Avalanche rises $200M developer fund in Layer 1 buildout boom.

An all-star investment team backed a $100M NFT fund from Smerfion

Rari Capital, the DeFi protocol created by teenagers, has shipped perhaps its biggest product to date — permissionless lending pools. The new feature allows anyone to create a lending and borrowing pool on the open interest rate protocol, meaning anyone can create a pool for any asset, thereby expanding DeFi possibilities.  Projects like NFTX, which…

The Tracer Protocol has completed a sale of 50M TCR tokens for 3.75M DAI, giving its total supply a valuation of $75M at the sales end. It has since nearly doubled to $137M, according to CoinGecko. The auction ran for five days, ending on September 15, and it used the Gnosis batch auction system, so…

The Layer 1 blockchain Harmony unveiled a $300M ecosystem fund today to back startups working on applications and protocols. There are many large blockchains now, but to a certain degree each one is a bit of a walled garden, Stephen Tse, Harmony’s founder told The Defiant, via a spokesperson. “Harmony was purpose-built so that developers…

In Facebook’s early days, it famously limited membership to students in colleges and universities, opening a few at a time. Hyype, a new social network for NFT collectors, plans a similar approach but Discord server by Discord server rather than school by school. To that end, Hyype today announced a $1.5M seed round from Electric…

Gitcoin rustles up millions of dollars in funding to support Ethereum developers. Lighthouse gives away Ethereum 2.0 software. And EthHub provides educational services on the Ethereum ecosystem gratis.  These endeavors are known as public goods, and no surprise, Defiers love them, and want more of them. But influential voices in DeFi, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik…

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,…

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…

SushiSwap’s $60M strategic fundraising round has come under fire from community members who dislike the plan to offer investors deep discounts at a time when its tokens are slumping in the marketplace. Last week, the SushiSwap team introduced a proposal  to diversify the protocol’s treasury. The decentralized exchange holds the bulk of its treasury funds…