The NFT marketplace OpenSea has reached a $1.5B valuation after a $100M Series B funding round led by a16z. This makes OpenSea the newest NFT-based unicorn, or a privately held startup company valued over $1B. A16z also led OpenSea’s $23M Series A round in March. This year, the venture giant also invested in Dapper Labs,…

The crypto market’s all-time highs are just a memory. The summer slump now seems to be deepening into something more disturbing. And it’s not so far-fetched that Bitcoin may give back all of its gains since the first quarter if bears continue their rampage. Gird yourselves, it’s white-knuckle time in crypto. On Tuesday, Bitcoin had…

Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO and Bitcoin enthusiast, wants to bring decentralized finance onto the OG cryptocurrency protocol. On July 15, Dorsey announced that his financial services and digital payments company, Square, is creating a new business focused on bringing non-custodial, permissionless DeFi services to Bitcoin. The new company, which is called “TBD” (just like…

Uniswap V3 has launched on Optimism. This is wild. It’s pretty fast to get over there but it takes a week to come back so be aware of that.

In this week’s episode Camila Russo interviews Raoul Pal, who retired from the hedge fund world at 36 years old and has run financial media company Real Vision for the seven years since. He predicted the housing bubble, he was early to call the devastating effect the pandemic would have on the economy, and now he gives us his…

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…

When I joined MetaCartel Ventures’ weekly meeting online earlier this month I didn’t know what to expect.  The outfit’s bare-bones website looks like something university students would cook up on an all-nighter, with low-rez GIFs and, strangely, an embedded mp3 of Evanescence’s hit “Bring Me to Life.” Its whitepaper features images reminiscent of playing cards…

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…

Alien Worlds, one of the biggest blockchain games running on the Wax blockchain (EOS fork), is making some participants millions of dollars in weeks. The issue is, these players are gaming the game.   Players buy NFT tools and click a button to get Trilium (TLM), the in-game currency, as well as more NFTs. Even if…

MistX is the first time in Ethereum history that FlashBots is available to regular users for front-running protection and “no success, no fee” transactions.