Author: The Block

DeBank, a crypto wallet that provides access to decentralized finance (DeFi) services such as token swapping and portfolio tracking, has raised $25 million in an equity funding round. The round was led by Sequoia China and saw participation from Dragonfly Capital, Youbi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com Capital, Circle, and Ledger. Founded in 2018, China-based DeBank is now valued at $200 million. Its total funding to date is unclear as the startup has previously raised two funding rounds of undisclosed amounts. DeBank did not announce how it plans to use the fresh capital. The Block reached out to the startup to learn more but…

Galoy, the startup that created the open-source, Lightning Network-compatible Bitcoin Beach wallet, recently completed a $3 million seed round to ramp up its operations and help bring its Bitcoin banking platform to more communities, businesses and governments.  Miami-based Galoy, launched Bitcoin Beach as a proof-of-concept in the El Salvador surf town of El Zonte in October 2020. The wallet supports the local Bitcoin Beach project there, which has sought to create a bitcoin-based economy. The wallet has more than 6,000 users, according to Galoy’s website. Bitcoin Beach is different than El Salvador’s state-backed wallet Chivo, which launched in September 2021, after a law making…

Late last week, a new decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called the OpenDAO suddenly emerged to distribute free tokens to users of OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace. According to its website, the goal of the OpenDAO (not to be confused with a stablecoin minting protocol by the same name) and its SOS token is “to pay tribute, to protect, to promote” the NFT community. Specifically, anyone who has transacted on OpenSea before December 23 can claim free SOS tokens via the airdrop. All they have to do is connect a wallet like MetaMask to the OpenDAO website, estimate their rewards based on…

Just weeks after a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) tried to buy an original copy of the US Constitution, another historical artifact has become the target of a DAO: the defunct movie rental business Blockbuster.  The new DAO’s name is, aptly, BlockbusterDAO. According to a Twitter thread posted on December 25, BlockbusterDAO seeks to govern the Blockbuster brand and create a decentralized film streaming service out of it — with plans for movie financing and production down the road. To achieve its goals, BlockbusterDAO intends to raise $5 million to purchase Blockbuster from Dish Network, an American television provider that bought the movie…

The combined trading volume of bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) futures surged over $32 trillion in 2021, according to The Block Research. That figure, based on data as of December 27, is a massive 338% increase compared to 2020 trading volumes. Last year, bitcoin and ether futures saw a combined trading volume of over $7 trillion. The month of May had the highest trading volume in 2021 for both bitcoin and ether futures, with a combined value of over $4 trillion. Binance is the market leader for both bitcoin and ether futures trading markets. The year 2021 was also a record year…

Jimmy Fallon, Post Malone, Diplo, DJ Khaled. Those are just a few of the growing number of celebrities — most of them musicians — who have leaned on crypto startup MoonPay to broker purchases of extravagantly expensive non-fungible tokens (NFTs).    The newest member of the crew is the NFT-curious rapper Snoop Dogg, who took to Twitter to flaunt four new pieces from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection on December 22. In a separate tweet, he thanked MoonPay and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright for helping with the purchase. Bored Apes represent a high proportion of the NFT purchases that MoonPay has brokered on…

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is planning to conduct a trial early next year that will see the global payments intermediary explore how it may play a role in the nascent asset tokenization market. “SWIFT, Clearstream, Northern Trust, SETL and other industry participants are exploring the feasibility and benefits of SWIFT as an interconnector, linking up multiple tokenisation platforms and various cash-leg payment types,” SWIFT said in a blog post published on December 1, noting: “As interest increases, SWIFT is exploring how it can enable and improve interoperability between participants and systems during the transactional lifecycle of tokenised assets.…

Decentralized exchange protocol Uniswap has gone live on Polygon, an Ethereum-focused scaling platform. Last month, Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic submitted a proposal on the Uniswap governance portal to deploy Uniswap v3 on Polygon. The Uniswap community then voted to accept the proposal last week. More than 72 million Uniswap (UNI) token holders supported the move, and as a result, Uniswap is now live on Polygon. In other words, Uniswap users can now swap tokens using the Polygon blockchain via Uniswap’s official interface. Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange in the market, having facilitated over $600 billion in trading volumes on its v2 and v3 platforms this…

Arcade (formerly Pawn.fi), a platform that lets users borrow against their NFTs as collateral, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round. Pantera Capital led the round, with Castle Island Ventures, Franklin Templeton Blockchain Fund, Golden Tree Asset Management, Eniac Ventures, Protofund, Probably Nothing Capital, and Lemniscap also participating. Angel investors such as BlockFi CEO Zac Prince and Quantstamp CEO Richard Ma also joined the round. The fundraise was an equity funding round and will help Arcade expand its team, launch the platform publicly, and reach more users, co-founder Robert Masiello told The Block. Arcade’s current headcount is…

A digital asset-focused bank in Switzerland is seeking to become whitelisted on Arc, the institutional platform developed by the team behind DeFi lending protocol Aave. In a governance post shared Tuesday, a representative from the bank said that it has sought the white-listing in order to enable its clientele to more broadly access the Aave platform, stating that “[d]ue to various regulatory restrictions in their jurisdictions, SEBA’s institutional clientele has not been able deploy liquidities at large scale in Aave until now.” “The launch of Aave Arc with its permissioned layer represents a great opportunity for them to access DeFi yields while…