Gm.
Please enjoy the January Deal Flow Digest, a monthly newsletter recapping recent web3 funding rounds.
Let’s dive in!
Developers in Web3
January Prices were up by 30+%, a welcome relief from the last year of carnage. But this isn’t a newsletter about prices.
Ultimately, prices will fluctuate, but developer interest is perhaps a better indicator of the growth and health of an emerging industry such as Web3.
Looking at developer interest shows how many people are actually building, writing code and creating value within the web3 ecosystem.
On 17-Jan-23, the Electric Capital Developer Report was published. This report is a beast, and incredibly valuable. This is their 4th annual report and a massive kudos to Electric Capital for continuing to publish this great resource.
Highly recommend you check it out.
The TLDR (From Maria Shen on Twitter), hits some of the key points:
Monthly devs GREW 5% YoY while prices are down 70%+
23k+ monthly devs
61k NEW devs touched crypto code in 2022
471k monthly code commits
3.9k monthly devs in DeFi (only 50% in Ethereum ecosystem)
Several ecosystems outside of Ethereum have 500+ devs and are growing through this bear market
Keep in mind this is tracking only open-source developers, working on “original” or “unique” code, so it doesn’t count forked code. It also is only open-source developers, so developers working at closed-source crypto codebases - e.g. Coinbase, Alchemy, Magic Eden, etc. Employees are not included in these figures.
The idea here is that devs are “sticky.”
In the previous bear following the Jan’18 peak, prices dropped by >90% and developers stayed pretty much flat. Now, prices are roughly equal to the previous Jan’18 peak, but developers are +297%.
NFTs are very much worth mentioning here. How big is the NFT developer community? From the report:
900+ devs/month work on open NFT projects
+299% monthly devs since 2021
BUT developer engagement is more than likely is not the best way to measure growth in the NFT ecosystem. Many NFT projects are closed-source & most NFT projects do not require lots of on-chain code, so they’d be excluded from these developer figures.
This is a big report. But I like these trends, and these are conservative estimates of devs counted - there’s a LOT more devs “contributing” to web3 (closed-source, etc.).
Web3 isn’t going anywhere as long as there continues to be increased developer interest, smart entrepreneurs entering the space and building infrastructure to support the next onboarding of new people into web3.
Top Five Crypto Funding Rounds
KreditBee | $200 Million | Series D | 1/5/23
KreditBee has extended its Series D funding round with a $100 million investment from private equity giant Advent International. The Advent money tops up the first tranche one of the Series D, which also raised $100 million and saw participation from Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group along with existing investors Premji Invest, Motilal Oswal Alternates, NewQuest Capital Partners, and Mirae Asset Venture Investments.
Beontag | $130 Milion | 1/16/23
Beontag has secured a €120 million debt raise led by Deutsche Bank — demonstrating confidence in market growth. Smart tags created by Beontag's IoT technology outfit Temera, have already been deployed by luxury brands including Alexander McQueen, Dolce & Gabbana and Bulgari enabling customers to access post-sale services and experiences via their smart phones — across both web2 and web3.
Blockstream | $125 Million | 1/23/23
The $125 million raise was financed by convertible note and a secured loan, Blockstream announced on Jan. 24. Venture capital firm Kingsway Capital led the convertible note raise, with additional participation from Fulgur Ventures. Cohen & Cohen Capital Markets, part of J.V.B. Financial Group, advised Blockstream on the deal.
Quicknode | $60 Million | Series B |1/23/23
QuickNode, a blockchain deployment platform, has raised $60 million in a Series B round for an $800 million valuation.
Plai Labs | $32 Million | Seed | 1/18/23
Plai Labs completed a $32 million seed round, lead by Andreessen Horowitz(a16z). Plai Labs aims to use the funding to grow its team and hire developers to build decentralized social platforms that couple Web3 and artificial intelligence.
Click to see all of January’s funding rounds here:
Hackathons
Ongoing
FVM Space Warp Hackathon: Jan 20-Feb 10
Virtual. The world’s first hackathon on the Ethereum-compatible layer of the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM)
Fantom Hackathon: Ends March 8th
Virtual. Create innovative, scalable, and functional apps on Fantom. $50,000 in prizes
Grizzlython: Feb 2 - Mar 14
Virtual. Over $700,000 in prizes for Solana projects across mobile, payments, consumer, infrastructure, defi, and DAOs
Upcoming
ETHDenver #BUIDL Week: Feb 24-Mar 1
IRL. ETHDenver’s hackathon proceeding Ethereum’s largest event.
We are Millions: Mar 1-21
Virtual. “We are millions building a better web. Let’s not f* up this time.” Events and workshops over three weeks sponsored by Swarm, Nordic Game, KIWIX and Gitcoin
Scaling Ethereum: Mar 10-29
Virtual. ETHGlobal Hackathon. Three weeks of hacking and summits devoted to pushing the envelope and building the future infrastructure of our Ethereum
Recently Completed
Aptos Seoul Hack: Feb 1 - 3
Aptos’ first major hackathon in Seoul Korea.
Demo Days
Recent Demo Days
The Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day
Beacon Web3 2022 Graduating Class
That’s a wrap for January. Enjoyed this newsletter or the data? Please share it with a friend, and THANK YOU for your time.
Good luck out there!
Ben & Brady
Some large funding rounds. Great to see!
This is really useful information, thanks for posting!