🖨️ Money printer on

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Hello Empire reader. It’s me again, David Canellis.

Good news: Bitcoin has set another all-time high overnight, this time above $124,500.

More good news: I’m coming back to this newsletter for another run, starting next week. Expect takes (good and bad), data visualizations and what we’ll call analysis, just to keep things highbrow.

Is it correlation, causation or coincidence that bitcoin might be insanely bullish, just as I’m about to return? Not sure, but I have a feeling more good things are on their way.

🕺 All about the funding

But before David’s return, you’re stuck with me (Katherine Ross) for a wee bit longer. And since we have yet to take a look at funding data, let’s recap last month.

Last month, we saw over $6 billion go into funding, a pretty big increase in comparison to June, according to Blockworks Research data. 

Of that $6 billion, roughly $177 million came from M&A activity. To break that down further: 96 raise announcements were made in comparison to just 12 M&A announcements. Both June and May saw 10 or fewer M&A announcements, it did pick up ever so slightly.

If we look at TIE data, which included Digital Asset Treasury company raises, then we can also gauge what stage of raises were the most popular last month. 

With the rise of the Digital Asset Treasury companies, there is a decent amount of post-IPO equity being raised. But, excluding DATs, most raise announcements were either seed rounds or Series A rounds. 

Let’s break down venture funding further: Coinbase Ventures was one of the most active investors in the last month, participating in 21 rounds. 

To put all of this in perspective, June saw a bit of a comeback in funding after a very slow May, and it looks like July is yet again showing another pick up. 

Last month also outpaced March, which had been the most successful month since 2021 based on Blockworks Research data, which goes to show how large the appetite is. Currently, DATs clearly reign supreme if we’re looking at total fundraising. 

Payments, however, also saw a decent amount of activity. As did DeFi (which was the second most popular category in June for fundraising). 

Here’s my take: DATs are the hot item of the moment, and it shows in the data. However, I’m curious to see if they can continue this momentum into August (which, like the summer months, tends to be seasonally weak) or if we’ll see a slight decline next month. 

But overall, the data looks pretty strong at this point, and we didn’t even really touch on just how successful crypto IPOs have been. 

Brought to you by:

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To help drive this vision forward, Mantle has recently welcomed Helen Liu, co-CEO of Bybit, and Emily Bao, head of spot trading, to its advisory board.

Known for their leadership in global scaling, compliance, and DeFi innovation, their addition signals a major step in Mantle’s mission to build an institutional-grade on-chain ecosystem.

• Justin Sun’s suing Bloomberg, alleging that the media company plans to publish his crypto holdings, which puts him at risk. 

• Bullish followed in Circle’s footsteps, notching a successful IPO debut. 

• MetaMask may finally announce its stablecoin this week.

It’s the summer of DATs and the party is going strong. 

But when October rolls around, everyone will be looking to DAS: London to hear from these meta-defining voices on where things stand and where they’re headed.

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📅 October 13-15 | London