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A handful of early stage crypto startups received over $50 million from investors this week.<\/p>\n
The biggest winner to announce their round was Blackbird Labs, an NFT membership application that connects its users to restaurants. It secured an impressive $24 million.<\/p>\n
The funding round was led by a16z, with participation from Amex Ventures and Bolt by QED, among others.<\/p>\n
Blackbird itself is built on top of Coinbase\u2019s layer-2 network, Base, and gives restaurants insights into their customers\u2019 dining preferences. For diners, the app rewards them with FLY tokens which can be used for rewards at participating restaurants.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This new funding will give Blackbird the opportunity to bring more offerings into the market, the company noted in a press release<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the infrastructure and privacy side, Fairblock, a research and development team focused on advanced cryptography, has secured $2.5 million in a pre-seed funding<\/a> round led by Galileo. Lemniscap, Dialectic, Robot Ventures, GSR, Chorus One, Dorahacks, and Reverie also participated in the round.\u00a0<\/p>\n This funding will be used by Fairblock to advance its development of conditional cryptographic encryption and enable pre-execution privacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n In an earlier interview with Blockworks, Fairblock co-founder Peyman Momeni said that the company wanted to lower the risks for average crypto users to enter the space.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to build something that gives the freedom to users to optionally keep their transactions and protect the contents of the transactions. Transactions can be decrypted under certain conditions, such as a deadline or specific prices,\u201d Momeni said.<\/p>\n Perpetual exchanges are also gaining some attention from investors. Notably, Ostium Labs has secured $3.5 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst and LocalGlobe.<\/p>\n This latest funding will be used by the company to help build a decentralized perpetuals exchange for real world assets (RWAs<\/a>).<\/p>\n \u201cThe market lacks a dedicated platform for trading real world assets in a format already familiar to DeFi power users \u2014 catering to the increasing demand for on-chain exposure to diversifying bets on macro beyond crypto,\u201d the company wrote on X<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n A public testnet of the DEX will be available on Arbitrum this quarter, and the company anticipates that it will launch mainnet early next year, depending on audits.\u00a0<\/p>\n Other notable fundraises<\/strong><\/p>\n Don\u2019t miss the next big story \u2013 join our\u00a0free daily newsletter<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
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