electric Capital, Highland Capital Partners, Khosla Ventures, Daniel Sundheim, Kevin Warsh, Moore Strategic Ventures, and others.

• Rangers Protocol — with participation from Framework Ventures, Puzzle Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Spark Digital Capital, SNZ Holding, Hashkey Capital, and others.

• NFT Genius ($4M) — with participation from Roham Gharegozlou, Mark Cuban, Ashton Kutcher, and Anthony Pompliano.

• Parallel Finance ($2M) — with participation from Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Breyer Capital, 8 Decimal Capital, and Hypersphere Ventures.

We have also added the following investors: Operator Partners, The MBA Fund, Vestigium, BlackFin Capital Partners, Extra Watts, Evangelion Capital, and many angels.

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See you on Thursday for Thursday Thoughts #3,

The Dove Mountain Team