DeFi Daily: 50+ Punks on JPEG'D, Argent Raises $40m, fountains of Fraud.
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Argent raises $40m round for DeFi and Web3 'super app', LatAm expansion - AltFi
By Daniel Lanyon on Thursday 28 April 2022
The boom in funding for DeFi and Web3 strategies is starting to filter through as crypto firms look to the metaverse.The company is building a single app for all things DeFi and Web3 and the new cash will be used for product development, hiring and expansion including a move into the LatAm market.The round was led by Fabric Ventures and Metaplanet, with existing investors Paradigm, Index Ventures and Creandum, as well as strategic investors including Starkware, Jump and Animoca.“For crypto to live up to its potential, it needs to break the stranglehold of big exchanges and incumbent wallets.“This latest investment will enable us to double-down on product development, bringing more DeFi and Web3 use cases to the app, and enable us to expand into South America, where due to high levels of inflation and a deep mistrust of institutions, our product market fit is especially strong”, Lesuisse added.
DeFi investment bank Ondo raises $30m - Finextra
The round was led by Founders Fund and Pantera Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, GoldenTree, Wintermute, Steel Perlot, Tiger Global, and Flow Traders.The firm's first offering was a novel primitive for decentralised structured products that offer choice between downside protection and enhanced returns.The company quickly expanded to other use cases, such as its Liquidity-as-a-Service offering, which matches DAOs with underwriters to provide liquidity for a DAO's native token.The startup now plans to launch a host of new products, including vaults that bundle yields from algorithmic stablecoins as well as vaults that aggregate yield across different blockchains.Nathan Allman, CEO, Ondo Finance, says "We're excited for some new product launches that will make it much easier for passive investors to obtain broad exposure to DeFi yields at a customized risk level."
"Gushing fountain of fraud in crypto and DeFi” says journalist whose reporting led to collapse of Wirecard - AltFi
By John Reynolds on Wednesday 27 April 2022
FT journalist Dan McCrum was speaking today (Wednesday) at AltFi’s Festival of Finance conference with AltFi managing editor Oliver Smith, detailing the demise of Wirecar
"There is a gushing fountain of fraud in crypto and DeFi (decentralized finance), according to the journalist whose reporting helped bring down German fintech Wirecard.Wirecard's former CEO Markus Braun, and two other former senior executives, have been charged with suspected market manipulation and false representation of the company’s financial accounts.Asked what advice he would give investors to spot a fraudulent firm, McCrum said: “There is a simple thing that Warren Buffet has always said, which [is] he doesn’t invest in a business that he doesn’t understand” which is simple but effective advice, he said.“And the thing about Wirecard was I could not understand this business”, he said, adding that even when he had worked it was operating fraudulently, it was hard to convince others.McCrum said he was “dumbfounded” when he heard that Softbank was investing $1bn in the German payments company in 2019, despite the FT reporting alleged accounting malpractice at the
“So when SoftBank announced it was doing this deal, I was dumbfounded.”
His editor walked into the office and said 'Dan you do realise Softbank has just bet a billionaire dollars that you’re wrong'.
DeFi Cryptocurrency Faces All-Time High Fraud Reports - The National Law Review
If you read the hype, then you will have read that lack of regulation, speed of transactions, irreversibility of trades, and hidden identities are positive features of the crypto world. Crypto enthusiasts say that finance can only be improved by avoiding banks, regulators, and rules. But faster and looser isn’t always better when we are talking about your investments. In fact, it is a recipe for you to be defrauded out of your money.
Moving money quickly is the essence of crypto. It is also the essence of any organized fraud scheme. And once taken, cryptocurrency can be moved quickly and laundered to avoid detection.
Here Is How to Improve DeFi Governance Using Ideas from Computational Voting Theory - Yahoo Finance
Here Is How to Improve DeFi Governance Using Ideas from Computational Voting Theory Don't miss CoinDesk's Consensus 2022, the must-attend crypto & blockchain festival experience of the year in Austin, TX this June 9-12.Jesus Rodriguez is CTO and co-founder of blockchain data platform IntoTheBlock, as well as chief scientist of AI firm Invector Labs and an active investor, speaker and author in crypto and artificial intelligence.Just as we were writing this article, stablecoin protocol BeanStalk was a victim of a governance attack that resulted in a $182M exploit.During those years, thinkers Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, and Jean-Charles, Chevalier de Borda created methods such as Condorcet criterion or the Borda count, respectively, which have become the foundation of many modern voting systems.When applied to DeFi governance, we can envision that voters will have to spend governance tokens at a cost that grows quadratically relative to the number of votes.
DeFi Trading Platform Hashflow Introduces Bridgeless Cross-Chain Swaps - CoinDesk
Decentralized finance (DeFi) trading platform Hashflow (HFT) is introducing a new feature to enable bridgeless cross-chain swaps, the company announced Wednesday
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The 1% tax deducted at source has been the biggest pain point in the new tax rules for India's crypto industry.The 1% tax deducted at source has been the biggest pain point in the new tax rules for India's crypto industry.
Crypto Report: DeFi Exchange 0x Labs raises $70M - Bloomberg
Liquidity portfolios are changing the way DeFi is used - Cointelegraph
As the ecosystem and the technology have further developed, liquidity pools’ inherent drawbacks have become a burden to DeFi users.By restructuring the very core of liquidity pools and introducing liquidity portfolios, Blueshift has managed to materialize numerous improvements that have been lacking in the old world of DeFi 1.0.Dozens of cryptocurrencies can be contained in liquidity portfolios, while users can only provide a single token as liquidity.The liquidity portfolios coming to Blueshift can be categorized as:
- Indexes such as top-10 ecosystem or metaverse tokens
- Verticals such as gaming, football, music or education
- Organizations that have branded portfolios with bundled tokens
- Technology such as as oracles, smart contracts, augmented and virtual reality, and NFTs
- Special tokens such as newcomers or rising stars.Other milestones to come are more market listings for Blueshift (BLUES) and the Arbitrum chain integration.
Crypto News
Why I'm still not taking crypto seriously - Financial Times
Crypto, goes the refrain, has “gone mainstream” — from BlackRock to UBS, every major investor is at the very least “exploring” it these days, while the big firms have tens of millions of retail investors each.This week the comedy came courtesy of the nominatively determined Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO and founder of crypto exchange FTX, a company recently valued at $32bn.On Monday, Bankman-Fried, himself recently valued at $24bn, appeared on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast and was asked to explain how a newish crypto phenomenon called yield-farming works.Yield-farming — a rather complex practice that essentially offers investors a chance to turn their crypto into more crypto, by borrowing money from the customers, giving them a “governance token” in exchange, and farming out this crypto into other coins and “DeFi” projects offering high yields — has long raised eyebrows.And who are we to say that they’re wrong about that?” He then described how all this becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, because once investors start feeling bullish about it, the token becomes more valuable and they “go and pour another $300 million in the box .
Crypto prices rebound and Solana's co-founder thinks bitcoin needs proof of stake - CNBC
Crypto prices rebound and Solana's co-founder thinks bitcoin needs proof of stake: CNBC Crypto World
CNBC Crypto World features the latest news and daily trading updates from the digital currency markets and provides viewers with a look at what's ahead with high-profile interviews, explainers, and unique stories from the ever-changing crypto industry.On today's show, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko speaks with CNBC's Kate Rooney about the platform's development, the token's price swings and whether bitcoin should adopt the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.08:08
5 hours ago
Gibraltar became a hub for crypto — now it wants to tackle attempts to manipulate the market - CNBC
The overseas British territory, located on the southern tip of Spain, published an amendment to existing regulations Wednesday requiring firms dealing in bitcoin and other digital currencies to respect the integrity of markets in which they operate.Some fairly large names have set up shop in Gibraltar and obtained licenses from local regulators, including FTX, Huobi and Bullish, which is backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.Executives from Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange, also visited Gibraltar "some months back," but does not have a license, Isola said.The Gibraltar Stock Exchange recently agreed to be acquired by Valereum, a blockchain firm, in a bid to become the world's first regulated bourse for share and crypto trading.The region is "fully compliant with all transparency and exchange of information standards applicable in the U.K.," Isola said, adding this was at odds with descriptions of Gibraltar as a tax haven.
Crypto campaign targets EU ‘track-and-trace’ bill at 11th hour - POLITICO Europe
The bill aims to prevent the crypto market from becoming a laundromat for dirty money, requiring companies to check who’s sending funds, of any amount, in the form of cryptocurrencies — and who receives them.Crypto chief executives and lobbyists fear the European Parliament could introduce amendments that would force crypto companies to carry out extra identity checks on people who use digital wallets that hold cryptocurrencies outside of exchanges.The Parliament’s amendments pose a threat to people’s personal freedom and privacy, while demanding extra identity checks would stall Europe’s future market for the Internet of Things, where people can interact with machines without a middleman, lobbyists have warned."Those rules exist in the [currency] world," Ernest Urtasun, the Spanish Green MEP who shepherded TFR through Parliament alongside Belgium’s Assita Kanko of the European Conservatives and Reformists, told POLITICO earlier this month.This article is part of POLITICO Pro
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The FTX US Proposal That Shook Congress And The Crypto Derivatives World - Forbes
As a former U.S. regulator, the lack of transparency in the derivatives market and concentrations of risk led this country to the brink of failure amongst the global financial markets, so it is understandable why there is so much ado about a brand new crypto exchange looking to change the way margin trading for derivatives are cleared at the retail level.In this story, I review the timeline of events regarding this proposal first and then an interview with Brett Harrison, the President of FTX US who breaks down why this proposal is significant and his belief in how this type of margin clearing actually reduces the risks inherent in the current derivatives marketplace.Benham spends what he describes as months working behind-the-scenes with FTX US on their novel proposal regarding the clearing of margin trades for crypto derivatives at the retail level.March 24, 2022 - The CFTC announces that it is extending the request for public comment on FTX to 60 days, moving the due date to May 11, which is two weeks away.Interview with Brett Harrison, President of FTX US Jason Brett: Can you tell us about the significance of the CFTC’s review of your application to amend your registration to allow for a new kind of clearing process for derivatives that are directly between FTX US and your customers?
First Mover Asia: Indian Crypto Exchanges' Trading Volume Continues to Dive Following New Tax Law; Cryptos Higher - CoinDesk
Bitcoin (BTC): $39,207 +2.2% Ether (ETH): $2,887 +1.9% |Asset||Ticker||Returns||Sector| |Cosmos||ATOM||+4.9%||Smart Contract Platform| |Bitcoin Cash||BCH||+2.7%||Currency| |Bitcoin||BTC||+2.0%||Currency| |Asset||Ticker||Returns||Sector| |Dogecoin||DOGE||−1.9%||Currency| |Polygon||MATIC||−0.5%||Smart Contract Platform| |XRP||XRP||−0.4%||Currency| Bitcoin, ether take a short turn for the better Once more without conviction.Bitcoin appears to be "falling out of the window, but latching onto the windowsill," Alex Kuptsikevich, an analyst at FxPro, wrote in an email to CoinDesk.Bad news continued to flow from Ukraine, where the Russian military bludgeoned major Ukraine cities and cut off gas exports to former Soviet Union satellites Poland and Bulgaria, threatening to widen the conflict.For WazirX, this is a steep haircut from average daily trading volumes of above $90 million before the new regulations took effect.“For lot of us, blockchain or #bitcoin is Plan B,” Sathvik Vishwanath, founder of local exchange Unocoin, tweeted on Wednesday.
Crypto firms seek clearer U.S. rules on their interest-bearing products - Reuters.com
In February, New Jersey crypto company BlockFi agreed to pay $100 million in a landmark settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and state authorities who said its interest-bearing product qualifies as a security and should have been registered.Gemini, a crypto exchange, offers an interest-bearing crypto product that was approved by the New York State Department of Financial Services.CEO Alex Mashinsky did not say whether Celsius would register the product, but told Reuters early this month he was not concerned the SEC would sue because Celsius is a "much more conservative company than BlockFi".Kraken, for example, would like to offer an interest-bearing product but the company is wary since the SEC has not provided guidance, said Marco Santori, the company’s chief legal officer.Bitstamp, a crypto exchange that has a New York virtual currency license, hopes to offer a yield product to U.S. institutional investors, but believes it might need additional licenses and approval from New York regulators.
Grayscale targets European financial hub for crypto expansion - Financial Times
Grayscale Investments, the world’s biggest investment vehicle for cryptocurrencies, is scouring Europe’s top financial hubs to launch expansion beyond its North American base.The fund manager, whose $36bn of assets are invested in funds tracking digital tokens such as bitcoin and ethereum, is holding a series of meetings with possible partners, according to Michael Sonnenshein, chief executive.He told the Financial Times that the company was excited “by the potential to bring what we’ve learned from the US market to places like Europe”.“We’re conducting some research, meeting with different organisations and different partners to determine what is going to be the best way for Grayscale to bring a lot of that accessibility, a lot of the insights we have to European investors.”
“We’re exploring a lot of European financial hubs, to really think about what is going to be the right approach for us and how best to bring Grayscale to Europe,” he told the FT’s Crypto and Digital Assets summit.A move into Europe comes as the UK and EU step up their efforts to lay out a regulatory framework that will both protect investors and encourage them to explore the benefits of owning and trading digital assets.
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