The best blockchain projects that raised more than $100 million in 2022. Will they be the best investment targets in 2023?

2022 was an impressive year. Some investors made their fortunes during the Play-to-Earn rush in early 2022, while others dumped all their assets into FTX and lost it all. No matter how horrible it was, this is over. Despite the prevailing climate of pessimism among institutional investors about the economic outlook for 2023, earnings remain at the top of their wish list as ever.

As 2023 has just begun, we are going to review the projects that raised more than $100 million last year, but have not issued tokens yet. Will they be ideal investment objectives this year?

As one of the most mentioned projects by the end of 2022, zkSync has gained wide recognition among investors. The project raised $200 million during its Series C funding. Meanwhile, his team announced that upon issuance of tokens, two-thirds of the supply will be distributed to users of the zkSync ecosystem.

The zkSync 2.0 mainnet, which launched in October 2022, is ZK’s first Ethereum-compatible Layer 2 project on the market. Currently, the zkSync ecosystem covers projects in multiple segments, including DEX, NFT platforms/projects, derivatives transactions, infrastructure, etc. Meanwhile, many cryptocurrency investors are confident in the future development of ZK projects.

Limit Break is the parent company of DigiDaigaku, an NFT project that went viral in August 2022. During the same month, the company raised $200 million during a funding campaign led by Josh Buckley, Paradigm, and Standard Crypto, with the participation of FTX, Coinbase, Positive Sum, Shervinator, Anthos Capital, etc.

The company was co-founded by Gabriel Leydon and Halbert Nakagawa, two leading designers in the game industry. The two founders are experts in MMO game design and Limit Break also revealed that the funds raised will be used for the development of Web3 MMO games.

It seems that DigiDaigaku was just a marketing experiment by the two founders that had successful results. This is also why Leydon said that the company will build games with the Free-to-Own (F2O) model in the future, which is great news for the entire GameFi community. Market players expect a possible increase in such games.

Aleo is a household name to anyone who has invested in crypto in the past year. The project focuses on the privacy public chain category, which is a popular segment with constant innovations. In February 2022, Aleo raised $200 million in a Series B financing led by Kora Management LP and SoftBank, with participation from Samsung, a16z, etc.

Aleo launched Testnet 3 mining rewards in late 2022. It planned to distribute 25 million Aleo (ALEO) points to developers and validators. After the mainnet goes live, the points can be converted into native tokens on the chain at a flat rate of 5:1.

In addition to privacy, Aleo is highly editable and scalable thanks to its modular design. Furthermore, the project also created an attractive market story before issuing any tokens. In the future, Aleo may become a dark horse in the field of privacy chains.

Since the end of 2022, LayerZero has been frequently ranked as one of the most promising projects by media networks and crypto institutions. This multi-chain interoperability protocol secured $135 million in Series A+ funding from FTX Venture, Sequoia Capital, and a16z in March 2022.

Even though the funding involved FTX, which collapsed at the end of 2022, we are still impressed by LayerZero’s leading role in further developing DeFi and multi-chain interaction in the omnichain narrative.

At this time, LayerZero offers many outstanding projects, and the market is optimistic about its growth prospects.

MagicEden, the largest NFT marketplace on Solana, raised $130 million in June 2022. Despite FTX failing, according to data from renowned cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx, Solana remains the 12th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and the price of SOL has even bounced recently.

That said, MagicEden isn’t quite as trendy as it used to be, and investors have gone into other categories.

Aztec is a scalable protocol that preserves privacy at Layer 2 of Ethereum. According to the Series A financing information revealed in December 2021, the project managed to raise funds from Vitalik Buterin. A year later, Aztec raised an impressive $100 million from investors led by a16z.

After the Tornado Cash sanctions, discussions about privacy on the blockchain have gained momentum. As a trending project in the category, Aztec said that it has no plans to issue coins at the moment, but it has gained recognition from many powerful players with its strong programmability and Layer 2 anonymity.

Although the series of negative events in 2022 buried countless crypto figures and projects, we also witnessed many new stories and models posting rapid growth despite sluggish market conditions. Amid the strong current of history, many platforms and institutions failed to make it to the dawn, yet many others survived.

As a world-renowned cryptocurrency exchange that has seen bulls and bears, CoinEx celebrated its fifth birthday in December 2022. So far, the exchange has served more than 4 million users in more than 200 countries and regions around the world. .

Over the past year, I often traded cryptocurrencies on CoinEx because it includes 1,000+ trading pairs and 600+ premium cryptocurrencies, spanning popular categories like DeFi, meme, NFT, and GameFi. Its Market page features the main cryptocurrency categories and the New List segment, which allows users to categorize their assets and enjoy great ease of use.

CoinEx has never suffered from any security breach since its inception. Furthermore, the exchange has introduced multiple internal review mechanisms for the token listing, which minimizes investment risks for users and improves security.

Disclaimer: No investment advice is given in this article and all data mentioned here is for reference only. You should not rely on the information provided here to make an investment decision and you will be fully responsible for your own investment decisions.