The 50 Most Noteworthy Pre-TGE Projects in the Crypto Industry

Attention in crypto is everything.

This year’s narrative might belong exclusively to Meme, with its tidal wave coming in strong, each wave surpassing the last.

While Bitcoin continues to break records, altcoins haven’t seen their expected rise. Value investing has become futile, with founders throwing in the towel and self-deprecatingly saying “we can be Meme too.”

If Meme is an adventurer’s paradise, it’s filled with stories of cross-class, overnight wealth that reek of survivor bias. In the darker corners of this paradise, those who blindly followed the trend were mercilessly wiped out — “diamond hands” seized most of the wealth, while “paper hands” were left with nothing.

Perhaps we can view value investing as the game of the honest. We must acknowledge that technology and application innovation continue to provide a foundation for the entire crypto industry.

Last week, during Devcon in Bangkok, at the “DeInsight 2024” annual summit, Crypto data platform Rootdata officially announced the RootData List 2024. The list includes five categories: Top 50 Post-TGE Projects, Top 50 Pre-TGE Projects, Crypto VC Top 50 Investment Institutions, Top 10 Angel Investors, and Top 20 Best CEOs.

We believe the most noteworthy category is “Top 50 Pre-TGE Projects”. For value investors, these 50 projects might represent the most important investment opportunities in the crypto market for the coming period. This article will analyze the fundamentals and recent developments of these 50 projects.

Overview

Projects selected for the “Pre-TGE Top 50 Projects” list have a median funding of $25.71 million, with an average of 2 funding rounds. Seven projects have reached valuations of $1 billion or more, while four projects haven’t disclosed their funding publicly.

The majority of listed projects cover 26 categories, with modular, DeFi, infrastructure, and AI taking up larger proportions. Although GameFi, CeFi, and NFT categories have stagnated over the past four quarters, projects continue to innovate and have made significant progress this year.

Category: Chain Performance, Chain Ecosystem, Chain Community

Since early 2023, new public chains and Layer 2s have emerged in clusters. Public chain competition has gradually evolved into a battle for existing market liquidity. Infrastructure surplus has also created ghost towns in public chains, with ecosystems lacking real users and consumer applications. However, some new chains focusing on concepts like chain abstraction, privacy, intent, modularity, and parallelism have still managed to stand out in the fierce competition.

Anoma network is the leading project in the intent category, creating a privacy-focused architecture centered on intent. It introduces new paradigms for building infrastructure layers and a new operating system for decentralized applications, allowing existing crypto 2.5 dApps to become fully decentralized. Anoma founders Brink, Awa Sun Yin, and Christopher Goes previously worked together at All in Bits, a Cosmos development company.

The Anoma Foundation has gained recognition from institutions like Polychain and Coinbase, completing seed, Series A, and Series B rounds totaling $57.8 million. Recently, insiders revealed that Anoma is in talks for a new funding round that could value it at $1 billion.

While Anoma hasn’t yet launched its testnet, its first fractal instance, the privacy chain Namada, has announced its tokenomics, opened validator node applications in October, and is currently testing IBC asset transfers and shielding.

Espresso Systems is an EVM-compatible blockchain providing scaling and privacy systems for Crypto applications. By combining PoS consensus protocol with zk Rollup mechanism, it packages multiple transactions more resource-efficiently. Its configurable asset privacy smart contract applications can provide users with customizable privacy regarding sender and receiver addresses, as well as the amount and type of assets held or transferred. These elements can be set as public, private, or transparent only to selected parties.

Espresso Systems announced on November 11 that the Espresso Network has launched on mainnet, though currently at the initial (0) stage. They plan to launch mainnet 1 and mainnet 2 in the first quarter of next year, gradually integrating new stacks and transitioning to PoS.

In March this year, Espresso Systems completed a $28 million Series B round. Previously disclosed funding includes a $32 million seed round completed in 2022. Investors include a16z, Electric Capital, Graylock, Coinbase Ventures, and others.

Monad aims to become a high-performance blockchain capable of parallel processing within EVM. Monad’s goals extend beyond accelerating consensus mechanisms. It seeks to fundamentally change the execution environment, introduce parallel processing, and improve data storage methods to build a truly fast EVM chain, giving EVM Solana-like performance.

In April this year, Monad Labs completed a $225 million funding round, one of the largest crypto project fundraises in 2024, with participation from Paradigm, IOSG Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Electric Capital, and other notable institutions. Beyond its own capital appeal, projects in the Monad ecosystem such as Kintsu, Kuru, Monad Pad, and aPriori have also gained support from numerous institutions.

Monad has recently begun rolling out its testnet in phases. Monad launched its development network in March, achieving 10,000 transactions per second in internal testing.

Movement differs from other Move-based new public chains, as its first Move language-based Ethereum L2 is a convergence solution that shifts from being an “Ethereum killer” to “joining Ethereum.” It aims to leverage Move’s underlying execution performance and security advantages, while further integrating EVM’s ecosystem advantages, allowing developers to launch Solidity projects on M2 without writing Move code.

In April, Movement completed a $38 million Series A funding round, with participation from Polychain Capital, Binance Labs, OKX Ventures, Hack VC, and others. In late July, Movement announced the launch of its public testnet Parthenon.

Berachain is a high-performance EVM-compatible public chain built on Proof of Liquidity consensus. Originating from a Rebase NFT project called Bong Bears, it was later launched by several DeFi OGs. The name “Bera” pays homage to the classic crypto meme “HODL” by changing “Bear” to “Bera.” The Berachain community has very distinct Ponzi culture, Meme culture, and NFT culture characteristics.

Berachain innovatively proposed the PoL mechanism, aiming to attract liquidity by rewarding on-chain liquidity with token rewards, avoiding the ghost town predicament of existing public chains. In April, Berachain announced the completion of a $100 million Series B funding round, co-led by Brevan Howard Digital’s Abu Dhabi branch and Framework Ventures, with participation from Polychain Capital, Hack VC, Tribe Capital, and others.

Berachain is currently in the testnet phase, with mainnet and token planned for launch before the end of 2024.

Sophon is an entertainment-focused ecosystem. Built as a modular rollup based on Validium using ZKsync’s Elastic Chain, Sophon provides necessary infrastructure for high-throughput applications such as social, AI, and gaming.

Sophon believes there’s still enormous innovation space at the application layer. Rather than directly providing end products, it focuses on building platforms and products that support user self-expression. Therefore, Sophon emphasizes ecosystem building, with its founder revealing in an interview that many new applications like NFTs for bidding on space seats and AI girlfriends are being tested within the ecosystem.

In October, Binance Labs announced its investment in Sophon, bringing its total funding to over $70 million. In March, Sophon completed a $10 million funding round with participation from Paper Ventures, Maven 11, The Spartan Group, SevenX Ventures, OKX Ventures, HTX Ventures, and others. Sophon’s mainnet is expected to launch in November, with token deployment imminent.

Particle Network is developing a modular L1 blockchain that enables each user to have a single, unified on-chain address and balance across all blockchains through chain abstraction. It also extracts gas and unifies liquidity. This allows existing L1s and L2s to collaborate seamlessly across ecosystems, solving liquidity fragmentation in multi-chain ecosystems and eliminating manual multi-chain interactions in the user experience.

Particle’s Universal Accounts have already launched on mainnet and are currently undergoing final testing. At the recently concluded Bangkok Devcon, the team demonstrated Universal Accounts for the first time. Particle previously also drove the formation of the Chain Abstraction Coalition with over 60 participants.

In June, Particle Network announced the completion of a $15 million Series A funding round, with participation from Spartan Group, Gumi Cryptos Capital, SevenX Ventures, Morningstar Ventures, Flow Traders, HashKey Capital, and others. In August, Binance Labs announced its investment in Particle.

RISC Zero is building next-generation scalable blockchains using zero-knowledge proof technology and RISC-V zkVM. RISC Zero allows developers familiar with standard programming languages like Rust, Go, C++, and others to build ZK applications. RISC Zero is open-source and permissionless, allowing anyone to build applications through its API.

Recently, RISC Zero launched Boundless, a universal ZK protocol and verifiable computation layer, providing decentralized ZK infrastructure capable of handling proof generation, aggregation, data availability, and settlement for any chain. Developers can use Steel to move Solidity contract execution off-chain, saving 99.99% in gas fees. Boundless has entered early testing and will open developer access in Q4. RISC Zero also recently launched the hybrid architecture Kailua OP Rollups, providing 1-hour finality for OP chains without ongoing ZK proof costs.

RISC Zero has three publicly disclosed funding rounds totaling $54 million. The most recent was a $40 million Series A round completed in July last year, valuing it at $300 million, with participation from Blockchain Capital, Galaxy Digital, IOSG, and others.

Succinct is building a decentralized prover network allowing anyone to build trustless applications and infrastructure. Succinct unifies the proving supply chain, providing highly available proof generation infrastructure and first-class pricing for rollups, coprocessors, and other applications using zero-knowledge proofs.

In August, Succinct launched SP1, a high-performance open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) for verifying execution of arbitrary Rust (or any LLVM-compiled language) programs. Polygon, Celestia, Avail, Hyperlane, Taiko, Sovereign, and others have adopted SP1. In September, Succinct collaborated with the OP Labs team to create OP Succinct, combining OP Stack and zkVM SP1, enabling existing OP Stack chains to use ZKP with only 1 hour for completion.

Succinct has completed $55 million in total funding, with participation from Paradigm, Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Geometry, ZK Validator, and others.

Base is Coinbase’s Ethereum L2 developed on Optimism’s open-source OP Stack, aiming to bring the next billion users to Crypto with plans for gradual decentralization over the coming years. In just one year, Base has rapidly grown into a significant on-chain participant through integration with Coinbase, an active developer and user ecosystem, and key partnerships with entities like Stripe. Base briefly became the largest L2, temporarily surpassing Arbitrum.

The Base ecosystem is highly active, encompassing applications in DeFi, NFTs, and social, among others. Its partnership with Stripe to launch stablecoin services and becoming a hub for launching third-layer (L3) solutions sets it apart. Unlike other major L2 chains, Base currently hasn’t launched a token and hasn’t disclosed plans to do so in the future.

Additionally, Base hasn’t conducted any public fundraising. However, Base has been known for its high sequencer yields, earning over $50 million in revenue year-to-date, with projections reaching approximately $60 million by year-end.

Eclipse is a customizable modular Rollup solution focused on providing flexible blockchain scaling tools for developers. Its technology allows for choices and combinations between multiple execution environments (such as EVM, SVM, MoveVM) and data availability layers (such as Celestia, Polygon Avail). This enables Eclipse to adapt to various application scenarios, including DeFi, Crypto gaming, and on-chain asset management.

Eclipse has raised $65 million to date, completing a $50 million Series A round in March, co-led by Placeholder and Hack VC, with participation from OKX Ventures, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and others. Eclipse mainnet launched on November 7.

Initia is a network for full-chain Rollups, aiming to build an interconnected network to simplify users’ cross-chain experience. In fact, Initia built the entire new technology stack from 0 to 1, developing both Layer 1 and Layer 2. Having a complete technology stack will enable Initia to implement chain-level mechanisms to coordinate economic interests among users, developers, Layer 2 application chains, and Layer 1 itself.

In September, Initia completed a $14 million Series A round and a $2.5 million community round, bringing total funding to $25 million. Theory Ventures, Hack VC, and others participated. In October last year, Initia completed a $7.5 million seed round with participation from Binance Labs, Delphi Ventures, and Hack VC.

Initia launched its public testnet in May this year and plans to complete mainnet launch and TGE in Q4.

MegaETH is a fully Ethereum-compatible Layer 2 focused on improving performance through node specialization, reducing execution redundancy, and real-time compilation and parallel execution of EVM. It aims to achieve over 100,000 transactions per second, building the “first real-time blockchain” to make DApp response speed and functional logic equivalent to regular Web2 applications.

In June, MegaETH completed a $20 million seed round led by Dragonfly, with participation from Figment Capital, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, and others. Angel investors including Vitalik, ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin, EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan, ETHGlobal co-founder Kartik Talwar, and Helius Labs co-founder Mert Mumtaz also participated.

MegaETH’s public testnet was originally planned to launch this fall, with mainnet expected to launch at year-end or early 2025.

Consumer-Oriented Applications: Prediction Markets and Meme Platform

Polymarket is a blockchain-based prediction market platform established in 2020, founded by then 22-year-old Shayne Coplan. Its timely launch attracted significant attention during the 2020 U.S. election cycle. Despite subsequent crypto market volatility, Polymarket has survived tenaciously and returned with even greater popularity in the 2024 U.S. election cycle.

In May, Polymarket completed a $45 million Series B round led by Founders Fund. It has raised $70 million across two rounds (Series A raised $25 million), with supporters including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Recently, there are reports that Polymarket is in talks to raise over $50 million in new funding and plans to launch a token.

In October, Polymarket’s website reached 35 million visits, double the traffic of popular betting sites like FanDuel. The platform’s U.S. presidential election trading volume has exceeded $3.6 billion, with its election predictions frequently cited by mainstream media including The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

Pump.Fun is a token launch tool and community platform focused on Meme coins. Launched on Solana in January 2024, it added support for Ethereum L2 Blast shortly after mainnet launch. Pump.fun simplifies the token issuance process and lowers technical barriers, providing users with a simple and low-cost way to deploy and issue tokens. Users can easily use the platform by paying just 0.02 SOL without development experience. This simplification and low-cost feature quickly made Pump.fun popular. Compared to traditional token launch platforms, besides having a fairer token issuance model, Pump.fun’s major innovation is combining token launches with social features.

Due to frequent “moon shots” after launch, Pump.fun’s wealth effect quickly attracted Meme speculators, making it the biggest money-making machine in this Meme wave and inspiring copycat platforms on other chains. As the fastest-growing application in crypto economic history in terms of revenue, it achieved $100 million in revenue in just 217 days.

Pump.fun hasn’t conducted any public fundraising yet. Pump.fun co-founder Sapijiju revealed token and airdrop plans in October. In October, Pump.fun also added support for video token issuance, allowing users to upload videos and create tokens, with frontend access for other users.

DeFi: A Severely Undervalued Category in This Cycle

DeFi experienced its summer in 2021, but when the hype and bubble subsided, DeFi began to decline in 2022. Over the past two years, DeFi has gradually matured and entered a new phase of productivity, preparing for long-term scalability. DeFiance Capital founder Arthur recently pointed out in an article that after two years of adjustment, key DeFi protocol metrics like Total Value Locked (TVL) are rebounding, with DeFi market cap expected to grow to 10% in the next two years. Specifically in subdivisions, DeFi infrastructure including MEV, Perps (decentralized perpetual contract exchanges), DePIN, etc., might be among the few areas that definitely have value this year and are seeing numerous innovative projects emerge.

bloXroute is a DeFi transaction acceleration tool that built the Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN) for DeFi traders, allowing users to bypass network congestion and instantly receive critical information including buy/sell orders, pricing, positions, liquidations, and oracle updates. bloXroute’s unique network architecture can improve block propagation by 2 seconds, transaction propagation by 1 second, and transaction detection by 50–400 milliseconds. These services help DeFi traders win more trades by providing mempool services and transaction/block propagation facilities.

In 2022, bloXroute completed a $70 million Series B round at a $410 million valuation. SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Blindspot, Dragonfly, Flow Traders, Flybridge, GSR, Jane Street, Lightspeed, and others participated.

Flashbots is a research and development company focused on MEV, dedicated to mitigating MEV’s negative impacts and avoiding risks it might pose to Ethereum and other blockchains. Flashbots has three main focuses: Flashbots Auction, a private communication channel between miners and searchers for transparent and efficient MEV extraction; Flashbots Data, a set of tools for improving MEV transparency and reducing information asymmetry; and Flashbots Research, aimed at addressing short-term and long-term research questions related to MEV.

In July last year, Flashbots completed a $60 million Series B round at a $1 billion valuation. Early investors include Paradigm, Pantera Capital, Dragonfly, OKX Ventures, and other notable institutions.

Figure Markets combines traditional finance liquidity with decentralized asset control, providing investors with various blockchain-native assets including cryptocurrencies, stocks, bonds, credit, etc. Figure Markets has launched Figure Markets Exchange, a decentralized crypto asset custody marketplace that utilizes decentralized multi-party computation (MPC) wallet custody and provides bankruptcy-remote custody solutions. U.S. user dollar deposits are held in FDIC-insured banks.

In March this year, Figure Markets spun off from parent company Figure Technologies and announced a $60 million Series A round led by Jump Crypto, Pantera Capital, and Lightspeed Faction. Other participants include Distributed Global, Ribbit Capital, and CMT Digital.

Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual exchange operating on its own Layer 1, offering functionality similar to traditional centralized exchanges. It primarily includes an orderbook exchange using USDC as margin for trading. Its distinctive feature is supporting leveraged or perpetual contract trading for many long-tail assets, being one of the few projects supporting on-chain leveraged trading for certain specific assets.

With the recent Memecoin boom, players preferring higher odds and more diverse trading options have made Hyperliquid and other Perp DEXs the biggest beneficiaries of on-chain liquidity concentration. Over the past 3 months, Hyperliquid has become the Perp DEX with the largest market share and the most popular Perp DEX in the English-speaking community. In October, Hyperliquid announced the establishment of Hyper Foundation, with TGE approaching.

Hyperliquid currently hasn’t disclosed any public funding and is one of the few well-known projects on the RootData List 2024 without VC backing.

Infinex is a decentralized perpetual trading platform launched by Synthetix, officially opening account creation and deposit channels in May this year. The project’s vision is to bridge the experience gap between CeFi and DeFi through its own on-chain experience layer, and then integrate on-chain DeFi protocols to provide users with more tokens, more derivatives, and innovative yield products, ultimately serving its customers more effectively.

In October, Founders Fund invested in Infinex’s new “sponsorship” fundraising model, which sold Patron NFTs to venture capitalists, angel investors, and the community, raising $67.7 million. Wintermute Ventures, Framework Ventures, Solana Ventures, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and Aave founder Stani Kulechov participated in this investment.

Morpho is a lending protocol that combines the current liquidity pool model used in Compound or AAVE with the capital efficiency of P2P matching engines used in orderbooks. As a peer-to-peer (P2P) layer built on top of lending pools like Compound and Aave, Morpho enables users to lend and borrow at better rates through P2P and P2Pool matching, solving the problem of high borrowing rates and low supply rates caused by low utilization in lending pools, improving capital efficiency. Meanwhile, Morpho maintains the same liquidity and liquidation guarantees as the underlying protocols, with users able to receive the underlying pool’s APY or better P2P APY.

Morpho Markets, Morpho’s core product, has exceeded $2 billion in total deposits. Recently, preparation for Morpho protocol’s governance token MORPHO has been completed, with token transfer functionality to be enabled on November 21.

In August this year, Morpho completed $50 million in funding, with participation from Ribbit Capital, Hack VC, IOSG, Rockaway, L1D, Mirana, Cherry, Semantic, Fenbushi, Leadblock Bitpanda, and Robot Ventures.

Solv Protocol is a decentralized Bitcoin staking protocol, also a project built by crypto KOL Meng Yan. It unlocks the full potential of Bitcoin assets through liquidity consensus infrastructure. By solving fragmentation, yield opportunities, and custody solutions for BTC assets, Solv provides Bitcoin holders with a gateway to BTCFi, continuously building pathways and confidence for traditional funds to enter the cryptocurrency world.

In October, Solv Protocol completed $11 million in funding at a $200 million valuation, with investment from Laser Digital, Blockchain Capital, OKX Ventures, and others. In August last year, Solv Protocol completed $6 million in funding, with participation from Laser Digital, Bytetrade Labs, and others.

Glow is building a Proof of Physical Work (PoPW) protocol for carbon credits, incentivizing carbon credit creation by rewarding solar panel operators with tokens and replacing unclean energy from the grid. Its ultimate goal is to build the world’s largest solar network. Glow uses GLW tokens and stablecoins (like USDC) to reward power output and verified carbon credits from solar farms. Glow is one of the most profitable DePIN projects, generating over $5 million in revenue since its 2023 launch.

In late October, Glow completed $30 million in funding, co-led by Framework and Union Square Ventures. The funding includes $6.5 million for the company and $23.5 million for solar investments. These funds will support its expansion into regions like India, where Glow’s infrastructure is expected to meet the energy needs of 34,000 households.

AI+Web3

0G 0G is the first modular AI chain with a scalable programmable DA layer suitable for AI dapps. Its modular technology will enable frictionless interoperability between chains while ensuring security, eliminating fragmentation, and maximizing connectivity for a zero-gravity and open metaverse.

On November 13, Zero Gravity Labs (0G Labs) announced a $40 million seed round funding from Hack VC, Delphi Digital, OKX Ventures, Samsung Next, Bankless Ventures, Animoca Brands, and others, with $250 million in token purchase commitments received by the 0G Foundation (independent governing body of the 0G protocol).

The funds will be used to develop the world’s first decentralized AI operating system (dAIOS). dAIOS aims to reform big data use cases, achieve GB-level per-second on-chain data transmission, support high-performance application scenarios like AI model training, and allow Layer 2 and modular AI to seamlessly integrate into the Crypto ecosystem. On the same day as the funding announcement, 0G also opened public node sales (out of 175,000 total nodes, about half were already sold in community presale).

Ritual is a distributed AI computing platform that brings together a network of distributed nodes accessible to compute and model creators, enabling creators to host their models on these nodes. Users can then access any model on the network through a universal API. Ritual’s architecture is built on a set of sovereign modular execution layers called the Ritual Superchain. These layers are designed to handle various types of arbitrary computation, primarily focused on AI models.

Ritual has strong backing. In April, Ritual received a multi-million dollar investment from Polychain Capital. Last November, it completed $25 million in funding, including investments from Archetype, Accomplice, Robot Ventures, and angel investors like Balaji Srinivasa, Worldcoin research engineer DC Builder, EigenLayer Chief Strategy Officer Calvin Liu, and Monad co-founder.

On November 19, Ritual launched the Ritual Chain testnet, providing a platform for building AI-native applications. The team also announced the establishment of the independent Ritual Foundation.

Sahara is a decentralized, privacy-centric AI network infrastructure. On this platform, contributors can receive fair compensation, maintain sovereignty over data and models, and securely create, share, and trade AI assets while protecting privacy and promoting inclusivity. Its first launched products, Sahara Knowledge Agent (KA) and Sahara Data, are two cornerstone products. Sahara KA is an AI that goes far beyond conversational capabilities, automatically analyzing external and internal proprietary data to provide reliable decisions based on specific needs. Sahara Data provides high-value data services for AI model training, solving security and privacy issues in data processing.

Sahara is about to launch its testnet and AI marketplace, and the team plans to achieve mainnet launch in Q4. In August, Sahara announced the completion of a $43 million Series A round, led by Binance Labs, Pantera Capital, and Polychain Capital, with participation from Samsung, Matrix Partners, Bangkok Bank, dao5, Alumni Ventures, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, Mirana Ventures, and others.

Sentient is an AI research organization dedicated to building a new open AGI economy for AI builders and creators. It enables open-source AI developers to monetize their models, data, and other innovations, allowing AI platforms to collaborate openly, transcending the boundaries of traditional single and closed API-based AI platforms. Its core contributors include Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.

In July this year, Sentient completed a large $85 million seed round, co-led by Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures, with participation from notable institutions including Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, LD Capital, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital, Canonical Crypto, and Foresight Ventures.

Sentient released its OML (Open, Monetizable and Loyal) whitepaper in September and recently launched the OML 1.0 fingerprint library feature, supporting fingerprint identification of AI models to verify AI model developer identity. The team previously planned to launch testnet this year.

Infrastructure & Tools

Chaos Labs is an automated economic security tool that initially focused on stress testing DeFi protocols through “chaos engineering” and simulating worst-case scenarios. As the complexity of the crypto security environment continues to increase, Chaos Labs has expanded its business types to include risk management, risk oracles, analytics tools, incentive optimization, Sybil detection, etc. It has served over 20 leading protocols, including Aave, GMX, Arbitrum, Jupiter, and others.

In August, Chaos Labs completed a $55 million Series A round with investors including Haun Ventures, PayPal Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures. Chaos Labs also received support from angel investors including Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko and Phantom’s Francesco Agosti. In 2023, Chaos Labs received $20 million in seed funding led by PayPal Ventures and Galaxy Digital. To date, the company has raised a total of $75 million.

Conduit is a Rollup-as-a-Service project that enables teams to quickly scale their dApps with Rollup features by providing production-grade Rollup solutions based on the OP tech stack. Conduit has supported over 300 Rollups across mainnet and testnet. The TVL of mainnet Rollups running on Conduit totals approximately $1.2 billion.

In June, Conduit completed a $37 million Series A round co-led by Paradigm and Haun Ventures, with participation from Bankless Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and others. Conduit previously completed a $7 million seed round led by Paradigm in March last year.

In August, Conduit launched the new Conduit Marketplace, aiming to provide a one-stop integration solution for Rollup teams, bringing together tools from 48 partners. Recently, Conduit launched the sequencer Conduit G2, performing 10 times better than existing sequencers. It’s 100% compatible with OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit.

Helius is a developer platform focused on the Solana ecosystem, viewed as a key tool driving Solana’s ecosystem development. It aims to help developers quickly build high-performance crypto applications by simplifying the development process and optimizing toolchains. Founded in 2022 by a team of former Coinbase and Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineers, Helius provides a suite of tools to eliminate the complexity of developing Solana applications and enhance network performance.

In September, Helius completed $21.75 million in funding, with participation from Haun Ventures, Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, 6th Man Ventures, Chapter One, Spearhead, and others.

Orbiter Finance is a decentralized cross-Rollup bridge for transferring Ethereum’s native assets, supporting quick asset transfers across multiple Layer 2 networks (such as zkSync, Arbitrum, etc.). In early 2024, considering the growing market demand for Intent-Centric comprehensive Rollup solutions, Orbiter Finance rebranded as Orbiter Rollup based on ZK, serving as Ethereum’s infrastructure layer, focusing on ultimate interoperability and improving capital efficiency.

Last year, Orbiter Finance completed Series A funding with undisclosed amount; in 2022, Orbiter Finance completed a $3.2 million seed round. Investors include OKX Ventures, Tiger Global, Matrixport Ventures, and others. Orbiter previously stated plans to launch its native token this year and will gradually announce token economics and distribution plans. In June, it published the O-Points scoring system and latest rankings in preparation for an airdrop.

Zama is the most representative startup globally in the FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) direction, building open-source homomorphic encryption tools for developers. FHE is a technology that can process data without decryption, which can be used to create privacy smart contracts on top of public, permissionless blockchains where only specific users can see transaction data and contract states. Zama’s founder Pascal Paillier is a renowned cryptographer and one of the inventors of FHE technology, which is Zama’s core technology. Since early research, Zama has achieved a 100x performance improvement, and now aims to achieve another 1,000x performance improvement to support large applications.

In March this year, Zama completed a $73 million Series A round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Filecoin developer Protocol Labs, with participation from Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, and Stake Capital. Additionally, angel investors including Filecoin founder Juan Benet, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood participated in this round.

DeBank is a multi-chain asset management and data analytics platform supporting DeFi protocols across multiple chains, enabling users to manage investment portfolios more efficiently, explore DeFi projects, and compare rates across different protocols.

In 2021, DeBank completed a $25 million equity funding round at a $200 million valuation. Sequoia China led the round, with other participants including Dragonfly Capital, Hash Global, Youbi Capital, as well as notable institutions like Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com, and Ledger.

DEX Screener is a comprehensive analytics platform aggregating information from over 80 blockchain networks, including Ethereum, BSC, Solana, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Polygon. DEX Screener provides real-time data streams, allowing users to view data charts every five minutes. Additionally, DEX Screener’s iOS and Android applications enable push notifications based on percentage changes, target prices, or price movements within set time periods, supporting real-time tracking and charting of DEX data.

DefiLlama founder 0xngmi revealed in August that by tracking DEX Screener’s fees on DefiLlama, the platform earns $150,000 to $250,000 daily by charging $300 per token to add information like TG links and images. Currently, DEX Screener hasn’t raised funding or announced token issuance plans due to its self-sustaining profit model.

In June, Dexscreener launched Moonshot, a Solana-based launch platform similar to pump.fun. Moonshot officially launched on July 18, and in just 4 months became one of the biggest winners in this meme wave, even being hailed as the “Binance of memes,” becoming a key catalyst for the rise of BONK.

Bitcoin Ecosystem

Blockstream is a Bitcoin ecosystem development platform established in 2014. Blockstream’s core focus is developing new infrastructure for traditional financial systems, with key developments around Bitcoin sidechains and other blockchain-related applications. Core technologies include the Lightning protocol and Elements Project, a blockchain platform supporting open-source sidechains. Blockstream has launched Liquid Network, Bitcoin’s first sidechain, Blockstream Green wallet, and other products, while also providing Bitcoin mining operation hosting services.

Blockstream co-founder and CEO Dr. Adam Back is a British cryptographer and computer scientist known for inventing Hashcash in 1997, which later became the foundation for Bitcoin’s proof-of-work system. Back had communicated with Satoshi Nakamoto before the groundbreaking whitepaper was written in 2008. HBO’s recent documentary briefly suggested Back might be Satoshi, but Back has repeatedly denied being Satoshi, stating it was just a joke.

In October, Blockstream completed $210 million in convertible note funding led by Fulgur Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate market adoption of its Bitcoin Layer 2 technology, expand mining operations, and increase Bitcoin reserves. Blockstream recently opened a new R&D center in Lugano, Switzerland, aimed at driving fintech innovation on Bitcoin’s Liquid and Lightning networks. On November 21, Blockstream established an asset management division aimed at bridging the gap between Bitcoin and mainstream finance.

Babylon is a protocol that leverages Bitcoin’s security to provide security guarantees for other PoS chains. Babylon can provide secure, cross-chain-free, non-custodial native staking solutions for PoS chains including BTC layer2, enhance PoS chain security, shorten PoS chain staking periods through Bitcoin’s timestamp mechanism, and promote cross-chain interoperability. It’s often compared to Eigenlayer in the Ethereum ecosystem. Babylon was founded by Stanford University Professor David Tse.

In May this year, Babylon received $70 million in funding led by Paradigm, with participation from Polychain Capital and crypto exchange Bullish’s venture arm. In December last year, Babylon completed an $18 million Series A round co-led by Polychain Capital and Hack VC, with participation from Framework Ventures, Polygon Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, OKX Ventures, and others.

Babylon launched its mainnet in August this year. After successfully launching the first phase Cap-2 mainnet in early October and staking 24,000 bitcoins, the Cap-3 mainnet is planned for early December launch with longer staking windows and higher per-stake limits.

Wallets

Phantom is a multi-chain non-custodial crypto wallet initially designed for the Solana blockchain, now supporting Ethereum and Polygon networks, expanding its utility for users of decentralized applications (DApps), DeFi protocols, and NFTs. Launched in 2021, despite MetaMask’s established position in the wallet market, Phantom quickly gained attention with its elegant, smooth user experience and relatively fast product optimization updates.

In early 2022, Phantom completed a $109 million Series B round at a $1.2 billion valuation, with participation from Paradigm, a16z, Variant Fund, Jump Capital, DeFi Alliance, Solana Ventures, and others.

On November 20, Phantom acquired Web3 firewall technology provider Blowfish. The Blowfish team will launch new security features for Phantom, including intuitive transaction previews and real-time fraud detection insights. Phantom’s ranking has risen rapidly this month, reaching second place in Apple App Store’s US free utility apps category, second only to Google. Phantom reached a historic high in iOS free app rankings, placing ninth, surpassing WhatsApp and Instagram.

Backpack is a next-generation cryptocurrency exchange and multi-chain wallet offering a self-custody solution integrated with multi-party computation (MPC) technology to ensure fund security. The team initially developed the wallet for their xNFT protocol, but compared to its “wallet” positioning, Backpack is more like building a crypto ecosystem. Being rooted in the Solana ecosystem, Backpack’s strong integration capabilities with Solana have made it one of the beneficiaries of Solana’s rise.

In April last year, Backpack issued Mad Lads, the first xNFT collection on the Solana ecosystem. The NFT project became incredibly popular, with its trading volume briefly ranking first globally, even surpassing Ethereum ecosystem’s blue-chip NFT project BAYC. In October last year, Backpack launched Backpack Exchange and received a VASP license from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. This year, Backpack began frequently expanding to other popular ecosystems, such as Base, Monad, Polygon, and others.

In February this year, Backpack completed a $17 million Series A round at a $120 million valuation, led by Placeholder VC, with participation from Wintermute, Robot Ventures, Selini Capital, Amber Group, and others.

Payments

Huma Finance’s PayFi network is a leading use case in the Solana ecosystem, focused on building a Payment Financing Layer, primarily targeting the trillion-dollar commercial payment, trade finance, and remittance scenarios. Its current core application Arf solves the prepayment problem through blockchain and stablecoins, processing over $2 billion in on-chain transactions.

The Huma Finance team has internet backgrounds from Google, Meta, etc. Engineer Richard Liu worked at Google for nearly 8 years, participating in creating multiple well-known products including Google Trusted Stores and Google Fi. His startup Leap.ai was acquired by Facebook (now Meta).

In September, Huma Finance received $38 million in funding led by Distributed Global, with participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, and TIBAS Ventures, the venture arm of Turkey’s largest private bank İşbank.

Bridge is building a stablecoin-driven fund flow platform aimed at helping businesses accept stablecoin payments. By providing a series of software tools (such as API interfaces), it offers developers seamless conversion between fiat and stablecoins, supporting businesses in integrating stablecoin-based cross-border payments, exchanges, and other services, and even allowing businesses to issue their own stablecoins.

In August, Bridge announced the completion of $58 million in funding, with investors including Sequoia Capital, 1confirmation, Index, Haun Ventures, Ribbit Capital, and other institutions. This was Bridge’s first public appearance. Just two months later, payments unicorn Stripe ultimately acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion, becoming the largest acquisition in crypto history and Stripe’s largest acquisition to date.

Recently, Bridge acquired Web3 wallet infrastructure platform Triangle. As part of the transaction, the Triangle team will join Bridge to help build scalable stablecoin systems.

M⁰ is a decentralized stablecoin issuance protocol aimed at providing cryptocurrency issuance solutions for financial institutions and developers based on quality collateral (such as U.S. Treasury bonds). M⁰ users can earn yields from their held collateral while using USD stablecoins. The protocol will initially launch on Ethereum before expanding to other L1 and L2 networks. The M⁰ team includes core members from projects like MakerDAO and Circle. M⁰ plans to issue a stablecoin $M that is compatible and composable with any DeFi service or architecture.

In June this year, M⁰ completed a $35 million Series A round led by Bain Capital, with participation from Galaxy Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, GSR, and others. M⁰ previously raised $22.5 million in seed funding led by Pantera Capital in early 2023.

CeFi

Deribit is currently the largest cryptocurrency options exchange, with its bitcoin options trading volume accounting for over 80% of the total market volume and ethereum options trading volume accounting for over 90% of the total market volume. Deribit officially launched in June 2016, initially as a fully dedicated BTC trading platform, gradually adding other categories like ETH contracts. Currently, users can trade perpetual contracts, futures, and options contracts on Deribit. Additionally, data from the Deribit platform has become an important industry indicator, such as bitcoin options open interest, options expiry dates, and large transaction data.

In September 2022, Deribit completed $40 million in funding, and in 2021, Deribit completed $100 million in funding. Its investors include Mechanism Capital, Zee Prime Capital, QCP Capital, and others.

Yesterday, bitcoin futures contracts on the Deribit trading platform reached a historic milestone of $100,000, trading at a premium to the spot price.

Bitstamp, established in 2011, is a veteran cryptocurrency exchange considered to have relatively high compliance, with operations across Luxembourg, UK, Slovenia, Singapore, and the US. It is not only one of four crypto companies approved by the UK FCA in the past year but also became the first European crypto exchange to receive in-principle approval in Singapore, and has repeatedly served as Ethereum founder Vitalik’s “go-to” exchange.

In June, Robinhood acquired Bitstamp for $200 million to expand its international footprint. Recently, Bitstamp announced it received a MiFID MTF license from Slovenia’s securities regulator, allowing Bitstamp to offer more complex products to institutional and retail investors, including crypto derivatives.

Securitize, established in 2017, is a compliant RWA tokenization platform for issuing, managing, and trading digital asset securities within the existing U.S. regulatory framework, serving a community of over 1.2 million investors and 3,000 businesses. Simply put, it helps enterprises tokenize assets, allowing real-world assets to seamlessly convert into digital tokens.

Securitize’s tokenized on-chain assets have exceeded $1 billion. In October, Securitize announced the launch of Circle stablecoin (USDC) to USD conversion services, dedicated to BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL). It recently also launched new Securitize Fund Services to simplify operational and compliance tasks related to creating new blockchain-based real-world asset products.

In May this year, Securitize completed $47 million in strategic funding led by BlackRock, with participation from Hamilton Lane, ParaFi Capital, Tradeweb Markets, Aptos Labs, Circle, Paxos, and others.

Wintermute is a London-based cryptocurrency market maker established in 2017. Wintermute’s main business is providing liquidity services for cryptocurrency trading platforms, institutions, and individuals, while also providing market-making services in some cryptocurrency derivatives markets.

After Alameda’s collapse, Wintermute began to emerge prominently. In this bull market, Wintermute has been involved with almost all high market cap tokens. Among the “Big Four” (OP/ARB/STRK/ZK), except for ZK lacking clear data support, Wintermute participates in market making for the rest with large token quantities. Additionally, Wintermute has become Robinhood’s second-largest market maker, accounting for 10% of trading revenue.

Furthermore, Wintermute hasn’t missed the Meme wave. Latest data shows it holds 19 MEME coins with values exceeding $1 million each, with total holdings exceeding $100 million. These MEME coins are mostly from Ethereum and Solana, and most are popular projects, with many listed on Binance.

Wintermute’s last funding round was a $20 million Series B completed in 2022, with investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Sino Global Capital, Hack VC, and others.

Wintermute recently launched a new prediction market OutcomeMarket, which has already launched on Ethereum, Base, and Arbitrum.

Social, NFT, and GameFi

Farcaster is a decentralized social media protocol focused on interoperability, user autonomy, and privacy protection. Unlike traditional social networks, Farcaster doesn’t rely on central servers, aiming to create a censorship-free environment where users have complete control over their social data and social graphs, and can interact across different applications on the network through a single ID. Farcaster is open-source and permissionless, allowing anyone to build applications through its API. Since launch, Farcaster has attracted over 700,000 users. Warpcast is a major application on Farcaster and also the first Farcaster client.

Farcaster has been praised multiple times by Vitalik. In May this year, Farcaster received a $150 million Series A round led by Paradigm at a $1 billion valuation.

Farcaster recently published its roadmap, with its 14-person team divided between protocol, cryptocurrency, and social responsibilities. On the protocol side, they will build and migrate to Snapchain to scale the protocol and provide new FIPs for FC Connect; on the cryptocurrency side, they’re working to improve transaction user experience as part of Frames v2; on the social side, they will continue improving application performance, channel iteration, and user experience.

Story Protocol is an on-chain IP ecosystem hoping to create, manage, and license on-chain IP in a completely new way. It provides a simplified framework to manage the entire lifecycle of IP development, supporting features like source tracking, frictionless licensing, and revenue sharing. Applications built on Story Protocol are designed for creators of all media (prose, images, games, audio, etc.), enabling writers and artists to track the provenance of their work, allowing anyone to contribute and remix while capturing the value of their contributions.

In August this year, Story Protocol developer PIP Labs completed an $80 million Series B round led by a16z crypto, with participation from Polychain, Stability AI SVP and board member Scott Trowbridge, K11 founder Adrian Cheng, digital art collector Cozomo de’Medici, No Capital, and others.

Currently, Story Protocol has launched the IP-focused Layer1 public testnet Iliad and the IP marketplace Color, where users can buy, sell, and discover IP assets and licenses. Story Protocol’s co-founder recently revealed in an interview that they are in discussions with many top NFT projects while also engaging with some of Hollywood’s most renowned creators.

Magic Eden is a cross-chain NFT marketplace. Created in 2021, over three years of development, Magic Eden has evolved from a single NFT trading platform on Solana to a comprehensive ecosystem integrating NFT trading, wallet services, token swaps, and cross-chain functionality. Currently, Magic Eden has integrated ecosystem assets from multiple chains including Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, ApeChain, and others, supporting trading of various NFTs, tokens, and other assets on its platform.

In 2022, Magic Eden completed a $130 million Series B round at a $1.6 billion valuation, co-led by Electric Capital and Greylock.

Magic Eden recently announced its ME token economics, with a total supply of 1 billion ME tokens to be distributed over 4 years, with 50.2% allocated to the community. TGE will launch in a few weeks, and future community-first features will be introduced to reward loyal users, who can earn ME tokens through daily use of Magic Eden products.

Pudgy Penguinsis a collection of 8,888 NFTs accelerating Crypto innovation through IP utilization and community empowerment, with each holder exclusively accessing experiences, events, IP licensing opportunities, and more. The Pudgy Penguins CEO is known by the community as a “marketing genius,” and after being acquired for $2.5 million in 2022, Pudgy Penguins embarked on its IP journey.

Against the backdrop of many NFT projects performing poorly in the market, and in an era where even Bored Ape and Crypto Punks floor prices continue to fall and are no longer mentioned, Pudgy Penguins has consistently been innovating.

In early 2024, Pudgy Penguins launched the IP licensing platform OverpassIP beta; in May, Pudgy Penguins announced a partnership with gaming studio Mythical Games to develop an immersive mobile game launching in 2025, and in the same month, its plush toys sold over 1 million units, with upcoming partnerships with retailers including Walmart, Target, Smiths, Hot Topic; in June, Pudgy Penguins and its NFT licensing platform OverpassIP jointly established a parent company called Igloo; in July, they launched the consumer-focused Layer2 “Abstract” and launched testnet, planning mainnet launch later this year; in September, they launched the 1,000-day Penguin Club (Pengus Club) soulbound token Pudgy Penguin Soulbound Token; in October, Pudgy Penguins announced they would launch a Crypto mobile game (iOS & Android) called Pudgy Party next year in partnership with Mythical Games.

In July this year, Pudgy Penguins’ parent company Igloo announced the completion of $11 million in funding led by Founders Fund. Participants included Distributed Capital, 1kx, Everest Ventures Group, and Selini Capital. This funding will primarily be used to build their Layer2 network Abstract.

Azra Games is a blockchain gaming company aimed at building mainstream collectible battle RPGs. Their first game, Project Arcanas, is a fantasy collectible and fighting arena RPG. Azra Games has been developing its flagship game Project Legends since last year, with the game completing its first closed testing in early October.

The core members of the Azra Games team mostly come from EA. Founder Mark Otero is the former general manager of EA and led the development of “Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes.” Michael Noriega, who was the technical art director for “Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes,” now serves as the game director at Azra Games.

In October this year, Azra Games completed a $42.7 million Series A round with participation from Pantera Capital, a16z crypto, A16Z GAMES, and NFX, bringing Azra’s total funding to $68.3 million.