DeFi is catching the attention of the mainstream consumer, as NFTs draw artists in and Elon Musk to Mark Cuban sing its praises. Introducing DeFi to consumers has been both a design and messaging challenge due to the technical comprehension required. Yet the rate of production and adoption may be converging. In the last week…

PancakeSwap, a Binance Smart Chain automated market maker, surpassed Uniswap’s total value locked for the first time yesterday hitting $7.87B, a mark $100M higher than the Ethereum AMM. That makes the BSC-based AMM the largest by assets locked. PancakeSwap’s TVL is more than 53 times larger than it was three months ago when the AMM…

Step Finance, a Solana app which aggregates users’ DeFi activities across the blockchain’s open finance ecosystem has raised $2M in a round led by Alameda Research, Three Comma Capital and others. “The biggest problem in the Solana ecosystem is how most projects are siloed from one another,” Step co-founder Georga Harrap wrote in a press…

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced yesterday that it will mint six NFTs on financial services company Crypto.com’s new NFT platform. The NFTs will each mark the first trade of a company on its IPO day. The six companies, Spotify, Doordash, Roblox, Snowflake, Coupang and Unity are all software companies which have had their…

Defiant Media Inc., the creator of The Defiant, closed a $1.4M pre-seed round to build the leading information company at the intersection of tech and finance, from investors including IDEO CoLab Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Blockchange Ventures, MetaCartel Ventures, Defiance Capital, Mechanism Capital, GBV Capital, and angels including Anthony Pompliano, Mariano Conti, Andrew Keys and many…

zCloak Network, a Polkadot-based and privacy-focused computing platform, announced it closed a $1.3M seed round led by IOSG Ventures and Hypersphere Ventures. Other notable participants include KR1, DFG, Advanced Blockchain AG, PAKA Fund and Digital Renaissance Foundation. zCloak Network enables computation and analysis of personal data without sending them to 3rd party servers with the…

DeFi lending protocol C.R.E.A.M. Finance is launching a protocol-to-protocol flash loan product through its Iron Bank, with the aim to increase capital efficiency and expand the scope of decentralized finance. DeFi protocols will now be able to take out flash loans ––uncollateralized loans that need to be repaid at the same block that they are…

dYdX  launched its cross-margined perpetuals product on a Layer 2 scaling solution powered by blockchain software developer StarkWare.  The move is significant as it highlights how some of Ethereum’s most well-known DeFi projects are migrating to scaling solutions amid rising gas costs to operate directly on Ethereum’s Layer 1. $10M Trading Volume StarkWare co-founder and…

Compound has become the number one DeFi protocol by value locked. Compound had already been leading in terms of liquidity supplied—with over $15 billion deposited at the time of writing—but lagged behind MakerDAO in TVL. And one notable wallet recently made a significant contribution to those assets. The reason for this difference boils down to the…

Yat, a project building internet identities, ran its first auction last week, selling 18 “yats,” or strings of emojis which can be used in URLs or as payment addresses. Its highest selling item, the key emoji sold for $425K according to the auction’s website.  Yat is aiming to create a “new censorship resistant internet identity…