Base Network leads the fundraising market

The market is rallying again after Trump announced a 90-day halt on reciprocal tariffs. BTC has reclaimed $85K, and altcoins are climbing as well. But what happens after those 90 days? And who really knows what the Trump cabal is up to? 

For our main fundraising recap this week, we’re seeing a massive surge in total funds raised — jumping from $64M to $242M, a staggering $178M increase in just one week.

Many good projects with good narratives have raised this week, let’s see:

1. Towns raised $10M led by a16z crypto

Decentralized communication protocol - Towns Protocol has raised $10M in a Series B funding round led by a16z crypto, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Benchmark, bringing their total funding amount to $61M.

Towns is a group chat protocol designed for online communities with a SocialFi narrative. Built on Base, it consists of three key components: an EVM-compatible L2 chain, decentralized off-chain stream nodes, and smart contracts that are deployed on Base. 

Towns Protocol has 2 core communication apps: Towns & Propeller. Propeller is a Web3 version of Trustpilot which is still in private beta. 

Towns, the main product, embrace the concept of a town square—true to its name—by bringing together communities, NFTs, and gaming. It empowers members to truly own their digital town squares and communicate freely through a fully decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat protocol. 

Towns has launched an incentive points program that is already running since late 2024 with confirmed $TOWNS airdrop. 

2. Bitcoin-based Life Insurance Meanwhile raised $40M

Bitcoin-denominated life insurance provider - Meanwhile has raised $40M in a Series A funding round led by Framework Ventures, Fulgur Ventures, with participation from Wences Casares.

Meanwhile is the first and only life insurance company that operates entirely in Bitcoin. You pay your premiums in Bitcoin over a 10-year period, and in return, your policy guarantees a payout in $BTC to your beneficiaries upon your passing. The good part is,  when you borrow Bitcoin from your policy, it receives a new cost basis, meaning you can sell it without incurring any capital gains tax—so if $BTC skyrockets, you can cash out without any guilt.

This funding builds on their previous $20.5M seed round, bringing the total funding to $60.5M. This funding will be use to reach more people who are concerned about political risk, currency risk, inflation risk, or regime risk - said by Meanwhile

3. Blackbird raised $50M led by Spark Capital

Restaurant guest engagement platform - Blackbird has  raised $50M in a Series B funding round led by Spark Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, a16z crypto, Union Square Ventures, American Express Ventures.

Blackbird - the restaurant loyalty platform founded by Resy creator Ben Leventhal that aims to deepen the connection between diners and restaurants. 

Blackbird leverages the use of blockchain through Flynet, a payment service as a layer-three transaction protocol built on Base. Diners can use it to pay for meals at the table via Blackbird’s app, as well as to redeem $FLY loyalty points when they visit restaurants.

Now, with over 1,000 restaurants signed up, Ben Leventhal said Blackbird plans to use the money to launch its newest product, a cross-restaurant “points” service it’s calling Blackbird Club, as well as to expand into more markets.

4. Octane raised $6.75M from Winklevoss Capital

AI-Powered smart contract security platform - Octane Security has raised $6.75M in a Seed funding round led by Archetype, Winklevoss Capital, with participation from Druid Ventures, Circle, Gemini Frontier Fund, Legion Capital, Duke Capital Partners, Balaji Srinivasan, Sina Habibian.

Octane is a developer-first platform to battle-test smart contracts with cutting-edge machine learning. Its models are trained on a broad dataset of real-world exploits, audit reports and open-source repositories. The platform can identify vulnerabilities like frontrunnable exchange rates and drainable swap contracts in under a minute. The platform already counts 15 enterprise clients, securing over $5.8B of assets, including Circle, Trust Wallet, Azura, Redstone, ...

The founder is a 22-year-old - Giovanni Vignone, who dropped out of Duke University, where he was majoring in computer science and machine learning to build Octane.

Octane will use the funds to increase product development velocity, expand the team, mass label vulnerability data, and get their platform into the hands of every developer building in crypto. 

5. L2 blockchain OpenZK raised $6M

ZK-rollup layer 2 - OpenZK has raised $6M in a funding round from Animoca Brands, Coinstore Labs.

OpenZK is the first L2 solution on ZK rollup technology to unite native ETH staking, liquid restaking, and stablecoin staking in one seamless platform. Built for superior performance in DeFi, Real-Word Assets, and trading applications.

OpenZK is currently running an airdrop campaign on their OZK token, users can get airdrop points by doing some general missions, provide liquidity, or stake ETH, USDT & USDC  

Conclusion

This week saw a total of 25 funding rounds, with $242M raised in total

The SocialFi narrative & Base-based projects have attracted $60M in funding this week: $10M from Towns and $50M from Wunder Social , both built on Base network, along with Blackbird, which is also built on Base. 

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading!