Hello world, and welcome to Dove Mountain Weekly #7!
Today, we are digging into the fundraising landscape for stablecoin projects.
Stablecoins emerged in academic papers in 2014, and today are growing insanely quickly. The total stablecoin supply skyrocketed from $11.8B in June 2020 to $107.8B today.
The stablecoin fundraising space has historically been driven by huge raises from CeFi companies like Paxos and Circle, with traditional growth funds participating in $100M+ late-stage rounds. The most recent noteworthy rounds are:
Paxos ($300M) — with participation from PayPal Ventures, Liberty City Ventures, Declaration Partners, WestCap, Mithril Capital Management, and others.
Circle ($440M) — with participation from Fidelity, Digital Currency Group, and FTX.
With the growing emergence of alternative stablecoin mechanisms and great experiments in the space — non-pegged, algorithmic, protocol controlled value being the major ones — total amounts raised reached $755M in Q2 2021, with 8 rounds publicly announced. Since the beginning of the year, projects building around the stablecoin vertical raised $812M, with a total of 16 funding rounds.
A lot of capital has been raised by projects building algorithmic and fiat-backed stablecoins. But in terms of the number of rounds, three distinct categories can be outlined:
Infrastructure: any DeFi projects building financial infrastructure to harness the power of stablecoins specifically. Parrot Protocol, HaloDAO, and Smoothy Finance recently raised funds.
Algorithmic stablecoins: projects using a price stabilization algorithm to track a particular unit price are very attractive. Ampleforth and Basis both raised funding rounds back in 2018, but the recent renaissance powered by the idea of protocol-owned collateral revived the vertical deal activity. Fei Protocol’s Series A round with top-class funds (Coinbase Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Variant, Framework Ventures) undoubtedly symbolized the hype.
Fiat-backed stablecoins: the most traditional pegged exchange rate system still inspires trust for investors, and brings non-crypto backers to funding rounds. Circle and Paxos are leading the pack.
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 15 fundraising rounds:
Meson Network ($3.5M) — with participation from Digital Currency Group, YouBi Capital, Hashkey Capital, Zonff Partners, SevenX Ventures, Permanent Ventures, CMT Digital, Josh Hannah, Sam Williams, Thomas Bailey, Jack Herrick, Cecilia Li, Meltem Demirors, Libertus Capital, Mask Network, and Hash Global.
Risk Harbor ($3.25M) — with participation from Framework Ventures, Pantera Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Nima Capital, Digital Currency Group, Anthony Pompliano, Noah Jessop, Ashleigh Schap, Nikil Viswanathan, Joe Lau, Do Kwon, Sebastien Audet, Tyler Ward, and Ashish Rajpurohit.
RabbitHole ($3.6M) — with participation from Electric Capital, ParaFi Capital, Framework Ventures, Chapter One, Edge & Node, Balaji Srinivasan, Larry Sukernik, Slow Ventures, Collab+Currency, Tony Sheng, Late Checkout, and others.
Chainanalysis ($100M) — with participation from Coatue Management, Benchmark, Accel, Addition, 9Yards Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Durable Capital Partners, Altimeter, Blackstone, GIC, Pictet Group, SVB Capital, and Sequoia Heritage.
t3rn ($1.35M) — with participation from Polychain Capital, IOSG Ventures, DFG (Dynamic Fintech Group), and others.
XP.network ($4.5M) — with participation from ExNetwork Capital, Wings Ventures, NGC Ventures, Twin Apex Capital, Master Ventures, Kosmos Ventures, AU21 Capital, Blocksync Ventures, Magnus Capital, JUN Capital, Lunar Station, Vestigium, Minted Labs, Fairum Ventures, BlackDragon Capital, Walsh Wealth Ventures, ZBS Capital, Boga Capital, Legion Ventures, Metrix Capital, and Psquare Capital.
Block.one ($49M) — with participation from Cryptology Asset Group.
Yield Protocol ($10M) — with participation from Paradigm, Framework Ventures, DeFi Alliance, Symbolic Capital Partners, CMS Holdings, Variant, and others.
Kaiko ($24M) — with participation from Anthemis, Underscore VC, Point Nine Capital, Alven, Hashkey Capital, and others.
Rarible ($14.2M) — with participation from Venrock Capital, CoinFund, 01 Advisors, 6th Man Ventures, and others.
Stronghold Digital Mining ($105M) — with participation from MG Capital.
CipherTrace ($27.1M) — with participation from Third Point Ventures, Neotribe Ventures, Acrew Capital, Seraph Group, and others.
Tesseract ($25M) — with participation from Augmentum Fintech, BlackFin Capital Partners, Concentric, DN Capital, Jabre Capital Partners, LeadBlock Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Wintermute, Coinbase Ventures, and Icebreaker.vc.
Securitize ($48M) — with participation from Blockchain Capital, Morgan Stanley, IDC Ventures, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank (SMTB), AVA Labs, Global Brain Corporation, Migration Capital, Mouro Capital, Ripio, Ripple, and SPiCE VC.
Amber Group ($100M) — with participation from Tiger Global Management, Sky9 Capital, Pantera Capital, Gobi Partners, DCM Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, China Renaissance, Tru Arrow Partners, Tiger Brokers, and others.
We have also added the following investors: Cryptodrop Fund, Newtribe Capital, PrimeBlock Ventures, CatcherVC, BenMo Labs, SeaX, Iconium, Symbolic Capital Partners, Zeal Capital, SCC Investments, Seraph Group, One Max Capital, Newave Capital, Tag Capital, The Whitesholding Capital, A2DAO, Seikatsu Ventures, Mapleblock Capital, Boga Capital, and many angels.
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See you on Thursday for Thursday Thoughts #4,
The Dove Mountain Team