News linked to both this project and an event.
According to The Paper, Ant International announced that it has completed its Series A funding round. Ant Group, along with some existing shareholders including Alibaba and multiple well-known international investment institutions, participated in this round. It is reported that the funding amount is approximately $1.2 billion, which will be used to expand global business, accelerate investment in frontier technologies such as AI, broaden inclusive fintech services such as cross-border payments and global accounts, and help global merchants achieve growth.
Odaily News: Bitcoin News posted on X platform, stating that the paper "A Mechanistic Derivation of the Bitcoin Price Power Law: Network Adoption Dynamics and Generalised Metcalfe Scaling" authored by @Giovann35084111 and @moneyordebt has been officially published in Elsevier’s *Nonlinear Science* journal after peer review. The paper argues that Bitcoin’s long-term price power law can be derived from network adoption dynamics and generalized Metcalfe scaling, providing a theoretical foundation for one of Bitcoin’s most debated valuation models.
According to The Block, Cambrian, a blockchain data infrastructure startup, has announced the completion of a $6 million seed funding round co-led by Franklin Templeton and Polychain Capital. Flow Traders, Selini Capital, Paper Ventures, and Nomad Capital also participated. Angel investors include Jason Mo, Avi Felman, and Alex Lee and Willy Chuang, co-founders of TrueNorth. This round was structured as a SAFE with token warrants, and Franklin Templeton and Polychain Capital have secured board observer seats. With this round, Cambrian’s total funding raised reaches $11.9 million, including its previously announced $5.9 million pre-seed round led by a16z CSX.
Odaily reports: Blockchain data infrastructure startup Cambrian has secured $6 million in seed funding, co-led by Franklin Templeton and Polychain Capital, with participation from Flow Traders, Selini Capital, Paper Ventures, Nomad Capital, and others.As previously reported by Odaily, Cambrian also received a $5.9 million pre-seed investment led by the a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, bringing its total funding to $11.9 million.Founded in 2024, Cambrian currently offers APIs for institutions and AI agents, providing real-time and historical on-chain data covering yield, risk, lending rates, trading activity, liquidity positions, and market sentiment, helping users allocate capital on-chain. The company plans to expand its existing APIs into a verifiable blockchain data oracle network, serving institutional financial clients, AI agent builders, and protocols that require reliable data to control capital flows. Unlike traditional oracles that primarily provide price data, Cambrian aims to aggregate data from lending protocols, DEX liquidity, social sentiment, developer activity, and historical market data.According to Cambrian, its platform has processed millions of API calls, currently indexes approximately $4.5 billion in TVL across four major lending protocols, tracks 1,789 vaults managed by 895 curators, and monitors over 320,000 DEX liquidity pools on Base and Solana. The company also plans to expand trading data support by integrating Hyperliquid and richer perpetual contract data.
: DeepSeek has officially launched the image recognition mode on its web version, while the app is still in the internal testing phase. Functionally speaking, the newly launched image recognition mode is still in its early stages. The reporter repeatedly tested the model using photos of DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng. After several minutes of deliberation, the model gave many incorrect answers and ultimately admitted, "I am really not sure. It is not recommended to guess the name because guessing wrong is worse than saying 'I don’t know.'" In other tests by netizens, when presented with a photo of founder Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek even misidentified him as Yang Zhilin, founder of Moonshot AI, or a "younger version" of Ma Huateng.It is worth noting that just before the launch of the image recognition mode, DeepSeek was reported to have secured its first round of financing, exceeding 50 billion yuan. According to reports, the core investment terms for DeepSeek are: whether for major tech companies or VC funds, Liang Wenfeng’s most important requirement is: not to poach DeepSeek’s employees or suggest they leave to start their own ventures. The reporter inquired about the relevant situation with an insider from DeepSeek and learned that this account is largely accurate. (The Paper)
According to The Block, Cluster Protocol—an AI-native infrastructure company building for Web3—has raised $5 million in funding, led by DAO5, with participation from Paper Ventures, JPEG Trading, and Mapleblock Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $7.75 million. The new capital will accelerate the development of CodeXero, its browser-native IDE built for the EVM ecosystem, expand its product and engineering teams, and enhance its AI systems, developer workflows, deployment infrastructure, and ecosystem growth. Cluster Protocol stated that CodeXero has already connected over 300,000 wallets, processed more than 3 billion AI tokens, and supported the deployment of over 25,000 dApps.