Market Insights, Q1 2023

What happened in the Web3 fundraising world during Q1 2023?

Despite a 80% drop compared to Q1 2022, there was still 2,4bn$ that was injected into Web3 start-ups, with 439 deals and 14 new crypto funds.

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We could notice large fundraisings (100m$+) from Blockstream, LayerZero & Ledger. The most active funds were Coinbase Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, DWF labs that invested more than 100m$+ each.

Regarding the most trendy Web3 sectors, blockchain gaming projects represents approximately 30% of fundraisings this quarter confirming the investors interest in this huge market (+200bn$ market size)

The ZK technologies trend continues, confirming the need for scalability before trying to reach mass adoption. Beyond scalability, these projects also enable us to build more complex dApps while respecting both regulations and user data.

Even if Real World Assets (RWA) projects began a few years ago (notably through Real Estate tokenization), it became a real trend lately, confirmed by the large fundraising of Taurus led by Credit Suisse. DeFi protocols are also benefiting from this trend, as numerous projects are emerging to connect traditional finance with DeFi.

Finally, NFTs are still a hot topic, notably through the infrastructure / marketplaces projects like Candy Digital (38m+). After a spike in NFTs transactions volume in 2021 / 2022 followed by a notable decline in 2023, VCs invest into the NFTs infrastructure that will support the next NFTs wave.