Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
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Investments news
- Fold, a bitcoin (BTC) rewards app, announced a USD 13m series A round to fuel its growth. The round was led by Craft Ventures with participation from M13, Slow Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Also, the company has opened access to its bitcoin cashback debit card to all US residents. “Since its launch in 2019, Fold accrued a waitlist of over 250,000 waiting for access to their bitcoin cashback debit card,” they said.
- Talos, an institutional technology provider for digital asset trading, said it has completed a USD 40m Series A investment round. The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz and includes investments from PayPal Ventures, Fidelity Investments, Galaxy Digital, Elefund, Illuminate Financial, and STEADFAST Capital Ventures.
- QuickNode, which has built out blockchain software for firms crypto-based and beyond, raised USD 5.3m in a round led by Seven Seven Six, founded by Reddit Co-founder and Chairman Alexis Ohanian, with participation from SoftBank’s Opportunity Fund, Arrington XRP Capital, Crossbeam.vc, and Anthony Pompliano, among others, Miami Herald reported. QuickNode’s new funding will be put toward growing headcount and developing its product offering, it added.
- Automated portfolio manager and trading platform on Ethereum (ETH), Balancer Labs (BAL), has raised USD 24.25m by selling BAL tokens directly from the Balancer Labs treasury in a funding round that included investors like Alameda Capital and Pantera Capital. With the new funds, the company intends to increase awareness and education of the protocol in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as increase community engagement, the emailed release stated.
- Crypto exchange Pintu, based in Indonesia, said it has raised USD 6m in a Series A funding round led by investors Pantera Capital, Intudo Ventures and Coinbase Ventures.
Economics news
- US President Joe Biden will seek USD 6trn in US federal spending for the 2022 fiscal year, rising to USD 8.2trn by 2031, the New York Times reported. The growth is driven by Biden’s two-part agenda to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure and substantially expand the social safety net, contained in his American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan, along with other planned increases in discretionary spending, it added.
Exchanges news
- Coinbase said it is launching a Fact Check section of their blog, which will deal with “misinformation and mischaracterizations” about either Coinbase or crypto.
- Coinbase also said they’re working on tailoring their “load tests to better simulate real world situations, such as sudden traffic spikes.” “This will help surface more issues like untuned autoscaling rules, during controlled testing,” the company said in a May 19 Incident Post Mortem. “Another improvement that we are investing in is the implementation of kill switches for parts of the client application so that when failures happen, we can keep unaffected parts of our applications working while we work to address the failures,” they added.
DeFi news
- AllianceBlock, a decentralized capital market, has announced the launch of its Liquidity Mining as a Service (LMaaS) product, “breaking down barriers to entry for new DeFi projects and increasing the flow of capital across the sector,” said the emailed press release. The product is targeting industry newcomers, providing emerging projects with the means to create their own customized liquidity mining platforms, enabling them to deploy pools, launch liquidity mining and staking campaigns, and gain access to analytics tools to track key performance indicators. The first decentralized finance (DeFi) project to leverage AllianceBlock’s LMaaS will be DAFI Protocol.
- Securitize, a digital asset securities firm, said it has launched Securitize Capital, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary, that will serve as an alternative investment manager of digital asset funds to provide investors exposure to cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance (DeFi) in the form of digital asset securities
CBDCs news
- A bipartisan bill called the 21st Century Dollar Act was introduced, asking the US Treasury Department to evaluate the dollar’s role in the global economy, but also consider details around central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). These include other central banks’ efforts to create their own CBDCs, as well as updates to the committee on the research and potential creation of the Digital Dollar CBDC.
Mining news
- American technology company Nvidia still relies on PC gamers more than cryptocurrency miners for their revenue, the company’s CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. Still, their crypto-specific line of processors that launched in February generated USD 155m in sales in the first fiscal quarter of the year—but this line is “a bone thrown to cryptocurrency obsessives to protect gamers,” the article said.
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(Updated at 18:15 UTC to clarify that Balancer Labs raised new capital by selling BAL tokens.)
