🤑 Show me the money

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And that’s a wrap on May!

What a month. So much to take in, from the billions of dollars flowing through the so-called public crypto vehicles to huge M&A deals (thanks, Coinbase). 

And it wouldn’t be a Monday morning without a Strategy announcement. It’s been a minute since we’ve covered one here on Empire. 

This morning, Saylor’s Strategy added 705 bitcoin to its balance sheet for roughly $106,000 a bitcoin. The firm now holds a whopping 580,000 bitcoin.

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s dipped to $103,000, a slight decrease over the past day.

• Total funding deals topped $594 million in the month of May, per Blockworks Research.

• DeFi TVL is up to $111 billion, dipping 1.5% over the past 24 hours.

🐢 Spending slowdown

Not only is summer just around the corner, but a new month means new data around venture capital spending.

Fundraising totaled $594 million last month, per Blockworks Research data. 

As you can see, funding made up a very small slice of the overall pie, with M&A leading the month when it comes to money spent. A little over $2.9 billion went towards deals last month, of which most of that sum came from the $2.9 billion Coinbase-Deribit deal.

Overall, funding was on the smaller side, especially in comparison to the last few months. Is that concerning? I personally don’t think so. Not unless it becomes a trend, and it would take a few more months in a row to establish that. 

There were roughly 61 raise announcements, again slightly lower than what we’ve previously seen, as depicted in the chart below. 

While momentum clearly slowed, it’s on par for the season. Taking a look at the activity from last May to now, it looks like both years have seen a dip. 

There’s nothing that’s changed sentiment-wise that seems concerning, which would lead me to believe the dip is seasonal. But we’re going to have to see how June looks.

Per the TIE Terminal, it looks like the average venture capital round announced last month was the seed stage, with strategic rounds coming in second. 

Seed rounds tend to be smaller rounds, since they’re among the first rounds raised by projects so that could contribute to the overall sum. Strategic rounds can also be small, given that they’re generally a way for a start-up to not only access some capital but also support from investors. 

So not the most impressive month but, like I said, it’s not too concerning yet. The end of June will wrap up the second quarter, and we’ll be able to take that data and compare it to the performance from the first quarter. 

Pitchbook’s Robert Le previously told CNBC that he expects crypto funding to top $18 billion this year, and that number still looks like a real possibility as of now.

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• IG, a UK-based crypto investment platform, is giving retail traders access to some spot crypto trading. 

• The stablecoin market surpassed $250 billion as institutional interest continues to climb.

• Yuga Labs sold off the Moonbirds NFT IP to Orange Cap Games.

This week’s Empire episode dove into REV (real economic value) vs. RSOV (realized store of value). 

Basically, Blockworks Research’s head of data Dan Smith and Skycatcher’s Jonah Weinstein spoke about the two metrics and while I’m sure some of you would have loved a bigger argument around REV vs. RSOV, the conclusion was that the two are a bit different. 

As Empire co-host Jason Yanowitz put it, “ it's not REV versus RSOV because…one is a valuation model or trying to put a valuation model around an L1 token and one is the demand for transactions on the chain.”

Smith said that REV seeks to understand the demand to transact, which helps to better understand the financial health of the network. Weinstein said that RSOV “captures REV as it compounds over time.”