Circle’s 15 potential projects to watch in 2023

Circle's top 15 projects to watch in 2023.

“Pre-understanding, layout of potential projects favored by large institutions”

Original author: MooMs, encryption researcher

Original translation: Leo, BlockBeats

Circle, the issuer of USDC, is one of the largest companies in the cryptocurrency industry. According to CoinGecko data, the current market value of USDC is about 28.4 billion US dollars, and its investment department, Circle Ventures, currently holds a large amount of funds available for investment. Cryptocurrency researcher MooMs wrote an article about “Circle 2023 Investment Projects”, which is translated by BlockBeats as follows:

• Perform data analysis and comparison for the (3,3) section projects, bribery efficiency ranks as follows: Thena > Velo > Chronos > Pearl.
• New Project Preview | LSDFi: Lucid Finance to Assist Emerging LST Protocol in Gaining Liquidity
• Exploring the Ethereum Layer2 network Fraxchain

Circle is valued at 9 billion US dollars and is one of the largest companies in the cryptocurrency industry. Here is a complete list of Circle Ventures’ investment projects from 2023 to date:

Alkimiya

Alkimiya is a decentralized protocol dedicated to the consensus capital market, which allows consensus producers (PoW miners, pledge validators) to create contracts supported by underlying “consensus resources” (such as hash power).

Financing amount: more than 7.2 million US dollars, investors also include Dragonfly, etc.

Hourglass

Hourglass is a token market that binds trading time. Through TBT (Time-Bound Token), the market will allow users to obtain liquidity of their locked assets by selling time limit rights in the secondary market, enabling users to find promised liquidity through long-term consistency and protocols to obtain returns.

Financing amount: 4.2 million US dollars, investors also include Eletric Capital, etc.

LI.FI Protocol

LiFi Protocol is a cross-bridge and DEX aggregator. LiFi can cross any on-chain asset to the required asset on the selected chain, thereby providing an excellent user experience.

Financing amount: 23 million US dollars, investors also include 6MV, Coinbase Ventures, etc.

DFlow

DFlow is a decentralized order flow market, supported by the order flow payment (PFOF) model of the DFlow protocol, which aims to support order flow from various L1 chains and Rollups. On the one hand, brokers create, manage, monitor and analyze order flow auctions, while market makers submit bids on the other side. The winner of the auction obtains the exclusive right to execute the relevant order.

Financing amount: $7.5 million (Note from BlockBeats: The total funding for the two rounds is $7.5 million, with Circle Ventures participating in the $5.5 million round), and investors include The Spartan Group, Multicoin Capital, and others.

Affine DeFi

Affine is an investment platform that allows users to purchase a basket of assets (rebalanced vault) to invest in multiple strategies at the same time.

Financing amount: $6.9 million, and investors include The Spartan Group, Jump Crypto, and others.

Term Labs

Term is a scalable, fixed-rate DeFi liquidity solution that enables participants to determine a fair and transparent single market clearing rate through weekly auctions.

Financing amount: $2.5 million, and investors include Robot Ventures, Electric Capital, and others.

Catalyst

Catalyst is an open-source protocol that also serves as a permissionless liquidity layer for the future of modular blockchains. With Catalyst, any new modular chain can automatically connect to liquidity and exchange with any chain—including liquidity hubs like Ethereum and Cosmos—for seamless liquidity connections and asset exchange between blockchains.

Financing amount: $4.2 million, and investors include Robot Ventures, The Spartan Group, and others.

Architect

Architect is an infrastructure solution that provides low-latency trading for traders designed for institutions and large traders seeking secure, robust, and customizable trading tools.

Financing amount: $5 million, and investors include Coinbase Ventures, and others.

Huma Finance

Huma Finance is a DeFi project that allows users to borrow against future income streams without collateral. Similarly, users can also contribute to liquidity pools and earn rewards from idle funds while supporting the community.

Financing amount: $8.3 million, with investors including BlockingraFi Capital.

OpenTrade

OpenTrade provides access to on-chain structured financial products backed by investment-grade real-world assets (RWA) in the Web3 financial management field, acquiring short-term RWA investments through a global network of financial institutions, asset management companies, and B2B networks, and building them into on-chain financial products that generate income.

Financing amount: $1.5 million, with investors including Polygon Labs.

Fractal

Fractal allows all on-chain assets – from cryptocurrencies to real-world assets – to interact and collateralize through a universal margin account.

Financing amount: $6 million, with investors including The Spartan Group.

In addition to introducing Circle’s recent DeFi investments, I also listed their recent investments in blockchain services and infrastructure, as follows:

TipLink: TipLink is a lightweight wallet designed to make transferring digital assets as easy as sending a link. Crypto owners can create TipLinks and send the link to anyone on any platform (text, discord, email, etc.). Once the user connects their wallet to TipLink, they can deposit funds and then transfer ownership by sharing the link. Each transaction also creates a new wallet, so recipients don’t need to download a new browser extension or app to use the money. And if the recipient doesn’t claim the funds, the sender can still reclaim them.

zkME: zkMe, a zero-knowledge identity oracle provider, allows users to encrypt their data and prove their eligibility on their own devices using ZKP to effectively verify their eligibility while protecting their privacy.

Msafe: Msafe is the first and only multi-signature, non-custodial digital asset management solution on Aptos so far.

Rarimo: Rarimo is a multi-chain protocol designed to address liquidity, accessibility, and interoperability issues between non-fungible and fungible use cases. Rarimo makes it easier to work across different chains, allowing users to execute token transfers, token stakes, and providing cross-chain ownership proofs. Rarify Labs behind it serves as a service provider and community member for Rarimo.

TipLink is one of my favorite and very creative projects.

Finally, in 2023, Circle was also one of the investors in LayerZero Labs’ $120 million Series B financing, and LayerZero is also a highly regarded full-chain interoperability protocol. We hope that L0 will have a bright future!

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