FinTech news in blockchain category

"Our mission is to build the best infrastructure for exchanges," Jog said, adding that the blockchain also has projects building games, NFT marketplaces and rollups. "It’s not just DeFi, but other applications that derive demand from trading."

LayerZero Labs, a web3 messaging protocol, has closed a $120 million Series B round, raising its valuation to $3 billion from $1 billion, the company said on Tuesday.

Based out of Cambridge, England, says it is building tooling that focuses on “autonomous agents, network infrastructure, and decentralised machine learning” that help enable communication and actions between AI applications, the idea being to make the work produced by them more actionable.

Ethereum is promoting smart contract wallets as the future of Ethereum, so dApp developers will feel incentivized to make the switch, reckoned Zeng, an active member of the Ethereum community.

The distressing loss prompted Le Nguyen to develop security solutions for crypto transactions with the help of his co-founder Jake Harwood, an effort that eventually became Staging Labs.

In light of the downfall of centralized crypto services like FTX, Gemini and Babel itself, Yang is touting Hope, which blends centralized finance (CeFi), decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi), to deliver the kind of transparency and security that come with DeFi but provide the easy access offered by CeFi.

The accelerator program’s first cohort accepted 30 startups from a pool of over 220 applicants across 76 countries.

Coinbase, the second largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has launched Base, an Ethereum-focused layer-2 (L2) blockchain, Jesse Pollak, lead for Base and head of protocols at Coinbase.

The partnership plans to make it easier for all Google Cloud customers to become Tezos “bakers,” or network validators

SoftBank Corp, the telecom operator arm of SoftBank Group, has joined Oasys, a blockchain designed for video games, as a validator.

The round included 70 participants, including Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital and Finality Capital, as well as angel investors like AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant.

The startup was founded in March 2022 by Katz and Parker Jou, CTO of Caldera, in an effort to simplify the process of creating app-specific blockchains so builders can create layer-2 blockchains in the span of hours, opposed to months or years, the team said.

The Boston-based startup aims to reduce operating costs by up to 80% for enterprises running staking nodes and APIs as a service, the two co-founders, Sean Carey and Chris Bruce, said to journalist. BlockJoy, a startup providing white label blockchain nodes as a service, raised a total of $12 million from its seed and Series A rounds, the company exclusi1vely shared with journalist. Carey, who also the Helium co-founder, and Bruce, a four-time founder, began BlockJoy as a staking service side project. In the long term, BlockJoy hopes to make its technology more accessible so that running a node is easy enough that anyone can do it, Bruce said.

QuickNode, a blockchain deployment platform, has raised $60 million in a Series B round for an $800 million valuation, the company CEO and co-founder, Alex Nabutovsky, told journalist. While the capital will focus on expansion, the company also wants to use the funding for growing blockchain adoption, Nabutovsky said. QuickNode was founded in 2017 and aimed to bring Web 2.0 infrastructure to web3, but snowballed over time, Nabutovsky said. In total, the firm has raised more than $105 million, Nabutovsky said.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with Ava Labs, the company building out layer-1 blockchain Avalanche, to help scale blockchain adoption across enterprises, institutions and governments, the two firms exclusively told journalist. Ava Labs has also become a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), giving the firm access to deploy offerings on AWS with more than 100,000 partners in over 150 countries, Wright said. The two companies are also collaborating on events for entrepreneurs and developers through Avalanche Summit, Avalanche Creates and hackathons to help builders build on the blockchain. Ava Labs plans to add its Subnet deployment as a managed service to the AWS marketplace, so both individuals and institutions can launch their own custom Subnets easily.

Watch as we livestream more than 12 up-and-coming founders — spanning web3 infrastructure, DeFi, NFT and gaming — as they pitch to an audience (that’s where you come in), including influential execs, founders and investors. She served as the global head of the firm’s digital sustainability business, chief operating officer of its digital wealth business, and leader of strategic fintech investments and blockchain activities. The Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day, which takes place on January 11, 2023, is a joint production between the CCC and journalist. Tune in — for free — to the Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day on January 11, 2023.

The new initiative, which includes coffee-themed NFTs that translate to real-world experiences, is an extension of Starbucks’ existing loyalty program, Starbucks Rewards, but leverages web3 technology like the polygon blockchain and NFTs. To enter Starbucks Odyssey after getting an invite, members will need to have an existing Starbucks Rewards account as this program is tied to the company’s larger loyalty initiative. Starbucks today is launching its blockchain-based loyalty program and NFT community, Starbucks Odyssey, to its first group of U.S. beta testers. As you earn more points and NFTs, you may then begin to gain access to real-world experiences, like special events hosted at Starbucks Reserve Roasteries or even a trip to the Starbucks Hacienda Alsacia coffee farm in Costa Rica.

The world’s largest crypto trading platform has acquired 100% of Sakura Exchange BitCoin for an undisclosed amount, a registered crypto exchange in Japan, the company said Wednesday. Binance gets regulatory nod in France, paving the way for Europe push Japan’s gaming blockchain builder Oasys raises $20M in private token sale Aside from France and Japan, Binance has also obtained regulatory approvals or authorizations in Italy, Spain, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, New Zealand, Kazakhstan, Poland, Lithuania, and Cyprus. Buying an exchange regulated by the Japan Financial Services Agency has certainly smoothed Binance’s legal path into the country.

The DID system is compatible with more than 20 Layer 1 networks including Ethereum and Solana, which Yu says will allow Carv to cover 95% of the blockchain games on the market. Blockchain-based identity systems, they argue, are the portal to user-facing applications in the decentralized land, whether the piece of identity is used to send tokens or showcase a gamer achievement. On the enterprise front, Carv provides white-label data service to game operators which can then query cross-platform data about new users, such as their reputation and achievements on established ecosystems like Steam. Carv starts with games because it’s where much of the consumer-facing development in web3 is happening, Yu reckons, but the startup eventually wants to expand to other user scenarios when they are more mature.

New York-based venture platform Modus has launched Modus Africa, a venture capital fund for AI and blockchain startups across sub-Saharan Africa, journalist has learned. The firm is currently closing three investments in startups using AI and blockchain across insurtech, fintech and health tech, said the general partners who control the fund’s thesis, direction and investment strategy while leveraging Modus’s 50+ team to carry out due diligence and portfolio management. Though it has household names such as Tunisia’s InstaDeep, Kenya’s Sama, and South Africa’s DataProphet — and several web3 startups claiming to build on the blockchain — Africa’s AI and blockchain sectors are still relatively nascent. The thinking behind adopting this strategy can be traced to Vianney Mathonnet and Andre Jr. Ayotte, the general partners of Modus’s Africa-focused fund.

Joepegs, an NFT marketplace on the Avalanche blockchain, raised $5 million in a seed round led by now-defunct FTX Ventures and the Avalanche Foundation, its co-founders who go by the pseudonyms Cryptofish and 0xMurloc, exclusively told journalist. The marketplace launched in May and has grown rapidly to the largest NFT marketplace on Avalanche with over $3.4 million in secondary NFT sales and 12,000 users. Earlier this year, Avalanche dove further into the NFT space after partnering with the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, which now operates on the blockchain alongside other platforms like Joepegs and Kalao. It also has an in-house production unit, Joe Studios, as well as an NFT Launchpad, which has on boarded over 50 projects to the Avalanche ecosystem, the company said.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is often associated with trusting blockchain technology to execute services through smart contracts, while centralized finance (CeFi) usually refers to more traditional business models and involves having people manage funds and manually execute services. As the crypto market digests the past few days of chaos, venture capitalists see the moment as a warning, but also an opportunity for the growth of decentralization and maturation of the larger blockchain space. When there are massive crashes and burns, it speaks to what we’ve been seeing over the past decade: It the Wild West out there, Samantha Lewis, principal at Mercury, said to journalist.

Some games, like Delysium and Ember Sword, were initially developed for the layer-2 blockchain Polygon but switched to Immutable X, the company’s NFT platform and layer-2 scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain. Today, Immutable X launched GameStop’s NFT marketplace out of beta, which will provide GameStop players and customers across the U.S. access to NFTs tied to games on its layer-2 chain. Earlier this year, Immutable, a web3 gaming firm with its own layer-2 chain, Immutable X, launched a whopping $500 million fund to boost gaming on its platform. This announcement follows GameStop and Immutable X’s partnership and $100 million joint grant fund from February.

Telegram announced today that will it hold an auction for usernames — for both individual accounts and channels — through a marketplace built on top of the TON blockchain. In 2018, the company hatched up plans for Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain project and an initial coin offering (ICO). After Telegram stopped working on TON, various independent groups continued the development with Toncoin getting backing from Durov and winning the rights to ton.org website in 2021. Users will be able to log into the site using Telegram, the tonkeeper app, or their TON-based wallets.

In a blog post announcing the new service from Amit Zavery, GM and VP of engineering and platform and James Tromans, director of cloud web3, the two wrote that blockchain nodes have to work hard, constantly exchanging the most recent blockchain data, so that all nodes stay in sync. Google Cloud hopes to make it easier by offering a managed service to handle node creation, while providing a secure development environment in a fully managed product. For starters, the company will support Ethereum blockchain, so developers deploying nodes on Ethereum could do it themselves or pay Google to do much of that work for them. Accordingly, Blockchain Node Engine is focused towards [multiple] developer use cases: smart contract development, reading from and writing to the blockchain, etc.

The shifting sentiment is what drove SettleMint’s most recent fundraising close, an oversubscribed €16 million Series A round co-led by London-based venture capital firm Molten Ventures, an investor in UiPath and Revolut, as well as Europe-focused OTB Ventures. SettleMint is still working with Fujitsu on its go-to-market strategy, but there’s some indication of how its low-code solution can appeal to Japan. That a gap that SettleMint is trying to close with its low-code platform for blockchain engineers. One of SettleMint’s customers is a university in Indonesia that created a parallel blockchain-based voting system for the country’s 2019 election to ensure fair results.

Whether their app ends up passing the test, developers need to pay validators in Magic Square’s tokens to audit their apps. Validators are the ones who eventually decide what gets to be on Magic Square, and they do so by vetting projects by three criteria — content, security and user experience — not unlike traditional app store inspection. Crypto.com Capital, the VC arm of the namesake crypto exchange, has joined as a strategic investor and will leverage the large pool of projects listed on the exchange to help Magic Square onboard more developers. Founded last year, Magic Square is building an app store that lets developers list projects that are vetted by the community.

OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace, will operate on the blockchain alongside existing platforms like NFTrade and other Avalanche-focused NFT marketplaces, including Joepegs and Kalao. Even though the NFT market has slowed down in recent months, over the past 30 days, Avalanche’s NFT sales volume rose 38.52% to $2.1 million in sales, per CryptoSlam data. With Avalanche, OpenSea users will be able to settle NFT transactions in under a second with low transaction fees, the company said. With about $404.6 million in sales, Avalanche is the seventh-largest blockchain by NFT sales volume, CryptoSlam data shows.

According to a press release from New York Attorney General Letitia James, Nexo and Nexo Capital failed to register with the state securities and commodities brokers or dealers and lied to investors about their registration status. Crypto platform Nexo is being sued by eight U.S. state securities regulators representing New York, California, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Washington and Vermont. Separately, California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation issued a cease-and-desist order against Nexo’s crypto-interest-bearing accounts, according to a document released by the state. Nexo isn’t the first crypto company to land in hot water with U.S regulators over interest-bearing accounts, which have been viewed as securities in select cases in the past.

The division is backed by Barry Silbert Digital Currency Group and the blockchain protocol NEAR (from which OWC previously spun out), Jeff Lavoie, head of investments at OWC Ventures, said to journalist. Open Web Collective, a blockchain and web3 accelerator, has launched a new division called OWC Ventures to invest in early-stage crypto startups, the team exclusively told journalist. Aside from investing in developers, OWC Ventures will also deploy capital in other sectors like DeFi, SocialFi and gaming, Lavoie said. NEAR protocol’s focus has been on improving developer language, documentation, the technology and other things they’ve created, Lavoie said.

They include Mask Network, MetaWeb Venture, Eniac Venture, Tess Venture, Stratified Capital, Fundamental lab, Incuba Alpha, Zeuth Venture, Cogitent Venture, Atlas Capital; Impossible Finance, RSS3, ShowMe and ETHsign’s co-founders Yan Xin and Potter Li. That’s why Yu, along with his former BTC China colleague Errance Liu, set out to build KNN3, a permissionless (hence decentralized) tool for developers to draw insight from cross-blockchain user data. One of KNN3’s better-known customers is Mask Network, which enables users to send cryptocurrencies on Web 2.0 services and is now building a decentralized identity system using KNN3’s tech. The latest to get VC recognition is KNN3, a Singapore-based startup working to help developers make sense of relational data across blockchains.

Crypto exchange and marketplace Reku has been riding the wave with what it says are the lowest fees on the market, and a platform that is aimed at both newcomers and experienced traders. Its founders say that Reku’s five years of operation mean that they know how to scale and endure fluctuations in the market, including the pandemic and this year’s recession. It is compliant with Indonesia’s commodities future trading agency (BAPPEBTI) and emphasizes user safety by offering only well-established cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Today, the startup, founded in 2017, announced it has raised $11 million in Series A funding, led by AC Ventures (ACV) with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Skystar Capital.

The company’s co-founder and CEO Kevin Li said that while Goldsky closed the seed round before this summer’s dropoff in crypto prices, the company’s focus on infrastructure has given it an edge to weather bear market conditions. By automating the creation of data pipelines, Goldsky enables its customers to spend more time working on building their core products rather than parsing the data feeding into those products, Li explained. While there are other startups such as The Graph working to solve similar problems, Li said Goldsky’s differentiation lies, in part, in its focus on providing accurate real-time data to companies. Goldsky, a data infrastructure company for crypto startups, has raised $20 million in a seed round led by Felicis and Dragonfly Capital.

Others include existing and new investors such as Adaverse, Flori Ventures, Tekedia Capital, GreenHouse Capital, ODBA, Five35 Ventures, Chrysalis Capital, Enrich Africa, Thrive Africa, Angellist Ventures and angel investors, including Rene Reinsberg, Marek Olszewski and Honey Ogundeyi. According to the CEO, Bitmama launched Changera at the intersection of blockchain payments and lifestyle, mainly targeting non-crypto-savvy people who are more comfortable using platforms with basic UI interfaces and less crypto jargon to communicate. The blockchain company will use the pre-seed to expand its operational presence, strengthen its team, consolidate its product offerings and plot market penetration across Africa while rapidly scaling new use cases for cryptocurrency within the continent, it said in a statement. Subsequently, they built a crypto exchange platform and allowed these users to access virtual assets formally and explore other use cases, including buying, selling and swapping crypto and peer-to-peer transactions.

Koop also announced today that it is coming out of stealth with $5 million in funding led by 1confirmation and web3 creator economy-focused Variant Fund, with participation from Palm Tree Crew, Day One Ventures, Ethereal Ventures, DeFi Alliance, Volt Capital, PearVC, DCF God, 0xmons and angel investors including crypto influencer Cooper Turley, ex-Coinbase CTO and a16z investor Balaji Srinivasan and former Sequoia partner Liu Jiang. At its core, Koop is a protocol that helps creators and communities launch NFT-based membership passes to raise funds for projects, Murillo told journalist in an interview. The platform has seen $110 million in total value across the treasuries of its 50 active communities buying and selling NFTs, according to Murillo, who noted that the company has a waitlist of 8,500 groups who want to form Koops. Koops, in contrast, can be more centralized, tend to be smaller in size, and afford groups the option to organize around a short-term goal or cause and dissolve the Koop when it has been achieved, Murillo added.

Los Angeles-based Stacked, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Alex Lin, is making a video streaming platform for gaming content — basically Twitch for web3 users, the founder and CEO told journalist. Lin didn’t set out to develop Stacked for the crypto crowd, but Pantera Capital convinced the founder that blockchain will play a critical role in next-gen mobile games. Having founded two ventures before — YC-backed mobile gaming company LVL6 and social shopping mobile app Hush — Lin has seen enough market ups and downs to not fret too much over the current crypto bear market. The founder remains skeptical of certain P2E games that tend to exploit users, but he’s bullish that high-quality titles will eventually emerge, akin to how free-to-play went from a widely despised monetization strategy to a genre with successful hits.

A major motivation behind launching Symbolic for Nailwal was the opportunity to more formally support companies that are already in his orbit, he said, adding that he doesn’t feel he will have to spend much extra time managing the fund because it will help him realize synergies from relationships he’s already building, in part through Polygon’s own venture fund. Symbolic plans to primarily back companies building consumer-facing decentralized apps (dApps), Nailwal said, a move that seems aligned with Polygon’s own goal to speed up web3 app development. Now, the protocol co-founder Sandeep Nailwal is launching another project, he told journalist exclusively — this time, in the form of Symbolic Capital, a venture capital fund built by and for web3 founders. One key differentiator for Symbolic will be its internal data platform the firm has built to support its portfolio companies as well as to bolster its own diligence process, Nailwal said.

The company purchased education startup ChainShot, which runs coding bootcamps for aspiring web3 developers, Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan told journalist exclusively. Once rolled up into Alchemy, ChainShot will join the crypto infrastructure company’s two other education-related properties, self-paced coding programs Web3 U and Road to Web3. McCabe, who was inspired to found ChainShot after going through a coding bootcamp himself, said the company was bootstrapped before Alchemy bought it. In addition to the founders’ personal capital, which McCabe said included funds formerly in his 401(k), ChainShot covered its costs largely through grants available through its connection to the Ethereum ecosystem as well as through web3 crowdfunding platform Gitcoin.

The startup eponymous blockchain, which is currently in testnet, aims to be EVM-compatible and use proof-of-stake and proof-of-quorum consensus mechanisms to reduce the cost of running the network and rely on three types of nodes — validator, archival and standby — in its network, it said in the investor deck. Shetty is raising $20 million to $30 million in a seed financing round for his blockchain startup Shardeum, sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private. Indian crypto exchange WazirX‘s co-founder Nischal Shetty is in advanced stages of talks to raise a maiden funding round for his new venture, sources familiar with the matter told journalist. Shardeum is employing a technique called sharding that partitions the network into shards, resulting in more transactions being processed, verified and validated in parallel, the startup explained in an investor deck, reviewed by journalist.

The new fund will invest in crypto projects and companies that focus on layer-1 blockchains, web3 infrastructure, DeFi, NFTs and gaming, payments, asset management, exchanges, marketplaces and decentralized applications, Pakman said. Seven-year-old CoinFund is launching a $300 million early-stage web3 venture fund, CoinFund Ventures I, which is backed by institutional investors, family offices and crypto-native founders. Pakman thinks the recent drawdown in crypto asset prices generally provides more favorable entry prices for venture capital funds like CoinFund, but the transition from Web 2.0 to web3 is in its early stages. Even in this bearish crypto market, there more evidence of consumer and institutional adoption than previous cycles, Pakman commented.

Layer-1 blockchain Injective has raised $40 million in a round led Jump Crypto, Eric Chen, CEO and co-founder of Injective Labs.

Though Halliday plans to charge an initial fee to customers using the product to cover the startup’s costs, Malhotra hopes to eliminate the fee over time as his goal is to keep the product as low-cost as possible for gamers.

BlackRock’s Aladdin investment management platform will offer connectivity to Coinbase Prime to offer crypto trading, custody, prime brokerage, and reporting capabilities to shared clients.

Unlike most popular multi-sig wallet products on the market today, Taub added, Vault DAO is specifically designed for individual users to secure their own assets rather than for groups that require multiple parties to sign off on a transaction. For example, a user could require three signatories to sign off on any transfer of assets from a specific wallet, and those three signatories could either all be accounts operated by the user or could include accounts delegated by the user to a trusted friend. The Vault DAO, Upstream’s solution, operates as a multi-signature wallet that can be configured to require sign-off from multiple discrete accounts to authorize a transaction on behalf of a user. It’s fundamentally similar to Gnosis Safe, a popular multi-sig wallet tailored toward organizations, but Taub says the Vault DAO is much more user-friendly from a design standpoint.

The new division will be built upon the acquisition of blockchain-based loyalty platform for games WonderBlocks, as well as a strategic alliance with blockchain infrastructure gaming developer Forte.

An unknown actor had drained funds from 7,767 wallets on the Solana network as of 5am UTC on Wednesday, Solana’s Status Twitter account said. Solana spokesperson Chris Kraeuter declined to answer our questions, but referred us to Solana’s Status Twitter account.

Besides the founders, Cheri Beth Bowen, Ronald R. Deering, Samuel D. Ellis, Mark F. Hamlin, Carlos L. Martinez, Alisha R. Shepperd and Sarah L. Theissen were all also charged with violating federal securities laws in connection with Forsage, according to the SEC complaint.

The runaway success of Axie Infinity and StepN has convinced a flurry of entrepreneurs that web3 gaming, where the ownership of in-game assets is in the hands of users via blockchain adoption rather than a centralized platform, is the future.

Blockchain ecosystem Topl has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round to help companies track and monetize social impact initiatives.

Crypto infrastructure provider Blockdaemon has acquired Danish company Sepior, a digital asset security company providing key management services for institutional clients, for an undisclosed price.

In addition to the patent for the ENIAC, Arkive has also acquired Seduction (1985), a vintage print by Lynn Hershman Leeson, which, like the ENIAC patent, will be a part of Arkive’s traveling exhibition in late 2022.

The fund is strategic for Valkyrie in that it is focused on nascent infrastructure the firm might use in its digital asset management operations, including: security, authentication, compliance, data management, storage, networking, communication, governance, payments and transactions companies.

As capital continues to enter the crypto space, Tribe Capital has raised $25 million from outside investors and has launched its incubator program, Tribe Crypto Labs, its CEO Arjun Sethi.

A source close to the company noted that there was a reduction of 7%, or 68 members, in Gemini’s company-wide Slack channel Monday morning. The company had not widely communicated the extent of Monday layoffs internally, leaving employees to speculate on the exact number of co-workers laid off in this most recent downsizing.

Solomon co-founded Sunscreen last year alongside threshold cryptography veteran MacLane Wilkison of Y Combinator-backed NuCypher.

Smolin references the great lengths users go to at the end of the year to reach the next level of airline status as a way to signify how they price the value of the service; he wonders whether more services could build this relationship and create better membership programs for users.

Today, 70% of trading volume on Binance.US, the American offshoot of the global exchange, comes from institutional customers, its CEO Brian Shroder told us in an interview.

Pow, who worked at Ox Labs, a decentralized exchange protocol builder, and his co-founder Hongzi Mao, a computer science Ph.D. from MIT, have created a desktop tool that uses machine learning algorithms to turn still avatars into motion-tracked ones. Available as a Chrome extension, Hologram swaps out Pow’s real video feed with the cat avatar.

The donor-advised fund makes the process of launching a giving campaign much simpler for companies and charities because they can just search for a nonprofit from the list to be a beneficiary of their initiative rather than having to coordinate individually with those charities, get their crypto wallet addresses and process those donations manually, according to Nigam.

Reddit is launching a new NFT-based avatar marketplace today that allows you to purchase blockchain-based profile pictures for a fixed rate. Reddit noted artists also receive royalties — with a 50/50 profile split with Reddit — from secondary sales of these NFTs on marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible. You can use Reddit’s own blockchain wallet called Vault — which is available on the firm’s native app — to store and manage these NFTs. Reddit says that while NFT profile pictures is an early-stage blockchain project, it wants to explore more features with the tech.

The company just closed a $6.6 million seed round and plans to launch its first web3 gaming world, Project Nightshade, in the fall, Mark Warrick, founder and CEO of the company, exclusively told journalist.

Digital collectible platforms, according to the proposal issued by Tencent, Ant Group, and others, should hold relevant regulatory permits, ensure the security of underlying blockchain technologies, enforce user real-identity checks, step up intellectual property protection, resolutely ban financial speculations, and promote rational consumption among users.

The acquisition comes a month after eBay launched its first collection of NFTs in partnership with web3 platform OneOf. This is the start of a new chapter in the KnownOrigin story and we couldn’t choose a better time to focus on building and innovating with the team at eBay.

While most of what Srinivasan authored is, to a large extent, theoretical, Afropolitan, a community-as-a-service company for the African diaspora, is taking a bold step to bring that vision to life.

The crypto hash rate, which measures the computational power used by proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, in China plummeted to zero between last July and August after the country carried out the harshest crackdown on crypto mining.

While much of the deep, fundamental research and infrastructure development in the blockchain space still takes place in the US, Southeast Asia is ideal for web3 startups offering consumer-facing services, said Amy Zhao, lead at crypto investment firm Ocular.

Pacific also attributes Entropy’s edge to their own willingness to deviate from the traditional business model for custodians, wherein users pay them a fee to safekeep funds, and to work towards finding a model that can generate revenue not just for the custodian but also for the protocol itself, as well as crypto users.

The $1.5 billion venture capital firm is entering the crypto market with a new $110 million fund dedicated to the sector that it will operate jointly with Ledger, a French startup focused on digital asset security, said Cathay co-founder Dennis Barrier.

Despite the rising interest among Asia’s investors, most wealth management firms in the region do not yet offer clients a digital assets proposition — and two-thirds of firms currently have no plans to do so, according to Accenture.

Other major crypto companies have also been slowing hiring in response to a downturn in prices – Coinbase, Gemini close competitor, announced plans last month to reverse its prior headcount growth projections, and Latin American crypto exchange Bitso let go of 80 employees last week.

Iyer, a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits, spent the majority of last year honing in on his interest in web3 as a visiting partner at Pear VC and an instructor teaching a DeFi masterclass to over 2,000 students.

Wagner also noted that the company recently launched a new product line around CRM data sharing and since the company is seeing a lot of traction around its file-sharing capabilities, it is also investing in that as well.

Using the funds raised from the investors, among them Founders Factory Africa, Texas-based Kon Ventures, Europe-based venture capital collective Crypto League, Ghana-based R9C Ventures and Maximus Ventures, Ayoken plans to sign a number of exclusive deals with artists and partnerships with telcos, besides growing its team and secondary marketplaces.

Stokley will serve as co-CEO of the company alongside RJ Phillips, another former OnlyFans exec joining Zoop this summer. Zoop plans to release 500 cards per influencer for its initial drops and has long-term plans to launch its own token, Phillips told The Block.

Larsen said the situation with Hannum didn’t affect investors’ attitude towards the funding round, and that ZenLedger had already secured ParaFi as a lead investor before Hannum’s misdeeds were made public.

Of the total funds raised in this round, $32 million came from venture capital firms and $38 million from the sale of Flowcarbon’s Goddess Nature Token (GNT), a crypto token on the Celo blockchain backed by carbon credits, Reuters reported.

Doppel indexes NFT data across various blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Flow, and others, and uses models that incorporate keywords and metadata to spot fraud, Tian said.

eBay is the latest company to enter the NFT business, as the online marketplace announced today that it launching its first collection of NFTs in partnership with web3 platform OneOf.

Pebble’s 5% cash back is higher than what traditional credit cards tend to offer because traditional credit card providers rely on middlemen like Visa and Mastercard as well as fraud protection services and other third parties to process their transactions, leaving less in reward cash for the customer, Bai explained.

London, United Kingdom-based startup Encode Club, founded in 2020, trained 15,000 developers last year alone through its programming, CEO and co-founder Anthony Beaumont told journalist in an interview.

Even as more traditional financial players enter the crypto world, blockchain investor Fortis Digital Ventures is closing a $100 million crypto fund that aims to bridge the gap between the old and new finance worlds. The firm will focus on investing in web3 companies that are building better user experiences and solving real world issues for people or businesses.

Linktree is also introducing a new NFT lock feature that allows creators to lock their links using a smart contract address.

In October, the company partnered with Shopify to allow artists on its service to connect their Spotify profiles with their Shopify stores, allowing them to market their merchandise directly to fans through the Spotify app.

Terraform Labs, the company behind the UST and Terra (LUNA) cryptocurrencies, halted the Terra blockchain Thursday following the Terra ecosystem meltdown this week, which caused its TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin token to crash, taking with it the rest of the cryptocurrency market. The halt means no new blocks are being generated on the blockchain network after its block height of 7603700, and holders can’t move their Terra assets until the blockchain is unfrozen.

By offering invoice and recurring revenue financing, Crowdz says it wants to help SMEs have a greater shot at success by opening up access to capital. The company’s latest financing is part of an ongoing $200 million investment from Citi into technology creating social impact, and was led by its Spread Products Investment Technologies (SPRINT) team, the strategic investing arm of the bank’s Global Spread Products division.

Singapore-based crypto trading and asset management startup Amber Group is reportedly raising a new round at a $10 billion valuation; 11 months ago it had just reached the unicorn status in a $100 million financing round. Chainalysis, a startup that provides crypto investigation and compliance services, has secured $170 million in a Series F funding round led by GIC, a sovereign wealth fund of Singapore.

It’s been fairly active in the crypto space specifically — it led an investment in blockchain company Flipside, a data analytics tool for protocols that rewards users for completing queries, last month, and participated in Indian web3 startup CoinDCX’s recent $135 million fundraise. In February, Republic spun out its metaverse and NFT-focused investment division, Republic Realm, as a standalone company called Everyrealm run by Janine Yorio.

But Paper, a crypto-focused payments processing company launched in February, is working to make buying, using and holding NFTs easier for the everyday customer or fan trying to buy a digital collectible, James Sun, co-founder and CEO of the company, told journalist. While incorporating email addresses might feel more Web 2.0-focused, Sun said the team aims to maintain the interoperability of what crypto is supposed to be.

Alberto Simon, co-founder of art investing platform Masterworks, is leaving his current role at Gemini’s Nifty Gateway NFT platform to join Co:Create as a co-founder and chief product officer, Fung said. Co:Create will be chain-agnostic, meaning it will support the blockchains on which its customers have built their NFT projects, Fung said.

When people download the Arianee app and add the digital passport to their smartphone, brands get a new channel to reach their customers. Arianee has raised a $21 million Series A round (€20 million) in a round led by Tiger Global

It’s a little less than two weeks since Crypto Bahamas began, but we’re still bringing out content from the conference, because, seriously, there was so much good ideas we couldn’t not share it.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today that the platform is going to start testing NFTs with select creators in the United States this week. Mosseri noted that there will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on Instagram. At launch, the supported blockchains for showcasing NFTs on Instagram are Ethereum and \[…\]

Unlike NFTs that are minted on Ethereum or other public chains and traded with crypto on open marketplaces, digital collectibles issued in China are minted on permissioned blockchains managed by local tech giants and often sold on these companies’ own channels.

This means that GD1 Crypto Fund 1 will not only serve to give New Zealand startups a boost, but also to allow local investors to get involved in overseas startups in the hopes that some of those returns will make it back to the startup ecosystem in New Zealand.

Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firm’s commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty of crypto investors still don’t understand.

Instead, Bitso is working with Moss.Earth, a São Paulo, Brazil-based carbon offsets company, to indirectly mitigate the emissions associated with transacting bitcoin and Ethereum-based tokens via its platform.

To bring more users to its platform, it will also partner with NFT artists globally, who will do collection drops on Coinbase NFT in the near future, Saxena shared. For example, if an NFT contains details that are illegal in the U.S., Coinbase NFT would ban it, Saxena said.

Wayne Chang, co-founder and CEO of Spruce, told journalist that web2 platforms that offer sign-in capabilities have been able to access this data in the past because they offer trust and verification to users of the network. That’s the question Spruce is trying to answer by building a public utility of sorts for internet users, but doing so requires individual users to build trust with one another by voluntarily sharing data through the network when they can’t rely on a centralized intermediary to make assurances.

BlockApps has raised $41 million in a new funding round to continue its expansion into the enterprise blockchain space, the company president and CEO Kieren James-Lubin.

Uniswap joins a growing segment of crypto-native companies now formally dedicating resources to investing in other companies in the space, including crypto exchange FTX and DeFi protocol Cake, which both recently launched venture funds. Before launching this dedicated venture arm, Uniswap invested in 11 companies and protocols across the web3 ecosystem, including Tenderly, LayerZero, MakerDAO, Aave, Compound Protocol and PartyDAO, the company says. Uniswap Labs, the company behind the popular decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, has launched a venture capital arm to invest in web3 projects

After a decade at Alibaba and its fintech affiliate giant Ant Group, Max Ma founded SwooshTransfer in 2021 to facilitate cross-border payments for small- and medium-sized enterprises, as well as individuals such as overseas students, for whom tuition payments are often a hassle.

CertiK, a web3 and blockchain security company, has raised $88 million in its latest round, bringing its valuation to $2 billion. To date, CertiK has protected over $300 billion worth of crypto assets for 2,500 enterprise clients through its auditing and fraud investigation services, among other offerings, the company stated.

Taro will support developers transferring assets on the Bitcoin Lightning Network by executing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, a much greater volume than what the Bitcoin network could otherwise support, Stark said. Taro is the latest of multiple products Lightning Labs has built specifically for the Lightning Network, which is a layer-two solution that makes the Bitcoin blockchain more efficient.

Despite the similarities in branding, Zhang told journalist gumi Cryptos Capital  (gCC) is not a subsidiary or corporate venture capital arm of gumi, though Zhang notably still holds a position as a vice president at gumi in addition to his role as a managing partner at gCC. San Francisco- and Tokyo-headquartered gumi Cryptos Capital (gCC), a venture capital firm that focuses on blockchain startups, said it has launched a new $110 million early-stage fund.

Since that 2015 tweet, compensation for open source developers has remained a hot-button issue, and popular developer platform GitHub launched a feature in 2019 that allows users to send tips to their favorite open source coders.

Another crypto nonprofit platform, The Giving Block, has also already taken in $1.5 million in crypto donations and announced a campaign yesterday to raise $20 million in cryptocurrency for its Ukraine Emergency Response Fund supporting a variety of accredited nonprofit groups, including United Way Worldwide and Save the Children, according to a webpage for the campaign.

Espresso Systems, the company behind the blockchain project, is led by Fisch, chief operating officer Charles Lu and chief scientist Benedikt Bünz, collaborators at Stanford who have each worked on other high-profile web3 projects, including the anonymity-focused Monero blockchain and BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen’s Chia.

Lido aims to solve both of these issues through its decentralized staking platform that allows users to stake their coins with no minimum investment required. Andreessen Horowitz made the investment in Lido partially using ETH, buying up some of Lido’s governance tokens from other holders, Lomashuk said. Assets staked on Lido are worth over $10 billion USD at today’s prices, and are split across 76,000 individual crypto wallets.

Existing backers Accel (which led its Series A) and Point Nine Capital (which led its seed round) also participated, along with Abstract Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap, Daedalus, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Optimism co-founder and CEO Jinglan Wang, Eric Ries, founder of Long-Term Stock Exchange and Tihomir Bajic, CEO of LTSE Software.

Beyond the consensus mechanism, Wagstaff says Subspace allows for data to be stored far more cheaply than on other blockchains by incentivizing users to run archival nodes, which store historical data relating to a particular blockchain. Subspace will use the capital to expand its integrations with projects on other blockchains and build a dedicated product team to support its Subspace Meta Services (SMS) segment.

Coinbase Ventures investor Katherine Wu is leaving the company for early-stage crypto venture capital firm Archetype, less than a year after joining Coinbase as a senior deal lead in September.

The investors behind virtual hack.summit(), the world’s largest blockchain programmer event, have launched a $200 million crypto seed fund under the Hack VC umbrella, fund partner Alex Pack told TechCrunch in an interview. Ed Roman, formerly a solo GP, invested in early-stage tech and crypto companies for over 10 years through Hack VC before partnering \[…\]

Tesla’s decision to buy Bitcoin last year prompted a major bull run for the cryptocurrency, though that surge was famously reversed months later by the company’s announcement that while it did not immediately plan to sell its Bitcoin, it would no longer be accepting Bitcoin as payment for vehicle purchases.

London-based early-stage European VC fund Backed is bolstering its position by adding €75 million to its seed fund, while adding another €75 million via a new follow-on fund vehicle.

The new VC arm, called Stronghold Capital, has already invested in companies including Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research and funds including Precursor Ventures and Backstage Capital, both of which have a track record of backing underrepresented founders.

Until you remember that OnlyFans is doing NFT profile pictures now, which means maybe no one wins (except for the intersection of people who both love crypto and also want to compensate NSFW creators for their work?).

With big-name backers like The Chainsmokers, Alexis Ohanian, Mark Cuban and Snoop Dogg, Pearpop is launching Pearproof, a web3 app that allows creators to mint NFTs of their social media posts.

The company has built on top of many of its virtual properties — for example, it launched a retail store concept in Decentraland two weeks ago, which it plans to expand into other metaverse platforms, Yorio said.

The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) has seized over 94,000 bitcoins that were allegedly stolen in the 2016 hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex and arrested a married couple suspected to have laundered the money, the department announced today. While Morgan and Lichtenstein were not formally accused of perpetrating the hack.

As proof that web3 is not some passing trend, blockchain infrastructure startup Alchemy announced today that it has closed on a $200 million Series C1 equity round that values the company at $10.2 billion.

Wormhole released ETH to an Ethereum wallet based on those wETH, so the exploiter essentially stole some ETH from Wormhole’s reserves. It’s unclear what’s going to happen next with the assets and if wETH in Wormhole’s reserves are still backed by ETH.

Two of Fireblocks’ biggest competitors in the crypto custody infrastructure space were acquired last year, Shaulov said. In terms of crypto products, decentralized finance (DeFi) has been an especially hot growth area for the startup, accounting for 10% of Fireblocks’ transaction volume in the past month, according to Shaulov.

If this becomes a reality, value will be lost for a network’s stakeholders through under-pricing higher-value use-cases, while at the same time losing network revenue potentially derived from lower-value, high-volume use cases

Keep an eye on enterprising companies pushing into these areas – specifically collectibles – as a way to broaden the reach of crypto and blockchain in 2022.

The company is rolling out NFT Profile Pictures to Twitter Blue subscribers on iOS by way of Twitter Blue early access Labs feature

While Crypto.com is the world’s fourth-largest crypto exchange, it has been pushing hard into U.S. markets in recent months, with stunts including viral advertisements featuring actor Matt Damon and a $700 million purchase of the naming rights to the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers Arena.

Bfree was founded by Chukwudi Enyi (COO), Moses Nmor (CPO) and Flosbach (CEO), who were looking to develop better, ethical and tech-inspired debt-collection tools and processes following their firsthand experience working for digital lenders in Nigeria. Ethical debt collection standards ensure the privacy of customer information during the process.