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…

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…

Element Finance raised $4.4M in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Placeholder accompanied by SV Angel, A.Capital, Scalar Capital, and Robot Ventures.  Angels included Joseph Lubin, Fernando Martinelli, Stani Kulechov, Mariano Conti, Robert Leshner and Tarun Chitra. The project aims to bring liquidity to the fixed-rate income and interest markets Users will be…

InsurAce, the Singapore-based insurance protocol, raised $3M in a token-based funding round led by Alameda Research and HashKey Capital. Investors from the project’s $1M seed round, DeFiance Capital, ParaFi Capital, Hashed and Signum Capital, also participated. The round was completed with institutional investors, including, IOSG Ventures, ImToken Ventures, LongHash Ventures, HashGlobal, Tembusu Partners, Factorial Ventures,…

Reversible ICO (rICO)—the latest brainchild from Ethereum dapp developer and ERC 20 creator Fabian Vogelsteller—is a new model for ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings used to fundraise for start-ups) where investors reserve tokens instead of buying them outright. Returnable tokens This new fundraising mechanism allows investors to reserve and buy tokens over time, and “return” reserved…

Rarible, the community-owned non-fungible-token (NFT) marketplace, announced a $1.75M seed round from investors including 1kx, ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Coinfund. Rarible token RARI jumped 60% to $8 on the news yesterday. Rarible intends to use the funds to develop a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) structure which facilitates NFT trading. Central to the structure will…

dYdX closed its Series B round with an investment of $10M led by Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital. Other investors include Wintermute, Hashed, GSR, SCP, Scalar Capital, Spartan Group, and RockTree Capital. The dYdX exchange, which focuses on derivatives trading, notes that since launching its  decentralized perpetual contracts for three markets in 2020, it’s…

Decentralized finance keeps hitting new highs in its most popular metric, total value locked. But there’s another, lesser-known milestone it also reached: DeFi projects just crossed half a billion dollars raised in venture capital funding. The 34 DeFi Companies listed on DeFi Pulse have together raised just over $500M from more than 100 VC funds.…