Follow the Money: $2.5bn DeFi Deals Dominate as Investors Ditch Token Sales

BTCC / BTCC Square / incryptedEN /

Author:

incryptedEN

Published:

2025-08-23 09:02:00

Smart money floods decentralized finance while traditional token sales gather dust.

Capital Migration Accelerates

Institutional players pivot hard toward DeFi infrastructure—$2.5 billion in recent deals proves the thesis. Venture firms chase yield-generating protocols over speculative token launches. The shift signals maturity: builders get funded, gamblers get ignored.

Defi's Structural Advantage

Real revenue beats hypothetical valuations every time. Investors now demand working products, not whitepaper promises. The money follows utility—lending platforms, derivatives markets, and liquidity networks attract serious capital while token sales crumble.

Wall Street's Awkward Embrace

Traditional finance finally understands—or pretends to understand—composability and automated market makers. They'll still probably try to securitize it and charge 2% management fees.

The paradigm shifted while nobody was watching. Revenue-generating protocols eat the world—and the capital.

Incrypted infographic.

Classic venture

During this period, 16 projects received funding from investors. In particular:

$60 million — IVIZ. The platform, which helps governments fight large-scale financial crime, closed a Series B round led by O.G. Venture Partners. Other investors include Insight Partners, Citi Ventures, Team8, Disruptive AI, Cardumen Capital and Cerca. IVIX works to uncover hidden financial flows arising through offshore, shell companies, crypto networks and blockchain anonymity.

$11 million — DigiFT. Singapore’s Real Asset Exchange has raised funds in a new round of strategic funding led by Japanese financial services group SBI Holdings with participation from Mirana Ventures, Offchain Labs, Yunqi Partners, Polygon Labs and other investors. The proceeds will be used to expand its tokenised investment product line-up across equities, debt, alternative and cryptocurrency assets.

$10 million — Irys. The project completed a Series A funding round led by CoinFund. Hypersphere, Tykhe Ventures, Varrock VC, Echodot, Amber Group, Breed VC and WAGMI VC also participated.

$8.45 million — Almanak. The startup has raised funding from Delphi Labs, HashKey Capital, BanklessVC, NEAR Foundation, RockawayX, Matrix Partners, AppWorks, Sparkle VC, and Shima Capital.

$8 million — Block Earner. Australian cryptofintech Block Earner has received funds in a Series A round to develop its digital asset-backed lending business. Among the company’s new products is a bitcoin-backed mortgage with bitcoin as collateral at 9.5 per cent APR, more than double the rates of traditional banks. They plan to use the new investment to scale the business in Australia, launch the mortgage product in November and prepare for international markets.

$7.4 million — Cointel. The cryptocurrency analytics company has raised strategic funding from Avalanche and Sugafam Inc. The funds will be used to develop an AI-centric platform for crypto investors, as well as to implement the COLS token on Avalanche.

$7 million — OVERTAKE. Sui Network-based marketplace for secure trading of gaming assets has raised strategic funding from Sui, ItemMania, ItemBay, JB Investment, Green Whale Ventures and Immutable. The funds will be used to enable secure trading of digital assets and strengthen the ecosystem.

$7 million — DecentralGPT. The startup received strategic funding from AGICrypto with a one-year token lock-in for investors. The DGC token also went public on Bitget, KuCoin, MEXC exchanges and the Binance Alpha platform.

$5.2 million — Hyperbeat. The protocol that builds the yield infrastructure on decentralised exchange Hyperliquid has closed a pre-seed funding round. It was co-led by ether.fi Ventures and Electric Capital, with other investors including Coinbase Ventures, Chapter One, Selini, Maelstrom, and Anchorage Digital. The funds raised will be used to develop the Hyperbeat ecosystem, which offers traders, protocols and institutions the tools to profit from Hyperliquid funding.

$5 million — YOMIRGO. The AI agent and Web3 company has completed a funding round led by Gobi Partners with participation from Boman Group, NCIPA, FINWEX, Quest Enternal Group, Infinite Labs and ZC Capital. The funds will be used for product development, technology innovation and global expansion.

$5 million — Legion. The ICO platform raised capital in a seed round from VanEck and Brevan Howard Digital. Kraken, Coinbase Ventures and Crypto.com Capital also participated. The funding was in equity and token-warrants format.

$5 million — LO:TECH. The London-based digital asset trading company has completed a seed round led by 13books Capital. Lightspeed Faction, Veris Ventures, CRIT Ventures USA and private investors also participated. The funds raised will be used to expand trading infrastructure and develop transparency and functionality for onchain capital markets.

$4.2 million — o1.exchange. A startup building a trading terminal based on the Base network has raised funding from Coinbase Ventures and Alliance DAO. The product combines data from decentralised exchanges, wallet tracking, TradingView charts and more. The team’s goal is to become the primary trading terminal for the Base ecosystem.

$4 million — LYS Labs. Solana-based machine analytics platform for markets announced the closing of two rounds of funding – angel and seed. Institutional players such as Alchemy Ventures, Frachtis and Auros Global invested in the startup. The raised funds will be used to develop infrastructure that turns unstructured blockchain data into signals for AI agents and traders.

$1 million — Vanish. The company closed a pre-seed round led by Colosseum with participation from Solana Ventures, Pivot Global and angel investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

$400,000 — Main Street. The project attracted investment from Sonic Labs. The startup is developing a delta-neutral yield system based on stablecoins using option strategies.

A number of other projects have raised funding, but did not report the amount of investment.

Crypto project Loop crypto completed a strategic funding round led by Fabric VC and VanEck, backed by a16z Crypto, Archetype VC and others.

RICE AI project RICE AI closed a Series A funding round led by Floki. Other participants include DWF Labs, TokenFi, Vibe Labs, MacroCRG, Overdose AI and EnHeng456. The company has also received support from the BNB Chain Foundation as part of its MVB 10 programme. The raised funds will be used to develop the company’s AI infrastructure and expand its products.

StableStock, a blockchain-based equity trading platform, has completed a seed round with YZi Labs, MPCi and Vertex Ventures. The raised funds are being used to accelerate the development of the platform and integrate traditional equity liquidity into DeFi.

Tokensales

There was no information about tokensales this week, but you can find out about upcoming token campaigns in a special section on our website, where users find data about active and planned tokensales. In addition, our team maintains a thematic Telegram channel and promptly covers the most important events:

Corporate placements and transactions

Representatives of the institutional sector continue to accumulate funds to build cryptocurrency reserves and expand operations. The following deals took place last week:

$1.4bn — Galaxy Digital. The company, a leader in digital assets and data centre infrastructure, closed a line of credit to develop its Helios data centre in Texas. The funds will be used for the first phase of renovations and capacity expansion for AI and HPC operations in partnership with CoreWeave. Galaxy has already contributed $350 million of equity, with a loan package covering the rest.

$850 million — TeraWulf. The firm, which develops data centre infrastructure for bitcoin mining and high-performance computing, announced a private placement of convertible bonds due 2031 at 1% interest.

$29.9 million — TenX Protocols. TenX Protocols, a diversified cryptocurrency staking strategy, announced the completion of a subscription receipts offering. Of these, a portion was raised through a private placement led by Canaccord Genuity with participation from Sightline Wealth Management, Ventum Financial, INFOR Financial and Richardson Wealth. The larger half is received in the form of crypto-assets (Solana, SEI, USDC) donated by investors as payment. Funds received will be used for strategic acquisitions and working capital.

$23 million — LM Funding. Mining company raised funds through an equity offering. The capital raised will be used primarily to purchase additional bitcoins for the corporate reserve.

$2.57 million — Capital B. A European company positioning itself as a Bitcoin Treasury Company announced a capital raise. All shares were bought by Blockstream co-founder Adam Beck. With this, the company will be able to acquire approximately 17 more BTC, bringing its potential reserves to 2,218 BTC.

$25 million — Empery Digital. The company has received a credit limit to immediately access $25 million for share repurchases. Additionally, it is expected to be able to raise another $75 million through an unsecured line of credit to repurchase shares beyond the initial amount. The funds will be used for strategic share repurchases to increase bitcoins per share and reduce the company’s costs.

Acquisitions and mergers

Between 16 and 23 August, the market recorded three acquisitions and one partnership deal.

UK-based digital asset exchange Archax announced a strategic partnership with stellar Development Foundation. As part of the agreement, the latter has made a direct investment in Archax to expand the company’s real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation activities and integrate them into the Stellar network.

Valantis acquired the StakedHype protocol.

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken bought the assets and technology of Israeli startup Capitalise.ai, which has created a platform to automate natural language-based trading strategies for various asset classes.

Kerberus acquired Pocket Universe, a browser extension to protect users’ assets on Web3, providing alerts for malicious transactions on various blockchains.

Accelerators, grants and DAO funding

Ecosystems and DAOs did not provide funding to support projects this week.

Top Investors

The most active investors of the week were VanEck and Coinbase Ventures – each invested in two startups, according to CryptoRank.

Incrypted infographic.

What’s at the centre of investors’ attention?

Projects from blockchain services, DeFi, CeFi and blockchain infrastructure attracted funding between 16 and 23 August. The main focus of investor attention was on DeFi.