DeFi Telegraph (eng) ( ICO reviews)

2021-12-17 17:22:02 Bitwise is working on launching its first NFT index fund

On December 16, Bitwise Chief Information Officer Matt Hugan announced the launch of the Bitwise Blue-Chip NFT Index Fund, which he said is unparalleled in the world.

The fund, which is updated every three months, will contain ten of NFT's most valuable collections, including CgurtoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Meebits, Autoglouphs, Fidenza, VeeFriends and others. The index selects and weighs NFTs based on their market capitalization using so-called minimum prices. Separately, it explains that the "Adjusted Minimum Price" is intended to reflect "the price at which an investor can buy or sell the cheapest NFT in any collection."

Hugan added that the minimum investment is $25,000, which is less than many blue-chip NFTs. For now, they will only be available to accredited U.S. investors. Open / Comment

2021-12-17 15:41:02 Tron Foundation founder Justin Sun decides to go into politics

Justin Sun has been appointed the new ambassador of the World Trade Organization in Grenada, as a consequence of which he will cease to lead the Tron Foundation organization. Thus, one of the most famous and controversial participants in the cryptocurrency industry is distancing himself from the management of the blockchain project he founded, TRON, and is moving into politics.

In an interview with CoinDesk, San said he plans to focus on legitimizing cryptocurrency in Latin America, echoing the success of El Salvador.

After watching the U.S. House Financial Services Committee debate cryptocurrencies with industry representatives last week, San said that the industry cannot depend on U.S. action alone, especially given the conservative view of cryptocurrency legalization. Open / Comment

2021-12-16 18:59:02 Cryptocurrency lender Ledn raised $70 million and announces mortgage product

Ledn announced Wednesday that it raised $70 million in a Series B round and is now valued at $540 million USD.

Leading the round was Dan Tapiero's company 10T Holdings. As part of the deal, Tapiero joins Ledn's board of directors.

Other new investors in the round included Golden Tree Asset Management, Raptor Group and FJ Labs. Coinbase Ventures, Alan Howard, ParaFi Capital and Susquehanna Private Equity Investments also participated in the round.

Ledn says its business has grown significantly this year, both in terms of loans and assets (loan collateral and savings account balances).

"Since its founding, Ledn has processed more than $450 million in loans, with 90 percent of that coming in 2021," Ledn's Mauricio Di Bartolomeo said. Open / Comment

2021-12-16 14:55:03 Balancer launches more advanced DeFi pools

Balancer Labs has launched "advanced" pools to maximize returns from the capital DeFi-investors engage.

"Typically, traders use no more than 10% of the liquidity deposited into an AMM pool. This is because transaction sizes are much smaller than the available liquidity," says Balancer's blog.

The new product, Boosted Pools, allows you to place unused funds in lending pools to generate additional income.

Most users will no longer have to spend assets on wrapping and deploying tokens like DAI and aDAI. The associated costs will be borne by arbitrageurs who are "sufficiently interested in it."

Initially, users of the new product will be able to funnel untapped liquidity into Aave pools. The developers promise to integrate other protocols - Compound, Yearn, Badger, Fuse, etc. Open / Comment

2021-12-15 19:20:16 Indian startup raises $70 million

Indian fintech startup Uni, whose team created cards for purchasing goods and services by installment, has raised $70 million in the A-series funding round.

The project managed to get funding from General Catalyst, Eight Roads Ventures, Elevation Capital, Arbor Ventures, Lightspeed and Accel.

The Indian fintech startup's valuation, according to the publication, reached $350 million on the back of the round's completion.

Uni's developers plan to use the funds to pursue expansion plans in the South Asian market.

As part of the project, the developers have created payment cards with installment programs. With their help users can divide payment into 3 parts, which the system automatically distributes for 3 months. The goal of the startup is to attract as many people as possible to the installment market. To this end, the developers waived fees for users who pay the entire amount on time. Open / Comment

2021-12-15 16:44:02 Polygon (MATIC) will reduce the supply of its digital assets

Polygon's key digital asset development team has decided to implement the EIP-1559 enhancement protocol, which was originally implemented in the Ethereum blockchain, into the operation of its MATIC native tokens.

Polygon has a fixed volume of supply (10 billion tokens), while EIP-1559 will involve a reduction in the volume of such supply. The annual reduction volume will be 0.27% of the total number of native tokens.

The EIP-1559 protocol mechanism introduces a base fee system for all transactions on the blockchain instead of an auction-based transaction confirmation queue. In addition, it introduces a fee for priority validation of a transaction, but the funds for this fee in MATIC will eventually be zeroed out, which will lead to a reduction in the total supply of MATIC tokens. Open / Comment

2021-12-14 19:09:02 Ethereum investment products show outflows, Tron and Solana show inflows

Falling cryptocurrency prices are not preventing investors from taking large long-term positions. Interestingly, in addition to bitcoin, crypto-assets such as Tron (TRX) and Solana (SOL) also saw significant weekly capital inflows from institutional investors. Institutional investors invested nearly $19 million in Solana investment products, while Tron investment products received $17 million in the last week. This fact indicates that investors are interested in other cryptocurrencies besides bitcoin.

Ha last week Tron surpassed Cardano in terms of total assets under management, successfully winning the interest of global institutional investors.

While last week the total flows of funds in Ethereum remained positive, recently there was an outflow of $17 million, while the total amount of assets associated with ETH fell to $18.1 billion. Open / Comment

2021-12-14 15:17:01 Sushi jumped 10% after developer Avalanche proposed takeover

CoinGecko market data shows that Sushi tokens jumped 10% to more than $6.19 from a low of $5.30 on Sunday night. Prices were down slightly to $5.90 at the time of writing.

The move came shortly after Daniele Sestagalli, Avalanche's lead Tier 1 blockchain app developer, offered to join the platform in a post on the project management forum.

"Sushi's expansion and growth has been amazing - it's time to give the project additional resources and autonomy at a time when it needs it most," the proposal said, arguing that adding Sestagalli to the project could help end its ongoing failures. Open / Comment

2021-12-13 19:14:02 Miners have already mined 90% of the maximum amount of bitcoins

As of December 13, almost 19 million coins have been mined, which is 90% of the maximum possible volume of 21 million. This limit is set in the code of the cryptocurrency itself and is a hard limit of issue, which plays a key role in shaping its value and savings function. In recent years, it is this economic component that has attracted investors.

While it took miners a little more than 12 years to mine 9/10 of all possible coins, it will take 119 years to extract the remainder. This is due to another deflationary mechanism - halving.

The last halving took place in May 2020, reducing miners' remuneration from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC. The mining rate will continue to gradually decrease. In 2040, it will drop to 0.195 BTC. By that time, only 80 thousand bitcoins out of 21 million will remain unmined, but it will take almost 40 years to get them. Open / Comment

2021-12-13 16:45:15 Chainalysis will start tracking cryptocurrency in Robinhood app

Chainalysis, a blockchain provider of tools and services for transaction tracking, became a partner of Robinhood, an online broker. The company announced this on its blog. The analytics data provider will start tracking digital currency available in Robinhood's cryptocurrency app, Robinhood Crypto.

According to the announcement, the partnership with Chainalysis is necessary to comply with regulatory requirements. The company is expected to monitor not only bitcoin, but also dogecoin (DOGE), ether (ETH) and other altcoins on Robinhood Crypto's list.

Ben Einstein, head of partnerships at Robinhood Crypto, said the company chose Chainalysis for security reasons.

"Chainalysis develops industry standards with regulators and enforcement agencies, which is consistent with Robinhood's commitment." Open / Comment