The Block Research's Methodology

We have an extensive venture capital database of 6,380 funding deals recorded in 6 years. Our M&A aggregation includes 742 transactions since 2013. Every deal record is backed by a news article or a press release proving the deal's legitimacy. These backing documents may or may not contain information about the deal type, round, amount raised, valuation at which the company raised the money, and the investors who've taken part in the deal. The amount raised in funding deals may be denominated in various fiat currencies depending upon the jurisdiction of the stakeholders involved. The Block Research converts all the deal amounts into US Dollars for standardization in further analyses.

 

The Block Research has created a database of various attributes of projects raising a funding deal to further analyze the state of the venture funding in more detail. This database includes multiple data fields like the project's headquarters, the project's integration with various blockchains, and the category and subcategory of the project based on its value proposition.

 

Some attributes for a few of the recorded projects are unavailable from reliable sources. For example, out of the 4,461 projects we inspected, the official headquarters of 220 were unidentified. Amount raised for 1,557 deals out of 6,380 was not recorded. 526 of the 742 M&A deals do not mention transaction details. These data points were excluded from the analyses  whenever necessary, and a note mentioning the same is attached below the corresponding chart.

 

While inspecting various blockchain ecosystems, we only consider DeFi and NFTs/Gaming categories since the rest have low on-chain activity, contain centralized conglomerates, or conduct their businesses on private blockchains.

 

The list of participating investors may vary for different news articles based on their sources since the public declaration of participation could be refrained by projects in the spotlight or investors involved themselves. We have tried to aggregate this list of investors in a single database.

We only analyze private venture funding deals. Various private ICOs, like Telegram's TON Blockchain, were considered for this report. Although the capital in the Telegram deal was returned to the private investors following regulatory issues, we consider its existence for the analysis as it is a testament to investors' interest in the industry.

 

We note that the data behind these parameters can be misreported either by the data aggregators we considered for data compilation or by the projects themselves. However, The  Block Research's process of manual filtering and updating these data points increases the accuracy of the data compiled for this analysis.

 

The number of metrics we have considered to analyze the dataset is quite large. Rather than throwing in raw numbers and percentages, we've tried to convey the observations of our study through numerous visual charts.

 

 

Analyzing such massive data without sorting and segregation may result in confusing observations. The Block Research has created its own bespoke framework to study the venture funding landscape of digital assets. We have constructed eight categories, each further divided into several subcategories. A project is classified into one of the eight categories based on its value proposition in the industry. We believe this would encompass every project in the entirety of the digital asset sector. Occasionally there are outliers, but we try to fit them in the best way possible to reflect their true purpose in the space.

 

This framework can help the reader make their own inferences based on the observations made in this report.

Categories:

For a detailed explanation of category identification methodology, please refer to the appendix.

Mark Twain once famously said, "During the gold rushes, it's a good time to be in the pick and shovel business." There's a common belief in emerging industries experiencing enormous growth that rather than being another candidate in a competitive environment, it is better to be the one fulfilling the requirements of other companies to function smoothly.

 

Companies classified under CFS, Infrastructure, and Trading /Brokerage do precisely that in the digital asset sector. CFS and Trading/Brokerage offer an onboarding gateway to new users, allowing them to interact with cryptocurrency-based financial applications. Infrastructure sets up the foundational layer for decentralized applications by providing smart contracts, developer tools, interoperability mechanisms, etc. It sets up the foundational layer and creates a conducive environment for crypto-native projects from the rest of the categories to perform smoothly.

 

Historically, projects from these categories have been least affected by the volatility in market conditions. Throughout the report, Fundamental Categories point to the group of CFS, Infrastructure, and Trading/Brokerage.