How is the cryptocurrency ecosystem doing since the beginning of the year in terms of fundraising? Is there a significant difference with 2022? Who received the most funding? Let’s answer all these questions with data from the first 5 months.
Fundraising represents $3.4 billion since January
Between January 1 and May 31, the cryptocurrency ecosystem identified 350 fundraisers for $3.4 billion.
Over the past 5 months, February has been the most successful, with $878.77 million raised in 95 rounds:
Figure 1 — Fundraising since January 2023
Compared to 2022 which had nearly $13.97 billion in funds raised over the same period, we are there facing a fall of 75.6%.
However, this does not mean that there have been fewer fundraisers. On the contrary, these financing operations have even increased by 30%i.e. 269 against 350. The table below gives us a month-by-month comparison:
| Month | Number of fundraisers in 2022 | Number of fundraisers in 2023 |
| January | 26 | 66 |
| FEBRUARY | 42 | 95 |
| March | 66 | 68 |
| April | 61 | 60 |
| May | 74 | 61 |
Figure 2 — Comparison of the number of fundraisers from one year to the next
Finally, the previous data reflects the excesses committed during the bull run, although the bear market was already beginning to take hold.
The figures for 2023 show that projects are less funded, but that there are more of them to build. This therefore bodes well for the next few years, as reduced funding could encourage the seriousness of the actors involved, forcing them to establish more solid bases for their ideas.
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Who raises the most money?
The biggest fundraisers
If we focus on the top 10 biggest fundraisers this year, they alone represent 25.4% of the amounts invested in the Web3 ecosystem with $864.4 million.
Among the projects and companies concerned, 4 have managed to raise more than 100 million dollars in one fell swoop.
Thus, we count the Bitcoin infrastructure developer Blockstream, with 125 million dollars, the LayerZero bridge for 120 million dollars, the very controversial Worldcoin project, which raised 115 million dollars, and the manufacturer of hardware wallets Ledger with 109 millions of dollars.
To bounce back on the excesses pointed out previously, over the same period, 2022 had 37 fundraisers over $100 millionincluding that of the Luna Foundation Guard at $1 billion a few months before the crash.
Funding by sector
We can also look at this financing from a sectoral point of view, among which 4 families stand out more than the others :
- infrastructure;
- Decentralized finance (DeFi);
- Gaming;
- Non-fungible tokens (NFT).
The table below makes it possible to realize their distribution. However, note that these figures are most likely underestimated. And for good reason, the data extracted from DefiLlama includes 106 unreferenced fundraisers, which may relate to one of these categories or others benefiting from less significant representation:
| Sectors | Number of fundraisers since January 2023 | Funds raised (millions of dollars) |
| Infrastructure | 60 | 802.26 |
| Challenge | 55 | 229.82 |
| Gaming | 34 | 348.13 |
| NFT | 33 | 179.42 |
Figure 3 — Fundraising by main sectors
Still, the chart above supports findings made earlier in the year that the NFT market is suffering from a downturn. Furthermore, we can point out the good health of the “Infrastructure” categoryalthough this one is very generalist, counting solutions like LayerZero, or companies building Business to business (B to B) products like the Swiss company Taurus.
In view of all these elements, although the sums invested are less significant than last year, we have thus been able to observe that the various projects of the cryptocurrency ecosystem always managed to raise funds.
This is in line with conclusions made throughout the bear market: the industry continues to build. We will therefore come back to these analyzes in the months to come, in order to judge their evolution.
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Source: DefiLlama
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I timidly discovered the world of blockchain at the end of 2018 during my quest for financial freedom. Initially invested moderately, it was only two years later that I took the gamble of betting everything on the movement that was taking shape then. I then dedicate 2021 to training myself better to acquire more knowledge and seriousness. As I often like to say: I still have a billion things to learn. And what I do know, I want to share with you.
Vincent Mayor
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