This Issue's Highlights
According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 21 blockchain-related funding events globally last week (May 18–24), with a total funding volume exceeding $467 million. The capital was heavily concentrated in trading and financial infrastructure, as summarized below:
- The DeFi sector announced five investment and funding events, including PopDEX, a Perp DEX, which raised $30 million led by Foresight Ventures;
- Two investment and financing events were announced in the Web3+AI space, including AI-native bank Catena Labs completing a $30 million Series A round and applying for a U.S. trust bank charter.
- The infrastructure and tools sector announced six investment and financing events, including privacy-focused blockchain startup AmericanFortress completing an $8 million seed round.
- Five funding events were announced in the centralized finance sector, with JPYC, the issuer of the Japanese yen stablecoin, raising approximately ¥5 billion in its Series B round.
- The market direction forecast announced two investment and financing events, with Kalshi securing an additional $200 million from Baillie Gifford and Layer Global.
DeFi
Decentralized derivatives trading protocol Variational has completed a $50 million Series A round led by Dragonfly Capital.
The decentralized derivatives trading protocol Variational has announced the completion of a $50 million Series A round led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, and others. Previously, its seed round of $10.3 million was led by Bain Capital Crypto. Headquartered in the Cayman Islands, Variational provides on-chain derivatives trading—including for "real-world assets" (RWA) such as oil and commodities—by aggregating liquidity from major crypto exchanges and traditional financial market makers, aiming to compete with traditional markets like CME. The project currently operates on a zero-fee, broker-like model; its retail application Omni and the OLP (Omni Liquidity Provider) liquidity pool remain invite-only and will gradually open to the public in select jurisdictions, with plans to expand tradable assets and liquidity partners.
Perp DEX PopDEX raises $30 million in funding, led by Foresight Ventures
PopDEX, a perp DEX, has announced the completion of a $30 million funding round led by Foresight Ventures. The team stated that the funds will be used to inject initial liquidity, enhance trading depth and capital efficiency, accelerate product development, and expand the team and market presence. PopDEX is a trader-centric decentralized perpetual contracts platform focused on capital efficiency, trading experience, and value distribution mechanisms, aiming to build an on-chain derivatives trading platform driven by real trading activity. PopDEX is currently in internal testing.
TownSquare has completed its Pre-A funding round, bringing total funding to $16.25 million.
The RWA yield protocol TownSquare has announced the completion of its Pre-A funding round, bringing its total raised capital to approximately $16.25 million. The funds will be used to advance yield products based on institutional strategies and cross-chain brokerage services. The protocol focuses on bringing institutional-backed on-chain asset yields to retail users, with currently around $36 billion in institutional-backed assets on-chain offering yields exceeding the traditional 3%–5% range of U.S. Treasuries. TownSquare will build yield vaults around stablecoins such as USD1, tokenized gold, USDC, cbBTC, and other RWAs, and is collaborating with partners like World Liberty Financial to advance a $100 million USD1 pipeline initiative.
Cycles raised $6.4 million to build a multilateral clearing protocol and launch its stablecoin, Cycles Pay.
Cycles, a multilateral clearing startup founded by Cosmos co-founder Ethan Buchman, has raised a $6.4 million new round led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Compound VC, Primitive Ventures, and others, bringing its total funding to $8.7 million. Cycles aims to build an open clearing protocol that enables more trades to be cleared among multiple parties with less capital, using zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), trusted execution environments (TEE), and graph algorithms. Lynq and FalconX are among the first partners of Cycles Prime and will participate in a testnet pilot with market makers, prime brokers, exchanges, and multiple top-tier trading firms. The company has also launched Cycles Pay, a stablecoin integrated with its clearing engine.
Digital asset trading platform Temple Digital Group has completed a private funding round led by SBI Group.
Digital asset trading platform Temple Digital Group has completed a private funding round led by SBI Group. The specific amount raised has not been disclosed. Temple is using the new capital to expand its product offerings and is preparing for a regulated market listing in the second half of 2026. Temple Digital Group operates a compliant trading, liquidity, and asset issuance platform on the Canton Network, enabling privacy-preserving, blockchain-based digital asset transactions. It previously raised $5 million in seed funding in October last year, led by Paper Ventures.
AI
AI-native bank Catena Labs completes a $30 million Series A funding round and applies for a U.S. trust bank charter.
Catena Labs, an AI-native bank founded by Sean Neville, co-founder of stablecoin issuer Circle, has raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Acrew Capital and a16z crypto, with participation from Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, QED, and others. Catena Labs is building tools to enable AI agents to securely execute financial transactions and has applied to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for a national trust bank charter in New York to handle payments and custody of customer funds. The platform is currently invite-only and allows users to set risk controls such as spending limits, approved payee ranges, and account balance caps for AI agents. Neville stated that the company is still expanding its human team.
The AI agent settlement layer AEON has completed an $8 million pre-seed round led by YZi Labs.
AEON, focused on building the settlement layer for the agentic economy, has raised $8 million in pre-seed funding led by YZi Labs, with participation from IDG Capital, HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, Oak Grove Ventures, and others. The specific valuation and round structure have not been disclosed. AEON plans to use the funds to build settlement infrastructure enabling value exchange between AI agents, and has already launched its first AI payment product in May, allowing AI agents to connect with over 50 million physical merchants worldwide. The project has also partnered with BNB Chain to launch its native product, x402 Facilitator, which provides verifiable transactions, on-chain settlement, and tamper-proof receipts for service providers within the BNB ecosystem, and plans to deepen collaborations with partners such as Coinbase and BNB Chain.
Infrastructure & Tools
Privacy-focused blockchain startup AmericanFortress completes $8 million seed round.
Privacy-focused blockchain startup AmericanFortress has completed an $8 million seed round led jointly by SAVA Digital Assets Fund, Moon Pursuit Capital, and 0G Labs. The company has also launched a patent-pending post-quantum signature scheme designed to protect existing crypto assets from future quantum attacks without requiring large-scale asset migration.
This proposal safeguards approximately 1.1 million bitcoins owned by Satoshi Nakamoto and nearly 5 million bitcoins in dormant accounts, with a total value of around $400 billion. By using a backward-compatible soft fork and zero-knowledge proofs, it freezes and secures vulnerable pre-BIP32 Bitcoin addresses, with the community later deciding through governance how to handle the frozen assets. The proposal has negligible impact on the performance of major blockchains and requires only updates to node and wallet software. A quantum-safe solution is expected to be ready for discussion in the coming weeks and will be officially launched in Paris on June 2.
Stablecoin infrastructure company Checker completes $8 million funding.
Stablecoin infrastructure startup Checker has raised a total of $8 million in Pre-Seed and Seed rounds, with investors including Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures, Framework Ventures, as well as Bitso, Airtm, DFS Lab, Onigiri Capital, SNZ Capital, and Velocity. Checker provides a single API to institutions, enabling B2B payment providers and other financial institutions to access stablecoin liquidity, accounts, and compliance capabilities. It currently serves over 30 licensed institutions globally and has processed more than $3 billion in stablecoin transactions over the past 12 months, accounting for approximately 1% of global B2B stablecoin payment volume annually. The company plans to use the new funding to expand into Brazil, Kenya, Hong Kong, and the U.S., while launching embedded lending (settlement financing) and AI-powered agents for account opening, compliance verification, and fund management.
Bitcoin hardware wallet manufacturer Foundation has completed a $6.4 million funding round led by Fulgur Ventures.
Bitcoin hardware wallet provider Foundation has completed a $6.4 million new funding round led by Fulgur Ventures, with participation from Arche Capital and others, to expand from Bitcoin self-custody wallets into use cases such as identity, multi-factor authentication, and AI agent authorization. This round brings the company’s total funding to $16.5 million; valuation and round structure were not disclosed. Foundation also announced that its flagship device, Passport Prime, is now available for sale to all users, integrating a Bitcoin hardware wallet, FIDO security key, 2FA storage, a secrets vault, and 50GB of encrypted storage, with an emphasis on “human authorization” via dedicated hardware. Additionally, the company is expanding access to its KeyOS developer platform and plans to launch the KeyOS app store by the end of Q2, with initial partners including Cake Wallet.
Cross-chain platform Squid completes a $6 million strategic funding round led by North Island Ventures.
The cross-chain infrastructure platform Squid has completed a $6 million strategic funding round to launch a new consumer-facing product. The round was led by North Island Ventures, with participation from Ripple, Dialectic, and Borderless. Additionally, angel investors including Georgios Vlachos, co-founder and former director of Axelar, Connor Howe, founder of Enso Finance, and Dan Lynch, founder of Constructive, also participated in this round. This new funding brings Squid’s total raised to $13.5 million, following previous seed and strategic rounds of $3.5 million and $4 million in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
Lightweight crypto wallet Sorted Wallet completes $4.4 million seed round led by Tether and Gnosis.
Tether and Gnosis jointly led the seed round of Sorted Wallet, a lightweight mobile crypto wallet, raising a total of $4.4 million, including $3.4 million in equity financing. Individual angel investors such as Movement, Angel Invest Group, and the founder of RWA.io also participated, with an additional $1 million coming from strategic support by Vox Solutions. Launched in 2022, Sorted Wallet has a mere 10MB app size, making it the lightest crypto wallet available, with over 500,000 downloads to date. Its fastest-growing markets include Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Bangladesh, and Madagascar.
Tether announces investment in cross-border financial platform LemFi
Tether has announced an investment in the cross-border financial platform LemFi to promote the use of stablecoins in remittance scenarios in emerging markets and expand the reach of borderless financial infrastructure. LemFi primarily serves cross-border users living and working in the UK, US, Canada, and Europe, providing them with financial services for remittances to Africa and Asia. Tether stated that this investment will support LemFi in introducing USD₮ as a settlement layer across key cross-border corridors, replacing traditional SWIFT multi-day settlement processes to enable lower-cost, near-instant cross-border transfers.
The two parties also plan to further expand the stablecoin infrastructure by gradually integrating USD₮ into LemFi’s broader product ecosystem to deliver more stable, transparent, and convenient financial services. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that the company aims to promote global financial inclusion by supporting scalable financial solutions and believes that cross-border payments should place greater emphasis on speed, cost, and transparency.
Centralized Finance
HashKey Capital has completed a $40 million strategic investment in the options trading platform SignalPlus.
HashKey Capital’s fund has announced the completion of a $40 million strategic investment in the options trading platform SignalPlus, including $20 million in cash from HashKey Group. SignalPlus specializes in options trading systems, automated market-making, and structured product solutions, and is Asia’s leading institutional-grade crypto derivatives platform with a significant market share in mainstream options markets. This investment represents HashKey Capital’s continued commitment since SignalPlus’s seed round, with both parties set to deepen their strategic partnership to jointly drive product innovation and global institutional business expansion.
JPYC, the issuer of the Japanese yen stablecoin, raised approximately ¥5 billion in its Series B funding round.
JPYC Corporation, the issuer of the Japanese yen stablecoin, has announced the completion of its Series B funding round, raising a total of 5 billion JPY (approximately $31.4 million) across its first and second funding rounds. Four new institutional investors have joined: Life Design Fund, IHD STRATEGY FUND, Awagin Future Creation Investment Limited Partnership, and Meiji Yasuda Future Co-creation Investment Limited Partnership. The funds raised in this round will be used to expand the ecosystem in financial and Web3 sectors, further accelerating the adoption of the Japanese yen stablecoin JPYC.
Eisen completes a $10 million Series A round led by MissionOG
Eisen announced the completion of a $10 million Series A round led by MissionOG, bringing its total funding to $18.5 million. Previously, the company had raised an $8.5 million seed round led by Index Ventures, which had not been publicly disclosed until now. Investors also included First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Homebrew, and Restive Ventures.
Paris-based crypto exchange Ouinex has completed a new equity financing round of $3.5 million, bringing its total funding to $9 million.
Paris-based crypto exchange Ouinex has announced the completion of a new equity financing round of $3.5 million, bringing its total raised funding to $9 million—all from over 10,000 retail and professional traders on the platform, with no venture capital involvement. Ouinex was founded in 2022 by former FXCM executive Ilies Larbi. Its core differentiator is the rejection of the traditional CLOB (Central Limit Order Book) model in favor of a forex and CFD market structure: market makers submit only bid and ask prices to the platform without seeing retail orders or placing orders directly into the order book; Ouinex then selects the best quote and adds a spread to provide clients with a one-sided price, claiming to “compete only with the market, not against its users.” The platform holds licenses in South Africa, Saint Vincent, Australia, and Poland, and operates a single matching engine under KYC compliance.
Fintech company Jia has raised $3 million in seed funding, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and others.
Fintech company Jia has raised $3 million in seed funding from investors including Coinbase Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, and A100x, with additional investments from TCG and Hashed Emergent, bringing total funding to $7.3 million. The new capital will be used to expand Jia’s integrated financial platform to over one million small and medium-sized enterprises in the Philippines. Jia provides Filipino SMEs with a financial operating system that combines working capital, business banking, and cash flow tools. Through its proprietary AI credit model, Ossicone, trained on data from Southeast Asian SMEs, businesses can convert unpaid invoices into cash within 24 hours—without collateral or weeks of approval.
Prediction markets
Prediction market Kalshi raises an additional $200 million from Baillie Gifford and Layer Global.
According to Bloomberg, sources familiar with the matter said that the prediction market Kalshi raised an additional $200 million from two new investors, Baillie Gifford and Layer Global, expanding its previous $1 billion funding round led by Coatue Management, with the company’s valuation remaining at $22 billion.
Earlier this month, Kalshi announced the completion of a $1 billion Series F round led by Coatue Management, valuing the company at $22 billion. Other participants included Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley, and ARK Invest. Kalshi’s monthly trading volume in April exceeded $14 billion, with annualized revenue surpassing $1.5 billion.
The BNB Chain ecosystem project IOTrader has completed a $3.8 million strategic funding round, with participation from Animoca Brands and others.
The BNB Chain ecosystem's perpetual contracts and prediction market protocol, IOTrader, has completed a $38 million strategic funding round, with investors including Animoca Brands, ViaBTC Capital, Everwood Capital, CANDAQ, WAGMI Ventures, Credit Scend, and Web3 Labs. Over the past 11 months, the protocol has integrated perpetual futures, prediction markets, custom event markets, and AI-assisted trading into a single wallet experience, achieving cumulative trading volume exceeding $1 billion and attracting tens of thousands of monthly active traders. The IOI token has not yet been launched; the smart contracts have undergone third-party security audits, and the whitepaper has been submitted to the Central Bank of Ireland in compliance with the EU’s MiCA framework.
Other
Tomoland completes a $2 million funding round led by Sky9 Capital.
The mobile UGC gaming platform Tomoland has completed a $2 million funding round led by Sky9 Capital, with participation from WAGMI Ventures and Aureus Dealers. Tomoland positions itself as a mobile user-generated content (UGC) gaming platform that enables users to create and edit game worlds, further expanding the intersection of blockchain gaming and creator economies.
Acquisition
MoonPay acquires cross-chain routing and liquidity company Decent, and simultaneously launches its API product, MoonPay Trade.
MoonPay has announced the acquisition of the cross-chain routing and liquidity company Decent.xyz, with the transaction amount reported by sources to be in the eight-digit USD range. Concurrent with the acquisition, MoonPay has launched MoonPay Trade, an institutional-grade unified API that integrates Decent’s cross-chain routing algorithms, bridge infrastructure, and liquidity layer with MoonPay’s existing fiat on-ramp and off-ramp and compliance systems. This enables one-click execution, settlement, conversion, and payment across more than 200 chains and protocols, while providing the underlying execution layer for MoonPay Institutional’s asset tokenization business. MoonPay has recently acquired several infrastructure projects—including DFlow, Dawn, and Sodot—to build an end-to-end crypto-fiat infrastructure stack.
Zama acquires TokenOps to advance institutional crypto token distribution
FHE privacy company Zama has acquired the enterprise-grade token lifecycle management platform TokenOps, applying Fully Homomorphic Encryption to scenarios such as token vesting, airdrops, and cap table management. TokenOps reports that it has processed over $2 billion in token distributions. Through this acquisition, token issuers can encrypt critical information—including token allocations, release schedules, and recipient addresses—on-chain under the ERC-7984 confidential token standard, reducing signal leakage and front-running risks caused by on-chain transparency. The technology has already been deployed in institutional distribution by the RWA protocol KAIO, and Zama’s own ZAMA token team and investors are using TokenOps’ encrypted vesting solution. The TokenOps brand will continue operating independently and will open its confidential tools to additional issuers.
Standard Chartered Bank plans to acquire Zodia's crypto custody business; a non-binding offer has been accepted by Zodia's shareholders and creditors.
Standard Chartered plans to acquire the crypto custody business of its majority-owned subsidiary, Zodia Custody, following acceptance of a non-binding offer by Zodia’s shareholders and creditors. Upon completion of the transaction, Zodia’s digital asset custody operations will be integrated into Standard Chartered’s existing infrastructure, paving the way for custody services in new markets such as the UK and Australia. Zodia’s infrastructure business will be spun off into an independent SaaS company, Zodia Solutions, to be operated by Julian Sawyer, current CEO of Zodia Custody, and majority-owned by Standard Chartered’s venture capital arm. Whether existing Zodia investors—including Northern Trust, Emirates NBD, National Australia Bank, and SBI Holdings—will remain in Zodia Solutions is currently under negotiation.