📬 Inbox Dump #1

Hello Defiers! Defiant founder Cami here.

We’re starting a new section: The Inbox Dump. This post will come out every Saturday and include the updates and announcements that flood my DMs each week and didn’t make it to our content platforms.

At The Defiant the bar is high for coverage: We’re a news organization and so, of course, we cover the news —developments that are making an actual impact (good or bad). We give priority to projects that, as far as we can tell, are legit, live and running. But I know many of you are hunting for projects before they are fully developed and before they are newsworthy. My goal with this installment of the newsletter is to help you find them.

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. Look at them as the starting point to DYOR. I will also include a compilation of crypto funding rounds in the past week so you have these in one handy place.

The Inbox Dump will be exclusive to Defiant subscribers. I will send this first one for all signups of the newsletter to give everyone a chance to see if it’s worth becoming a member. Members also get full transcripts of the podcast, early access to guest posts, and an invite to the subscribers-only Discord chat. I will be raising the subscription price to $15/month, from $10/month in a week.

Subscribe now to lock in the $10/month price and to never miss an Inbox Dump and other subscriber benefits!

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

Inbox Dump!

🍑 nudities is the 1st nude & lewd NFT-Marketplace for Creators, Digital-Artists and Collectors

Soon nudities will open their gates for the public. Offering the first and biggest marketplace for nude & lewd related content sold as non-fungible-tokens. Many groups can use nudities to establish their name in the crypto world while creating a second income-stream.

👨‍🌾 Umbria DeFi Farm launch

Users of the Umbria Layer 2 DeFi protocol can soon deposit their UMBR-ETH LP (liquidity pool) tokens into the Umbria Farm https://farm.umbria.network/ and earn even more $UMBR as a reward.

🌈 Welcome to Ethermore — An emerging fantasy world built on community and blockchain

We are excited to announce the launch of a fantasy world, with community focus and classic fantasy at its core, backed by blockchain NFTs. Ethermore arrives as a drop of 15,000 NFTs, each a unique procedurally generated fantasy character that will populate the founding community of Ethermore. A fantasy world that will be created by the community.

💸 Hermez Network officially launches to solve crippling gas fees while supporting community projects

Hermez Network, the decentralised zero-knowledge rollup (zk-rollup) has officially launched its mainnet to scale and greatly reduce the cost of transactions on Ethereum. The Hermez zk-rollup is a decentralised Layer 2 solution that scales Ethereum by rolling multiple transfers into a single transaction.

⚡️ Introducing NFT Flash Loans

Today we are happy to talk about a new feature on the NFT20 protocol: NFT Flash Loans. As NFT utility grows, there will be more use cases to buy and sell NFTs programatically, or even use them for play and earn games and new use cases. You can now take out a flashloan on any of our pools and use any of the up to 18k NFTs locked in our platform, at the moment there is no fee for taking a flashloan, but in the future there could be.

🧛‍♂️ DeFi Vampirism Draws First Blood As Dracula Protocol Upgrades to v2

Our project provides users with proxy pools for staking funds. Staked funds transferred to the corresponding victim’s pools using adapters for the victims’ contracts. This results in Dracula smart-contract receiving victim’s tokens and the user receiving DRC. Invoking a drain functionality sells victims’ reward tokens for ETH, swapping ETH in the DRC-ETH pool and then burning DRC, increasing DRC/ETH ratio as a result.

🌟 Circle Launches Comprehensive NFT Platform & Marketplace Payments Solution

Circle, a global financial technology firm that provides payments and treasury infrastructure for internet businesses, today announced a comprehensive payments solution for non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces and storefronts that enables them to accept credit card and crypto payments alike in order to attract more mainstream audience adoption. Circle today also unveiled forthcoming features that will be made available over the coming months, including support USDC, BTC and ETH payments, NFT custodial services, and yield-generating Circle accounts for NFT market operators.

Funding

💰 StarkWare: $75M Series B Led by Paradigm

Announcing our $75M Series B, led by @paradigm, with new investors (Three Arrows & @AlamedaResearch), and old ones too (@PanteraCapital, @sequoia, @foundersfund,
@DCVC, @Wing_VC).

💰 Recur: $5M Seed Round Led by DeFi Alliance

RECUR, the new technology company that designs and develops on-chain branded experiences allowing fans to buy, collect, and re-sell digital products and collectibles (NFTs), announces its raise of $5M, the largest seed-raise to date in NFT history. It will build branded NFT Fan Experiences for global brands and the first is set to launch in Summer 2021.

💰 Linen: $4M Raised With $2M Crowdfunded

More than $2 million raised from almost 2,000 users of @GetLinen, community members, and friends! $4 million raised and committed in total and we had to upsize the round.

💰 Covalent: $2 Million Strategic Funding Round Led by Hashed

Covalent, a unified API for blockchain data, has closed a $2 million strategic funding round led by Hashed with participation from Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures, and other ecosystem partners. The new funding will accelerate product timelines to launch a decentralized version of the market-leading Covalent API.

💰 NAOS Finance: Seed Funding Round W/ Mechanism & Others (Undisclosed amt)

NAOS Finance, a technology company that has originated more than $250 million in crypto assets backed by real-world debt, announced today that it has raised a seed funding round to accelerate its efforts to bridge the worlds of traditional finance and crypto. The round saw participation from Mechanism Capital, The Spartan Group, SNZ, among others.

That’s all for today! Did you like this format? 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. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access, while free signups get only part of the content. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button above ($10/mo, $100/yr).