EarlyStage – Earlybirds Invest

Bitcoin Startups See Consistent Growth Across All Early Stages

The number of Bitcoin-native pre-seed deals in 2024 was more than seven times higher than in 2021, showing a big rise in new startups and ideas.

Seed and Series A deal volumes also saw year-over-year increases of 30% and 60%, respectively.

Image Source: Trammell Venture Partners

Total capital raised may have dropped, but deal count and new company formation continued to rise. This points to growing confidence in Bitcoin-native startups. TVP notes four straight years of growth as a sign these startups could soon capture a bigger share of crypto venture funding.

Big-Name VCs Back Bitcoin as Ecosystem Matures

Backing this momentum is a growing list of institutional investors. In 2024, firms like Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator and Valor Equity Partners participated in Bitcoin startup rounds. Their involvement points to rising confidence in business models built on Bitcoin’s protocol layers.

Bitcoin holds over half of the crypto market’s total value. Yet in 2024, it received only 2.3% of venture funding, the report notes. Researchers see this gap as an opportunity to rebalance, as the Bitcoin ecosystem expands beyond mining and asset holding.

Backed by simple business models, clear focus and growing investor interest, Bitcoin-native startups are quietly shaping a new path for crypto innovation.

The post Early-Stage Deals for Bitcoin Startups Jumped in 2024, Defying Broader Market Trends appeared first on Cryptonews.

The main organizations supporting the Arbitrum blockchain, Offchain Labs and the Arbitrum Foundation, unveiled a new program designed to kick-start early-stage projects in the ecosystem.

The new program, “Onchain Labs,” is designed to provide go-to-market support to “experimental and volatile” projects, according to a blog post from Offchain Labs, Arbitrum’s main developer.

“Through Onchain Labs, we’re dedicating resources to support developers looking to rapidly expand the application layer by ideating with them from the ground floor to bring the best user experiences to Arbitrum,” the blog post said. “As we do with many Arbitrum teams, we’ll provide product and [go-to-market] support to these early-stage projects, collaborating closely to help their applications thrive on Arbitrum.”

Arbitrum Foundation is a non-profit that stewards Arbitrum ecosystem governance. Offchain Labs, which created the blockchain in 2021, focuses on developer tooling and core network infrastructure.

Offchain Labs is pitching its new initiative as a way to spur greater activity and interest in the wider Arbitrum ecosystem. According to the blog post from the company, the first Onchain Labs projects will soon emerge from stealth. Offchain Labs said the only projects supported by its new program will be those that explicitly “commit to fair and equitable launches” — presumably meaning they avoid token launches and other mechanics that preference insiders.

Offchain Labs stated in its blog post that the selection criteria are meant to avoid “extractive ecosystems” and “zero-sum games.” Tandem, Offchain Labs’ venture capital arm, “may or may not purchase associated tokens in public markets,” the company added.

Arbitrum is a layer-2 optimistic rollup network on Ethereum. Like other rollups, the chain is designed to process transactions faster and more cheaply than the main Ethereum blockchain. Several new blockchains are built on Arbitrum’s technical framework, forming a network of interconnected blockchains called Arbitrum ‘Orbit.’

Arbitrum is currently the largest layer-2 network on Ethereum, with roughly $12.2 billion on its primary ‘Arbitrum One’ chain, according to L2beat.

Read more: Arbitrum Deepens Ties with South Korea’s Lotte Group