RootData February Crypto Market Report: M&A Surge Amidst VC Fundraising Slump
The total investment and financing amount reached $950 million, with 99 financing deals, both reflecting a month-on-month increase of approximately 18%. Additionally, 15 merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions took place this month, marking the fourth consecutive month with over 10 M&A deals.
Organized by: Gu Yu & Biscuit & Elvin, RootData
At the end of February 2025, Bitcoin (BTC) experienced a sharp decline, dropping to $78,000, a 29% decrease from last month’s peak of $109,000. The Cryptocurrency Fear and Greed Index has fallen below 20, the lowest level since September 2024, signaling extreme fear in the market.
Following the Chinese New Year and Christmas holidays, the crypto investment and financing market has shown signs of recovery. In February, the total crypto financing reached $950 million, with 99 financing events, both reflecting a month-on-month increase of approximately 18%. The average financing amount this month was $12.258 million, while the median financing amount stood at $4.75 million.
This article will delve into specific financing data, active investors, trending projects, and other key aspects to illustrate the evolving trends in the crypto market.
I. Financing Data
This month, two financing events exceeded $100 million, while 19 financing events surpassed $10 million. The largest funding round was $200 million, raised by blockchain financial services company Figure, with participation from Sixth Street. Meanwhile, delta-neutral stablecoin protocol Ethena secured a $100 million strategic financing round, with Franklin Templeton and F-Prime Capital among the investors.
Other notable funding rounds included crypto asset management firm Bitwise, which raised $70 million, gift card crypto platform Raise, securing $63 million, and Web3 security tool Blockaid, which received $50 million.
In terms of financing amounts and rounds, the $1–3 million range accounted for the largest share of financing (34.2%), with seed rounds being the most common stage, as 23 projects successfully completed seed round financing.
Notable projects include RWA fixed-income protocol Mansa Finance, which raised $10 million, institutional-grade on-chain financial asset management and custody platform Surus, securing $8 million, Solana-native liquid re-staking protocol Fragmetric, which raised $7 million, and fixed-rate lending protocol Tenor Finance, securing $2.5 million.
Additionally, February recorded 15 acquisition events in the crypto market, marking the fourth consecutive month with over 10 acquisitions. This trend highlights the continued sluggishness in the investment and financing market, prompting more projects to seek exit opportunities through acquisitions. At the same time, leading projects are increasingly leveraging acquisitions to optimize their industry positioning and expand their influence within reasonable valuation ranges.
Notable acquisition cases include:
- Phantom acquiring NFT data tool SimpleHash
- Coinbase acquiring on-chain advertising and attribution platform Spindl
- thirdweb acquiring Web3 social network Yup
- Forte acquiring decentralized cryptocurrency trust platform Sealance
II. Active Investors
In February, the most active venture capital firms were MH Ventures, Framework Ventures, and Bitscale Capital, each participating in four deals:
- MH Ventures: Shaga ($4 million), Imua ($5 million), Infinity Ground ($2 million), Fluent ($8 million)
- Framework Ventures: Plasma ($24 million), Reservoir ($14 million), henlo ($3 million), GOAT Gaming ($4 million)
- Bitscale Capital: Blum ($5 million), partnr ($4 million), Fragmetric ($7 million), GOAT Gaming ($4 million)
Following closely behind were Zee Prime Capital, Haun Ventures, No Limit Holdings, and Big Brain Holdings, each participating in three deals.
On the Web3 angel investment front, Will Price, Raj Gokal, and Balaji Srinivasan were the most active angel investors in February, each investing in at least three projects.
It is also noteworthy that fundraising for crypto venture capital (VC) funds remains at historically low levels, with no funds having disclosed completed fundraising rounds so far this year. Among the three crypto VC funds that disclosed fundraising in November-December 2024, the outcomes varied:
- Accolade Partners raised $200 million for its “Fund of Funds”
- Sora Ventures secured $150 million for its Bitcoin strategy fund
- Tioga Capital raised only €40 million for its project fund
Despite the sluggish fundraising environment, new crypto funds continue to emerge. Former executives and investors from Inception Capital, including Lucas He and Calvin Du, have jointly founded tmr Ventures. The new fund focuses on investing in and promoting real-world cryptocurrency projects.
III. Personnel Dynamics
RootData has also tracked the career movements of thousands of notable individuals and executives in the crypto industry. Here are some key personnel changes:
- Hsin-Ju C. has left her role as Growth Director at Fhenix and is now serving as Partner and Head of Operations at Hack VC.
- Shawn Chong is no longer a Co-founder of Zerobase and Salus, as well as their Chief Operating Officer.
- Jack Purdy has transitioned from Sales Director at Messari to Vice President of Sales at Flipside.
- Brett Li has moved from Chief Growth Officer at Obol Network to Vice President of Marketing at Flipside.
- Brian Trunzo has stepped down as Vice President and BD Head at Polygon Labs and is now the Chief Growth Officer at Mantle Network.
- William Fang has transitioned from Senior Associate at Sora Ventures to Strategic Director at BIO Protocol.
- Sina Nader is no longer the Strategic Director at Mysten Labs.
- Gala Wen has left her role as Ecosystem Development Director at BNB Chain.
- Jim Chang has joined LI.FI as Product Director after his startup Catalyst was acquired.
- Antonio Garcia-Martinez has become the Base Advertising Director at Coinbase following the acquisition of his startup Spindl.
- Ben Gray has been appointed as Chief Legal Officer at Kraken, replacing Marco Santori.
- Former FTX Chief Operating Officer Constance Wang has launched a new project called Pacifica.
For more personnel updates, visit: https://www.rootdata.com/people
IV. Trending Projects
RootData Popularity Rankings — February 2025
RootData’s popularity score is calculated based on normalized data from platform search volume, click-through rates, user votes, and Twitter popularity index. The most popular projects in February include:
1. Story Protocol
Story Protocol is developing Web3 technology to revolutionize narrative creation, enabling a “story Lego” ecosystem where IP can be remixed and recombined. It provides tools for source tracking, frictionless licensing, and revenue sharing, empowering creators across prose, images, games, and audio to monetize and protect their work.
2. Kaito
Kaito is a crypto intelligence hub integrating social media, governance forums, news, and podcasts into an AI-driven “InfoFi” network. It leverages semantic LLM capabilities, real-time analytics, and proprietary search algorithms to deliver actionable insights, helping users track attention flows and allocate capital efficiently.
3. Bybit
Bybit, founded in 2018, is a crypto exchange offering spot and derivatives trading, staking, NFT marketplace, and API services. It aims to be the most reliable exchange for digital asset trading, with a focus on high-speed trading engines and multilingual support.
4. Monad
Monad is developing a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain, aiming to be 100–1000 times faster than existing solutions. It seeks to eliminate blockchain bottlenecks, enabling more complex decentralized applications and mass adoption.
5. Succinct
Succinct is building a decentralized prover network to enable blockchain applications secured by cryptographic proofs instead of trust. It offers high-availability proof generation for rollups, co-processors, and zero-knowledge applications.
6. Four.Meme
Four.meme is a BSC meme token launchpad, designed to offer a streamlined and low-cost platform for launching new meme tokens on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
7. 0G
0G is a modular AI blockchain with a scalable programmable DA layer, optimizing AI-powered dApps by ensuring interoperability, security, and reduced fragmentation in the open metaverse.
8. Pi Network
Pi Network, launched in 2018, focuses on accessible mobile mining to introduce more users to cryptocurrency. The Pi mobile app allows users to mine Pi tokens directly from their phones, making crypto adoption more mainstream.
9. Safe
Safe is a leading multi-signature wallet provider, offering smart contract-based asset management for businesses. It enables secure fund management through predefined multi-key access control schemes.
10. time.fun
time.fun is a time tokenization platform, allowing time holders to engage with fans while earning ETH from transactions and redemptions. The more value time holders provide, the higher the market-driven valuation of their time.
11. SoSoValue
SoSoValue is a crypto financial research platform offering real-time market intelligence, macroeconomic insights, and AI-powered news classification to assist investors in making data-driven decisions.
12. Infini
Infini provides a crypto payment solution, enabling instant payments via the Infini crypto card while allowing users to earn daily interest on their holdings.
13. RedStone
RedStone is a cross-chain oracle solution, delivering fast, cost-effective, and auditable data access. It utilizes Arweave for data storage and offers an insurance-backed dispute mechanism for users.
14. Super Exchange
Super Exchange is an on-chain trading platform that eliminates the need for liquidity providers, ensuring constant liquidity at every price point through an innovative joint curve mechanism.
15. Berachain
Berachain is a high-performance, EVM-compatible blockchain built on a liquidity-proof consensus mechanism. It fosters strong validator-project synergies and is powered by Polaris, an advanced blockchain framework.
16. MegaETH
MegaETH is developing ultra-high throughput and low-latency EVM-compatible L2 solutions, aiming to accelerate Ethereum’s long-term scalability.
17. B3
B3, created by Base/Coinbase alumni and ETH OG contributors, is a horizontally scalable gaming ecosystem built on Base, developed by NPC Labs.
18. Solayer
Solayer is enhancing Solana scalability with infiniSVM, a hardware-accelerated execution system designed to maintain atomic state at speeds of 100 Gbps.
19. OpenSea
OpenSea remains one of the largest NFT marketplaces, offering a platform for users to discover, collect, and trade NFTs.
20. Fragmetric
Fragmetric is Solana’s native liquid re-staking protocol, designed to enhance Solana’s security and economic potential. It leverages token expansion mechanisms and standardized LST integrations to build a secure and efficient re-staking infrastructure.
V. Project Dynamics
In February, RootData also recorded many projects’ mainnet launches, recent airdrops, and other events to help users understand important project dynamics in the market and grasp earlier alpha opportunities.
Due to space limitations, the above is a portion of the mainnet and token information. For more complete and timely data, please visit the RootData official website (https://www.rootdata.com/ ) for more information.
