December 01 – December 07 (Published December 10th)
PERSPECTIVES by Steve Payne
38 Crypto Private Financings Raised: $216.6M
Rolling 3-Month-Average: $609.4M
Rolling 52-Week Average: $400.8M
Last week’s private financings again trended down. And again, we repeat that these deals have been worked on for months and just recently announced, so we don’t expect that current events are the prime drivers of activity. But check again with us next week….
There were two $50M rounds announced, both in our Developer Tools & Infrastructure subsector of crypto. Digital Assets, the Canton Network developer, raised $50M from trad investors including BNY Mellon, iCapital, Nasdaq, and S&P Global. This follows a $135M round announced earlier this year. Canton is building a privacy-focused, public Layer 1 blockchain designed for financial institutions.
The other $50M round was an announced commitment by Bitcoin mining pioneer Bitfury to Gonka. Bitfury, which spun out multi-billion dollar NASDAQ-listed mining leaders Cipher Mining and Hut8, last month announced a $1B fund to invest in “ethical companies” in segments including AI, quantum computing, self-sovereign identity and decentralized systems. Decentralized AI compute network Gonka fits nicely.
Bitfury CEO and co-founder Val Vavilov states that decentralized machine intelligence now stands among the most important frontiers and claims Gonka advances that frontier at exceptional speed. As with most decentralized compute providers, Gonka networks individual and data center compute into one open cloud – in this case, with the power of more than 6000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. Gonka also features a unique Proof-of-Work model, designed to channel hardware power into productive AI tasks versus just consensus.
Decentralized AI attempts to solve several problems: concentration of compute with a few hyperscalers, access, transparency, data ownership and sharing incentives, etc. Players like Akash and Hyra Networks have been building out decentralized AI networks, and in the past six months we’ve seen a handful of new financings: ARO Network, Sparkchain AI, AINX, Manifold Lab, Acurast and DeepNode all raised early-stage rounds to build out their respective decentralized AI compute networks.
Manifold’s Targon network, built on Bittensor (Subnet 4), is particularly interesting – the Manifold team is led by well-known Bittensor founders and builders, and back in July Targon was already serving over 20B paid inference tokens a day, backed by 1,500+ H200s. Their $10.5M Series A was led by OSS Capital, with participation from Digital Currency Group and a long list of Bittensor and AI luminaries.
