Speedinvest’s Post

Very happy to announce the closing of a $4M priced equity round led by AlbionVC with participation from existing investors a16z crypto CSX and CMCC Global. This brings our total seed funding this year to $7.2M. I'm also honoured to have Jay Wilson and Shiau Sin YEN joining the board of directors. Both bring a wealth of experience to our team. The announcement is timely. Stablecoin market cap has reached an all-time high today of over $190B. Stablecoin transaction volumes more than doubled that of Visa in the first half of 2024. And they are increasingly not just a crypto product for crypto users. Over 1/3 of consumers in Latin America have made a purchase using a stablecoin. That is ASTOUNDING. It's clear that the next generation of financial services and markets will be built on internet-native, permissionless digital dollars (i.e. stablecoins). I expect the market cap to reach several trillion by 2030. Our role at OpenTrade is to build critical components for this burgeoning ecosystem; stable, secure, compliant stablecoin lending and yield products that can be embedded directly in the digital wallets and apps businesses and individuals use to manage their financial lives. Over the past year we have seen our business perform very well and expect to see that accelerate in 2025. Almost weekly now, new customers and partners of OpenTrade products are being launched. Whether we’re powering USD and EUR savings products for hundreds of thousands of consumers in Colombia via our partnership with Littio, enabling compliant retail access to the risk free rate through our partnership with WOO X, powering institutional yield products for investors in the EU and APAC through our partnerships with SCRYPT, Trakx, and InvestaX, it’s all part of the same mission, the same mega trend, the same future. Q2 and Q3 were our first two quarters in full production. Over that time we’ve grown total outstanding loan principal over 100% and have processed over $100M in transaction volumes. Customers report that they love the product and their usage is growing. The pipeline has more than doubled and its growth rate is accelerating as we’ve gone from pure founder led sales to a growing team of rock stars. We've also launched several new products and support for a new network ( Avalanche). The platform continues to function extremely well, with zero major production incidents, withdrawal times averaging less than 24 hrs and most processed same day, and more and more customers fully integrating via our improved API. Our network of financial counterparties continues to grow; we are now in production with some of the largest Financial Institutions in the world, enabling us to offer same day liquidity, access a huge range of off-chain assets to expand our product suite, and build trust and credibility with customers. Needless to say, the future is extremely bright.

Very happy to announce the closing of a $4M priced equity round led by AlbionVC with participation from existing investors a16z crypto CSX and CMCC Global. This brings our total seed funding this year to $7.2M. I'm also honoured to have Jay Wilson and Shiau Sin YEN joining the board of directors. Both bring a wealth of experience to our team. The announcement is timely. Stablecoin market cap has reached an all-time high today of over $190B. Stablecoin transaction volumes more than doubled that of Visa in the first half of 2024. And they are increasingly not just a crypto product for crypto users. Over 1/3 of consumers in Latin America have made a purchase using a stablecoin. That is ASTOUNDING. It's clear that the next generation of financial services and markets will be built on internet-native, permissionless digital dollars (i.e. stablecoins). I expect the market cap to reach several trillion by 2030. Our role at OpenTrade is to build critical components for this burgeoning ecosystem; stable, secure, compliant stablecoin lending and yield products that can be embedded directly in the digital wallets and apps businesses and individuals use to manage their financial lives. Over the past year we have seen our business perform very well and expect to see that accelerate in 2025. Almost weekly now, new customers and partners of OpenTrade products are being launched. Whether we’re powering USD and EUR savings products for hundreds of thousands of consumers in Colombia via our partnership with Littio, enabling compliant retail access to the risk free rate through our partnership with WOO X, powering institutional yield products for investors in the EU and APAC through our partnerships with SCRYPT, Trakx, and InvestaX, it’s all part of the same mission, the same mega trend, the same future. Q2 and Q3 were our first two quarters in full production. Over that time we’ve grown total outstanding loan principal over 100% and have processed over $100M in transaction volumes. Customers report that they love the product and their usage is growing. The pipeline has more than doubled and its growth rate is accelerating as we’ve gone from pure founder led sales to a growing team of rock stars. We've also launched several new products and support for a new network ( Avalanche). The platform continues to function extremely well, with zero major production incidents, withdrawal times averaging less than 24 hrs and most processed same day, and more and more customers fully integrating via our improved API. Our network of financial counterparties continues to grow; we are now in production with some of the largest Financial Institutions in the world, enabling us to offer same day liquidity, access a huge range of off-chain assets to expand our product suite, and build trust and credibility with customers. Needless to say, the future is extremely bright.

IX Swap Q2 Recap: 7 Key Pillars of Progress — Quarter 2 of 2024, was undoubtedly one of the busiest quarters for the IX Swap team. To help you paint a better picture of what went down, we'd like to present you a recap of significant milestones and achievements, showcasing why IX Swap is the world's leading real-world asset tokenization platform. 📜 Listings and Activity To kick off April, IX Swap listed on Poloniex. Our CKGP Sprint attracted over 900 participants and a surge in KYC signups. 🤝 Partnerships We forged partnerships with Kima Network, Hyve, RealtyX DAO, Tiamonds, AlphaX, Cygnus Finance, Thovt.io, QuillAudits ➡️ EthCC 🥷🛫, Cogito Finance, and ElectroWizy. Plus, new clients: 1 Asset Exchange, Treasurer, VMIC AVIATION, Socialerus, and Nanuhm Angels. ✔ Deals Launched & Successful Raises New deals: Sangamithra and Kumar Unbanned - Movie IP Tokenization. Treasurer's Tokenized Wine Collection unveiled (Public sale live). IX Swap also announced the successful 500K USDT raise for CKGP. 🌐New Markets Unlocked IX Swap enters the Philippines with the acclaimed Tokenization event series co-hosted by the leading Philippines exchange, PDAX, including a stronger presence in South Korea with new partnerships unlocked. 🏦 New LP Announcements: IX Swap's group receives backing from The Spartan Group, UOB Venture, and Signum Capital 📰 IXS Featured Reports: Recognized by Greythorn Asset Management, KPMG Singapore, Singapore FinTech Association (SFA), The Tokenizer, IMIR Market Research Pvt. Ltd., and Hubbis We'd like to take this time to thank our partners, clients, and supporters. It is with your support and trust that IX Swap continues to make strides and innovations in the real-world asset market. With Q3 officially underway, IX Swap is excited to unveil our upcoming developments in the following months to come. Read more in our full Q2 report here ⬇ https://lnkd.in/g5tbg6RF #web3 #blockchain #blockchaintechnology #tokenization

Coinshift Unveils csUSDL & Strategic Partnerships Coinshift, a leader in onchain treasury management, just launched csUSDL, a liquid lending token (LLT) aimed at maximizing rewards, security, and transparency for all investors. Here’s what makes it standout: Backed by USDL, a Paxos-issued stablecoin tied to US Treasury Bills and cash. Direct Yield to Users, with FSRA regulation and monthly audits. Built on Morpho, enabling DeFi lending yields with zero intermediaries. Strategic partners include Steakhouse Financial, known for managing treasuries for DAOs like MakerDAO and Lido. 💡 Why it matters: csUSDL combines cutting-edge stablecoin tech with DeFi potential, setting a new bar for onchain finance! #Coinshift #csUSDL #DeFi #TreasuryManagement

Lots of news about stablecoins in the past weeks, sheding light on the rationale behind the $1bn acquisition. The Castle Island Ventures and Brevan Howard report on Stablecoins role in emerging markets comes to the same conclusion as a16z crypto 2024 State of Crypto report: stablecoins and crypto market cycles are not correlated 📈 The report highlights the growing range of non-crypto and non-speculative use cases: if stablecoins were merely utilized as a collateral or a form of settlement between traders and crypto exchanges, as is commonly alleged, you would expect the settlement volumes, transaction counts, and monthly active addresses to largely correlate with the crypto market cycles. However, the divergence that appeared throughout the cooling off period in 2022-23 suggests that stablecoins have meaningful usage outside of mere speculative uses, examples for USD-backed stables with similar applications for other currencies: 💵 Access to dollar banking, saving money in dollars and earning a yield 💱 Currency conversion – better rates and 24/7 availability 🛍 Paying for goods and services 🌍 Cross-border transactions 💸 Receiving a salary Notably, the report uses an adjustment methodology to estimate aggregate stablecoin settlement - the so-called denoising and deduplication through assessing transactions 'intent' to remove the duplicative impact of complex arbitrage and lending transactions. Even after the adjustments, estimate that stablecoins in the aggregate conservatively settled $3.7 trillion in 2023, and $2.62 trillion in the first half of 2024, at an annualized pace of $5.28 trillion. Stablecoin settlement volumes have grown steadily throughout the market cycle, despite the selloff in cryptoassets and declines in exchange volume evident in 2022 and 2023. This is another indication that stablecoins have reached a new set of users that are not solely interested in using them for exchange settlement. In the spirit of the above, other market signals are strong: Stripe acquiring Bridge is huge not only because of the deal size and Bridge's startup to unicorn fast track 🦄, but because it is capable of rewiring the whole merchant payments and financial system. Full report here: https://lnkd.in/eKW94u2D #stablecoins #crossborderstractions

RWA feels like gamefi at this point, a narrative pushed by over-invested VCs without much real interest from the market My tl; dr on researching Real Word Assets: - The main problem is liquidity — to attract liquidity, you have to offer higher APR than other crypto products, but you can't do it because of the nature of tokenizable assets. Moreover, you add more risks by tokenizing some assets, so class AA assets turn into B and lower. - Almost all growth of RWAs in 2023 is in short-term treasury bills: while all crypto was at the bottom and giving no returns at all, the degens moved their bags into treasures to earn 5% APY from them with less risk. - In the RWA space, nobody can clearly answer who their customers are: 1) B2B companies are conducting pilots with R&D teams and shutting down projects after launch. 2) B2C companies can't compete with other investment products. - The business model that works is creating a hedge fund with an RWA narrative: raising more funds from VCs and then investing them in some assets and creating a digital secondary market with zero real traffic. - To understand the project, ask yourself: Where does your liquidity come from? I do believe that RWA can be big in the future in two scenarios: more long-term players will join the crypto game (will happen eventually, but not in the next 5+ years) or some governments turn their asset playbook so each asset will be tokenizable by default and it's going to open new horizons. Remember, in the past, there were hundreds of other promising ideas in the space and none of them worked out: - Banks first started talking about tokenization back in 2013 (10 years ago!). - In 2015, J.P. Morgan's C-level executive, Blythe Masters, raised $50 million to change the world of finance through Digital Ledger Technologies (DLT) - this is when all your transactions on blockchain can be confirmed in court; in 2018, she stepped down without success. - Goldman Sachs, one of the world's leading banks, has been actively exploring the use of blockchain for financial transactions since as early as 2015. It has been busy accelerating clearing and settlement in securities trading. Despite the promising prospects, there is still no widespread application of these developments in the industry. - IBM has been active in developing blockchain platforms for various industries, including financial services. In 2016, they launched a project for tokenization and transparency in supply chains. So far, there is no widespread application. - In 2019, J.P. Morgan announced the Onyx project, which was supposed to be a SWIFT killer for banks but didn't get adopted by other banks/ But it doesn't really mean that you're not going to succeed. It means you have to test your ideas more carefully.

Kriptown, a French #fintech, has raised €4.2 million in Series A funding to launch Europe’s first stock exchange for SMEs, leveraging the European DLT Pilot Regime. This regulatory framework allows financial markets to be created using #blockchain technology. 💸 💡 SMEs, which are vital to Europe’s economy, often face limited equity financing options. Kriptown aims to close this gap by providing asset managers and individual investors access to #SME shares, supported by a 24/7 secondary market that enhances liquidity. This expansion will increase the number of assets eligible under France’s PEA-PME scheme, which was established in 2014 to diversify SME funding. Under the DLT Pilot Regime, Kriptown combines the roles of both a Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF) and a Central Securities Depository (CSD), ensuring instant, risk-free delivery versus payment. The company has also submitted its application for a DLT TSS (Trading and Settlement Systems) license to the ACPR, the French Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority. Mark Kepeneghian, Kriptown's co-founder, stated, "Having BNP Paribas and Bpifrance as shareholders strengthens our mission to create a dynamic financial ecosystem for SMEs. Our goal of reshaping market infrastructure aligns perfectly with their vision of innovation." This funding round was led by BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, and CENTILUX Family Office. The funding follows a €2 million investment earlier this year in Axiology, a blockchain-based #securities trading platform. #AltBanking The leading aggregator, bringing the best actionable news, information and opportunities in this rapidly evolving ecosystem right to you. Share and Follow us to stay up-to-date! #finance #banking #innovation #digitalassets #Web3 #investment #tokenisation #crypto #DeFi #TradFi #digitalfinance #BNPParibas #tokenization https://lnkd.in/e2crkpGH

Hello #fintech friends! Welcome back to our weekly dive into the buzzing world of #european FinTech. Today, we've got a special treat in store – among the latest #deals and developments, there's one that hits particularly close to home. Ready to explore with us? 💫 🔍 Last week we saw 7️⃣ official fintech deals in Europe for a total amount of 438.9m€ raised with: 4️⃣ deals in the UK 🇬🇧 2️⃣ deals in Denmark 🇩🇰 1️⃣ deal in Germany 🇩🇪 🥇 Congratulations to Monzo Bank, the UK's largest digital bank, who has successfully raised £340 million in their most recent funding round led by CapitalG, the round also sees participation from leading global tech investors, including GV (Google Ventures) and HongShan, as well as existing backers, including Passion Capital and Tencent 🥈 Well done also to Baanx Group Ltd, a cryptocurrency payments specialist authorized by the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), for having raised $20 million in Series A funding with participation from Ledger, Tezos Foundation, FS Investments, and British Business Bank 🥉 Lastly, we want to extend a special congratulations to the newest addition to our portfolio, Formalize (formerly Whistleblower Software) , a Danish compliance operations platform designed to streamline workflows and automate processes, for having secured €15 million led by us 👊 💡 To learn more about last week's activity and the 6️⃣ news that caught our eye, check Michele's article ➡ https://lnkd.in/eE4g4kez

Q2 2024 update With the approval of the BTC ETF in Q1 2024, there has been a notable uptick in institutional interest in digital assets. As a result, in Q2 2024 we have seen an impressive 110% year-over-year growth in the volume of customer transactions through our OTC trading infrastructure for institutions, reaching a historic high in transaction volume. In Q2 2024 Finery Markets hit a major milestone by exceeding $20 billion in turnover (https://cutt.ly/Jegrgo6O). This accomplishment highlights our dedication to enhancing the crypto OTC trading experience for institutional players. It demonstrates that Finery Markets is establishing itself as a leading crypto ECN. BitGo and Finery Markets have launched the first integrated crypto trading and off-exchange settlement solution (https://cutt.ly/regrdDTE). Prime brokers, OTC desks, and exchanges can now utilize Finery Market's trading infrastructure with confidence, knowing that BitGo will securely store and automatically settle counterparty assets. The BitGo/Finery Markets model is prime broker agnostic, allowing any prime broker, OTC desk, or exchange to offer clients qualified custody services and automated settlement without the need to manage settlement themselves. Finery Markets has been named one of the top 50 emerging companies in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 competition, highlighting our rapid growth and innovative spirit (https://cutt.ly/qegrfwBT). This recognition showcases our company's success in a program that recognizes the fastest-growing technology companies in the Middle East and Cyprus. The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 program, now in its third year, saw a doubling of applications, indicating a strong and competitive tech industry. We have been selected as a finalist for the Global Startup Awards in the South Europe region. We would greatly appreciate your support by voting for us here (https://cutt.ly/regrfjXy). The South Europe Startup Award (SESA) is a new addition to the GSA network, launched in 2019, and includes countries such as Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Spain. For the second year in a row, Finery Markets was thrilled to co-host the Fintech Unplugged (https://cutt.ly/HegrfIhA) afterparty in Limassol in partnership with Sumsub and Nexpay. Our event provides a top networking opportunity for fintech professionals in a chic and laid-back setting. Over 200 industry professionals attended, reaffirming the significance of Fintech Unplugged as a prime platform for networking and business discussions. Our dedication to growth goes beyond our internal operations. We highly value our clients and aim to show our appreciation for their support. Our referral program(https://cutt.ly/tegrf19O) has been gaining popularity among our clients, offering fantastic rewards for referring new clients to Finery Markets. It's a win-win opportunity with numerous benefits and no upfront costs. See the full update on our blog: https://cutt.ly/kegrh7cO

Congratulations Luca Prosperi, Oliver Schimek & Gregory Di Prisco on completing your $ 35M Series A round, led by Bain Capital Crypto. Stablecoins are set to propel past the payment volumes of giants like Visa this year, and the growth will continue thereafter. M^0 Labs is building institution-grade middleware that will allow the minting of fungible stablecoins backed by high-quality collateral. In doing so, M^0 is aiming to facilitate wider adoption of DeFi by some of the biggest financial services institutions in the world, fundamentally reshaping value distribution with a new back-end to financial services infrastructure. M^0 Labs have assembled a team that is up to this momentous task, combining years of experience in DeFi and traditional finance. We've been proud to see their execution velocity since backing them from the very beginning! Excited for launch and the next phase of growth! Read more here https://lnkd.in/eJAV7pVm Tim Rehder Earlybird Venture Capital