Margin trading allows an investor to borrow money or cryptocurrency to leverage their trading position and increase its size or the expected return. For example, borrowing Tether (USDT) will allow one to buy Bitcoin (BTC), thus increasing the exposure. Although there’s an interest rate involved with borrowing, the trader expects BTC's price appreciation to compensate for it. Newer traders might be unaware of this, but investors can borrow BTC to margin trade a short position, thus betting on price downside. This is why some analysts monitor the total lending amounts of Bitcoin and Tether to gain insight into whether investors …

In a press release today, C.R.E.A.M. Finance announced a new feature for (and, by proxy, an unofficial relaunch of) Iron Bank, the protocol-to-protocol lending platform designed for flash and undercollateralized loans. C.R.E.A.M., which founder Leo Cheng describes as “the yolo-est Compound fork,” is a money market designed to cover assets that are “underserved” and allow for greater capital efficiency for decentralized finance power users, listing assets such as Yearn vault tokens and liquidity pool tokens. “We’re adding assets that people want to have but others may be scared of,” said Cheng. Iron Bank is, in many ways, an extreme implementation …

Automated market maker exchange Bancor has rolled out a new mechanism that allows users to increase their capital efficiency while providing liquidity in its pools. Called Vortex, the solution allows users providing liquidity in BNT, Bancor’s utility token, to borrow funds while continuing to obtain yield from swap fees. The Vortex mechanism reworks the existing mechanism of vBNT, a special version of the BNT token that entitles users to participate in governance. The voting token is automatically received when staking BNT into a liquidity pool, and it can be defined as Bancor’s pool token. The Vortex proposal adds functionality to …

Finance Redefined is Cointelegraph's DeFi-centric newsletter contextualizing major events in the previous week. Subscribers receive a copy every Wednesday. Editor's Note This is one of those weeks where it’s hard to find a central topic for this newsletter. There weren’t any big scandals or releases, more like a slow grind with a few projects launching new features, others announcing their fancy investment round, while every celebrity and their mother keeps dropping nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Snoop Dogg is the latest, I believe? I suppose a fair question to ask is, “Why NFTs and not decentralized finance?” The answer is money. …

Kava, a DeFi-centric blockchain project built on the Cosmos SDK, has announced the concurrent release of Kava 5.1 and Hard Protocol V2, which marks the full launch of two-sided lending markets on the Kava blockchain. Unfortunately, the actual vote to implement it failed to reach the required quorum, pushing back the launch by at least a week. The Kava 5.1 upgrade is a significant boost to performance over previous major versions, with the team claiming a ten-fold increase in throughput through “consensus enhancements.” The upgrade also carries improvements to the BEP3 relayer that acts as the connection to Binance Smart …

Watch Cointelegraph’s latest interview with Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek to understand the catalysts that will push crypto to 200 million users. For more crypto and blockchain content, check out and subscribe to Cointelegraph’s YouTube Channel! When adoption? It took over a decade for crypto to reach 100 million users, or ~1% of the global population, according to a study by Crypto.com. But Marszalek expects the next 100 million users to arrive in a far quicker time frame. He said: “Going from 100 to 200 million is going to be much, much faster than going from, you know, 50 to 100 …

Teller Finance, a project building an undercollateralized lending protocol for decentralized finance, has announced the launch of its mainnet alpha stage. This will enable certain users to obtain credit without being required to post collateral, which is the case for most other DeFi lending protocols. The Teller alpha will be accessible only to holders of a special nonfungible token, called the Fortune Teller NFT. The tokens will be sold on Thursday, with half of the proceeds of the sale going to the protocol’s liquidity pools, and the remaining half will be used to fund development. Only $10 million in total …

New decentralized finance project Alchemix Finance has raised a strategic $3.1 million round from notable crypto investments funds and angels. The round was led by Spartan Capital, the investment arm of crypto consulting firm The Spartan Group. Delphi Ventures, Nascent, CMS Holdings, Maven 11, Genesis Block Ventures participated in the round as well. Several angel investors joined in as well, including Jason Choi, general partner at The Spartan Group. Alchemix also raised $4.9 million in an over-the-counter token sale deal led by CMS Holdings and Alameda Research. The Alchemix project is building a new DeFi primitive, combining yield generation with …

It’s hard to argue that the crypto market is not in a bull market right now, but this run does show different characteristics and catalysts than the 2017 bull market. In 2017, investors were hyped by the allure of high returns from initial coin offerings (ICO) that promised much but delivered very little in the form of an actually working ‘product.’ Fast forward to 2020, and the current altcoin season has been primarily focused on lending, liquidity, and yield farming. Growing interest in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) was triggered by the four-digit APYs being earned from staking assets, besides the decentralized …

Bain Capital Ventures, Pomp Investments, Tiger Global, and partners of DST Global have led investors in a $350 million series D funding round for the crypto lending firm BlockFi, according to an announcement on March 11. The company indicated that with the addition of these funds, as well as $100 million raised via three earlier funding rounds in the last two years, BlockFi is now valued at $3 billion. The secured funds will reportedly be used to expand the crypto offerings at the firm, including a Bitcoin (BTC) rewards credit card and a Bitcoin trust. “In less than six months …

Bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform Cred Inc is believed to have unwittingly appointed a prison escapee as its Chief Financial Officer. A report filed by examiner Robert Stark of Brown Rudnick LLP on March 8 asserts that former Cred CFO James Alexander has been identified by U.K. authorities as a financial fugitive who had been sentenced to more than three years imprisonment in December 2007. Stark said: "At the time of his incarceration, there was a prison break at this facility. Mr. Alexander has been identified by the UK government as a fugitive." Stark was appointed by Judge John Dorsey in …

This week's temporary closure of registrations for crypto lending and borrowing app BlockFi was due to an attack by a “malicious actor” according to Forbes. According to employees of the company, a single attacker began the registration process for more 1,000 fake accounts on Mar. 7, using email addresses belonging to real users. The attacker entered “vulgar and racist” terms as the first and last names for the fake accounts which resulted in about 500 emails containing offensive language being sent out automatically before BlockFi caught on to the problem and halted registrations altogether. I received an email from @BlockFi …