Deep Ventures Monthly Newsletter - June 2024

Welcome to the very first Deep Ventures monthly newsletter!

Each month we’ll highlight what’s new with DV portfolio companies, live investment deals, cool things happening in crypto, and other interesting info.

Today we talk about Decent Land Lab’s fundraise, an investment deal for SuperSight, the launch of Solana Blinks, and more.

Let’s go!

Portfolio Company Highlights

Decent Land Labs raises $3M

Decent Land Labs has raised $3m in seed funding to build WeaveVM, an L1 that solves the EVM storage bottleneck with Arweave. The round was funded by Foresight Ventures, LongHash Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, and others.

We invested in DLL in 2022 and love their team. We believe that Arweave is one of the most underrated ecosystems (we angel-invested in them in 2018) and is set to explode; DLL will surely benefit from this.

Read more about the fundraise here.

Kinto opens up claiming of $K, launches native stablecoin

Kinto, the safety-first Ethereum L2, has opened up claiming of its native token, $K, for those who participated in their Engen launch program.

They also launched their first native asset, USD+, in collaboration with Dinari. $5M of USD+ has already been minted, taking the total value locked (TVL) in the protocol to $25M.

The Kinto product is a masterclass of great crypto UX, TVL is growing, and users are real and long-term aligned. The Kinto team is absolutely crushing it!

Exa Protocol is approaching its TGE and listing on BitMart is confirmed

The mobile-first distributed file storage protocol is approaching its token generation event and is engaging its community with quest campaigns.

BitMart has committed to listing $XAP when it goes live.

We invested in Exa at the end of 2021. The team has built through the bear market and will soon launch their token and innovative products that will change the way data is stored across the world.

Industry News

Ethereum ETF approved, Solana ETF filed

Following the approval of Ethereum Spot ETFs in May, VanEck and 21Shares filed Solana ETFs during the last week of June. Is a crypto ETF explosion coming soon?

Airdrops, airdrops, airdrops

Three major airdrops happened in June, and no one was happy about any of them.

Many claim that ZKsync did not do enough to avoid bots and farmers. And expectations were not met by the Blast and LayerZero airdrops.

Teams just can’t win with airdrops.

Solana launches Actions and Blockchain Links (Blinks)

Actions and Blinks on Solana allow any website that can display a URL to perform a Solana transaction. This is a massive unlock that integrates Web3 into Web2 sites.

Read more about Actions and Blinks and check out the tweet thread I wrote on how easy it was to create a Blink.

Events and Networking

Sherman and I will be in the San Francisco Bay Area next week!

We are hosting an Investor Happy Hour on Wed, July 10 in the Mission. If you’re around, ping me at [email protected] or @mikewchan on Telegram and I’ll add you to the invite!

Hope to see you there!

We hope you enjoyed the first edition of the DV monthly newsletter!

Hit me up at [email protected] or @mikewchan on Telegram with your thoughts about the newsletter, what’s happening in crypto, or anything else!

And please give us a follow on Xwitter and LinkedIn.

Talk soon!