Crazy VC fundraise, Polygon Pro in Partnerships, Coinshift | 17th July ‘22 | #3
GM folks!
Welcome to Litmosis, where we lose our sleep every weekend to give you digestible insights about Web3 and early-stage projects, with alpha on what’s going on in India🇮🇳.
This week on Litmosis, we have got (some revival?):
VCs are doubling down 📊
Polygon keeps winning 🏄🏻♂️
IAMAI, the internet body is moving out of crypto🥲
Decoding Web3 Fundraises
The project that caught our eye ft. Coinshift 👀
Tweet of the Week 🐣
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 56 seconds
Multiple VC fund announcements: Big Win for India🇮🇳
This week saw a slew of VCs announcing mammoth funds, which they might have raised during the bull run. Here are a few:
Lightspeed: The global lightspeed fund has raised $7 Billion to deploy in startups, with $500 Million of them fully dedicated to India & SEA. Their focus remains on three key sectors: SaaS, Cross-border, and Web3! The best part, they have launched a dedicated & independent Web3 VC arm, “Faction”, run by crypto veterans.
Multicoin Capital: One of the most successful Web3-native VC firms, announced a $430 Million fund, with a special focus on India! Why? They are simply bullish on the deep Indian market and Indian Talent who are ready to build not just for India, but for the world.
Circle Ventures (undisclosed), Variant Fund ($18 Million) & Protagonist ($100 Million): Many other VC firms, which aren’t truly focused on India, also announced their fundraises. It goes without saying, Indian Web3 projects building for global audiences are well-suited to ripe the benefits.
The Litmosis Take:
In the 2018 bear market, VCs didn’t have so much capital to deploy. While fast forward to 2022, VCs literally have so much gunpowder and this makes their bargaining power much stronger when public market valuations are dirt cheap. This has also affected private Valuations and that’s what VCs will look forward: to investing at a much cheaper price and maybe dumping on public markets in the next bull run🤷♂️.
Overall, it’s great for the ecosystem, with so much capital being ready to be deployed in the next 2-3 years, Web3 is poised to grow on the back of capital, which in turn brings more talented folks to solve the most challenging problems!
Polygon continues to shine despite the hazy winter ❄️
Polygon. Yes, that geek and nice guy in a class 👨💻.
We are talking about the one project that keeps churning out much good news consistently in this so-called crypto winter, Polygon (aka Matic).
In bull markets, traders can have a list of coins to pick ones that will go up. Bear markets put a test on that, requiring much more effort to find projects that could perform well over the long run.
Polygon has continued to shine despite the hazy winter, by showing mainstream adoption across different industries. Different projects are migrating now to web3 and the polygon network has become the choice for everyone.
Let it be a sustainable web3 infrastructure built over ETH or the low gas fees, they have worked themselves in the best form of marketing possible attracting many projects and a large sum of potential users with them.
Out of many partnerships by Polygon, these are some of the significant ones which not only strengthen the network but also bring a new set of functionality to the masses.
Latest significant partnerships:
Disney (accelerator program)
Reddit (avatar marketplace)
Draft Kings (NFT marketplace)
Meta (avatar marketplace)
Stripe (global payments)
Coca-cola (NFT collection)
Polygon x Nothing
With that, $MATIC is also seeing a growing number of platforms offering liquid staking for the token, enabling holders to earn staking rewards. How cool is that!
Polygon is also in a position to capture outsized scalable solutions market share.
The Litmosis take:
It seems like the strategic decision of spinning out, “Polygon Studios” which focuses on media & gaming, and appointing Youtube’s ex-gaming Head, Ryan Wyatt has paid off.
IAMAI Forum to shut down India’s Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council
If you are into crypto and you are in India, you know the grey area which exists in crypto regulation in India. Despite taxing digital assets from this financial year, the conflict continues to hold its position between the central bank and the centralized crypto exchanges.
In this ringing hour, the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) has decided to shut down the Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council (BACC).
In simple terms, BACC was created to represent centralized crypto exchanges before the government authorities like RBI and other departments.
It just depicts the growing disbelief of Indian authorities in crypto. As things got more chaotic in the ecosystem after the 30% tax and the 1% TDS on the digital assets, things in the BACC basket started to dismantle. And RBI’s sustained view on crypto has finally led to the BACC, the entity over a ton of crypto startups to finally shut down.
This is definitely NOT a good sign going forward, particularly for crypto and Web3 adoption in India.
(Authorities are like: You can be the biggest userbase base of crypto, but you won’t have crypto 🙅)
Decoding India’s Web3 fundraise (🤔)
DAOlens: A DAO tooling platform focused on making the onboarding and contribution within a DAO frictionless, has recently raised an undisclosed sum in funding from many angels including CoinDCX founders Neeraj Khandelwal, Sumit Gupta, and others.
Last month DAOlens also raised $5 million led by Nexus Ventures Partners, angels like Balaji and Sandeep Nailwal from polygon.
Are we headed towards a DAO-first world? let us know your views in the comments.
A project that caught our eye: Coinshift 👀
Crypto companies, particularly DAOs face a huge problem of managing their treasuries, and one of the Web3 startups, based in India: Coinshift is solving exactly that. It is a treasury management and SaaS platform that enables DAOs and crypto businesses to manage cryptos and risks along with that.
How does it work? It has built a UI/UX layer on top of Gnosis Safe, a multi-sig protocol, where multiple users can manage funds and sign transactions with different parties. Coinshift takes it a step further and built a suite of tools around that: Swapping, Spending Limits, Mass Payouts, Reporting, and many more!
How far they have come?
They have facilitated the creation of 3400+ safes (wallets), $91 Million in payouts, and $1.3 Billion in Assets Under Management. Companies like Consensys, Messari, Biconomy, Uniswap, Perpetual Protocol, Balancer, and others are already using it. They have also raised $17.5 Million from marquee investors like Tiger Global, Alpha Wave Global, and more!
The Litmosis Take:
While they have significant traction, at the end of the day, all assets reside with the Gnosis Safe smart contract, and they are just building a front-end on top of it. Think of it as “PhonePe” built on top of UPI. They are still on the hunt for a solid business model, and cross-selling/up-selling other products around treasury management like insurance, and asset management will be their crucial piece to generate revenue. Overall, we are quite bullish on the B2B Web3 space!
Weekday reads: A DAO special 🤝
(yes, we are renaming the Weekend reads section to Weekday reads, coz why not?)
Tweet of the Week:
The startup mentioned here has the tagline: “Fifth-generation blockchain” and has raised a $100 Million mammoth round (at least they claim so :P). We won’t keep you in suspense. Check them out here: 5ire!
Oh btw, we also help projects with research & strategy and have previously helped 5+ projects, if you need help with any of these, do let us know at @Litmosis.
That’s all lovely folks from your friends: Yash and Sitesh. See ya, next week! 🥂
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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is only for educational purposes and should not be considered investment advice or any recommendation to buy or sell any assets. Do your own research. None of this is financial advice and you can possibly get rekt.