🟣 Raises, acquisitions and memecoins

Lots of investments - some more serious than others

Author

Carolina
June 04, 2024

Welcome back to 0xResearch – quick hitting alpha for the crypto degens. Here's what we got for you today:

  • Bitcoin ETFs inflow streak continues

  • Avail raises $43 million in series A

  • Polygon acquires ZK firm Toposware

  • Memecoins keep winning

BTC and ETH price action remains fairly uneventful, showing much less volatility in the past weeks than observed all throughout April and until mid May. Moreover, US spot bitcoin ETFs are currently in a 15-day streak of positive daily inflows.

Founders Fund, Dragonfly and Cyber Fund co-lead a $43 million series A for modular blockchain Avail, bringing its total funding to $75 million. The project had raised $27 million in seed funding in February and previously $5 million in a pre-seed round. Avail is developing three products: Avail DA (data availability layer); Avail Nexus, a permissionless framework that connects multiple rollups or blockchains; and Avail Fusion Security, which will allow Avail to leverage assets such as BTC and ETH to enhance its security, in addition to its native token AVAIL, through a process similar to restaking. Avail DA is currently in its incentivized testnet phase and this new investment round comes ahead of its expected mainnet and token launch in the next few weeks. The Nexus and Fusion Security products will be launched after the mainnet.

Polygon Labs acquires ZK cryptography firm Toposware, reaching a total of $1 billion invested in zero knowledge technology. Previous investments included the acquisitions of the companies Hermez and Mir, whose founders now lead Polygon Labs' in-house ZK teams. Toposware is a blockchain research firm that helped develop Polygon’s Type-1 prover. Polygon Labs has long been betting that ZK tech will be key to scaling Ethereum's blockchain ecosystem and this latest effort emerges as one more step towards that goal.

On less serious news, memecoins show no signs of slowing down, and Pump.fun on Solana is one of the main winners in this rally. The protocol’s revenue just passed $30 million with creators launching tens of thousands of new coins daily, apparently forgetting the $1.9 million exploit that happened just two weeks ago. The newest trend reflects celebrities’ involvement, like we’ve seen with Caitlyn Jenner and Iggy Azalae, bringing further attention from outside the typical pool of crypto traders. The return of Roaring Kitty to X and Reddit also helped reignite this rally, in particular for cat-themed memecoins.

– Carolina (X: @GoldDefi)

CORZ surge:

Core Scientific, a Nasdaq-listed American bitcoin mining and hosting services provider, announced today that it signed a series of 12-year contracts with AI Hyperscaler CoreWeave. It expects the partnership to generate a total cumulative revenue of over $3.5 billion over the 12-year period. The relationship aims at diversifying Core Scientific’s business model, balancing its portfolio between bitcoin mining and alternative compute hosting. CoreWeave will fund all the capital investments needed to fulfill Core Scientific’s plans to supply 200 megawatts of infrastructure and revamp its existing sites to accommodate CoreWeave’s operations. Core Scientific's shares CORZ surged 40% in pre-market trading after this announcement.

The proliferation of new perp DEXs has led to fragmented liquidity across various DEXs and chains. Our latest report, made free thanks to Vertex, shows how Edge is tackling cross-chain liquidity fragmentation with its synchronous orderbook liquidity. Check it out here!

On May 1, Aave Labs introduced two Temp Checks on the Aave Governance forum: Aave V4 and Aave 2030. These proposals outline a vision for several substantial innovations and iterations to the Aave Protocol, and seek to engage the community for discussion and feedback on the roadmap. These changes aim to improve capital efficiency, enhance chain abstraction, and support the adoption of Aave’s GHO stablecoin. At large, the proposed changes seek to both defend Aave’s incumbent position as the premier onchain money market, but also position the protocol to remain competitive for the years to come.

Pyth is set to benefit from numerous fundamental tailwinds, most notably the insatiable demand for high frequency trading and price data that arises naturally as financial markets mature and complexity compounds.

Partnering with EtherFi and Angle, the fully on-chain perp DEX features bespoke collateral.

The NYSE went down yesterday after a glitch caused a string of erroneous trades. Does DeFi fix this?

The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.