📬 Inbox Dump #14

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!

✉️ Ultra’s Mainnet Launch Heralds A New Era for Games Development and Gamers

After three years of development, Ultra, a next-generation gaming ecosystem partnered with Ubisoft, AMD and Atari, has announced its mainnet will go live on 29th June. This marks a major milestone for Ultra, and means developers can start building on its platform, while gamers can get paid to do what they love.

✉️ Paris Fashion Week Accreditations Features NFT Artwork

An NFT art piece by fashion illustrator Richard Haines is among the virtual perks offered with accreditation to Paris’ fashion weeks this summer. French blockchain specialist Arianee and the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode have teamed to offer selected accredited guests non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, as part of a pilot program taking place over the June men’s wear and July haute couture weeks.

✉️ Sushi & Harmony Announce Full Stack Partnership with $4M in Incentives

In April we announced our initial partnership with Sushi with Sushi Swap deploying natively on Harmony, enabling swapping and providing liquidity with 2-second speed and less than $0.001 fees. Today we’re excited to announce that Sushi and Harmony are coming together to deepen our partnership and launch a full suite of Sushi products on Harmony. This is timely with Harmony celebrating its 2 year mainnet anniversary on June 28th, with 59+ million blocks, 24+ million transactions, 128,000+ accounts, 50+ apps (as of date of writing)

✉️ Bringing DeFi to the Masses: Launch of X-Accounts & Fireblocks Partnership

London, UK, 23 June 2021 - Digital payments platform, Wirex, has announced the launch of their game-changing X-Accounts feature, and partnership with Fireblocks, an industry-leading crypto provider. Set to become one of the world’s most accessible interest-paying accounts, X-Accounts will allow users to earn up to 16% on their crypto and fiat funds*.[LW1]

✉️ Step Finance now allow users to aggregate and visualize Augmented Reality NFTs as part of their portfolio

23 June 2021 - Step Finance, the front page of Solana, has become the first dashboard where users can aggregate and visualize Augmented Reality NFTs as part of their portfolio, beginning with AR NFTs from the Star Atlas metaverse, a next-gen gaming world that runs on Solana. This is the first time NFT and DeFi traders have been able to bring each kind of asset into one place on Solana.

✉️ RMRK: The dawn of Art Legos is upon us!

Switzerland. June 2021: The popularity of NFTs is soaring into the sky, and the numbers have been crazy. In 2020 the transactions just tripled, and many traders ended up making six-digit profits. Thousands of artists found a new way to earn a stable income, and we witnessed a dramatic rise in the NFT space. However, the high prices of Ethereum and lacking UX of other platforms have driven creators and collectors elsewhere. Fortunately, RMRK developed an NFT system that runs on Kusama Network, is eco-friendly, and extremely cheap to mint.

✉️ Endaoment Partner Rari Capital Votes To Take The Crypto Giving Pledge

SAN FRANCISCO — June 22, 2021 — Endaoment, the first philanthropic institution built entirely on the Ethereum blockchain, has announced its first continual giving partnership with Rari Capital, a distributed autonomous organization (DAO) and a suite of DeFi products aimed at reaching retail and institutional customers. Through this partnership, Rari will propose a vote to its community to contribute one percent of its annual revenue to social impact causes, facilitated by Endaoment and The Giving Block. This collaboration would designate Rari as the first Endaoment partner to commit to continuous contributions and the first DAO to fulfill The Crypto Giving Pledge.

✉️ Agoric Announces First Round of Developer Bounties to support early BLDrs

San Francisco, California — 22 June 2021 — Agoric, the JavaScript-native smart contract platform for a decentralized future, has announced the details of its first three bounties totalling $34,000. The bounties will see DeFi entrepreneurs, the JavaScript community, and native crypto developers build important pieces of infrastructure including a StableSwap-style curve for Agoric’s AMM (Automated Market Maker), port the core Chainlink aggregation contract functions to Agoric codebases, and launch a pool-based loan protocol. The initiative launches today and will continue to release additional bounties over the coming weeks.

✉️ Wanchain makes LTC smart contract compatible, adds Litecoin to cross-chain blockchain infrastructure

SINGAPORE, June 22, 2021 – The Wanchain Foundation today announces that Litecoin is now fully integrated into its cross-chain infrastructure. Wanchain, the decentralised blockchain interoperability solution that connects the world’s isolated blockchain networks, is the only decentralised finance (DeFI) project that enables truly decentralised cross-chain transactions between isolated heterogeneous blockchain networks. Wanchain’s cross-chain infrastructure already supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, Wanchain, EOSIO, Binance Smart Chain and XRP Ledger. The addition of Litecoin reinforces Wanchain’s position as the world’s most advanced cross-chain solution.

Funding

💰 Andreessen Horowitz triples down on blockchain startups with massive $2.2 billion Crypto Fund III

While the cryptocurrency market’s most recent hype wave seems to be dying down after a spectacular rise, Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm is reaffirming its commitment to startups building blockchain projects with a hulking new $2.2 billion crypto fund. It’s the firm’s largest vertical-specific fund ever — by quite a bit.

💰 Visa, PayPal Join Crypto VC Blockchain Capital’s New $300M Fund

PayPal and Visa are chasing bets across the crypto industry as partners in Blockchain Capital’s fifth venture fund, a $300 million war chest announced Tuesday. Blockchain Capital is one of older and larger crypto-native venture capital firms with over $1.5 billion under management, General Partner Spencer Bogart told CoinDesk. He said the firm’s fifth fund also received backing from pension funds and university endowments but declined to name additional LPs.

💰 Crypto Data Firm Kaiko Closes $24M Funding Round, Looks to Asia

Kaiko, a Paris-based cryptocurrency market data and research provider, has closed a $24 million Series A funding round led by Anthemis and Underscore VC. Other investors include German venture capital firm Point Nine and French VC firm Alven.

💰 Morgan Stanley co-leads $48m funding round for blockchain player Securitize

Digital asset securities firm Securitize has raised $48 million in a Series B funding round led by funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value and Blockchain Capital.

💰 Donut Raises $2 Million to Bring DeFi Mainstream

LOS ANGELES, June 22, 2021 - Donut, a mobile app to save and earn high yield with DeFi, today announced the closing of $2 million in a new funding round. Redalpine added to their commitment, bringing Donut’s total funding to date to $3.8 million. Other investors include Inventures, Compound founder Robert Leshner, Entrepreneur First and a group of enthusiastic users, including the owners of the Washington Nationals baseball team.

💰 Amber Group Raises $100 Million in Series B Funding at $1 Billion Valuation

HONG KONG — JUNE 20 2021 — Amber Group(www.ambergroup.io), the leading crypto trading and technology firm, announced today it had raised $100 million in Series B funding led by China Renaissance, with participation from Tiger Brokers, Tiger Global Management, Arena Holdings, Tru Arrow Partners, Sky9 Capital, DCM Ventures, and Gobi Partners. This financing round also includes participation from previous investors: Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Blockchain.com. The fundraise marks a significant milestone for the company boosting its pre-money valuation to $1 billion, 10x its previous Series A round from 2019, in which the company raised $28 million at a $100 million valuation. The funding round comes at a time when Amber Group is expanding its operations globally to bring its crypto finance offerings to more regions.

💰 Augmentum Fintech plc: $10 million investment into Finnish Fintech Tesseract

Augmentum Fintech plc (LSE: AUGM) (the “Company” or “Augmentum”), the UK’s only publicly listed investment company focussing on the fintech sector, announces that it has made a $10 million (c. £7.3 million) investment into Helsinki based Tesseract Group Oy (“Tesseract”), marking Augmentum’s first investment into Finland.

💰 DeFi Insurance Upstart Risk Harbor Goes Live With $3.25M in Seed Funding

Decentralized finance (DeFi) insurance platform Risk Harbor is emerging from stealth, armed with a $3.25 million seed round co-led by Framework Ventures and Pantera Capital. Also included in the round were Bain Capital Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Nima Capital and Digital Currency Group (parent company of CoinDesk).

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

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