Blockchain analysis firm bitsCrunch Ltd. today announced that it has raised $3.6 million in new funding from Animoca Brands to develop its tools that provide visibility into nonfungible token markets.

The private funding round was also joined by Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com Capital and Polygon Studios, among others.

Nonfungible tokens are a type of blockchain asset that can represent the verifiable ownership of digital items such as artwork, music, videos, video game items and more. What gives NFTs value in the eyes of investors is that the token showing ownership of the digital item can be bought, sold or traded and every trade is recorded indelibly on the blockchain.

In 2021, the NFT market went through a popularity boom that reached $41 billion in trade volume, according to the most recent metric, up from $100 million during 2020.

BitsCrunch has made it the company’s mission to be the “NFT ecosystem protector” and to make it a safe place for NFT collectors and creators by providing tools that provide deeper visibility into the market.

The company provides a set of tools for NFT creators and investors that use artificial intelligence to analyze blockchain transactions in order to deliver real-time analytics for different NFT collections. This includes detecting “wash trades,” a form of market manipulation that artificially inflates the value of NFTs, a forgery detection tool and more.

Using Scour, users can detect NFT wash trades happening in collections and more easily avoid them. According to a report from Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, 110 profitable wash traders made $8.9 billion in profit during 2021.

With Liquify, users can get a fair price estimation of NFTs. It will act as an oracle to display if an NFT is currently within a range that will most likely be profitable or not given the market. It uses AI to consider different characteristics such as sales history, metadata, market sentiment and other metrics to come to an estimated fair value.

Unleash NFTs allows users to track their portfolios and analyze the NFT ecosystem itself. The Unleash dashboard delivers a real-time analytics tracker for the comprehensive value of NFT holdings. It also helps solve the issue where collectors may have multiple NFTs distributed across multiple different blockchains, which can make it difficult to track historical activity in one place.

Finally, Crunch DaVinci is an AI forgery detection tool that watches the market to determine if newly minted NFTs are actually copying other NFTs. With the market boom in 2021, there have been more issues with plagiarized and counterfeit NFTs. During the same year, a faked art NFT purporting to be made by the political artist Banksy sold for $336,000 to a British collector; the money was returned by the forger, but it revealed a rising problem with the technology.

BitsCrunch said that it would use the new funding to expand its team and focus on securing the many prominent blockchains and NFT marketplaces. The company’s capabilities are already in use by the NFT marketplace Rarible and Ethereum scaling solution Polygon.

Image: bitsCrunch