March crypto fundraising saw $5B+, the highest monthly total since June 2022

Interestingly, despite the surge in capital, the number of deals was lower than February, from 145 to 137

Selective investors? No. $3.5B came from just 2 deals:

• Binance ($2B)
• NinjaTrader ($1.5B)

According to data from the VC Printer dashboard (June), the median VC unrealized ROI is just 3x.

A sharp drop from 563x in the last cycle.

What’s going on?

We’ve seen projects launch at $1B valuations and now sit at $50M - without shipping anything meaningful. Meanwhile, teams and early investors already made bank by selling tokens OTC and padding their treasuries.

This is where trust breaks:
When the team profits first, before a product, before users, before value.

The most common mistake founders make?
They catch FOMO on their own project.

Instead of hyping how it’s “the best product ever” or shilling the token, focus on two things:

1️⃣ Prove you can execute in any market. Bull or bear, traction matters. Most founders disappear when things get tough.

2️⃣ Focus on product over token. There are 11M+ tokens on CoinMarketCap - no one cares unless there’s real utility.

But not everyone agrees.

Some say it’s 50% product, 50% marketing.

Right now, investors do look at how well a founder can sell the token and build mindshare.

As institutional capital comes in, product-market fit will matter more - but valuations need to reflect that.

Full VC alpha here:
https://x.com/SimplicityWeb3/status/1907448382982877396

Crypto Funding in March saw 138 rounds in total. a16z joined 11 of the deals, and led 2 of them

But when it comes to leading rounds, DragonFly Capital led 4 of its 6 deals, the highest leading ratio

Most VCs didn’t lead. They just followed Being active is easy. Leading isn’t.

Source: CryptoRank

Tokens as a growth hack vs. tokens as a sustainable value layer

One of the most formidable challenges faced by new businesses is acquiring users.

In Web3, tokens offer a powerful and relatively “free” way to bootstrap early traction and network effects. With the right strategy, a new player can challenge even the biggest incumbents.

Look at Blur vs. Opensea. Blur used a smart airdrop campaign to pull users from Opensea, rapidly gaining market share. Opensea, without a native token, had no way to compete on the same level, and Blur won that round.

But this playbook only works if your product is actually better.

Blur delivered. Most don’t.

Many teams throw tokens at users, hoping for adoption, but end up with worthless coins, failed experiments, and burned treasuries.

If you’re using your token as bait, not a long-term value layer, you’re on a timer.

Fundraising is only the beginning. If you’re not using those funds to make smart, strategic decisions, statistically speaking, you’re setting your project up to fail.

Read more: https://www.simplicitygroup.xyz/blog/how-to-research-tokens-as-retail

$TRUMP has a huge unlock coming.

Currently there's 200M circulating, with an extra 40M unlocked on 18th April - valued at current prices at $320M.

This 40M and all remaining unvested tokens - in total 80% of the supply - are owned by CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC - both entities owned by Trump.

Since its a memecoin slow rug, these tokens are going to be dumped.

There is substantial liquidity in the market - around $30-40M on DEXs, probably double that on CEXs. But it's nowhere near enough able to absorb $320M worth of selling from this unlock and the $Bns subsequent unlocks.

Selling will be slow and via the MM, unless the morons full clip and nuke the chart in one 🥴

Mantra collapses. Down to $2.4Bn FDV in 30 minutes. The crypto market never fails to be anything but entertaining.

happy Monday

time to work on your tokenomics so your token can survive longer than your last relationship

https://calendly.com/enquiries-simplicity/tokenomics

Alex, our co-founder & COO, breaks down one of the most misunderstood plays in crypto:

"High FDV Extract Game" is not about listing at high valuations and exiting onto retail.

It's about pumping the valuations to exit OTC.

Watch now, and don’t beg for more exciting alpha videos. Alex is busy cooking up elite tokenomics for our clients.

Gunzilla built a AAA Web3 game with $100M+ raised and industry veterans behind it, yet the price is down by ~50% since launch

What’s the issue? Tokenomics

A 37.8% investor allocation, just 10% for players. This is what happens when you build a great game but forget your users

-
Research is coming soon

Virtuals went from making $1.6M/day in fees to barely reaching $5k/day only 90 days later

Real infra. Real hype. No addressable problem

As a founder, are you building to solve a problem? Or just riding every other trendy narrative?

chart source

Our client World of Dypians is the #1 featured dapp on trust wallet

They of course are experiencing similar market turmoil, but are easily one of the best launches in these terrible conditions, holding a 2x FDV from launch and a 3x for latest investors.

Great pleasure to be working with a project like this which keeps smashing UAW and traction records:

- Featured in the latest
CoinMarketCap GameFi report for leading the
BNB chain gaming ecosystem

- Leads the Top Web3 Games of Q1 2025 with the most active players, according to the latest DappRadar report

- Made the cut in the Top 5
BNB chain games to watch in 2025, according to BSC News.

- The 2nd BNB app with the Highest User Count over the past week, and the 2nd game with highest transactions

- Featured once again by
Binance Research in their latest industry report as a top innovator in Web3 gaming



Just the goats really

$100M raised. AAA game. Tier 1 exchange launch.

And still, the $GUN token tanked over 56%.

Gunzilla had everything Web3 gaming dreams are made of: big names, big money, and big tech.

So why are users calling it a red flag instead?

We dove deep into the GUNZ ecosystem to unpack what went wrong.

Is Web3 gaming doomed? Or did Gunzilla just shoot itself in the foot?

Read now: https://x.com/SimplicityWeb3/status/1912041730737643732

Solana has 7x more DAUs than Ethereum right now (3.6M vs 486k), but Ethereum’s ARPU (Avg. Revenue per User) is still 44x higher ($1.40 vs $0.0317)

Interestingly, Ethereum’s ARPU spiked dramatically on July 26, 2021

• Due to EIP-1559, where a portion of fees started to be burned

BTC redistribution phase is real

Over the past year, retail Bitcoin holdings dropped ~4%, while larger investors consistently increased their holdings by ~3.5%

Price has climbed moderately. Larger investors seem to be acting as support, absorbing sell pressure as retail exits

Source

Many start-ups experience enormous popularity and runaway growth, but only a few go on to become stable giants.

We invite you to (humbly speaking) one of the nicest Token2049 side workshops, focused on scaling AI startups. Together with PhDs from Cambridge University, we will explore how to:

– Launch and scale real-world AI systems
– Raise funds and actually close the round
– Design tokens that grow with your project
– Avoid the rookie mistakes that sink most startups

📍 Coinvesting, DIFC
April 29 | 11:00–14:00


Come through!
https://lu.ma/scalingstartups

Measuring VC performance by deal count misses the bigger picture: lead investing.

Over the past year, Polychain and Hack VC had the greatest % of their deals be lead investments.

Which VCs actually bet on their investments?
- Polychain: 55%
- Hack VC: 46%
- The Spartan Group: 22%

On the contrary, the lowest % was:
- MH Ventures: 0%

On March 26th, Hyperliquid got hit by a bold trader who pulled off a short squeeze with $jellyjelly.

So what exactly went down? And why does it matter for anyone still betting on decentralization?

We unpack it all in our latest research:
https://x.com/SimplicityWeb3/status/1914275755598528678