**Babylon Leads Funding Announcements Alongside OpenSocial, Aperture, and Scrypt**

This week saw several venture capital rounds, with Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon leading the announcements. Babylon revealed a $70 million raise on Thursday, led by Paradigm, with participation from Bullish Capital, Polychain Capital, and Galaxy.

“This latest investment will accelerate Babylon’s mission to enable a Bitcoin-secured decentralized economy,” the company stated. “Babylon Bitcoin Staking protocol allows PoS systems like PoS chains, layer-2s, DA layers, oracles, etc., to acquire staking capital from Bitcoin.”

PitchBook analyst Robert Le previously told Blockworks that infrastructure projects are likely to attract venture capital attention at this point in the cycle. “Infrastructure is still underdeveloped,” Le said, pointing to transaction costs on Base. “We can’t say infrastructure and blockchains are mature when you pay $5 to sign a transaction.”

“Trustless staking is a novel and fundamental primitive for Bitcoin and the broader ecosystem,” said Arjun Balaji of Paradigm. He praised the team for being “at the frontier of Bitcoin innovation.”

While the week was quieter on the funding front, it followed Farcaster’s announcement of a $150 million raise. Additionally, Fortune reported that Neynar, which allows developers to build social applications on Farcaster, raised $11 million from Haun Ventures and Coinbase.

Other notable funding news includes:

- OpenSocial, an infrastructure layer for building social applications, announced a $5 million seed funding round, closed in January 2024. *Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz participated in this round.

- DeFi platform Aperture announced a Series A raise, totaling $12 million across its rounds, bringing its valuation to $250 million. The raise included participation from Skyland Ventures and Blockchain Founders Fund.

- Swiss-based crypto asset financial services company Scrypt announced a $5 million strategic funding round led by Braza Bank.