A Mission to Better Manage Emissions with Blockchain
Heard of carbon credits? They’re permits that help manage carbon emissions. Countries and businesses receive credits from a governing authority allowing them to produce a given amount of carbon emissions. If they produce less carbon than they’re allotted, they can sell the remaining credits. In theory, this promotes cleaner, greener business practices, but managing carbon credits is a complex process, as there’s no central exchange for trading them. IBM is tackling the problem head-on, working with Veridium, an eco-minded coalition of industry leaders, to manage carbon credits on Stellar, a public blockchain network. IBM is committed to environmental stewardship, and by helping carbon credits work harder on blockchain, IBM is working to better protect our environment and make the world a better place for everyone in it.
Amidst the stratospheric rise of defi and heightened demand for unique and innovative solutions, the global community of angel investors and VC firms is continuously engaging in private funding rounds and token sales. The resulting flood of capital demonstrates that entrepreneurs and startups play their part in developing a new generation of blockchain technology.
Balancer Labs Raises $24.25 Million to Accelerate Protocol Development
Balancer Labs, the company behind Balancer, an automated portfolio manager, liquidity provider, and price sensor, has raised $24.25 million from leading investors in its recent token sale, which will be utilized to accelerate the development of the Balancer protocol. The recent round witnessed an influx of new investors, including Alameda Capital, Pantera Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Blockchain Capital, Longhash Ventures, Fintech Collective, and Continue Capital.
One of the Balancer Protocol highlights is that it uses multidimensional values to build a mathematical and analytical framework, allowing varied portfolios to auto-adjust to market conditions. The second evolution of the Balancer protocol (Balancer V2) will restructure the current system architecture to improve transaction costs while easing developer integration and user experience.
World’s First FBA Network, Flare, Raises $11.3 Million
Flare, a new contract platform built on a modified version of Avalanche, is a distributed network with some unique properties. Not only can it be used to create two-way bridges between networks, such as Ethereum and the XRP Ledger, but it is also the world’s first Turing complete FBA network. Flare claims to be the only platform that applies Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus to smart contracts, making it secure and accessible to most blockchain development communities.
Led by Kenetic Capital, the platform has recently raised $11.3 million from some of the world’s leading venture capitalists, such as Digital Currency Group, Coinfund, LD Capital, cFund, Wave Financial, Borderless Capital, and Backend Capital, and angel investors including Vinny Lingham, Do Kwan, and Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, as well as Newform Capital, Genesis Capital, ZB Group, Ripple, and DeFi Capital.
Automata Network Backed With $2.4 Million to Build Privacy-Oriented Web 3.0
Automata Network, which purports to offer seamless privacy for dApps, has raised $2.4 million from prominent investors such as IOSG Ventures, KR1, and Jump Trading. The platform, officially launched on Binance Launchpool, aims to deploy a privacy-first and cross-chain compute protocol, offering developers the required infrastructure to leverage Web 3.0.
The protocol aims to empower Web 3.0 applications and businesses built on Polkadot and Ethereum with privacy-first, high assurance and friction-less transactions. In addition, Automata supports unified cross-chain connections for better operability, a collaborative reward mechanism, and a framework to make data privacy a built-in option across dApps, among several other unique features.
Defi Startup Cryption Network Collects $1.1 Million From Private Round
Switching between blockchains, navigating the complex interfaces, and issues related to scalability and fees are the biggest obstacles blocking the mass adoption of defi according to many. To address these concerns, retail defi startup Cryption Network, built on Polygon, offers a suite of user-friendly crypto products for the everyday retail investor who wants to invest in crypto but is intimidated by its complexity.
Cryption Network, with its wide range of products and services aimed to increase the adoption of cryptocurrencies, recently wrapped up a successful private funding round. The project attracted many acclaimed investors from the crypto universe, including VC firms like Genblock, Master Ventures, CMS Holdings, X21 Digital, Gravity X Capital, Water Drip, and AU21, leading to a capital influx of $1.1 million. In addition, angel investors like Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal and Fetch.ai’s Humayun Sheik, also funded the network.
Panther Protocol Raises Allotted $8 Million to Build a Defi Privacy Solution
In a world where digital assets are constantly under the spotlight of regulators, privacy seems to be the one thing that’s troubling many traders, retailers, and investors. Panther Protocol, an end-to-end privacy solution, provides defi users with interoperable, fully collateralized privacy-enhancing digital assets to address this problem. Panther Protocol provides users with customizable transaction-level privacy. Using zk SNARK technology, the protocol aims for a robust privacy mechanism, allowing users to mint zero-knowledge zAssets and leverage them across a range of defi applications.
The platform has completed its private funding round, raising more than $8 million from over 140 investors. VC firms and angel investors from across the globe participated in the private financing round. Some early contributors include Alphabit Fund, Deep Ventures, Ex Network, Market Across, Master Ventures, Moonwhale, Nextgen, Protocol Ventures, Rarestone Capital, Titans Ventures, and more.
Impossible Finance Receives $7 Million to Open Defi Incubator, Launchpad, and Swap Platform
Impossible Finance, a platform offering inclusive financial instruments via defi, has raised over $7 million from its recent funding round. The platform aims to make Defi easy by removing complicated interfaces, allowing users to quickly swap tokens, add liquidity, and stake their tokens for additional rewards. Impossible Finance, built by Defi pros from top fintech firms, aims to use the funds to accelerate work on its multifaceted platform that offers a Defi incubator, launchpad, and swap features.
The recent funding round featured participation from True Ventures, CMS Holdings, Hashed, Alameda Research, Genesis Block Ventures, Emniscap, Primitive, Incuba Alpha, BR Capital, Sino Global Capital, IOSG, Coin98, The LAO, Maple Leaf Capital, and others. Several prominent angel investors, including Sandeep Naiwal (Matic), Kain Warwick & Jordan Momtazi (Synthetix), Bette Chen & Ruitao Su (Acala), Bobby Ong & TM Lee (Coingecko), Larry Cermak (The Block), Calvin Liu (Compound), and others also invested in this novel concept.
Reef Finance Announces $20 Million Grant to Encourage App Development
To drive increased participation from developers willing to build applications on the Reef Chain, Reef Finance has announced a grant of $20 million spread across several categories, including defi lending protocols and bridges, runtime modules/chains, NFT development, decentralized exchanges (dex), wallets and interfaces, and development and deployment tools. In addition to being an EVM-compatible defi chain built on Polkadot substrate, Reef Chain is said to be fast, highly scalable, and boasts minimal transaction costs.
The latest announcement of allocating grants to developers aligns with the company’s vision of simplifying defi and making it accessible to everyone. Leading defi brands like Lendefi, Realm, and Kwikswap are some of the outstanding examples of the ecosystem’s unique capabilities. Alongside the launch of the grants program, Reef Finance will also continue enhancing the features and functionalities of Reef Chain in an attempt to drive mainstream adoption of its funding ecosystem.
ROK Capital and Solana Foundation Establish $20 Million Solana Eco Fund
To attract more developers to Solana infrastructure development projects and expand the blockchain’s reach in Korea, ROK Capital, a leading blockchain accelerator in the country, and the Solana Foundation have unveiled a $20 million fund to support teams and projects. The ecosystem fund endeavors to bootstrap companies adding value in multiple areas of the Solana blockchain by building the architecture to support activities in Web3.0, NFTs, and defi.
The fund is also joined by Factblock, a blockchain consulting organization, and community-based accelerator Despread, which will share their expertise with the initiative as partners. Already the fund has bootstrapped several organizations as part of its mandate, including Mercurial Finance, Parrot, Serum, Symmetry, and Synthetify.
What do you think is the most interesting project? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?
Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?
So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.
So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.
There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.
Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.
See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:
So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.
Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.
Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.
Graphics cards!
Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.
Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.
So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage.
OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.
Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.
But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.
Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.
Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.
What a waste.
was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem
Hypothetically what happens if an EMP goes off between those warehouses
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