Tether (USDT) makes a $10 million equity investment in the crypto lending platform Celsius Network (CEL) at a $120 million pre-money valuation, bringing the post-money valuation to $150 million. The company is raising a total of $30 million in equity which will bring its valuation to $150 million, but the round hasn’t closed yet. In 2018, Celsius completed a $50 million ICO. Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky told Cointelgraph that his company has continued its policy of not fundraising from venture capital. Investors will have no say Mashinsky also pointed out that the equity sold in this round does not come …

United States cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Pro announced the listing of COMP, the token powering the decentralized lending protocol Compound. According to a Thursday announcement, COMP trading will start on June 23 at 9 a.m. Pacific Time if the liquidity requirements are met. Furthermore, users will be able to deposit their COMP tokens the day hours before the trading activity is scheduled to start. Trading will start progressively After a sufficient — and unspecified — supply of COMP tokens make their way to Coinbase Pro, the exchange will progressively roll out trading functionality for the tokens. There will be two trading …

The price of MakerDAO (MKR) has rallied by roughly 30% over the past 24 hours, posting a new year-to-date high above $720 on some exchanges. The rally follows a late May spike of up to roughly 45% on the heels of MKR’s second Coinbase Pro listing. The past day’s high saw the price top 100% gains in two weeks. MKR/USD on Bitfinex: TradingView When measured against Bitcoin (BTC), the rally saw Maker break above its upper-range for 2020 and spike to a local top of 0.076 BTC, before quickly retracing to 0.060 BTC. MKR is currently trying to establish support …

Mexico’s blockchain and financial technology, or fintech, industries have nearly doubled in size over just two years, according to data provided to Cointelegraph Espanol by blockchain-focused law firm, Legal Paradox. The firm estimates that Mexico’s fintech and blockchain sector has grown by 90% since 2018, describing the country as establishing a “benchmark” for the industry worldwide. Despite the global economic slowdown amid the coronavirus pandemic, Legal Paradox notes an increase in local adoption of distributed ledger technology, or DLT, as large traditional firms turn to blockchain solutions in a bid to reduce inefficiencies and best position themselves to survive the …

Decentralized lending and borrowing platform Celsius Network has crossed $1 billion in total cryptocurrency deposits since its launch in 2018. The platform claims that it returns 80% of its total revenue to its users and has so far paid its community of cryptocurrency holders $17 million in interest rewards, $12 million of which was in Bitcoin (BTC) and $3 million in its native CEL token. Thriving through the pandemic The growth of the platform in recent months has been considerable despite the coronavirus pandemic having an adverse effect on most businesses. In March this year, Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky claimed …

The Aave lending protocol introduced a new market based on Uniswap liquidity tokens, which lets depositors borrow assets against these synthetic tokens. The Uniswap market was launched and announced on May 28, and it lets holders of specific liquidity tokens use them as collateral to borrow crypto assets from the protocol. Each liquidity token represents ownership in a Uniswap liquidity provider pool, and they can be redeemed for the actual tokens at any point. Liquidity providers receive a portion of the trading fees acquired by the Uniswap protocol, making it one of the many ways of earning passive income through …

Tether (USDT) usage in decentralized finance (DeFi) appears to be growing, as lending protocol Aave reports over $7.2 million in USDT locked, out of a reported $60 million in total assets. This result comes two months after the initial launch of Tether on the platform, which offers a wide range of other stablecoins including Dai (DAI), USD Coin (USDC), sUSD and TrueUSD (TUSD). Tether says that a notable portion of that usage is made of flash loans, a loan that does not require collateral as long as it’s returned in the same block. The interest rate on depositing Tether is …

BitGo, a United States-based firm that handles about 20% of all Bitcoin (BTC) transactions, is introducing BitGo Prime, a new entity specifically for institutional trading services. On May 27, BitGo said that the new prime broker platform will incorporate multiple services targeting institutional investors. After launching an institutional-level crypto lending service in March 2020, the new full-service platform integrates institutional crypto lending, trading and custody services. BitGo focuses on institutional investors Apart from the recent launch of institutional crypto lending services, BitGo has been actively working with institutional traders. Nick Carmi, head of financial services at BitGo and the newly …

Crypto lending provider BlockFi reported on Tuesday that it suffered a data breach that may put some of its clients in physical danger. According to its incident report, some of the company’s client data was breached through a SIM card swap attack performed on one of its employees. The attackers successfully stole the email account and phone number used for the employee's account verification procedure, which allowed them to access BlockFi’s records. SIM swapping attacks are the result of network operator vulnerabilities and are usually performed through co-conspirators with access to the phone network’s equipment — though external intrusion techniques …

A report published by venture capital research firm, Ana.vc, has revealed a 57% decline in crypto funding from VCs over the month of April. Despite the decline in overall investment, the decentralized lending sector appears to still be flourishing — raising 150% of its March total. Crypto fundraising plummets during April The report excludes Bakkt’s raise, identifying 32 disclosed deals valued at nearly $50 million in total, down from $117 million last month. “Crypto winter isn’t over and is not entirely immune to macro economic trends as [the] majority of the deals are done in equity,” the report asserts. Ava.vc …

A researcher from the crypto asset investment firm, Paradigm, has co-authored a whitepaper for a new decentralized finance, or DeFi, lending protocol boasting fixed-interest rates. The whitepaper for Yield protocol was written by Paradigm’s Dan Robinson and Allan Niemberg — who announced the project on May 8. Niemberg also announced that Yield Protocol has received seed investment from Paradigm, which will be designated toward building the initial version of the product. New DeFi protocol promises fixed-rate lending The Ethereum (ETH)-based protocol purports to introduce “fixed-term, fixed-rate lending and interest-rate markets to decentralized finance.” Yield’s whitepaper describes “a standard for a …

As the decentralized finance, or DeFi, industry continues to grow, the need for liquidity in cryptocurrencies is steadily increasing. DeFi startup Equilibrium has today expanded the supply of its decentralized EOS stablecoin, EOSDT, as a result of integrating Bitcoin (BTC)-powered liquidity. Equilibrium, a major multi-chain DeFi framework, has raised the EOSDT circulation cap from $70 million to $170 million, the firm announced on May 1. EOSDT integration with pBTC drives the liquidity flow This push became possible through EOSDT’s integration with cross-chain DeFi liquidity network pTokens, which enabled Bitcoin collateralization through pTokens’s BTC-pegged token, pBTC. Bitcoin is the biggest cryptocurrency …