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Welcome to a fresh week folks 👋
Last week, Uniswap dominated headlines with the release of its UNI governance token. The Uniswap team showed just how to move from a centrally controlled product to one that is owned and governed by its community, along with team members, investors, and advisors. Keep your eye out for other teams to follow a similar path if they have the community to back it up.
Now, let’s catch up on what happened last week in crypto💨
7 New Funding Rounds
5 Tokens to Watch
3 pieces of Macro News
New Funding Rounds 🍨
Seed Rounds
Gelato Network raised $1.2MM led by IOSG Ventures and Galaxy Digital. The protocol “can be used by developers to automate the execution of their users’ transactions, without having to run any of the underlying server infrastructure themselves.”
Paraswap, a ‘DEX Aggregator,’ raised $2.7MM. Read their Medium post to learn more.
Token Sales
PowerTrade raised $4.7MM led by Pantera Capital. PowerTrade is a mobile app for Bitcoin options trading.
SKALE, ‘a blockchain network that gives developers the ability to provision configurable fully decentralized chains that are compatible with Ethereum,’ raised over $5M via a public sale of 167MM+ SKL tokens.
Exits
Blockdata was acquired by CB Insights for an unknown sum. That’s it.
Grants
Marqet Exchange received a grant for an unspecified dollar amount from Fair Launch Capital. Marqet provides trustless margin trading of any synthetic asset.
COVER (formerly SAFE) received a “grant of $25,000 (and 5 ETH)” from yearn.finance creator Andre Cronje and what sounds like an additional grant of an unspecific amount from BlueKirby.eth. Why this grant was needed is an interesting story worth digging into.
Tokens to Watch 🦄
UNI: This was big, big, big, big, big, big, BIG news from one of the most used and adored crypto products. In some ways, UNI’s release is yet another demonstration of one of crypto’s great promises. It showed one way to meaningfully reward early community members for their role in making the product a success through their use and evangelism. You will be sure to hear more about UNI in the future with Uniswap v3 in the works.
YFI: The governance token of yearn.finance was listed on Coinbase Pro 9/14 and Coinbase 9/17. This headline-grabbing news got lost in the mix with Uniswap stealing the headlines. As of Sunday PM, YFI was trading at ~$27,000 per token 😯
PICKLE: The Pickle protocol is an experiment to keep stablecoins close to $1. Read the Pickle team’s announcement and one bull/bear opinion.
DPI: The DeFiPulse Index is a basket of 10 DeFi tokens consolidated under one token, making it easier to gain exposure to a curated set of DeFi tokens in one swoop.
YAMv2: The “fully functional and audited” Yam protocol launched last Friday. Yam Finance outlined their new plans in this Medium piece.
Macro News 🦑
Kraken Financial is first crypto bank in the United Statues: “Kraken Financial is the first digital asset company in U.S. history to receive a bank charter recognized under federal and state law, and will be the first regulated, U.S. bank to provide comprehensive deposit-taking, custody and fiduciary services for digital assets” (Kraken) This is expected to enable Kraken to dramatically expand the range of products and services it can offer.
Go deeper → Decrypt, CastleIsland pod, Coindesk, The Block
U.S. crypto regulation may get simplified: The Conference of State Bank Supervisors announced a plan to create a unified regulatory regime that would govern payment firms, including crypto exchanges. It appears that this would only affect the largest companies, such as Coinbase, Circle Internet Financial and Square. Stay tuned for more clarity on the framework itself and the full implications.
Go deeper → CSBS, Coindesk, Coingeek, Decrypt
MicroStrategy buys more Bitcoin: MicroStrategy (MSTR), a business analytics company, purchased $183,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. This is their second major Bitcoin purchase of the year. When will we see another publicly-traded company following suit??
Go deeper → Decrypt, Coindesk, Bankless @ ~1:07:00
