According to a Wu Blockchain report citing RootData statistics, venture capital investments in 2024 grew by 26.1% overall compared to the previous year with 1,535 projects.
The report shows a total of 102 crypto VC investment projects in December, representing a 7.4% month-on-month (MoM) increase from 95 projects in November. However, this was a 6.4% decrease from the previous year compared to 109 projects in December 2023.
Budget totals for December came in at $740 million, a 60.9 percent monthly increase from November's $460 million, but an 18.7 percent year-over-year decline of $910 million in December 2023.
For the full year, disclosed budgets totaled $9.33 billion, slightly ahead of 2023's $9.28 billion by 0.5 percent.
Failure section
By sector, DeFi leads with 24.4% of all projects, followed by NFT/GameFi with 15.1%, Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions with 11%, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects with 9.6%.
Centralized financing (CeFi) accounts for 5.7%, real assets (RWA) and decentralized physical infrastructure projects (DePIN) 8.8%. Wallet tools and infrastructure make up 7.3% of the total.
Among the biggest funding rounds of 2024, Stripe's $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge in October stood out as the largest in the crypto industry.
Australian crypto mining company Iris Energy raised $413.4 million through a share offering in the first half of the year. Avalanche It secured $250 million in December through a token sale led by Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly and ParaFi Capital.
Other transactions
Monad Labs raised $225 million in April to develop one Ethereum Layer 1 blockchain compatible with virtual machines and Block Stream In October, it secured $210 million to expand its Layer 2 technologies.
Meanwhile, Robin Hood announced that it plans to acquire a crypto exchange Bitstamp for $200 million, which is expected to be completed in the first half of 2025.
Other notable deals included Bit Farms $175 million acquisition of Stronghold Digital CleanSpark's $155 million merger with GRIID Infrastructure and Hut 8 150 million dollars of strategic investment for the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
In addition, decentralized social protocol Farcaster raised $150 million in May, bringing its valuation to $1 billion.
