Solana ecosystem project Orca has concluded an $18 million Series A investment round led by some of the biggest venture funds in crypto, offering further evidence that high-profile investors are keen to back SOL-based startups. Orca, which operates as a decentralized exchange, will use the funds to continue developing its automated market maker solutions for Solana, the company announced Wednesday. The raise comes less than eight months after the project was launched by a two-member team consisting of Yutaro Mori and Grace Kwan. In addition to Three Arrows Capital, Polychain, Placeholder and Coinbase Ventures, Series A participants included Jump Capital, …

Solana has attributed the 17-hour outage it suffered last week to a denial-of-service attack aimed at Grape Protocol’s Sept. 14 initial DEX offering (IDO). In a Tuesday blog post, the Solana Foundation stated that bots spammed the network as Grape launched its IDO on the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Raydium at 12:00 UTC last Tuesday. The botting activity overwhelmed the network with a transaction load of 400,000 per second, with Solana noting that “unbounded growth of the forwarder queues and resource-heavy blocks” resulted in a number of forks being automatically proposed to the network. The attack caused Solana’s network validators …

SushiSwap (SUSHI) prices crept higher on Sept. 16 following another day of gains for decentralized exchange (DEX) tokens. The SUSHI/USD exchange rate rose by 7.54%, or $1.14, to reach $16.31 for the first time since May 21. The pair's upside move pushed its 24-hour adjusted timeframe profits up to 23%, making SUSHI the best-performing DEX token in the given period. For instance, UNI, the token representing the leading DEX Uniswap by market cap, jumped 6.23% against the U.S. dollar in the previous 24 hours. Meanwhile, PancakeSwap (CAKE) rose 2.5%, THORChain (RUNE) climbed circa 13%, and Curve (CRV) inched higher by …

Uniswap (UNI) was among the best performers among the top cryptocurrency tokens by market capitalization in the previous 24 hours, logging better gains than other top cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Binance Coin (BNB). On Wednesday, the UNI/USD exchange rate jumped 13.26% to hit a seven-day high of $25.68. Traders continued to bid higher on the pair entering Wednesday, pushing its value higher to $26.07 at one point, up more than 15% from the previous session’s open of $22.66. Market-wide recovery behind UNI gains? The majority of UNI’s gains in the previous 24 hours seems to have surfaced …

Decentralized finance-focused protocols are seeing a sustained upward move, and the momentum appears to be picking up pace now that the NFT sector has cooled off over the past two weeks. Since the beginning of August, Elrond (EGLD) — a scalable and secure blockchain platform designed for distributed apps and enterprise-level businesses — has been in a strong rally. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since hitting a low of $52.00 on June 22, the price of EGLD has charged 437% higher to a new all-time high of $302.14 on Sept. 14. Three reasons for EGLD's surge …

The recent 256% recovery by Polkadot (DOT) over the past 56 days has been nothing short of spectacular. Although the price is 23% below its $49.80 all-time high from four months ago, the altcoin's $39 billion market capitalization has outperformed Ether (ETH) by 66% over the past thirty days. Polkadot is a blockchain network designed to support various interconnected, application-specific parallel chains — known as parachains. This scalability-focused project breaks transactions up into many shards and processes them in parallel, similar to what ETH 2.0 aims to achieve. Polkadot refers to the entire ecosystem of parachains that plug into a …

Decentralized exchange dTrade has raised $22.8 million for a market-making fund designed to provide the ecosystem with higher liquidity, potentially setting the stage for wider DeFi adoption on Polkadot once the DEX launches later this year. The funds will enable dTrade to launch with “deep liquidity” backed by some of crypto’s largest market makers, the company announced Tuesday. Specifically, the capital will be used to facilitate on-chain loans to market makers that provide order book liquidity on dTrade. Community members will also have the opportunity to participate in the on-chain program once dTrade launches, which is expected soon after Polkadot …

Tokenization is far from a new concept. For perspective, tokens were used back in the British Empire when there was a lack of fiat money and continue to be used when citizens pay with coins or bills in their local currency. Today, the same concept is being used alongside blockchain technology to increase liquidity and reduce the time required to execute a trade. While just about everything can be tokenized on the blockchain, the actual process of creating tokens is lengthy and expensive. Sometimes even requiring the help of experienced developers to complete. Recognizing the potential for new projects, the …

A new, fully decentralized cryptocurrency exchange is designed to solve several significant issues seen with legacy platforms — delivering an innovative trading model that is neither operated nor controlled by centralized intermediaries. XSWAP has been built on top of ABEYCHAIN, and according to the ABEY Foundation, this is set to be the first of many DeFi-focused decentralized applications that will play a starring role in its ecosystem. The blockchain is positioning itself as a compelling rival to the Ethereum network, which has been beset by high transaction fees and disappointingly low speeds. XSWAP is fully compatible with ARC-20 tokens based …

Airdrops have been a fan-favorite in the cryptocurrency ecosystem for years because they offer projects a way to reward early adopters and increase token distribution. The latest project to surprise its community of supporters with retroactive rewards for its newly minted token is dYdX, a non-custodial decentralized derivatives exchange that operates on a layer-two version of the Ethereum network. Data from CoinGecko shows that on its first day of trading live in the markets, DYDX is trading at a price of $10.28 at the time of writing after hitting an intra-day high at $14.24. The number of tokens received by …

FTX crypto exchange’s native utility token, FTT, reached a new record high on Monday a week after it agreed to acquire LedgerX, a United States-based crypto derivative platform, for an undisclosed sum. On Monday, the FTT/USD exchange rate surged 16.37% to $73.99 in a market-wide rally that saw other top coins post similar but dwarfed price rallies. Additionally, the pair’s intraday climb coincided with gains among top exchange tokens, with Binance Coin (BNB) rising 2.3% and Uniswap’s UNI recording 3.5% profits on a 24-hour adjusted timeframe. LedgerX acquisition The news of FTX’s Ledger acquisition served as the primary bullish backdrop …

An important part of preserving investing profits is knowing when an asset or sector is showing signs of exhaustion and when a sector rotation is underway. This is especially important in the rapidly moving cryptocurrency markets, which can change direction in a heartbeat and turn crypto millionaires into depressed bag holders. Most investors know that the nonfungible token (NFT) sector has been on fire since July, and as CryptoPunks, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and pet EtherRock NFTs fetched six- and seven-figure sums, while top NFT marketplace OpenSea surpassed $4 billion in total sales. While the frenzy has been exciting, many …