Cryptocurrency staking protocol ClayStack has secured $5.2 million in seed funding from several prominent blockchain investor funds, putting it on course to introduce new innovations in staking later this year. The seed round was co-led by CoinFund and ParaFi Capital, with around a dozen other venture funds also participating, ClayStack announced Tuesday. Most notably, Coinbase Ventures, Solana Foundation, Hashed and Spartan Group were among the investors. On an individual level, some of the seed investors who participated in the round include Meltem Demirores of CoinShares, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, Solana co-founder Raj Gokal and Sandeep Naiwal, the co-founder of Polygon. …

After a dramatic 12 months, the state of the cryptocurrency sector now is vastly different to where it was a year ago. We’ve seen crypto exchanges list on stock markets, massive companies buy vast amounts of Bitcoin, and a number of banks start to handle cryptoassets. But challenges remain — including debates over regulation. Here, Bitget CEO Sandra Lou reveals how her exchange is spurring adoption of digital currencies — and explains why she believes regulation is inevitable and essential. 1. Hello Sandra! Tell us about yourself. Hi! I have been working in the traditional financial industry for nearly a …

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization and former foreign and finance minister of Nigeria, said blockchain technology could help empower unbanked and underbanked women around the world. Cointelegraph editor-in-chief Kristina Cornèr addressed the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response today, asking regulators and lawmakers how blockchain technology could help promote financial inclusion for women in the time of COVID-19 and beyond. Okonjo-Iweala, a co-chair on the panel, was the only one out of several members including representatives from the United States and Singapore to speak on women …

The world runs on consumer spending and consumer saving. It is everyday people who actually power the most important parts of the global economy and the global financial system. For consumers, this system runs through their retail bank. It is where most people save, spend and pay their taxes. This is the battleground for the coming fight: the battle for global consumer deposits. Make no mistake, this will be the fight of the century. It will change the shape of the world more fundamentally than the internet has already. The internet was about information. DeFi is about capital — and …

Investment management company XSpring Capital has secured a large funding round with partners in Thailand to accelerate the development of its financial marketplace that combines traditional and digital asset products. It also hopes to bring an expanded platform to the United States. According to an announcement, the $225 million has been raised through a partnership with Thai real estate firm Sansiri, local insurance company Viryah, and Thai private investor and multi-millionaire Mongkol Prakitchaiwattana. Formerly known as Seamico Securities, XSpring Capital (not to be confused with Ripple’s Xpring project incubator), has a wide variety of trading licenses enabling it to operate …

Traditional hedge funds are willing to increase their exposure in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency markets over the next five years, a new survey has found. Intertrust Global, an international trust and corporate management company, polled the chief financial officers of 100 hedge funds globally about their intention to purchase crypto assets. About 98% of them responded that they expect their hedge funds to have invested 7.2% of their assets in cryptocurrencies by 2026. The survey found that a 7.2% investment into the cryptocurrency sector would equal about $312 billion if replicated across the sector. Meanwhile, about 17% of the polled …

Pandora Finance, a decentralized platform for NFT-backed real-world assets, recently completed a multi-million dollar seed round backed by some of the biggest venture capital firms in the blockchain space. In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, CEO Pushkar Vohra outlined his company’s vision — namely, how Pandora Finance aims to create a bridge between the illiquid world of real-world assets and the blockchain. Vohra believes the gap between these two domains represents one of the biggest adoption challenges for decentralized technologies. “We are uniquely positioned to solve the biggest problem,” he said, adding: “There are around $300 trillion of real-world assets …

Support for the Algorand ecosystem appears to be growing, with digital asset manager Arrington Capital earmarking $100 million for projects building on the smart-contract platform. The massive Arrington Algorand Growth Fund, or AAGF, has been designed to accelerate additional development across all facets of the smart contract platform, the company announced Thursday. This includes applications spanning the DeFi, traditional finance, public sector and NFT marketplaces. AAGF will invest in an array of Algorand-focused projects, including native cryptocurrencies that drive new financial applications on the network. Arrington Capital was founded by TechCrunch and Crunchbase founder Michael Arrington. The company oversees more …

Is tokenization of securities the way of the future? In an interview with Raiffeisen Bank International, the bankers leading its blockchain research hub stated that indeed, by 2030, most securities will have been tokenized. To gain a deeper understanding of how blockchain technology can transform traditional stock exchanges, Cointelegraph Research compiled a dataset of all security token offerings and found that almost $5 billion was raised in 2020. Cointelegraph’s first report on security tokens explains how bond and stock tokenization works, how many assets have already been tokenized, what returns they have provided, and how they are regulated in different …

Bitcoin may not mean an end to traditional currency and banking, according to research director of Coin Center Peter Van Valkenburgh “I think there are folks in the Bitcoin community who probably make too many noises about how Bitcoin is going to dominate all economic systems and nobody will be using dollars anymore, and nobody will be using banks anymore, and I think that’s actually a little foolhardy,” Van Valkenburgh said in a Friday interview with the Washington Journal on C-Span. “The fact of the matter is that there’s going to be times when a Bitcoin transaction is what you …

Nonfungible tokens could become a bridge to connect the legacy financial system to the emerging fintech world in the near future. During a recent interview, Adrian Lai, CEO of Liquefy — an investment firm and an incubator for decentralized finance platforms — told Cointelegraph China that synthetic assets, NFTs and digital securities are redefining the way capital markets operate. Lai especially believes that the value of synthetic assets could give each individual in decentralized finance access to essentially any asset, as long as there is a reliable data feed. This emerging trend between traditional finance and DeFi is inevitable. Lai …

For decades, a lack of innovation has stifled the banking sector. We still live in a world where cross-border payments can take several days, and inefficient algorithms deny loans to consumers who can afford to pay them back — all because they don’t fit inelastic requirements that aren't reflective of the 21st century. It’s been interesting to see how new concepts and key milestones in digitization have been pioneered by so-called “challenger banks.” These institutions, often fronted by fresh-faced financiers who previously worked at old-fashioned institutions, have seen how customers end up drowning in fees. As you will have seen …