Bucking a bearish crypto market, FTX, the two-year-old cryptocurrency exchange, announced a $900M Series B funding round at a valuation of $18B, the company said in a statement released yesterday.  The deal is a clear sign that for all the angst in the markets, well-heeled investors are only too eager to play the long game…

When Philipp Pieper and Timo Lehes co-founded Swarm Markets in 2017 in California and then moved to Berlin, they did a strange thing. They knocked on the door of Germany’s financial watchdog, known as BaFin, and said, please regulate us. That’s not supposed to happen in DeFi. The whole idea is to break free from…

Grayscale is now offering institutional investors index exposure to DeFi. The Grayscale DeFi Fund tracks Coindesk’s DeFi Index (DFX), a new market cap-weighted benchmark index following a representative basket of ten DeFi crypto tokens. These include Uniswap (UNI) weighted at 49.95%, Aave (AAVE) weighted at 10.25% and Compound (COMP) weighted at 8.38%.  Grayscale’s new index…

Anchor savings has no minimum deposits, account freezes, or signup requirements – it can be used by anyone in the world with access to the internet. Anchor’s money market is a Compound-inspired lending protocol for lending out deposited Terra stablecoins to borrowers. Anchor sources its deposit yields from bAsset-collateralized loans, where rewards of their bAsset…

Grayscale Investments intends to convert Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) into an exchange-traded fund (ETF), the asset manager said in a blog post Monday.  “While several firms have submitted Bitcoin ETF applications in the form of an S-1 or 19b-4 to the SEC, we are confident in our current positioning and engagement with the SEC,” according…

I always want to give things the benefit of the doubt, try and see the positives but I’ve never come across a project that I found as hard to like as this one. So let’s give it a fair shake and try and understand why so many are getting so excited about it.

CME Group, the world’s largest financial derivatives exchange, is set to launch Micro Bitcoin futures, at one-tenth of a Bitcoin, on May. CME Group already offers standard Bitcoin futures, which have traded at an average volume of 13,800 contracts (roughly 69,000 BTC) daily throughout 2021. Micro Bitcoin futures will offer institutional traders and investors more…

The Spartan Group has announced the launch of its $50M Spartan DeFi Venture Fund aimed to back new founders and innovators in the DeFi space. The group has raised $30M of their targeted $50M. Investors include bankers and finance industry veterans who want to see DeFi succeed as the future of finance.  They pitch themselves…

Grayscale also thinks ETH is money. Digital currency asset manager Grayscale, breaks down three lenses through which to value  Ethereum’s cryptocurrency Ether; money, commodity and interest bearing asset, in its first Ethereum-specific report. Grayscale offers institutional investors a vehicle to get exposure to ETH via its Ethereum Trust, which now has an AUM of $5.1B.…