FinTech news in Decentralized Finance category

Its new ecosystem fund is backed by previous investors like Pantera and Jump as well as other web3 players, including Kraken Ventures, Kucoin Ventures, Delphi Labs, Flow Traders, Gate Labs and IDG Capital. Injective, a layer-1 blockchain focused on building financial applications, has launched a $150 million fund ecosystem initiative, the platform CEO and co-founder, Eric Chen, told journalist. The group aims to support projects building on Injective or Cosmos blockchains in the interoperability, DeFi, trading, proof-of-stake infrastructure and scalability solutions sectors, it said. In the current market, there’s a lot of quality projects looking for backing but having more difficulty reaching investors, Chen noted.

And now, without further ado, here are the final four startups ready to impress investors: Meet Candy Shop, a one-stop solution provider designed to make NFT deployment and brand-management problems a thing of the past. It The Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day, a showcase of 12 boundary-pushing early-stage startups building projects across web3, DeFi, NFT and gaming. Founded by Gabrielle Patrick, the company builds clearing infrastructure designed to let firms leverage distributed ledger technology, become payment institutions or become electronic money institutions. Join us tomorrow — January 11 —  for the Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day and see for yourself what the brilliant minds behind 12 up-and-coming projects are building.

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.

While many layer-1 blockchains out there were built for a pretty general purpose, other networks were designed around very specific use cases. Sei, a layer-1 blockchain designed for trading, has launched a $50 million ecosystem and liquidity fund to support new decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on its platform, its co-founders Jeff Feng and Jay Jog \[…\]

ECB President Christine Lagarde said the central bank must be careful that a digital euro won’t crowd out commercial bank deposits.

Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and chief executive of Wintermute, disclosed in a series of tweets that the firm decentralized finance operations had been hacked, but centralized finance and over the counter verticals aren’t affected. Wintermute, a leading crypto market maker, has lost about $160 million in a hack, a top executive said Tuesday, becoming the latest firm in the industry to suffer a breach.

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

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.

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.

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.

The program has cohorts three times a year for 10 weeks, Qiao Wang, a core contributor at Alliance DAO, said during the event. “Startups from all stages have joined our cohort, from those with just an idea to billion-dollar companies.”

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 $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.

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.

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.

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.

While some may be hesitant about stablecoins after the UST situation, the dramatic growth in USDC speaks to the fact that the crypto market does understand what a trusted stablecoin could provide, Allaire said. For example, the two largest stablecoins by market capitalization, Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC), are backed by fiat-equivalent reserves issued by centralized firms.

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.

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.

Ondo is primarily focused on building many of the functions typically associated with the middle and back office of an investment bank on-chain, Allman explained, noting that it does not currently have plans to directly offer advisory services to DAOs or crypto companies as a traditional investment bank might.

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.

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

This is part of the reason you read about layer 1 (L1) and layer 2 (L2) networks so often; VCs are making bets on competing L1 blockchains to take advantage of this deficit and L2 blockchains that sit on top of Ethereum are designed to improve the speed and price of transactions. It’s a technology that has been pretty widely accepted as a near-term solution for the Ethereum network and VCs have already christened a number of other unicorns in the optimistic rollup space including Optimism and Arbitrum.

The ether and USDC deposits on Ronin were drained from the bridge contract, but the network is working with stakeholders from Axie Infinity and its parent company Sky Mavis to determine the best move forward so no user funds are permanently lost, it said.

The $1.5 billion in capital puts Haun Ventures in the company of other crypto native funds like Paradigm and Electric Capital, which have debuted large funds in recent months.

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.

The press release lays out seven major goals of the executive order with added detail: Protect U.S. Consumers, Investors, and Businesses Protect U.S. and Global Financial Stability and Mitigate Systemic Risk Mitigate the Illicit Finance and National Security Risks Posed by the Illicit Use of Digital Assets Promote U.S. Leadership in Technology and Economic Competitiveness to Reinforce U.S. Leadership in the Global Financial System Promote Equitable Access to Safe and Affordable Financial Services Support Technological Advances and Ensure Responsible Development and Use of Digital Assets Explore a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) For those in the crypto sector concerned about aggressive government intervention, the order language seems to signal that the Biden White House is uninterested in sweeping near-term reforms and is instead merely focused on ensuring that agencies are on the same page in researching and observing the national security implications of the crypto industry.

Toyosaki, who also headed up marketing at Bitcoin.com, told journalist in an interview that many of the strategies available to crypto derivatives traders today are fairly risky, a motivating factor behind why she founded Cega, which she says is the first-ever DeFi exotic derivatives protocol. Now, Cega, a new protocol founded by former UBS derivatives trader Arisa Toyosaki, is setting out to create a new category within DeFi — exotic derivatives.

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.

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 \[…\]

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.

It also announced today its intent to register a new, compliant lending product, called BlockFi Yield, which it says would be the first SEC-registered crypto interest-bearing security.

Egorov is a DeFi superstar, and he’ll take the virtual stage with three other mighty minds — Andre Cronje, co-founder of Fantom Protocol; Taariq Lewis, founder of Volume; and Ivangbi, builder of narratives at Gearbox and LobsterDAO — for this must-see session.

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.

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.

Coinbase, one of the world largest crypto exchanges, announced an exclusive partnership earlier this week with crypto tax and portfolio tracking provider CoinTracker, meaning Coinbase users will get access to CoinTracker’s software at a discounted price.

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.

Conduit aims to be a one-stop shop for neobanks and financial institutions to plug their own products into the DeFi ecosystem, which Gertman said is made easier because Conduit itself is regulated and compliant, taking the compliance burden off of companies using its tools.