$6.5B Seized BTC Sell Pressure?

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Good Morning.

GM - markets are down badly to the point that CT is debating about LLM, a satire meme coin made out of ai16z’s Eliza character and its derivatives. Yes, all of this happened in the past 48 hours. Sometimes it’s a good reminder that we’re not serious.

In Today's Email:

• What Matters: Mantra $1B Tokenized RWA 🏠

• Founders Highlight: Jason of Solayer 🤓

• Deal Flow: SoSoValue $15M Series A 💰️ 

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TOGETHER WITH

Superseed

The Superseed team has raised $4.47M from 1,148 participants, sticking true to their ethos of a community-owned L2 that repays your debt. To get a deeper overview of what the Superseed protocol is, click below!

WHAT MATTERS

Mantra to Tokenized $1B of Property

State of play: MANTRA will tokenize at least $1B worth of property developer DAMAC Group’s assets in 2025.

• DAMAC’s portfolio includes real estate development firms, hospitality, and data centers.

• DAMAC began accepting crypto payments in 2022.

• Donald Trump has said that DAMAC laid out plans for a $20B investment in data centers.

Why it Matters: This trend shows that there’s a significant appetite from capital allocators outside of the US to tap into the tokenization space.

What’s next: We’ll be seeing more tokenization of foreign assets because they’ll benefit significantly from the onchain crypto markets and liquidity in comparison to their own domestic stock markets.

For builders and investors: 2025 is the year when a crypto founder’s commercial skill is being put to the test. There’ll be more need to work with offchain entities and integrations such as this deal done by Mantra.

BUILDER-INVESTOR HIGHLIGHT

Jason Li of Solayer

Intro: Jason Li is the co-founder of Solayer, a Solana restaking network that has raised a $12M seed round led by Polychain Capital. It is designed to empower on-chain decentralized applications (dApps) with improved network bandwidth while simultaneously enhancing Layer 1 security.

Previous background: Jason graduated from UC Berkeley and started his entrepreneurial journey by initially building LoopChat. He transitioned into crypto in 2022 by co-founding MPCVault, a non-custodial crypto wallet designed for teams and multi-chain capabilities.

The big idea: Since then Solayer has expanded from providing restaking services to creating its chain, called the Solayer InfiniSVM.

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INSIGHTS

Market Fears 69,370 BTC Sell Pressure

State of play: The US government has received approval to liquidate 69,370 BTC from federal seizure, ending a 4-year legal battle tied to the Silk Road marketplace.

• Chief Judge Richard Seeborg denied a motion to block the forfeiture, allowing the DOJ to sell the assets valued at $6.5 billion.

• The report comes just 11 days from President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration.

• Trump has vowed not to sell any of the 187,236 BTC that is still in possession by the U.S. government.

DEAL FLOWS

SoSoValue $15M Series A

Deal flows slowed down this week - we saw $70M in deals 💼 

SoSoValue, a crypto data platform, raised $15M for its Series A funding less by Hongshan, SmallSpark, Mirana Ventures, and Safepal.

• The round values the company at $200M, bringing its total funding to ~$20M.

• SoSoValue’s dashboard lets users access real-time crypto prices, an AI-curated news feed, and interactive charts.

• The platform is best known for its comprehensive ETF data that tracks daily inflows and outflows.

Deal flows in the past week:

• Rena Labs, $3.3M Pre-Seed Round

• ZK Candy, $4M Seed Round

• SoSoValue, $15M Series A

• Aligned Layer, $1M Public Sale

• Superseed, $4.47M Public Sale

• 0G Labs, $32.24M Public Sale

• Starpower, $2.5M Unknown Round

• Nakamoto Games, $10M Unknown Round

QUICK BITES

• Ripple outlines the next steps for listing RLUSD.

• Sol Strategies is raising $20M via debt financing.

• JPMorgan says EU’s MiCA could boost Euro stablecoins.

• Solana pushes validators to test early ‘Firedancer’ upgrade.

• Coinbase subpoenaed by CFTC in Polymarket investigation.

• Ex-Nasdaq exec joins Arbitrum to head its venture studio Tandem.

• Standard Chartered plans to offer crypto custody services in the EU.

• Gemini onboards a new leadership team in the EU and plans expansion.

• Lummis is poised to lead the newly created Senate crypto subcommittee.

NOTEWORTHY READS

• Helius’ read on Solana's MEV report.

• Kain’s read on how we’re still in a bull market, relax.

• Three Sigma’s read on MegaETH vs Monad vs Hyperliquid.

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Disclaimer: All the information presented in this publication and its affiliates is strictly for educational purposes only. It should not be construed or taken as financial, legal, investment, or any other form of advice.