PANews said that from Sept. 21 to Sept. 27, the global blockchain sector recorded eight financing and M&A developments, with total disclosed funding exceeding $74 million. The week’s crypto activity clustered around stablecoin payments, on-chain trading, and infrastructure, led by HIFI’s $37 million Series A, Atum’s $13.5 million seed round, and MeshWallet’s $10 million private financing. The period also included two acquisitions: Citrea’s purchase of privacy wallet Crest and CoinMarketCap’s acquisition of crypto derivatives data platform Coinglass.
On-chain yield and trading infrastructure deals
DeFi yield protocol infiniFi said it raised more than $3 million in a new financing round led by Electric Capital, with participation from New Form Capital, Generative Ventures, Fasanara Capital, 2Square, 4th Revolution Capital, DCFGod, and The Rollup. The project said its token generation event is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026, and the new capital will go toward protocol development, new integrations, multichain expansion, and product marketing.
infiniFi emerged from stealth in February 2025 after completing a $3 million pre-seed round and launched in June that year. It said combined pre-seed and seed funding now totals more than $6 million. The protocol has expanded to Ethereum, Arbitrum, Katana, and Base, and has worked with or integrated Ethena, Pendle, Morpho, Aave, FalconX, Curve, and Euler. Since launch, it has generated more than $9 million in yield, according to the project. Its historical peak TVL reached $180 million and currently stands above $50 million.
XStable, an AI-native on-chain trading infrastructure platform for gold and foreign exchange, said it recently received a new round of institutional backing from YZi Labs, Sui Foundation, Taisu Ventures, and Catcher VC. It added that it had previously won support from Solana, Amber Group, KuCoin Ventures, and Singchain, bringing cumulative funding to several million dollars. The company said the fresh capital will be used to strengthen product development, trading infrastructure, and global market expansion, while improving market data, execution, liquidity, and risk management tools for quantitative teams and AI agents. XStable disclosed daily trading volume above $100 million and cumulative transaction volume in the billions of dollars.
On-chain perpetuals protocol Travix also announced a seed round, with Amber Group named among the disclosed investors. The amount was not disclosed. Travix said the proceeds will be used to deepen perpetual markets tied to computing-power assets and East Asian equities, expand Compute-Led RWA trading pairs such as chips and storage, advance its “financial world model,” continue development and deployment of a trusted AI agent trading engine, broaden its global and ecosystem footprint, and launch trading incentive programs.
The project said it is built on a modular blockchain architecture and uses a hybrid structure that combines off-chain high-performance matching with on-chain settlement, allowing millisecond-level processing efficiency. It also uses a unified account management model. Its focus areas include perpetual contracts tied to computing assets such as H100 chips and storage hardware, a financial world model that converts probabilistic events such as policy implementation and product launches into quantifiable trading signals, and trusted AI agent trading through an Agent Engine for automated strategy deployment.
Infrastructure and stablecoin payments
MeshWallet, a no-gas-fee USDT wallet based in Tallinn, Estonia, announced a $10 million private financing led by a group of private investors and small family offices. MeshWallet runs on the TRON (TRC20) network and is designed to remove the need for users to hold TRX to pay gas fees, settling transfer fees directly in USDT. The company said the financing will support its product roadmap expansion and user ecosystem development.
Stablecoin payment network Atum said it closed a $13.5 million seed round led by Variant, with PayPal Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Road Capital, Mirana Ventures, First Commit, and Credibly Neutral also participating. Atum said it does not issue stablecoins, operate a blockchain, or custody funds. Instead, it positions itself as a coordination layer for global capital flows across stablecoins and chains, handling authorization, routing, and confirmation while supporting AI agent payments through protocols such as x402 and MPP. Founder and CEO Pete Cooling previously led Visa’s crypto product team.
Stablecoin infrastructure company HIFI completed a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital. Its valuation was not disclosed. HIFI CEO Zach Walsh said this was the company’s first priced round and that the platform is currently processing roughly $7 billion in annualized direct transaction volume. The new capital will be used to expand HIFI’s stablecoin payment products and tokenized capital markets infrastructure.
HIFI currently supports on- and off-ramps between U.S. dollars and stablecoins, payments through the U.S. banking system and card rails, and U.S. dollar cash settlement for tokenized repo agreements and U.S. Treasury transactions. The company also previously took part in the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s tokenized securities production trading test.
Prediction markets and NFT collectibles
Prediction market protocol functionSPACE announced a $1.7 million pre-seed round to build an economic primitive for pricing numerical outcomes. The round was co-led by Maven 11 Capital and Blockwall, with participation from Smape Capital.
NFT collectibles trading platform CatchBack said it raised $8 million in a seed round led by Foundation Capital, with Y Combinator, Robinhood Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Solana Foundation also taking part. The company said the funds will be used to build products tied to collectibles trading.
M&A activity
Citrea said it acquired self-custodial privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet Crest. Crest will become Citrea’s flagship privacy product, and Crest founder Meliksah Gurtemel will join Citrea as head of product.
Citrea said Crest plans to launch a Bitcoin mobile wallet in the coming weeks with automatic privacy protection, private BTC transfers, and cross-chain access from Bitcoin and Ethereum. It also plans to add private cross-chain swaps and exit routes so users can privately pay USDC or ETH to EVM addresses using private BTC.
CoinMarketCap said it has completed its acquisition of crypto derivatives data platform Coinglass. Financial terms were not disclosed. Founded in 2019, Coinglass covers 28 exchanges and more than 2,500 trading products, offering data on open interest, funding rates, liquidations, and options. It said it has more than 5 million monthly active users and over 10,000 API customers.
CoinMarketCap said the acquisition will bring Coinglass derivatives data onto its platform, giving its 115 million monthly users access to information such as leveraged positioning, liquidation distribution, and funding rates. Coinglass said it will continue operating as an independent business and that its website, app, free tools, API, and pricing will remain unchanged.
Fundraising by investment firms
Breed VC, founded by independent general partner and former Circle head of digital assets Jed Breed, has raised $15 million for its second crypto fund. Backers include FalconX, Hutt Capital, Arrington Capital, Castle Island Ventures’ Nic Carter, Dragonfly’s Rob Hadick, and CoinFund’s Jake Brukhman.
Breed VC said the new fund will invest in “day zero,” pre-seed, and seed-stage crypto startups, with check sizes planned at $250,000 to $750,000. Its focus is open financial infrastructure and decentralized AI. The firm said Fund II has already invested in Silicon Data, 3Jane, M1X Global, and USD.AI, and it expects to deploy capital over the next three to four years.
Selected AI financings
AI infrastructure
AI cloud computing company Nscale announced a $3.36 billion convertible note financing led by Third Point, with participation from both new and existing investors including Nvidia, funds managed by Apollo, Citadel, Hudson Bay Capital, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council. The first $2.36 billion tranche has already closed. Nvidia separately committed an additional $1 billion that is expected to be funded in mid-November 2026.
Nscale said it now has total contract value above $103 billion. The proceeds will be used to accelerate expansion of AI cloud infrastructure, including behind-the-meter power facilities, liquid-cooled AI data centers, and large-scale GPU clusters. The convertible notes will automatically convert into common shares after an IPO, while the portion held by Nvidia will convert into non-voting shares.
AI infrastructure company Verda raised $189 million in a new financing round led by Emergence Capital, with MUFG Innovation Partners, computer maker Super Micro Computer, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance, and Lifeline Ventures also participating. The company said its post-money valuation reached at least $1 billion. Verda provides a full-stack AI cloud offering spanning physical data centers, computing hardware, cloud platform services, and AI infrastructure. The funding will support product development across the stack and continued expansion in Europe, the United States, and Asia.
Chicago-based startup Go.AI completed an $85 million Series A led by Updata Partners, with existing investors GFT Ventures and LAUNCH also joining. The company said total funding now stands at $90 million. Go.AI builds locally deployed, auditable AI infrastructure for regulated institutions such as banks, and said the fresh capital will be used to expand its engineering team and increase go-to-market efforts.
AI agent startup Ema announced a $77 million Series B led by Creaegis, with existing investors Accel, Section 32, and Prosus adding to the round. The company said total funding has now reached $140 million, and its valuation is more than triple the level from its 2024 prior round.
Ema was founded in 2023 by former Google and Coinbase executive Surojit Chatterjee and former Okta executive Souvik Sen. The company builds what it calls “AI employees,” systems that coordinate multiple AI agents to help enterprises execute multi-step business workflows within existing applications instead of handling only one task at a time. Ema said most of the new money will go toward market expansion after previously focusing mainly on product development.
Web data infrastructure company Firecrawl said on X that it raised $75 million in a Series B led by Smash Capital and launched Alexandria, a knowledge base for AI agents designed to unify access to the live web, official data providers, and specialized indexes. According to its official page, Alexandria currently integrates 82 data providers and 471 data capabilities, along with more than 113 million papers, READMEs, issues, and technical documents across 28 categories including finance, government, code, shopping, and real estate. It supports access through MCP, CLI, and API. Firecrawl said internal testing showed Alexandria delivered answer quality 21% higher than built-in web tools on around 1,000 directory-style questions.
AI applications and agents
AI startup Island announced a $400 million Series F led by Evolution Equity Partners, with existing investors Prysm Capital, Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management, Cyberstarts, Insight Partners, and JP Morgan Growth Equity Partners also participating. The company said its valuation reached $6.4 billion. It added that the funding will help drive its next phase of growth and innovation, expand enterprise use of AI agents, and modernize how work gets done.
AI-native operating system developer Brahma AI raised $150 million through a preferred share issuance, including a $100 million investment from Multiples Alternate Asset Management. The company’s customers include Warner Bros., the NBA, and Google, while Hakuhodo and DNEG serve as strategic distribution partners. Its platform centers on the enterprise content intelligence and media evaluation platform Brahma AI Core and the creative production suite Brahma AI Studio, with technology spanning visual AI, digital humans, voice, and multilingual performance.