📬 Inbox Dump #8

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 ...

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!

[This post is exclusive to subscribers]

Inbox Dump!

✉️ Launch of LP Royale — Liquidity Pool Simulator Game

May 7, 2021 -- 10:01AM EST - APY.Vision, an all-in-one liquidity pool analytics and yield farming rewards tracking tool, today announced the exciting launch of a new game called LP Royale. LP Royale is a fun and free to use educational platform designed to teach beginners about Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and being a liquidity provider (LP) through an immersive simulated experience of being an LP. Players compete to become the best LP, learning and using real LP techniques of balancing and re-balancing their portfolio and monitoring their pools, to get to the top of the leaderboard.

✉️ The Tor Project Auctions First Onion Address, Dusk, as an NFT on Foundation for 500 ETH

The Tor Project, developers of the internet’s first anonymous decentralized network known as Tor, have closed an NFT auction on Friday, May 14 on the Foundation platform at 500ETH (~2,019,820 USD). All proceeds will benefit the Tor Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. More than fifteen years ago, the Tor Project brought innovative privacy to the internet in the form of onion services—websites that end in “.onion”—that can only be accessed through the Tor network. The very first .onion website is known as Dusk, or duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion. All kinds of websites, apps, and services can use onion services to offer privacy to their users.

✉️ AFA ANNOUNCE THAT ARGENTINA WILL BECOME THE FIRST NATIONAL TEAM TO LAUNCH A FAN TOKEN

BUENOS AIRES, MAY 12TH: The Argentine Football Association (AFA), in partnership with Chiliz - the creators of Fan Tokens and the Socios.com fan engagement platform - have announced plans to launch an Official $ARG Fan Token for the Argentina National Team. Fan Tokens are collectible digital assets, minted on the Chiliz blockchain, that provide owners with access to voting rights in polls, VIP rewards, exclusive promotions, AR-enabled features, chat forums, games and competitions on the mobile app Socios.com.

✉️ RIMOWA Travels to the Metaverse with Launch of Their First NFT and Bets Big on What They Believe Has Changed Art Fairs This Year and Beyond

May 11, 2021: Since premium luggage label RIMOWA was founded in 1898, it has been rooted in product innovation, expert craftsmanship, and industrial know-how. Throughout this rich history, art and design have played a fundamental role in RIMOWA’s identity, both informing its distinctive iconography and inspiring leading artists and fashion designers in highly creative collaborations. Now, RIMOWA continues to forge new frontiers as the first luxury travel brand to create a collection of conceptual NFTs designed for the metaverse.

✉️ Anatha Founder and CEO Edward DeLeon Launches Master Class “Cryptocurrency: What It Is and How It Will Change Everything”

SHERIDAN, WYOMING -- May 12, 2021 at 10 AM EST --Anatha (anatha.io), an ethos-driven technology company founded by Apple, Adobe, Visa, and JP Morgan alumni building decentralized applications with native digital rewards enabling a regenerative economy, today announced the release of the first-of-its-kind master class led by founder, CEO, and crypto innovator, Edward DeLeon. In this free, on-demand, 16 episode master class, titled “Cryptocurrency: What It Is and How It Will Change Everything,” DeLeon shares his expertise as one of the industry’s earliest adopters and educators, giving viewers unique insights into Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, how these concepts have changed the world and will solve the inefficiencies of the current economic systems.

✉️ SwissBorg accelerates growth and selects OpenPayd’s banking-as-a-service platform in Europe

LONDON, 13 May, 2021 – OpenPayd, a leading global payments and banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform for the digital economy, today announced it is working with SwissBorg, a cryptocurrency wealth management platform based on blockchain technology. OpenPayd’s platform enables SwissBorg to seamlessly embed a full suite of financial services into its user experience, driving increased processing speeds and reducing operational costs, to support further business growth.

✉️ Thailand’s Brooker Group Becomes First Publicly Listed Company to Invest Nearly $50m in Diversified Portfolio of DeFi and dApps Projects

Thailand, Bangkok, May 11, 2021: The Brooker Group (BROOK), a financial consultancy and capital management company based in Bangkok, is the first publicly listed company in the world to invest in a diversified portfolio of decentralized Applications (dApps) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) tokens beginning with a $48m initial investment plan. This new direction to digital assets, DeFi and dApps will eventually make up approximately 50 percent of the company’s total assets.

✉️ DoinGud: A New NFT Platform Where Every Transaction Does Good

Zug, Switzerland - 10th May, 2021, DoinGud, a new community-driven art marketplace on the blockchain, is launching this summer and will share profits to social causes that its community are passionate about. DoinGud hopes to separate itself from the crowded market. The recent hype in NFTs has caused and tangibly moved forward the causes that matter most to its community. This reflects the desire of the new generation of creators and their supporters who don’t want to just make business but want to actually do good as well in the process.

✉️ Online Blockchain Plc: Umbria announces alpha version of its Layer 2 DEX

The DeFi protocol’s trading platform is fully functional with asset swaps and liquidity provision both successfully tested. Umbria - https://umbria.network/ -, which was recently mapped on Polygon (formerly Matic), will enable its users to benefit from fast, fractional cost transactions when using its developing suite of features. On testing, the transaction fees for swapping ERC20 tokens were less than $0.001. The Layer 2 DEX is a modified version of SushiSwap with extra governance features. The Umbria token list, which includes the ERC20 assets that users will be able to swap and provide liquidity for on Umbria DEX, can be viewed here.

✉️ Aleph.im Selected For the Sixth Season of Ubisoft’s Entrepreneurs Lab

Paris, May 10 - Aleph.im, a cross-blockchain decentralized storage and computing network, announced today that Ubisoft, the leading video game company, has selected aleph.im to participate in the sixth season of their incubator program, Entrepreneurs Lab. Aleph.im also took the opportunity to announce that Ubisoft is running a core channel node on aleph.im, furthering the development of the decentralized AWS-like network.

✉️ New NFT Company Sells Out World’s First Collectable Movie

A UK pioneer sharing entertainment content through non-fungible tokens (NFT) has announced it has sold out its latest collectible movie, with the film the first of its kind in the world to be distributed this way. NiftySplits is set to capitalise on the growing NFT industry, which has already seen significant value sales of art and sports collectables, with the release of its latest film ‘Kevcoin the Movie’.

✉️ New GoodFi Website And Advisory Panel Announced, With 22 Executives From Chainlink, Aave, Radix, mStable And More

London, May 13, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GoodFi, a not-for-profit organization created by Radix with the mission of getting 100 million people into DeFi by 2025, announced today the addition of 22 executives to its advisory board from DeFi industry leaders such as Chainlink, Aave, Sushiswap, Avalanche and mStable.

✉️ SUPPLY CHAIN SURVEY REVEALS WHERE ANALYTICS DATA IS STILL PREVENTING WAREHOUSE OPERATORS FROM MAKING REAL-TIME DECISIONS

ATLANTA (May 10, 2021) – Rebus® built by Longbow, a leading provider of warehouse visibility solutions that redefine and integrate supply chain and labor operations to drive efficiencies and reduce operational costs, announced today results of a recent industry survey that illustrate where continued inefficiencies are taking place within the warehouse.

Funding

💰 Explosive Decentralized Finance VC, Framework Ventures, Closes Second Fund of $100 Million

San Francisco -- May 14, 2021 --Framework Ventures, the largest venture capital fund in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, announced today a $100 million closeout of its second fundraising round, “Fund 2,” that experienced soaring interest among institutional investors. This number underscores how large institutions have been seeking out investment exposure not only to projects backed by Framework’s team, but also to the rapidly growing DeFi ecosystem more broadly.

💰 HashMix Raises $3M to Debut NFT-based Mining Power Marketplace

HashMix, a next generation hashrate tokenization and marketplace protocol, announced today that it has raised $3 million in a funding round participated by HashKey Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Continue Capital, GBV, SevenX Ventures, Kenetic Capital, FBG Capital, LongHash Ventures, Morningstar Ventures, A&T Capital, Qtum among others. The fresh capital will be used for protocol development, marketing, and talent enhancement.

💰 Upshot Raises $7.5 Million in Series A Led by Framework Ventures, CoinFund and Blockchain Capital

BOSTON - MAY 6, 2021 -Upshot, a blockchain-based protocol that incentivizes experts to answer subjective questions honestly, today announced that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding co-led by Framework Ventures, CoinFund and Blockchain Capital with additional investments from Slow Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Delphi Digital, CMS Holdings, Stani Kulechov, Kain Warwick, Ryan Selkis, and more.

💰 DeFire raises $5M in pre-IDO funding round to bring DeFi onto Cardano

Switzerland, Zug, May 13, 2021 — DeFire, the decentralized smart order routing engine being built on Cardano, has raised $5 million in a pre-IDO funding round. The venture capital round comes shortly before the DeFire token makes its debut through an initial DEX offering on the OccamRazer platform.

💰 Polkadot platform for DeFi derivatives lands $6.4 million in seed funding

On May 13, dTrade announced the closing of its seed funding round, which saw $6.4 million in investment from Three Arrows, DeFiance, Huobi and Polychain. DTrade aims to be the first derivatives exchange built on Polkadot. A press release shared with The Block said that it enables leveraged derivatives that settle on-chain. The goal is to remove custodial and counterparty risks from such trading.

💰 Shield Finance Closes Private Funding Round to Bring Insurance to DeFi

The vision outlined by Shield Finance has attracted ample attention from private investors. After setting the initial goal to $780,000, that amount was raised relatively quickly with the help of prominent investors. Entities supporting this venture include Zokyo, NGC Ventures, GD10. Ventures, Titan Ventures, and others. This successful private funding round marks a significant milestone for the team, as it confirms their vision for insurance in decentralized finance has merit.

💰 NiiFi raises $3 million in seed round to bring instant finality to DeFi

NiiFi, a new decentralized exchange (DEX) and lending protocol aimed at mainstream use cases, today announced that it has successfully closed a $3 million seed round, as per a press release. The DEX would use raised funds to buildout as the first application on Nahmii 2.0, the first Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution that enabled fiat currency swaps, instant transaction finality, and KYC/AML compliance capabilities required for broad adoption.

💰 Mobile DeFi Application Alice Raises $2 Million Through Seed Investment Round

Alice, a mobile Decentralized Finance (DeFi) application, announced on Thursday it raised $2 million through its latest seed funding round, which was led by Arrington Capital. Alice is reportedly powered by Terra, the Proof-of-Stake blockchain network built on the Cosmos SDK that deploys a suite of algorithmic, fiat-pegged stablecoins underscoring a blossoming DeFi ecosystem.

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

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The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Spread the word and share!

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