Manta Network, a privacy layer project for the Polkadot ecosystem, has completed a new funding round to continue scaling decentralized finance (DeFi) use cases by boosting blockchain privacy. Announced Tuesday, Manta Network’s latest $5.5-million funding round included participation from more than 30 venture funds, including crypto hedge fund CoinFund and alternative investment firm ParaFi Capital. Other investors included Web 3. investment fund LongHash Ventures, CMS Holdings, Divergence, Spartan Group, Global Coin Ventures, SkyVision Capital, Zee Prime and SNZ. The funding has also featured some of the industry’s prominent individual investors from major cryptocurrency companies such as Digital Currency Group, Consensys …
A report published by research firm CB Insights has found that equity funding has dramatically overtaken initial coin offerings (ICOs) as the dominant means of finance in the blockchain space. While the largely unregulated ICO boom of 2018 raised $7.8 billion, initial coin offering funding fell more than 95% to raise $371 million in 2019. By contrast, equity funding raised $2.8 billion last year. The report also notes the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi), noting that there are currently more than $1 billion in assets on DeFi platforms — up from $300 million as of January 2019. Crypto firms are …
The Avalanche Foundation has unveiled “Blizzard” — a fund offering more than $200 million in incentives to developers who build on the Avalanche network. The fund will provide liquidity to those early-stage projects that innovate decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and other products on Avalanche. Avalanche is a Proof-of-Stake network that launched in September 2020. The network boasts Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatibility, allowing developers to port decentralized applications over from Ethereum. The network now boasts more than 320 projects that are currently building on it, including top stablecoin issuer Tether, popular DEX SushiSwap, and oracle providers Chainlink and …
On Friday, Assembly, a decentralized layer one smart contract network built within the IOTA ecosystem, announced it had raised $100 million from private investors, including LD Capital, HyperChain Capital assembly, and Huobi Ventures. The project stated that the funds will be used to accelerate the development of decentralized finance protocols, nonfungible tokens, and play-to-earn crypto games. IOTA is a blockchain designed for facilitating internet-of-things transactions. Its proprietary technology consists of a system of decentralized acyclic graphs that can connect to one another in multiple vectors as opposed to in-series as with a regular blockchain. As a result, one new block …
The competition among the computing networks is warming up, with decentralized players coming into the stage with backing from the crypto ecosystem. Decentralized storage and computing network Aleph.im completed a $10 million funding round led by Stratos Technologies. Zeeprime, NOIA Capital, Theia, Bitfwd Capital have contributed to the funding, among others. The cross-blockchain network aims to provide fully decentralized computing power and censorship-resistant data storage, according to the announcement. Aleph.im scheduled its first computing resource node rollout for January following the funding round. The nodes would eventually become the decentralized network’s main processing power source. Aleph.im rewards its core channel …