Calls from the crypto community for Ukraine to accept other cryptocurrencies have been answered. The official Ukraine Twitter account shared that it will now accept donations from Polkadot (DOT), while other cryptocurrencies will soon be added. The people of Ukraine are grateful for the support and donations from the global crypto community as we protect our freedom. We are now accepting Polkadot donations too: $DOT: 1x8aa2N2Ar9SQweJv9vsuZn3WYDHu7gMQu1RePjZuBe33Hv. More cryptocurrencies to be accepted soon. — Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) March 1, 2022 Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Polkadot had previously shared that if the Ukraine wallets were to add DOT, he would …

Within the first week of the Russia-Ukraine war, the Ukrainian government has reached out to the crypto community on Twitter for raising funds to support its civilians and troops. Ukraine has now started accepting Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Tether (USDT) as donations. As Russia threatens to take over Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv, the government of Ukraine sought help from numerous international organizations to overpower the imminent threat. However, considering time is of the essence, the official Twitter account of Ukraine extended its call for help to Crypto Twitter. Stand with the people of Ukraine. Now accepting cryptocurrency donations. …

China’s hardline policy on crypto took another turn on Thursday as the Supreme Court of the country revised its judicial interpretation for illegal fundraising to include digital currency transactions. The Chinese Supreme Court issued a revised version of its "Decision on Amending the Interpretation of the Supreme People's Court on Several Issues Concerning the Specific Application of Law in the Trial of Criminal Cases of Illegal Fund Raising". Just In: For the first time, the Supreme Court of China has included virtual currency transactions in the judicial interpretation of illegal fundraising, which is mainly to punish the behavior of absorbing …

Late Friday afternoon, decentralized finance, or DeFi, investigator @zachxbt published a series of tweets accusing fraudster Omar Zaki of hiding behind the facade of 0xbrainjar, the anonymous head of product at Composable Finance. From last November to this February, Composable Finance raised over $167 million through seed funding, as well as crowdloan auctions on the Polkadot (DOT) and Kusama (KSM) parachains. Over 9,000 participants contributed to the DOT crowdloan alone. As told by zachxbt, who cited documents from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, Omar Zaki, then a 21-year-old New York resident and graduate of Yale University with …

Late Saturday, Spice DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization that owns a copy of an unpublished manuscript of Frank Herbert and Alejandro Jodorowsky's never completed Dune film, announced its roadmap going forward. In the Tweet, Spice DAO said it would "Make the book public, produce an original animated limited series inspired by the book and sell it to a streaming service, and support derivative projects from the community." The group had previously won the Christie's auction in November for the copy's sale at 2.66 million euros, or about 89 times its price estimates at the midpoint. However, there was just one …

From the very beginning of the cryptocurrency movement, the societal potential of Bitcoin (BTC) has been one of the fundamental selling points. The decentralized design of crypto-based systems introduces the possibility of bringing individuals together to work toward shared goals, as well as enabling them to pool resources while remaining insulated from outside control. 2021 saw a number of cases that could serve as evidence of this emancipatory power of digital assets. ConstitutionDAO: $49 million raised in a few days Arguably, the most high-profile case of a massive fundraising effort enabled by a decentralized autonomous organization in 2021 was ConstitutionDAO. …

On Dec. 15, Genius Yield, a decentralized automated market maker and liquidity management protocol built on the Cardano (ADA) blockchain, announced the launch of its initial stake pool offering, or ISPO. The fundraising will continue for six months until June 15, 2022. At the time of publication, more than 95.8 million ADA, worth approximately $118 million at the time of writing, have been delegated to the stake pools. In an ISPO, blockchain enthusiasts stake their cryptos in a protocol and receive tokens of the new project they fund as rewards. After a lockup period, investors can then reclaim their staked …

Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter will be launching a new company that will eventually see its website move to a blockchain-based system on Celo. In a Wednesday blog post, CEO Aziz Hasan and co-founder Perry Chen said Kickstarter would be developing an open source protocol that will live on the Celo blockchain. The two execs cited the blockchain’s efforts in minimizing its environmental impact — being carbon negative — in addition to the fact it was open source. “We are entering a significant moment for alternative governance models, and we think there's an important opportunity to advance these efforts using the blockchain,” …

Crypto converted another Wall Street veteran this week after former Citi executive Matt Zhang launched a $1.5 billion digital asset fund. A new funding mechanism allowing users to access early-stage crypto startups shined the spotlight on Cardano’s massive community. One of Latin America’s biggest crypto exchanges raised $50 million in private funding to expand its operations. 1inch Network raised another $175 million from some of crypto’s biggest venture funds to expand DeFi liquidity. These were just some of the week’s biggest headlines from the world of crypto. Every Thursday, Cointelegraph’s Crypto Biz newsletter gives readers a pulse of the business …

On Thursday morning, Acala, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol operating on the Polkadot (DOT) network, announced it had won the first-ever Polkadot parachain auction. Acala raised a total of 32.5 million DOT, worth roughly $1.28 billion, from 24,934 contributors via an initial coin offering (ICO) structured as a crowdloan. As the proceeds are classified as 'crypto debt,' Acala would eventually need to pay back the DOT it had solicited from investors. Users' DOTs are locked for the duration of the rental agreement for Polkadot's parallel chains up for sale. It’s a testament to the strength of @Polkadot that so many …

Decentralized finance protocol Acala announced Monday that they have raised 8.5 million DOT (worth $451.8 million USD at time of publication) from over 53,000 participants. The protocol is also set to win the first parachain auction on Polkadot. Unlike typical crowdfunding rounds, Acala's financing mechanism is a crowdloan, which means it will eventually need to pay back the "crypto debt" it has solicited from investors. On Nov. 5, Polkadot developers added the first parachain onto its network. Parachains are custom, project-specific blockchains that can be integrated into a main blockchain. The distinguishing feature of Polkadot is its Cross-Consensus Message Format. …

The growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has been a recurrent headline throughout 2021 and to date, hundreds of billions of dollars in crypto assets are locked on protocols across numerous blockchain networks and earning a yield for their holders. What started off as a simple Ethereum-based swap interface that allowed ERC-20 tokens to be exchanged in a decentralized manner, called Uniswap, has exploded into a vast ecosystem full of decentralized exchanges, yield farms, lending protocols and staking platforms. As development continues and older protocols become more established, newer projects have emerged to incorporate more pieces from the traditional …