📬 Inbox Dump #13

Hello Defiers! Welcome to Inbox Dump where we include the updates and announcements that flood our DMs each week and didn’t make it to The Defiant’s content platforms. Sometimes announcements here didn’t meet the bar to become a news story, sometimes they may have slipped through the cracks, or they came late and we haven’t had a chance to cover.

At The Defiant we cover the most important DeFi-related news and developments but I know many of you are hunting for projects before they are fully developed and before they are newsworthy. Our goal with this installment of the newsletter is to help you find them. Look at this as the starting point to DYOR.

We also include a compilation of DeFi and crypto funding rounds in the past week so you have these in one handy place.

Keep in mind these have been unedited. With that —here we go!

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Inbox Dump!

✉️ Roxe Announces Roxe Payment Protocol, World’s First On-chain Forex Swap Protocol

NEW YORK --Roxe, a next-generation global payment network, today announced the official debut of Roxe Payment Protocol (RPP), an open, decentralized and peer-to-peer payments protocol designed to deliver the best available wholesale foreign exchange rates to individuals, payment companies, banks and other financial institutions. Roxe Payment Protocol uses a key innovation -- decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity pools -- to deliver among the least expensive, fastest, and most transparent foreign exchange (FX) rates and cross-border payments.

✉️ CIRCLE, MAPS.ME PARTNER TO BRING BENEFITS OF DEFI TO MORE CONSUMERS

BOSTON, June 17, 2021 -- Circle, a global financial technology firm that provides payments and financial infrastructure for internet businesses, today announced a partnership with Maps.me, which offers millions of users globally access to a decentralized finance ecosystem via the world’s leading offline mapping application. Together, Circle and Maps.me will offer consumers using USD Coin (USDC), the world’s fastest growing dollar digital currency, simple access to Maps.me’s DeFi ecosystem.

✉️ StreamingFast joins The Graph Foundation in $60 Million Grant Deal

SAN FRANCISCO, JUNE 17, 2021— Today The Graph Foundation awarded a $60 million grant to StreamingFast which will see it join as a core developer in The Graph’s ecosystem long-term. StreamingFast will retain ownership over its brand and personnel, but will join The Graph ecosystem as a core protocol developer and open source contributor alongside Edge & Node, a software development company dedicated to advancement of the decentralized Internet.

✉️ Starter Announces START Vesting Available on Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and Ethereum

BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS - June 16, 2021 at 9 am EST -Starter (https://starter.xyz), the first multiple chain community-selection launchpad and ecosystem supporting interoperability of IDO (Initial Dex Offering) launches on seven major blockchains, today announced that its START Vesting Protocol ($VEST), will be available on Polygon, Ethereum, and Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Any project with a token on these chains can use the START Vesting protocol to securely lock their tokens in an audited smart-contract vault for a set period of time, building community trust between investors, developers, and IDOs on the platform.

✉️ Art Lawyer JEFF GLUCK Launches Gold Standard For NFT Minting, Appoints Daniel Arsham as Chief Brand Officer

(LOS ANGELES, CA — June 15, 2021) – Today, CXIP founder Jeff Gluck announces the appointment of Daniel Arsham as Chief Brand Officer, helping to craft a universal NFT minting solution that better protects creators and collectors. The visionary artist will join the firm in its mission to create a safer, more equitable, and ecologically sustainable NFT industry.

✉️ Cobalt Goes Live with 4OTC for Post Trade FX and Digital Assets Connectivity

London, 15 June 2021: 4OTC, the FinTech connectivity specialist for FX and digital assets, today announced that Cobalt, a provider of risk and settlement infrastructure for FX and digital assets, is using 4OTC's new TicketLounge service to capture and normalise post trade data onto a single FIX API.

✉️ Step Finance becomes the first dashboard to aggregate Serum DEXs including all Solana AMMs

16 June 2021 - Step Finance, the front page of Solana, has now aggregated Solana’s DEXs including Raydium, SerumDex, and Orca to enable users to trade at the best prices across the Solana Blockchain with $845 Million dollars of liquidity from the Step dashboard.

✉️ Liti Capital Announces Tokenized Private Equity for Litigation Finance

Geneva, Switzerland - June 14, 2021 - Liti Capital SA, a Swiss Litigation Finance company, is announcing their launch into the world of crypto tokenization with the goal of providing retail investors with investment opportunities previously only available to the top 1% of investors. This puts the excitement and voting rights directly in the hands of the average investor. As one of the few asset-backed equity tokens soon to be on the blockchain, the LITI token can provide high ROI even in a bear market.

✉️ BLAST Premier and Bondly Team Up to Launch NFTs Featuring Chickens Synonymous with Counter-Strike

New York City, New York - June 11, 2021 - Esports tournament organiser BLAST Premier and Bondly, the premiere NFT solutions provider, have teamed up to launch a fun, affordable and gamified collection of NFTs featuring original artwork of chickens synonymous with Counter-Strike.

Funding

💰 Crypto Derivatives Platform dYdX Raises $65M in Paradigm-Led Series C

Crypto derivatives exchange builder dYdX raised $65 million from crypto investment firm Paradigm and a handful of market makers after seeing its improved swaps protocol catch fire among users.

💰 Blockchain infrastucture platform PARSIQ secures $3M in Series A funding round

PARSIQ, a blockchain infrastructure platform, announced earlier this week it has closed its $3 million Series A funding round. The round was backed by the Solana Foundation and Axia8 Ventures. In addition, participation came from Mindworks VC, Krypital Group, CoinUnited, Transfero Swiss, Elevate Ventures, Sanctum Ventures, and others. Lastly, Evan Cheng, Director of Research at Facebook’s Novi Financial (formerly Calibra) also contributed to the round.

💰 Coinbase-Backed Instadapp Raises $10 Mn To Tap Rising DeFi Wave

Fintech startup Instadapp, which works in the burgeoning segment of decentralised finance (DeFi), has raised $10 Mn in its latest funding round from venture capital firm Standard Crypto, Yearn founder Andre Cronje, DeFi Alliance, Longhash Ventures, among others investors.

💰 Umee Protocol raises $6.3MM seed round for creating a Cross Chain DeFi Hub

The round was led by Polychain with participation from investors including Ideo Colab, Coinbase, Tendermint, Brian Kelly Capital Management, Alameda Research, CMS Holdings, Argonautic Ventures and Joe Lubin via Ethereal Ventures. Many influential groups throughout the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystem have shown solid support for this project and we are looking forward to building out this platform.

💰 Polychain, Pantera Back $14M Funding Round for DeFi Derivatives Platform SynFutures

Decentralized finance (DeFi) derivatives exchange SynFutures raised $14 million in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital, SynFutures announced Wednesday. As DeFi continues to gain in popularity, investors look to capture niche markets within the industry. SynFutures said it will focus its entire platform on derivatives, which are financial instruments like futures contracts or options. The funding comes fresh on the heels of a $65 million capital raise for fellow DeFi derivatives exchange dYdX.

💰 Bybit-backed BitDAO Announces USD 230M Funding Round to Fuel R&D

The recently created decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) BitDAO says it has raised over USD 230m from a private sale funding round. In a press release shared with Cryptonews.com, the DeFi group stated that it had received support from the likes of Peter Thiel, the Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Dragonfly Capital. The Bybit exchange – the DAO’s first contributor – has also “pledged recurring contributions to BitDAO,” and a “total of more than 20 institutions and DeFi projects” took part in the round.

💰 Trace Network raises $1.6 million from strategic investors for their limited edition luxury & lifestyle product NFT marketplace BLING

Trace Network’s is a unique business model which is wrapped as an Enterprise-grade, POS consensus-based, permission-less protocol for supply chain, data management, trade settlement & financing powered by DeFi & NFTs. It is this unique proposition that attracted some of the best names in the business who have not only provided the initial capital towards the build, but will also add a huge value in terms of market penetration, outreach and overall growth of the business as a whole.

That’s all for today. Let me know what I missed!

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