Daily Digest 1/13
Insights on the biggest stories of the day.
Mark Cuban and Robinhood's CEO join $6 million round for high-yield investment app Seashell
As cryptocurrencies become more popular there will be more and more apps that come around with the ability to buy and sell as well as earn interest on their holdings. New start-up Seashell is offering up to 10% to its users and the company has some big-name backing that just raised them $6 million.
A laundry list of venture capital investors included Coinbase Ventures, Solana Ventures, and the Avalanche Foundation. As far as individual investors you have people like Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and CEO of Robinhood Vlad Tenev. They also got some big names in crypto such as Do Kwon from Terra and Sandeep Nailwal from Polygon at the end of the funding rounds.
With all of this new money, they are planning on launching their app in the first half of the year. CEO, Daryl Hok, aims to provide an easy on-ramp for investors to generate high yields since most banks are giving rates that are lower than 1%. Hok is also the former COO of the popular blockchain audit company Certik.
They will be able to give users high yield by converting the fiat money into stablecoins and putting them into defi protocols through a qualified custodian. They have not yet announced who the custodian is but Genesis trading would be a popular choice for exchanges that are offering a similar product. To start, Seashell, will only be operating in the US but they have plans to expand internationally soon after launch.
“We're building a multichain solution to be able to deposit stablecoins into the high yielding yet trustworthy protocols," said Hok. "The intention is to diversify among various high yielding protocols across major blockchains."
World of Women Ethereum NFTs Follow Bored Apes to Hollywood, Prices Surge
The NFT and crypto space as a whole is overwhelmingly dominated by men but women are making a deep push into the space as artists and investors. The most popular woman-run project is the World of Women and they are now being represented by Guy Oseary as they want to expand their brand further into the entertainment industry.
This is not the first NFT company that Guy Oseary is doing this type of work for as he is also helping expand the brand of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. What this will bring to the table for the World of Women is bring the possibilities of being shown on tv, movies, and more. Popular advocates of the World of Women include Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria , and Gary Vee. Guy Oseary represents some of the biggest names in the music industry like Madonna and U2.
The part of this that stands out the most is that it will give the individual holders of a World of Women NFT full intellectual property (IP) rights over their NFTs. Since this announcement was made public the volume on the project has increased 1,100% in the last 24 hours with the floor price rising to 7.5 ETH.
Gemini acquires crypto portfolio management platform BITRIA
Popular New York based cryptocurrency exchange, Gemini, is involved in many different aspects of crypto by offering their users the opportunity to earn on their tokens and also acquired the NFT platform Nifty Gateway. They even have a large presence in the metaverse space through The Sandbox.
Gemini continued its growth today by acquiring BITRIA which is a portfolio management platform. In August of 2020, the two companies entered into a partnership that allowed investors using BITRIA the ability to buy, sell, and store crypto with Gemini. Now what this acquisition gives Gemini is the ability to serve the RIA industry. This means they will be able to offer features to their customers such as rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting.
“The future of wealth management lies in digital assets and blockchain technology and the integration of BITRIA's technology with Gemini provides a bridge to that future," said Daniel Eyre, co-founder, and CEO of BITRIA.
Gemini is now valued at around $7.1 billion, acquired 5 companies, and is considering going public in the near future. The Winklevoss twins are building one of the quietest empires in the crypto space and doing a lot more than the exchanges that we hear about on a daily basis. It will be exciting to see what they have planned next.
So many companies are receiving funding that it is hard to keep up with at times. This is a good graphic showing where some of the biggest Venture Capitalist companies or individual deep pockets investors are putting their money into. So many names on here like A16Z, Coinbase, Sequoia, and more have been so important to the growth of the entire space.
Livepeer and Crypto Slam are the big names on this list but if these companies are receiving money from these large VCs then they all should be on people’s radars. This funding is great but does also take away some of the decentralized factors of web3 but these companies do need money to be able to fund all the technology and work that will be going into this.