Crypto’s Stellar Week: $50M Investment in Cryptography and NFT Memberships

Cryptocurrency and blockchain startups have ushered in a blockbuster investment week, amassing over $50 million in funding from enthusiastic investors. The spotlight shone brightest on Blackbird Labs, an innovative NFT-based platform bridging diners with restaurant experiences. The platform celebrated a colossal investment of $24 million. Spearheading this investment marathon was renowned venture capital firm a16z, backed by noteworthy participants such as Amex Ventures and Bolt by QED.

A distinctive feature of Blackbird is its architecture built on Coinbase’s Layer-2 network named Base. The platform stands out by equipping restaurants with in-depth insights into the culinary inclinations of their customers. In reciprocity, diners are awarded FLY tokens, redeemable for delightful perks at associated dining outlets.

Through the freshly injected funds, Blackbird envisions an expansion of its market presence, as revealed in their recent press release. Diving deeper into the cryptographic realm, Fairblock emerges as a beacon of innovation. The R&D outfit, with a primary focus on advanced encryption techniques, has successfully bagged $2.5 million in its pre-seed funding round. The investment was championed by Galileo and supported by industry leaders such as Lemniscap, Robot Ventures, and Reverie, to name a few.

These funds earmark Fairblock’s ambitious journey towards revolutionizing conditional cryptographic encryption, paving the way for unparalleled pre-execution privacy. The company’s co-founder, Peyman Momeni, shared Fairblock’s aspiration of mitigating entry risks for average crypto users in a conversation with Blockworks. He emphasized the company’s drive to empower users with conditional transaction decryption, reliant on pre-set parameters like pricing or time constraints.

Additionally, the buzz around perpetual exchanges is becoming hard to ignore. Ostium Labs has made waves with a successful $3.5 million funding round, led by the collaborative efforts of General Catalyst and LocalGlobe. The investment aligns with Ostium Labs’ mission to architect a decentralized perpetuals exchange tailored for trading real-world assets (RWAs). Addressing a market void, the company shared its aim on platform X, highlighting the need for a dedicated platform that resonates with DeFi veterans, while simultaneously diversifying beyond the crypto universe.

Ostium Labs has unveiled plans for a public testnet release on Arbitrum within this financial quarter. If all goes as planned and post-audits, a mainnet launch is projected for the early days of next year.

This week’s funding news underscores the dynamism and potential of crypto, encryption, and blockchain technologies, suggesting a promising future for their integration into various sectors of the economy.