FinTech news in decentralization category

The Tel Aviv-based firm aggregates crypto data across different wallets, accounts and platforms, so crypto entities’ financial teams can better understand what happening internally at their business without needing the crypto-native knowledge and experience to gather the information, Zackon said. Its platform can onboard any on-chain or centralized finance data sources and enable financial workflows like balance calculations or auditing and reporting so businesses can monitor and manage their web3 assets both on-ramp and off-ramp, Zackon added. To date, Tres has monitored and analyzed more than $40 billion of crypto assets for customers like Hivemind Capital, non-custodial staking platform Stakely and blockchain infrastructure firm Blockdaemon across the U.S., Israel and Europe, its press release stated. Something like that doesn’t exist today, you have to look at Ethereum data or Solana data one at a time.

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.

The team’s goal is to tap the blockchain to build a music creation suite that bakes in an open source ethos, allowing producers to sample a wide variety of songs and sounds while the platform ensures that credit always flows back to original creators appropriately. Arpeggi Labs, a new crypto startup focused on using blockchains to make music creation more collaborative, has scored $5.1 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz crypto arm alongside a host of artists including names like Steve Aoki, 3LAU and Wyclef Jean. To make this dream happen, Arpeggi is aiming to go beyond developing a protocol and build an entire in-browser digital audio workstation that allows producers to mix blockchain-minted beats while integrating with the wider arena of Web 2.0 and web3 music platforms. While the company hasn’t landed on whether they’re looking to issue a token for the platform down the road, the founders say they are mainly focused on enticing music professionals who haven’t already aligned themselves with the web3 mantra but are excited about the idea of the industry doubling down on open source.

While crypto mining, the process that verifies and adds new transactions to the blockchain using the proof-of-work method, is costly to join and prone to regulatory clampdown, crypto staking, enabled by the Merge, offers enhanced censorship resistance thanks to its low barriers to entry both in terms of cost and the computing power required. The Merge, the much-anticipated network update on Ethereum that’s slated to unfold this week, could provide a new way for China’s crypto enthusiasts to participate in the blockchain economy two years after the country began phasing out the lucrative crypto mining industry. Before China banned crypto mining, the country accounted for as much as two-thirds of Bitcoin’s worldwide hash power, the energy consumed to carry out proof-of-work. Big hopes for the upcoming Ethereum Merge Users who are more crypto-savvy could opt for decentralized protocols, which use algorithms to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions rather than relying on a centralized intermediary, allowing for a higher degree of anonymity.

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.

Other investors in the round include PrimeBlock Ventures, M77 Ventures, ShataCapital, Kryptos, Antalpha Ventures, Waterdrip Capital, 7 O’Clock Capital, Misa Zhu, founder of AR glasses maker Rokid and Fan Zhang, a former co-founder of Sequoia Capital China. Other startups are also using MPC to enable distributed signing of crypto transactions, but Wang pointed to the fact that Safeheron is open-sourced, which gives its clients more transparency into its source codes. Since its product launch in October, Safeheron has powered over 20 clients, which altogether have more than $100 million in cryptocurrencies under custody and have facilitated more than $4 billion worth of transactions using Safeheron’s wallet as a service, according to Wang. Private keys, critical to decentralized crypto apps, let individuals take control over their digital assets through self-custody wallets rather than leaving control to a centralized institution.

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.

Four Tencent veterans want their offering .bit, an identity protocol built on the blockchain, to become the universal identification system in web3, like how emails and phone numbers became ubiquitous in Web 2.0, while giving users control over their own data rather than letting it reside in the platforms they use. The strategy won investor support as the company has closed a Series A funding round of $13 million led by CMB International, which is owned by the Chinese conglomerate China Merchants Group, HashKey Capital, known for its early investment in Ethereum, QingSong Fund, GSR Ventures, GGV Capital and crypto-focused investment firm SNZ. On Jike, a social network favored by China’s tech workers, venture capitalists and web3 enthusiasts, people are attaching the .bit suffix to their names even if they haven’t actually registered an account with the platform. The company’s next ambition is to promote the use of .bit for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), said Yeoh.

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

Outside of Miami, Quinn said, RealOpen’s crypto focus has attracted a strong pipeline of listings from sellers all over the world. By using RealScore, buyers can defer converting their crypto into cash until the very instant the transaction closes without having to explain to a seller what the value of their offer is beforehand, according to Dumontet.

As to how to restore investor confidence in the crypto sphere, Ge believes regulators are on the right track to bring more oversight over consumer-facing crypto products and protection for retail investors, as is the case in Singapore.

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.

Nomad, a token bridge that allows users to send and receive tokens between Avalanche (AVAX), Ethereum (ETH), Evmos (EVMOS), Moonbeam (GLMR) and Milkomeda C1 blockchains, was attacked on Monday, with hackers draining almost all of the protocol’s funds. This meant that when a user transferred funds from one blockchain to another, Nomad allegedly never checked the amount, enabling the user to withdraw funds that didn’t belong to them. Approximately $190.7 million in crypto was stolen from the bridge, according to decentralized finance tracking platform DeFi Llama, which shows that the current total value locked — the amount of user funds deposited in a DeFi protocol — is less than $12,000 at the time of writing. The attack comes just days after Nomad revealed that a number of high-profile crypto investors, including Coinbase Ventures, OpenSea, Polygon and Crypto.com Capital, had participated in its $22 million April seed round, which landed the company a $225 million valuation.

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.

Interplay current offerings include a venture capital arm that houses two early-stage funds, a foundry that helps build companies from scratch, an incubator to support existing companies and a family office.

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

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.

In April, China’s top financial industry associations proposed that NFTs must not be used for securitization; nor should they be traded with cryptocurrencies, which have been outlawed in the country.

The new fund will focus on a handful of areas in the crypto ecosystem, including web3 infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized autonomous organization (DAOs) tooling, and new business models to collaborate on intellectual property, to name a few.

It’s a bold move, and one of the reasons why we’re excited to announce that Solana’s co-founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, will join for a fireside conversation on stage on October 18-20 in San Francisco.

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.

A staff at Customer.io, an email vendor contracted by OpenSea, misused their employee access to download and share email addresses of OpenSea users and newsletter subscribers with an unauthorized external party, the world’s largest NFT marketplace said Wednesday night.

In addition to the announcement of Saga, Yakovenko shared the launch of the Solana Mobile Stack, or SMS, which is a web3 layer for Solana built on the phone. The co-founder and CEO of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, had a Steve Jobs moment when he stood in front of an auditorium in New York City and announced the launch of Saga, an Android web3-focused smartphone.

A Cloudflare outage on Tuesday knocked out numerous popular web services, including major crypto exchanges FTX, Bitfinex, and OKX, raising questions about the security of centralized crypto platforms.

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.

Its fund will also collaborate with other web3 gaming and NFT-focused investors including BITKRAFT, Animoca Brands, Arrington Capital, Double Peak, AirTree, King River Capital and GameStop, as well as strategic gaming publishers, for additional investment opportunities. Immutable, an Australia-based web3 gaming firm, launched an inaugural $500 million developer and venture investment fund, Robbie Ferguson, president and co-founder of Immutable.

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.

Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey is teaming up with artist Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) to launch The Bitcoin Academy at Marcy Houses, the public housing complex in Brooklyn, New York where Jay-Z grew up.

Solana Ventures and Solana Foundation have set up a $100 million investment and grant fund to deploy capital into South Korean web3 startups, Johnny Lee, general manager of games at Solana Labs, told journalist.

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.

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.

InfStones, which aims to help clients build applications across a number of blockchain platforms, closed a $66 million round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and GGV Capital, the company announced on Wednesday.

Last week, former Binance executives at Old Fashion Research launched a $100 million venture fund to focus on the metaverse and bringing greater crypto adoption to emerging markets like Latin America and Africa, according to its managing partner, Ling Zhang, who was previously the vice president of M&A and investments at Binance. Venture capital firms continue to deploy and raise capital for crypto markets despite volatility in recent weeks, with Binance Labs closing a $500 million investment fund to focus on web3 and blockchain technology adoption.

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.

The objective of the partnership is to bring programmable money, or digital money that can be coded to act in a certain way based on predetermined conditions, into the Japanese market, said Digital Asset in a separate statement.

When people have little or no confidence in the financial system, or they don’t know certain financial services that meet their needs exist or they don’t have formal identification documents to seek these services, achieving optimal financial inclusion can prove herculean.

Zhang said she has noticed a growing interest of funds coming into the crypto space or new funds launching to invest in crypto after they saw the potentials of blockchain technology and crypto ecosystem.

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.

Primitives’ ultimate goal is for the digital wallet to become a central location for a user to hold NFTs and cryptocurrencies, interact with friends, store music, play games, and more, Gabeau said.

Babel has evolved from a crypto lending business targeting miners and others into a comprehensive crypto asset manager for institutional investors. The growth of Babel Finance, which offers a suite of institution-facing crypto financial products, could be an indicator of how banks, investment funds, and other traditional investors are embracing the emerging digital asset class. It’s one of the many crypto firms to have recently opened an office in Singapore, which is competing with Hong Kong to be the crypto nexus of Asia.

For one, it’s working on a price stabilization mechanism to ensure the cost of its coins is always at a rate that the shoes are affordable for new users but also not so cheap that existing users lack the incentives to mint new shoes, that is, create new shoes on the blockchain and sell. Since its launch in December, StepN, an app that lets users walk and run to earn tokens, has quickly become a household name in the play-to-earn blockchain gaming, or GameFi, world.

At the Permissionless conference in West Palm Beach this week, conversations around crypto M&A were heating up as market players discussed this trend growing at the protocol level for DeFi.

CyberConnect plans to generate revenues through the social data network, which include different participants like data contributors, indexers and recommenders, curators, and users.

With a custodial wallet, Robinhood holds the private key on behalf of a user, meaning that users can invest in crypto by tracking its price movements but they cannot directly transact with their crypto funds. Now that it’s launching a non-custodial wallet, users will be able to access and manage their own digital assets, including cryptocurrencies and decentralized apps (dApps) including NFTs, Kerbrat said.

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.

Bitcoin’s most prominent layer-two, the Lightning network, can execute hundreds of thousands of transactions per second by settling transactions off-chain in a separate ledger, Lightning Labs CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark told journalist.

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.

While Bitcoin and Ethereum have sustained over 20% declines each over the past week, a number of emerging projects have been hit even harder, including Silicon Valley darling Solana which has seen its token price decline some 40% week-over-week.

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.

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.

The startup’s web3 infrastructure works with over 10,000 off-chain data sources from credit bureaus, bank data aggregators, and alternative data across 78 countries allowing Masa to create on-chain credit scoring for its users. Masa Finance, a hybrid credit protocol and decentralized credit bureau founded by Pngme CEO Brendan Playford in late 2020, has raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding.

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.

Sienna is among several other blockchain startups trying to prevent “front-running”, where transactions on Ethereum can be preempted by someone else simply by them paying a higher transaction fee — just like trumping a trade on the stock market by paying a higher fee to a broker.

The Boston-based asset manager, which administers plans covering more than 20 million participants representing $2.7 trillion in assets, said the launch is expected to take place by midyear, debuting at bitcoin supporter Michael Saylor firm MicroStrategy, which holds billions of dollars of the asset on its balance sheet.

LiquiFi, part of Y Combinator’s winter 2022 batch, helps startups automate their token vesting, manage their token cap table, and issue token grants in compliance with regulations.

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.

The verdict that China web3 community has been waiting for months is here: NFTs, or the tokens used to prove the ownership and authenticity of an item, must not be used for securitization or transacted in cryptocurrencies, said China’s banking, securities and internet financial associations in an announcement on Wednesday.

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

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.

It was helping mid-size startups keep track of equity as they grew, but last summer, as the price of Bitcoin shot to a historic high, the company began getting requests from its clients to help manage employee tokens. The company declined to mention how many customers it’s servicing but said Hong Kong-based microinsurance firm YAS Digital and crypto gaming company Animoca Brands are among its early users. Sprout created Folium in light of this customer demand to help companies trace digital coins and non-fungible tokens across various blockchain platforms.

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.

This has pushed some founders to build competing blockchains on entirely unique infrastructure, while others in the developer community are focusing their resources on building modular blockchain solutions that sit on top of Ethereum, bundling transactions faster and cheaper while keeping a record of the movements on the central chain.

It settled on its current structure in 2020 through a transaction that sold certain assets from ConsenSys Mesh, the company’s venture arm, to ConsenSys Software Incorporated (CSI), a newly formed company that, post-transaction, now functions as the parent entity to some of the company’s key products, including MetaMask and developer platform Infura. The funding round comes amid allegations by a group of ConsenSys shareholders that the company’s founder, Joseph Lubin, illegally shifted assets from ConsenSys Mesh into CSI as part of this transaction.

Payments giant Stripe already powers a pretty major swath of the web financial infrastructure, now it’s launching crypto payments support to give customers an easier path to onboard web3 users and interact with cryptocurrencies.

The fund is backed by a who’s who of crypto investors, with LPs including a sizable chunk of a16z’s investing team.

The firm, led by former Tinder product chief Jeff Morris Jr., has shifted from a more generalist vertical interest toward web3 obsession over the past several months, as early bets in crypto startups like Dapper and Compound Finance have taken off.

This capital raise pushes the Palo Alto-based fund toward the company of larger firms like Andreessen Horowitz, which closed a $2.2 billion crypto fund this past June, and crypto VC Paradigm, which debuted a $2.5 billion fund in November.

While CTC pulls in all the data needed to build a transaction history and performs tax calculations for its users, Brunette still advises advanced crypto users to consult a tax professional to help them interpret regulatory grey areas to determine what they actually need to pay, and what rules apply to their activity.

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.

Nestcoin raises $6.45M pre-seed to accelerate crypto and web3 adoption in Africa and frontier markets Educating Africa’s young population about web3 and decentralization seems to be a correlating theme with recent web3 upstarts in Africa.

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.

In a market full of challenger banks — and some very close Vivid competitors such as Sequoia-backed neobroker Trade Republic — Vivid’s backers believe the company’s traction and all-in, easy approach that appeals to new consumer investors will see the company picking up more users and usage as it expands.

Starting on February 17, fans can mint a Cameo Pass for 0.2 ETH — about $550 at the time of publication — which provides access to limited release artworks, exclusive in-person and virtual events and early access to new Cameo features. The collection of NFTs will be hosted on OpenSea, featuring art by Burnt Toast of the Doodles collection, Vinnie Hager of the Letters collection and artist Luke McGarry, who sells personalized artwork through his Cameo. Some creator platforms like YouTube and Patreon have flirted with the idea of NFTs, but Cameo is forging ahead with its plans. But when journalist asked about which celebrities on Cameo were involved in the project, the company did not provide any names.

Many crypto detractors contend that the web3 space is buoyed by meme money, so Coatue leading a $69,420,000 Series B in a blockchain startup shouldn’t leave them too surprised. The investment — made in crypto analytics platform Dune Analytics — brings the startup valuation to $1 billion.

Though compliance presents an ever-evolving suite of challenges, the most persistent landmine for DAO tooling startups has been helping DAOs educate their users on potential threats — something that will only become more important as crypto startups and DAOs look to entice an increasingly mainstream user base.

While DCG focuses on western markets and building products for HNIs and institutional clients with custodial features, Nestcoin primarily builds, invests and operates web3 and non-custodial products that are more accessible for everyday people in frontier markets. Before starting Nestcoin, founders Yele Bademosi and Taiwo Orilogbon led the charge at Bundle Africa.

Web3 security companies and projects like Certik, Forta, Slithe, and Securify are the equivalents of the code-scanning and application security testing tools that were originally developed for Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications.

Phantom, one of the premier wallet apps for the Solana ecosystem, has seen plenty of momentum as the result of investor and developer attention being paid to the Ethereum competitor which has seen its value explode over the past year — though the relative newcomer is also proving to be a more volatile bet with the token taking a particularly rough hit during the most recent crypto crash.

Collaboration, not litigation Blockchain technology provides artists a direct way to build a community with their fans by allowing them to identify fans, gift or sell things to fans without intermediaries, and form communities with shared artifacts and signals.

On-chain funding is not a magic bullet — it is simply the best framework we currently have to align the funding process closer with the mechanisms the developers find most useful while keeping the process open and equitable.

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.

Autograph, an NFT agency co-founded by athlete Tom Brady with a particularly deep bench of star power, has banked new funding from crypto investors who hope the platform can bring a new generation of celebrities and their fans into the fold of crypto collectibles.

This noticeable shift of influence toward ultra-high-net-worth individuals and firms among bitcoin and other crypto circles goes against the very ethos that the Bitcoin white paper was based upon when it described a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Here are 5 NFT trends that will bring social media audiences into web3 en masse: NFT verification Skeptics are quick to point out that NFTs are dumb because you can simply right-click and save the underlying files.