Paxos, a major cryptocurrency company and PayPal’s crypto collaborator, has completed a massive fundraising round shortly after receiving preliminary approval to form a national trust bank. On Thursday, the firm announced a new $300-million Series D funding round bringing Paxos’ valuation to $2.4 billion. The new funding round included previous Paxos investors — PayPal Ventures, Declaration Partners, Mithril Capital, Senator Investment Group, Liberty City Ventures, WestCap and others. The newly raised funds will help Paxos continue investing in the development of enterprise-grade infrastructure and further grow its commitment to regulation, security and compliance, as well as expand operations, the firm …

A new global cryptocurrency derivatives exchange, Globe Derivative Exchange — or GlobeDX — continued its preparation for the platform's launch by securing another major raise. GlobeDX announced Wednesday that the firm successfully raised $18 million through a new funding round featuring investors like seed money startup accelerator Y Combinator and Tim Draper’s Draper Dragon fund. Other investors included crypto exchange OKEx, Pantera Capital, Republic Crypto, CMT Digital and Wave Financial. Scheduled for launch in early May, GlobeDX will allow users to trade major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), as well as decentralized finance tokens with up to 100x …

Venture capital funding for crypto and blockchain startups looks set to break records in 2021. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, crypto firms received more funding in the first quarter of 2021 than the whole of 2020. Indeed, three companies in the market attracted $1.1 billion from backers in Q1 202 — a third of the total funding for crypto and blockchain firms reported in 2018. With the current bullish enthusiasm in the crypto space, VC funding appetite for blockchain startups might continue throughout the year. This early-stage funding frenzy also appears to be spreading to the retail side with initial …

Amid a bull market for decentralized finance that has teams developing new products at a breakneck pace, the demand for smart contract developers couldn’t be higher — but unfortunately, the amount of available talent couldn’t be lower. Team members from multiple projects have taken to Twitter in recent weeks to gripe about the shallow hiring pool, including representatives from high-profile mainstays like Yearn.finance and SushiSwap. The complaints come despite hefty incentive packages that include token allocations and generous salaries. But regardless of the carrots projects offer, there simply aren't enough developers to go around. Fuck, we've hit the "developer crunch" …

In a blog post today, decentralized finance protocol Badger DAO announced a forthcoming integration with Fireblocks, a digital asset storage, management and DeFi on-ramp for institutional investors. “We’re excited to announce a strategic partnership between Fireblocks and BadgerDAO to enable their 200+ institutional clients to securely hold Badger assets on their platform and put their Bitcoin to work through the Badger protocol,” reads the post. BadgerDAO founder Chris Spadafora said that the integration will help make Badger’s vaults and products more accessible to institutional investors, and not just the retail DeFi crowd: “Our intention is to further help onboard institutional …

TON Labs, the development arm behind the Free TON blockchain, raised $6 million through an investment round led by venture capital firm Runa Capital. The funding will go toward building out a new product environment for the Free TON blockchain, which the company describes as the fastest decentralized protocol due to its unique dynamic sharding mechanisms. Dmitry Chikhachev, a general partner at Runa Capital, said TON Labs is the only blockchain company to receive direct funding from his firm. “As a deep tech and software investor, we appreciate the technical challenges solved by the company and see a strong potential …

Cryptocurrency and blockchain-related companies have already received more funding this year than in all of 2020, according to a new report. In the first quarter of 2021, 129 startups focusing on crypto and blockchain technology have received a total of $2.6 billion in funding, Bloomberg reports, citing data from business analytics firm CB Insights. Over the course of 2020, crypto and blockchain firms attracted a total of $2.3 billion in 341 deals. According to the data, 2018 is the record year in terms of funding secured in the crypto industry, with total funding amounting to $3.3 billion. According to CB …

Coinbase Ventures, the investment arm of the San Francisco-based digital currency exchange, has thrown its weight behind a layer-one blockchain designed to bring full-service DeFi to the Polkadot ecosystem. The investments are focused on Acala, the Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchain that is building a host of DeFi capabilities on Polkadot, as well as Karura, which is building a DeFi ecosystem on Kusama. Acala has already built four core products for the Polkadot ecosystem: Liquid DOT staking, a stablecoin, an automated market maker decentralized exchange and a sovereign wealth fund. The amounts allocated to Acala and Karura were not disclosed. According …

Blockchain venture studio Draper Gorem Holm has announced plans to incubate Tezos-based startups as part of its $25 million venture fund, highlighting its conviction in the smart contract platform. The venture fund, called Fund 1, was launched in October 2020 as a way to incubate emerging blockchain companies. Fund 1 is set up as a traditional venture capital fund focusing on emerging fintech and blockchain startups. The inclusion of Tezos-based projects into the fund is hardly surprising given the company’s growing support for the smart contract platform. Draper Goren Holm already backs Tezos Stable Technologies, the team behind the USDtez …

One of the toughest puzzles in crypto is figuring out what to take seriously. On Friday, the DeFi Alliance — a decentralized finance startup incubator and accelerator — announced a list of 11 new members. Some were predictable, such as oracle provider Chainlink and venture capital stalwart Blockchain Capital, but one name stood out in particular: eGirl Capital, the social media menace and upstart VC outfit inspired by a horned-up internet subculture. The announcement prompted an industry-wide heavy sigh and rubbing of the eyes: So @egirl_capital has joined the @defialliance what timeline is this lol. https://t.co/UWbsemV94t — Qiao Wang (@QwQiao) …

Can a new non-fungible token (NFT) platform finally solve the problem of ecosystem-wide royalties? NFT platform Recur announced on Thursday a $5 million seed round led by the DeFi Alliance, Delphi Digital, Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, and Gemini, among others. The raise claims a number of notable superlatives, including the first seed investment in the NFT ecosystem from industry veteran Gary Vaynerch, as well as the largest seed round ever for a NFT project (Dapper Labs has raised many multiples more money over its three year fundraising history, but largely in Series A rounds). Currently there are a number of …

As Ethereum gas fees soar and the demand for scalability reaches fever pitch, layer-two scaling solution StarkWare has announced on Wednesday a $75 million Series B funding round led by Paradigm, Three Arrows, Alameda Research, Pantera Capital and Sequoia, among others. The team announced the raise in a tweet: Announcing our $75M Series B, led by @paradigm, with new investors (Three Arrows & @AlamedaResearch), and old ones too (@PanteraCapital, @sequoia, @foundersfund, @DCVC, @Wing_VC). — StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd) March 24, 2021 StarkWare, which previously raised $30 million in 2018, offers zero-knowledge rollup technology allowing for off-chain computation and beefed up transactional throughput, …