CoinDesk Crypto

If there's one asset class captivating investors these days, it's cryptocurrency. Led by Bitcoin, digital currencies – the credible ones at least – are taking the financial world by storm.

The 2021 Bitcoin bull run shows no signs of slowing down. Furthermore, the most recent all-time high of nearly $65,000 could just be the first of many to come during this cycle

Institutional participation in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has dramatically scaled up over the past few months.

Reflecting the high energy everywhere in the world of bitcoin (BTC), major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN) saw its valuation reach over $80 billion after its first day of public trading.

For investors who are bullish on crypto but wary of holding the actual virtual currencies, Coinbase is a solid bellwether for the broader crypto economy.

When non-fungible tokens first gained initial prominence within the cryptocurrency community in 2017, they were the subject of much excitement among those advocating for blockchain adoption.

It is common knowledge that the advent of blockchain technology disrupted traditional governance structures and democratized access to finance.

The Stacks Foundation is shepherding a $4 million accelerator program to invest in early stage teams building on the network formerly known as Blockstack.

The three-month program will invest up to $50,000 in anywhere from 10 to 20 startups per class, Stacks Accelerator Managing Partner Trevor Owens said in an interview. The accelerator takes a small equity cut in each team with 80% of any profits going back into the accelerator to fund future cohorts, Owens said.

Stacks is looking to position itself as the home for smart contracts and decentralized apps secured by the Bitcoin blockchain. The still-nascent developer scene on Stacks is far smaller than that on smart-contract heavyweight Ethereum and even nimble upstarts such as Binance Smart Chain, according to public data.

Related: Asset Managers, Owning Bitcoin Is Now Your Fiduciary Duty

The accelerator and other efforts within the Stacks ecosystem aim to change that, but with a particular focus.

“This focus on innovating and scaling and extending the functionality of Bitcoin. That’s one definite distinguishing factor,” Jenny Mith, who runs the grant program at the Stacks Foundation, said in an interview. “I think the other thing is just the focus on building user-owned businesses.”

On the accelerator side, Stacks has tapped a number of prominent advisers for cohort startups to consult with. At launch, CoinShares CSO Meltem Demirors and “The Lean Startup” author Eric Ries are listed as mentors; investor Anthony Pompliano, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov and others are involved in a more limited capacity.

“Our goal is to create a community around the creation of successful companies built on the Stacks blockchain,” said Owens.

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• Bitcoin Traders Seek Further Upside Exposure, Pushing Futures Premiums Higher
• NFT Investments Raises $48M via London Stock Exchange Growth Market Listing

Bullish bitcoin (BTC) sentiment is growing as the cryptocurrency advanced to a fresh all-time high above $63,000 on Tuesday. The annualized premium between the BTC futures price and spot price is now approaching 50% on 3-month contracts. This indicates extreme willingness of traders to obtain upside exposure in BTC futures, according to a new report by Arcane Research, a cryptocurrency research firm.

• “The current premiums on the retail-focused exchanges are the highest we have registered,” according to Arcane.
• The premium on the institutional-focused Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) is just above 10% annualized versus 50% for retail-focused exchanges such as FTX, BitMex and Deribit.
• Arcane also noted the lack of liquidity on retail exchanges coupled with the demand for upside exposure as the main reason for the uptrend in futures premiums. The rise in premiums have accelerated since the March 25 price low in BTC around $50,000, which followed a near 19% selloff.
• It is possible that sellers have capitulated around that level, which encouraged extreme bullish positioning in the futures market ahead of the recent breakout to a new all-time high.

Funding rates have also skyrocketed in the perpetual swaps market for bitcoin, which indicates extreme upside leverage.

“Most perpetuals are currently trading at a significant premium to spot,” wrote Arcane. “Leverage is an essential ingredient in the recipe for liquidations, and we would not be surprised to see an influx in long liquidations soon.”

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• Coinbase ‘IPO’ Isn’t an IPO. Here’s Why That’s Important
• Stacks Launches $4M Accelerator to Fund Tech Teams Building Apps on Bitcoin
• NFT Investments Raises $48M via London Stock Exchange Growth Market Listing

NFT Investments, an investment company focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has raised £35 million ($48 million), three times more than planned, through a listing on the Aquis Stock Exchange Growth Market (AQSE) in London.

• According to the announcement Tuesday, the raise values NFT Investments at £50 million ($68 million).
• NFT Investments has now completed the placing of 700 million new ordinary shares at £0.05 each and will begin trading on the AQSE on April 16.
• The firm had originally expected its market capitalization to be around £25 million ($34 million) and claims to be the first investment company focused solely on the NFT market to launch on a stock market in a major jurisdiction.
• NFT Investments has been launched by the co-founders of Argo Blockchain, a leading crypto miner valued at more than $1 billion.

Read more: Coinbase Is Going Public: Everything You Need to Know

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• Coinbase ‘IPO’ Isn’t an IPO. Here’s Why That’s Important
• Stacks Launches $4M Accelerator to Fund Tech Teams Building Apps on Bitcoin
• Bitcoin Traders Seek Further Upside Exposure, Pushing Futures Premiums Higher

NFT Investments, an investment company focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has raised £35 million ($48 million), three times more than planned, through a listing on the Aquis Stock Exchange Growth Market (AQSE) in London.

• According to the announcement Tuesday, the raise values NFT Investments at £50 million ($68 million).
• NFT Investments has now completed the placing of 700 million new ordinary shares at £0.05 each and will begin trading on the AQSE on April 16.
• The firm had originally expected its market capitalization to be around £25 million ($34 million) and claims to be the first investment company focused solely on the NFT market to launch on a stock market in a major jurisdiction.
• NFT Investments has been launched by the co-founders of Argo Blockchain, a leading crypto miner valued at more than $1 billion

Read more: Coinbase Is Going Public: Everything You Need to Know

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• Bitcoin Traders Seek Further Upside Exposure, Pushing Futures Premiums Higher
• Integrated Ventures Set to Buy $35M Worth of Bitcoin Mining Equipment
• DeFi Is Transparent, Unless You Look Closely
• The NFT Craze Is Helping Nigerian Artists Go Global

Pennsylvania tech company Integrated Ventures has entered a purchasing agreement to buy $35 million worth of bitcoin mining equipment.

In a partnership with Wattum Management, a New York mining management firm, Integrated Ventures has purchased 4,800 Antminer model S19Js for $34 million from ASIC manufacturer Bitmain. Additionally, the company also purchased 150 WhatMiner PO-2s for $1 million dollars.

The firm’s shares are up 22% at the time of publication.

Related: Bitcoin Traders Seek Further Upside Exposure, Pushing Futures Premiums Higher

The deal includes “downside protection and the right to replace the [Bitmain] miners with new models, scheduled to be released in early 2022,” a release reads.

Integrated Ventures anticipates that, “at minimum,” 2,000 of these bitcoin miners will be operational by December 2021.

“The Company is very pleased to secure this large scale purchase agreement, especially during a period of scarce supply of mining hardware. Going forward, INTV is committed to deploy any raised capital for purchases of the mining equipment. This purchase effectively doubles INTV’s hash rate and represents a major step in INTV’s strategic growth plan, resulting in significant increase of the Company’s projected revenue growth rate,” CEO Steve Rubakh said in the release.

Integrated Ventures broke into the crypto mining industry in 2018, and per releases on its website, it has been buying up ASICs this year from any and all manufacturers in a frenzy that matches the investment appetite we’ve seen from other bitcoin mining ventures. The venture operates its machines, in part, in mining colocation data centers operated by Compute North.

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• The NFT Craze Is Helping Nigerian Artists Go Global

In March, Oyindamola Oyekemi Oyewumi, a 24-year-old Nigerian artist who creates portraits using ballpoint pens, tweeted her drawing of Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson.

Hoskinson noticed the tweet and put it up for sale as a non-fungible token (NFT), or one-of-a-kind digital item with its own digital signature. By the end of the month, the tweet sold for $6,300 and now it’s Hoskinson’s Twitter profile picture. 

“Luckily for me, Hoskinson himself told me about NFTs. He gave me a link to read about NFTs and, after reading about it, I decided I want to try it out,” Oyewumi told CoinDesk. Last week Oyewumi sold the first NFT she minted by herself on Mintable, and a friend helped her convert her crypto earnings to the local naira currency.  

Related: Bitcoin Traders Seek Further Upside Exposure, Pushing Futures Premiums Higher

NFTs are all the rage this year, especially after the artist Beeple sold a digital art collage for $69.3 million through the British auction house Christie’s in March. Christie’s also announced Thursday it will be selling nine NFT collectibles known as CryptoPunks. This month, American-Senegalese R&B singer Akon launched AkoinNFT, an NFT platform to “supercharge and empower” artists and brands.  

Now the trend has spread to Nigeria, where local financial institutions are banned from servicing crypto firms. This means Nigerians cannot convert digital assets to naira through traditional crypto exchanges. But that hasn’t wiped out crypto in Africa’s largest economy, thanks in part to its young and tech-savvy population. Users began switching to peer-to-peer platforms to avoid using banks and the use of crypto continues, as evidenced by how local artists like Oyewumi are embracing NFTs. 

Although more Nigerian artists are entering the NFT space, they do so wary of the hype. Some Nigerian artists told CoinDesk that although minting their artwork comes with a number of advantages, they have concerns about the impact of NFTs on the art world in general. 

Only good for already-established artists

Oyewumi feels the NFT culture is only beneficial to those artists who already have a large fanbase. 

Related: NFT Investments Raises $48M Via London Stock Exchange Growth Market Listing

“If I put my art up as NFTs, sure, lots of people will see it. But some people will still prefer to purchase work from artists they already know. People might end up just creating pieces and uploading but not be able to sell anything,” Oyewumi said. 

For instance, NFT art collector Michael Ugwu typically likes to check out an artist’s online presence and work before purchasing his or her art. A London-based music executive and entrepreneur of Nigerian descent, Ugwu owns around 40 NFT pieces by artists from around the world, including Nigeria. Ugwu told CoinDesk he only buys art he loves, but there is also a business perspective to consider. 

“I also want to know that there’s going to be a global marketplace for that piece, if I want to sell it on the secondary market. It’s much easier to sell a Fewocious, a Billelis or if you get lucky and get your hands on a Beeple. So based on those factors, from African artists I primarily acquire work that I feel has a global audience,” Ugwu said.

He added that for some African artists, minting their first pieces could be a challenge due to the Ethereum gas fees sometimes needed to sell an NFT. 

“It’s not cheap. A typical African artist may or may not have the $100 or $200 it’s going to cost them per piece. So that’s a small barrier,” Ugwu said, adding there are some platforms that waive or subsidize the minting fee.

Oyewumi feels new artists may also struggle with pricing their pieces and end up selling their art for less than what it’s worth. 

All about the money 

One NFT art piece in Ugwu’s collection is by the acclaimed Nigerian digital artist Osinachi. 

Osinachi, 29, has made a name for himself as a digital artist and produces most of his work using Microsoft Word. When he first started making art in the late 2000s, his primary goal was to see his work displayed in a traditional art gallery. Over the years Osinachi reached out to numerous galleries but received no response.

Then he discovered crypto art. 

In 2017, Osinachi learned people were posting artwork as NFT collectibles. With some help from the community, Osinachi minted a few of his works. In 2018, his art was featured in the Ethereal blockchain summit in New York. 

The following year Osinachi’s dream came true when he was invited to show his work at a contemporary art gallery in Switzerland. In 2020, his art was featured in CoinDesk’s “The Most Influential People in Crypto” list. The same year, he quit his job as an academic librarian at the University of Nigeria Nsukka to focus on his art full time. A month ago he sold one of his digital paintings, “Am I pretty?,” for 13.2 ETH (around $27,600 as of Friday). 

“A single NFT sale can translate to my one-year salary when I was working at the University of Nigeria,” Osinachi said. 

Now, he is helping other Nigerian digital artists mint their work. Osinachi told CoinDesk that thanks to the NFT gold rush, digital artists like him are getting the attention they deserve and (thanks in part to the Beeple sale) learning that digital art can be priced as high as or higher than traditional art. 

But he is also concerned about aspects of the traditional art world flooding the NFT space.

“Now, you also see marketplaces paying attention to certain big names. They care about the big artists that would make huge sales, and not necessarily about the art that is being made,” Osinachi said. 

Tricky

Oyewumi, who set up her NFTs by herself, found the process to be complicated and experienced a number of unfamiliar technical issues. 

She also saw a colleague’s art minted without the artist’s knowledge or permission. As NFTs went viral, scammers took to minting other artists’ work. In early March, illustrator Derek Laufman lashed out at NFT platform Rarible when a Twitter user notified him his art was listed on the website for sale without his knowledge. 

Anthony Azekwoh, a 21-year-old chemical engineering student and digital artist, minted his first NFTs last month but finds the NFT space quite “tricky.” 

“It’s been very complicated for me as a Nigerian. I come from a place where you make money through years of hard work, but with the NFT space it’s a situation where in a single minute you’re making millions of naira. I feel like the relationship most Nigerians or most people from places like Nigeria would have with the NFT space is, ‘Wow, how does any of this work? How is it possible?’” Azekwoh told CoinDesk. 

But it’s not all bad. 

Like Osinachi, Azekwoh is wary of the focus on monetization in the NFT world and determined to help other Nigerian artists. With his NFT earnings, he has set up a fund that pledges 200,000 naira to young local artists between the ages of 15 and 25.

Ugwu believes that although the NFT space in Nigeria is still small, it has the potential to propel Nigerianartists to the global stage if local digital art curators emerge in the coming years. 

There are “a lot of great artists out of Africa, and Nigeria, who are focused on physical work, and I’m all for them getting a better understanding of the opportunities of NFTs,” Ugwu said. 

Despite the many complexities, younger artists like Oyewumi and Azekwoh, inspired by veterans like Osinachi, are slowly working out the kinks and establishing themselves as global artists of the digital era. 

NFT newcomer Oshomah sold his first multimedia artwork two weeks ago and has minted his second. Oshomah said that at the moment he could probably only name 10 Nigerian NFT artists, but there are hundreds of talented artists who, with some help, can enter the space in the months and years to come. 

“You will see a lot of artists come out of Africa [who] will give Beeple a run for his money,” Oshomah said. 

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Gryphon Digital Mining has raised $14 million to establish renewable energy-driven bitcoin mining operations in the United States.

Established in late summer of last year, Gryphon raised the undisclosed round to fund a 100% renewables mining venture. The company is coming out of stealth at a time when public scrutiny of bitcoin mining and its perceived rampant energy appetite is burning hotter than ever.

“Some other companies in the industry right now use renewables, but no other company is committed to 100% renewable energy. We’re excited about that, especially considering the backlash the industry has received lately,” Gryphon Chair Brittany Kaiser said to CoinDesk.

Related: Bitcoin Traders Seek Further Upside Exposure, Pushing Futures Premiums Higher

“We have committed to not using [fossil fuels] going forward, so anything we use will be either hydro, nuclear, solar or wind. I believe we’re the first bitcoin mining company [to do so],” echoed CEO and co-founder Rob Chang.

The team would not reveal where they will host its machines, though a press release says they can “access electricity costs as low as $0.013/kWh.”

Gryphon’s first fleet of miners, roughly 730 petahashes worth, is already set up and will launch in the coming months. The team hopes to scale this to at least two or as many as five exahashes by 2022 as they import new ASIC shipments, the team told CoinDesk.

The venture has plans to go public, but at an unspecified date, the team told CoinDesk.

The US bitcoin mining gold rush

Related: NFT Investments Raises $48M Via London Stock Exchange Growth Market Listing

Bitcoin’s price is up in light of Coinbase’s public listing tomorrow, an event that, perhaps better than any, edifies bitcoin’s increasingly accepted status in mainstream investor circles.

The same institutional attention has focused on bitcoin mining, as both old and new ventures in the United States ramp up operations to cash in on bitcoin’s bull run. Many continue to raise money to finance bulk purchases of ASICs or expand to new data centers.

Chang said that Gryphon’s renewables-only model “was a good selling point,” adding that the energy question is an “item that is increasingly more important in the minds of investors.” Indeed, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary has swung his investor’s ax in bitcoin mining and told CoinDesk recently that this topic was a concern to him and others in his circles.

“For some it was a nice onus, and for others it was the entire reason they wanted to invest in miners. It was a good mix,” Chang told CoinDesk.

Whether they are investing in renewables mining of flared/vented gas mining, U.S. investors are rushing for their stake in 2021’s digital gold rush. Kaiser doesn’t anticipate the trend will slow any time soon, as pressure from the Chinese government’s new digital currency and U.S. interest in the sector continue to drive hashrate to America.

“I think we have seen a perfect storm in the market. We have strong interest from institutional investors from N.A. But China is releasing the digital yuan, and you can see pressure on miners to not create competitive coins. There is a huge opportunity, especially before the U.S. dollar is released, for Bitcoin and other networks to gain traction and have exponential mining growth in the U.S.”

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Step Finance, a trading dashboard born out of the Solana hackathon, announced Tuesday a $2 million funding round from Alameda Research, 3 Commas Capital and more.

Its investors are betting on Step Finance emerging as the “front page” of the high-throughput Solana blockchain. The Solana ecosystem is backed heavily by Sam Bankman-Fried, Alameda’s CEO.

Other participating investors included Raydium, One Block, Solidity Ventures and a number of private individuals connected to the Solana ecosystem, according to a press release.

Related: Bitcoin Traders Seek Further Upside Exposure, Pushing Futures Premiums Higher

The firm said the funding will be used to build the Step Platform, which will allow users to visualize, analyze, execute and aggregate transactions across all Solana contracts. It’s a tool similar to Zapper and other products in the Ethereum ecosystem that make it easy to understand your investments.

Read more: OKEx and MXC to Invest $40M in Solana-Based Projects in DeFi Arms Race

The Solana Foundation raised $40 million from a pair of crypto exchanges last month in a bid to fund more software development on the network. While Ethereum users have suffered from high fees caused by blockchain congestion, Solana is said to have transaction speeds that rival traditional financial networks. Boosters of Solana and other base layers see now as the time to attract new users.

“The biggest problem in the Solana ecosystem is how most projects are siloed from one another,” said George Harrap, the Step Finance co-founder who formerly helmed remittance startup Bitspark.

Related: NFT Investments Raises $48M Via London Stock Exchange Growth Market Listing

“There is no way to know your token and LP balances, current position sizes, etc., without actually visiting each website individually and logging in to understand your portfolio,” he said. “Step was born out of this necessity and is here to solve that.”

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Decentralized finance (DeFi) trading platform Enso Finance, announced Tuesday it has closed a $5 million private funding round co-led by Polychain Capital and Dfinity Beacon Fund.

• Other participating investors included cryptocurrency investment firm Multicoin Capital, P2P Capital, Singapore’s Spartan Group, Zola Global, and The LAO and angel investors from AngelList, Dfinity, Synthetix, Status, Fantom, Nexus Mutual, Aave and Messari, according to Enso Finance.
• The funding will be used to develop Enso’s platform, expand its community, and go toward its mainnet launch scheduled for the second quarter of this year.
• Enso highlights the trading landscape has become “highly fragmented” which makes it complicated for traders to hedge or generate yield.
• The firm claims to solve this issue by allowing traders to create “metastrategies” by subscribing to or following other traders and combining strategies together.
• “Traders using Enso can batch purchase assets on AMMs [automated market makers], yield farm, liquidity mine, rebalance based on tolerance bands, restructure debt, execute flash swaps, or run arbitrage trades,” said the firm.
• “While other platforms focus on either active or curated passive strategies, Enso is fully customizable and enables anyone to become a fund manager with the click of a button,” said Spencer Applebaum, an associate at Multicoin Capital.

Read more: NYDIG Raises $100M From Insurance Giants in Latest Round

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A Switzerland-based cryptocurrency custody company is expanding its offering so that clients can get exposure to more esoteric areas of public blockchain such as decentralized finance (DeFi) and proof-of-stake (PoS) mining.

Announced Tuesday, METACO Harmonize brings together the company’s institution-grade vault solution with trading, asset flow and tokenization tech, allowing for peer-to-peer trading and access to the DeFi industry – a set of smart contracts providing bank-like services on the internet.

METACO is located in the middle of Switzerland’s burgeoning digital asset movement. Its clients include several large banks such as Standard Chartered Bank, BBVA and Gazprom Bank’s Swiss division. 

Related: Enso Finance Completes $5M Funding Round Led by Polychain, Dfinity

Adrien Treccani, CEO and Founder of METACO said the first wave of demand for exposure to DeFi, staking and the like is coming from Swiss private banks that serve high-net-worth consumers, as opposed to large banks serving institutional clients.

“DeFi is not about technical capability, but about user experience,” said Treccani in an interview, adding:

“It’s about simplifying these complex smart-contract interactions into something a bank (and ultimately the end-client of the bank) is able to use on a daily basis – generate yields, or lend or borrow – but without having to understand the inner details of the multiple smart-contract method calls that are involved.”

METACO hiring push

In addition to its product launch, METACO has also announced the appointment of two senior hires: Andre Israel, formerly a banking expert at Accenture, joins as chief operating officer; former Standard Chartered Bank exec Craig Perrin is now vice president of sales.

Related: IMF Wants More Crypto Supervision in the Philippines

Recently, METACO made a joint announcement with IBM, foretelling the U.S. software giant’s ambitions beyond enterprise blockchain, looking at cryptocurrency through the lens of custody infrastructure. Treccani made clear that IBM’s ambitions include the full gamut of public decentralized protocols going forward. 

“IBM has great ambitions with public ledgers and not just permissioned ledgers, as an infrastructure provider,” Treccani said. “In broad sense, custody, staking, DeFi are all of direct interest to IBM. Even though we presented these joint announcements as a way to promote their fantastic hardware in the context of digital asset management, we have joint ambitions which go beyond hardware.”

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U.S. headline inflation rose to a 12-month pace of 2.6% in March, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in its latest CPI report, accelerating from the 1.7% increase reported last month.

The pace exceeded economists’ average estimate for a 2.5% increase.

The gauge of consumer prices is now rising at its fastest since August 2018, largely due to base effects from the pandemic-induced recession that rattled the economy a year ago, when the lockdown-induced drop in demand sent costs tumbling for many goods and services.

Related: Enso Finance Completes $5M Funding Round Led by Polychain, Dfinity

The CPI report is particularly important for some cryptocurrency investors who view bitcoin (BTC) as a hedge against inflation and ongoing currency debasement. However, concerns about higher inflation beyond the 2% threshold could cause the Federal Reserve to consider tightening monetary policy, which could weigh on risk assets.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has said he views higher inflation as temporary and not enough for the U.S. central bank to alter its record-low interest rate policies.

• On a month-to-month basis, headline March CPI increased 0.6%, beating expectations for a 0.5% rise after rising 0.4% in February.
•  The March 1-month increase was the largest rise since a 0.6% increase in August 2012, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• The gasoline index continued to increase, rising 9.1% in March, and accounted for nearly half of the seasonally adjusted increase in CPI.

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Ethereum’s biggest supporter is back on track with the close of a carefully constructed funding round. 

ConsenSys, an Ethereum development operation headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y., has raised $65 million from financial institutions JPMorgan, Mastercard and UBS, as well as leading firms in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. 

Having toughed it out through the crypto winter of 2018-19, Tuesday’s bullish fundraising announcement is further evidence ConsenSys has found its footing. The firm has now been successfully restructured into two parts: a core software business (CSI) and an investment and incubation arm known as ConsenSys Mesh.

Related: Enso Finance Completes $5M Funding Round Led by Polychain, Dfinity

In addition to the big banks, the $65 million round included Filecoin’s Protocol Labs, DeFi’s Maker Foundation, Fenbushi, The LAO, Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research, CMT Digital, China’s Greater Bay Area Homeland Development Fund, Quotidian Ventures and Liberty City Ventures. 

Several firms invested with Ethereum-based stablecoins, DAI and USDC, ConsenSys said in a statement.

Read more: ConsenSys Confidential: Ethereum Builder Is Back in Growth Mode, Document Reveals

Last year, ConsenSys brokered a deal with JPMorgan to acquire Quorum, the enterprise-focused Ethereum client that now forms an in-house software stack of Codefi, Diligence, Infura, MetaMask and Truffle. 

Related: IMF Wants More Crypto Supervision in the Philippines

The general tightening of the ship has seen ConsenSys appear to chart a course away from consulting and services, towards being more product- and revenue-focused. MetaMask – a key gateway to the world of DeFi – counts over 3 million monthly active users and ConsenSys earns a sliver of fees on the wallet’s $1.95 billion token swap feature.

Founder and CEO Joe Lubin said ConsenSys was always a product company – only it was embedded in an ecosystem, and dependent on a technology that was extremely immature.

Today things have moved on some. For example, with Mastercard as an investor, ConsenSys engineers are using the Quorum blockchain to build a permissioned network for commerce and finance.

“The round was pretty carefully constructed,” Lubin said in an interview. “It’s almost all strategics, and we intended for them to be in different industries. Some in the traditional economy, some in the decentralized economy, and we also intended for it to be regionally distributed.”

The ConsenSys chief could not go into detail at this time about what was being built with the large financial institutions that invested in the round, but said: 

“We have multi-year commercial arrangements with JPMorgan and Mastercard, and have commercial activity with UBS.”

ConsenSys roadmap

Looking ahead, Quorum’s enterprise-friendly connection to Ethereum mainnet will have managed services launched around it. Also driving the theme of convergence, MetaMask Institutional, which is in beta, will roll out soon. 

“MetaSwaps, launched first into the consumer platform, is providing swap trading capabilities for nearly the entire universe of active tokens,” said Lubin. “We can take that next, wrap it in APIs and make it available to developers in both Infura and in Truffle, so developers can build swapping directly into their software. You can also package it up into a module and enable trading on Quorum systems, say, on a cloud.”

As such, ConsenSys is positioned to build the infrastructure needed to make institutional DeFi a reality. 

Read more: Microsoft, EY and ConsenSys Tout New Way for Big Biz to Use Public Ethereum

With this in mind, Lubin pointed to the Baseline Protocol, a way of enabling organizations to link their systems of record to one another using a global frame of reference: the Ethereum mainnet.

“Tokenization is happening in the Baseline Protocol, so you can pay for inventory with tokens,” Lubin said. “Invoices on some projects right now are starting to get tokenized. So you can imagine factoring invoices and trading those and in markets. It’s happening relatively quickly.”

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Mobile bitcoin options trading platform PowerTrade announced Tuesday retail investors outside the U.S. will be able to download its new app on the Apple iOS store from April 15.

• In a press release, PowerTrade said most bitcoin options trading is still done at the institutional level. With the app, retail investors using the app will be able to buy call and put options on bitcoin in just three clicks. It will not be available within the U.S.
• A call option gives the holder the right but not the obligation to buy the underlying asset at a predetermined price on or before a particular date. A put option represents a right to sell.
• In September, PowerTrade raised $4.7 million via token sales in a round led by Pantera Capital and joined by Framework Ventures, CMS Holdings, and QCP Capital among others.
• “Easy to understand options are key to further retail adoption of crypto,” said Joey Krug, co-chief investment officer of Pantera Capital.
• The app “prioritizes user education through design and launches with fee-free trading for all early users,” PowerTrade said.

Read more: New Bitcoin Options App Raises $4.7M in Round Led by Pantera Capital

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