Originally announced in April, the bank joins other well-known investors such as PayPal PYPL-2.1%, crypto derivatives exchange FTX, and Coinbase. The round was led by Oak HC/FT and gives Paxos a $2.4 billion dollar valuation, with it having raised $540 million across multiple rounds of funding.
This investment comes to light after the May 2021 announcement that Bank of America joined the Paxos Settlement Service, which allows for same-day settlement of stock trades. Other partners on the network include Credit Suisse and Japanese bank Nomura Holdings.
In announcing the new investors Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla noted, “We’re at the beginning of a technological transformation where new market infrastructure is needed to replatform the global financial system. Paxos uses innovative technology to build the regulated infrastructure that will facilitate an open, accessible and digital economy. We’re defining this space and are excited to grow our enterprise solutions beside these market leaders.”
Additionally, Bank of America appears to be warming up to digital assets and cryptocurrencies. The bank created a research team in July to analyze the emerging asset class and its various applications. On July 16th it was reported that the bank would allow bitcoin futures trading for select clients.
By taking this step, it appears that Bank of America is following the lead of its fellow financial services brethren, who are increasingly engaging with the space, often in response to consumer demand. Bank of America is following the lead of its fellow financial services brethren, who are increasingly engaging with the space, often in response to consumer demand.
State Street STT-0.8% recently created an entire digital assets division, and in an interview with Forbes Jenn Tribush, Senior Senior Vice President & Global Head of Alternatives Product Solutions said, “We’re going to bridge between the innovation that’s happening within the digital world with solving the need for clients to be able to operate in this new paradigm so for me it’s incredibly important to have this level of focus within a dedicated division.”
Paxos – a provider of blockchain infrastructure – said Bank of America, crypto exchange FTX, Founders Fund and Coinbase Ventures were among a heavyweight list of investors in its $300 million Series D funding round, the firm disclosed on Thursday.
Oak HC/FT led the funding round, which the nine-year-old company announced in late April at a valuation of $2.4 billion. The round also included PayPal Ventures and Mithril Capital, among others. The firm has raised more than $540 million over multiple funding rounds.
The company noted that Bank of America joined the Paxos Settlement Service earlier this year. The platform uses blockchain technology to achieve same-day settlement of stock trades. Paxos started providing infrastructure for PayPal’s crypto service last year, which has extended to PayPal’s Venmo payments app. Credit Suisse, fintech Revolut and Societe Generale are among other customers.
Few had heard much about decentralized finance (DeFi) in its early days in late 2017 and late 2019, beyond murmurs about Bitcoin and a mysterious new digital technology called blockchain.
But a pandemic can change everything.
Since May of this year, the total value locked (TVL)—the amount of any currency locked into tokens, the vehicle of holding and moving assets on blockchain, in smart contracts on a blockchain ecosystem—in decentralized finance projects rose a whopping 2,000 percent, according to DeFi Pulse. Many investors would be hard-pressed to find such an astronomical rise of any assets or expansion of any financial ecosystem, but DeFi app developers seemed to find success. So what’s the rage, and why does it matter going into the new year?
What is DeFi?
DeFi, many fintech leaders argue, is the world’s answer to the 2008 financial crisis. Thanks to poor decision making and a lack of proper financial regulation, legacy financial institutions brought the world’s economy to its knees in the most major financial crisis since the Great Depression. The knee-jerk reaction was to create an ecosystem dependent on every link in the chain, rather than centralized authorities—hence the term “decentralized finance.”
The concept of blockchain, a decentralized ledger, was designed to ensure financial transactions would be transparent. Moreover, transaction approval would come from network individuals incentivized to approve them by solving complex mathematical equations or by network consensus voting.
Later, the idea of operating a decentralized financial system on a decentralized ledger, independent of legacy institutions, grew into a thriving, albeit relatively small, ecosystem. Now, users can find financial services on the distributed ledger for loans, insurance, margin trading, exchanges, and yield farming (yielding rewards from staking digital assets on a network to help facilitate network liquidity).
But there is still a way to go. Not enough consumers are comfortable with DeFi quite yet, because platform accessibility and blockchain tribalism remain a problem. Nevertheless, now the world is experiencing another economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and DeFi is finally getting its day in the sun.
For companies and individuals already active in the space, navigating the ecosystem remains impeded by technical limitations. In order to access certain markets and execute transactions on the blockchain—whether it’s borrowing or lending, staking assets in liquidity pools, or trading on an exchange—users need to own an e-wallet that’s properly connected to the ecosystem.
E-wallets are the backbone of transactions on blockchain. Just as the digital assets they help transact and store, these wallets are secure, transparent, and easily accessible to users. At least, that’s the idea behind them, though there are various degrees of security and transparency. For DeFi to attract more users, the wallets must be compatible with multiple blockchains running financial dApps (decentralized apps that operate on a blockchain system). One of the first wallets, created by Ethereum and called “MyEtherWallet” (MEW), lacked a user-friendly interface and was challenging to grasp for people outside the hardcore crypto crowd.
Since then, a number of blockchain developers have created alternative e-wallet solutions. Most recently, Spielworks, a blockchain gaming startup, reached an agreement with Equilibrium and DeFiBox to integrate its e-wallet “Wombat,” which is currently available on the Telos and EOS blockchain mainnet (a blockchain network that is fully developed, deployed, and operational).
The Wombat wallet provides users with access to several DeFi platforms that offer token exchanges, yield farming, borrowing, and lending. Wombat recently also integrated with Bitfinex’s new EOS exchange, Eosfinex, as well as 8 other DeFi networks. Rather impressively, the wallet also offers free and fast account creation, automatic key backup, and free blockchain resources.
Developments in blockchain wallets, such as Wombat’s, will be pivotal in the next few years in the growth of DeFi applications and the movement of users toward decentralized finance and away from traditional finance. While wallets are important, so are the underlying mechanisms to piece the entire ecosystem together, because one a DeFi ecosystem is not enough if confined to just one blockchain mainnet.
Piecing it all together
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” President Lincoln’s famous quote referred to the Civil War that ravaged the United States at the time, but his historically renowned words can apply very well to the blockchain community today.
For DeFi to reach its maximum potential, as a decentralized ecosystem that doesn’t answer to a central authority, blockchain platforms must stand united and interoperate. Could anyone imagine if payment transfers between regular banks were not possible? How could an economy function? This is the sort of technical problem plaguing the DeFi world: Each blockchain platform has its own benefits, but each remains largely separated from the others in its own silo. The root of the problem is attitude, the other part is technical limitations.
Ethereum and EOS are primary examples of this sort of rivalry, both of which have their own technical benefits for dApp developers. If the two ecosystems could be connected to one another, EOS-based and Ethereum-based developers alike, for example, could benefit from each other’s platform’s strengths. Users could also benefit, via financial opportunities without having to sacrifice shifting their base from one blockchain to another.
This is precisely what LiquidApps’s latest development—its DAPP Network bridging—has solved. LiquidApps’s technology provides the technical mechanisms to connect separate blockchain mainnets and recently provided its tools to EOS-based developers to successfully deploy a bridge between EOS and Ethereum.
This was shortly followed by decentralized social media app Yup’s deployment that demonstrated the possibility of moving tokens easily between different once-separate blockchain mainnets. It still remains to be seen how long it will take before blockchain platforms themselves integrate built-in cross-chain technologies, but LiquidApps is starting the next crucial step to DeFi development.
Whether it’s cross-chain technology or the e-wallets that grant access to dApps, tech developments and attitudes in the DeFi space over the next few years will determine its success. The latest developments suggest the future of DeFi looks promising. Time to go decentralized.
Start trading Bitcoin and cryptocurrency here: http://bit.ly/2Vptr2X DeFi applications – https://defipulse.com/defi-list/ DeFi is becoming more and more popular as the main use case for cryptocurrencies. This video explains in detail what DeFi is and what you should know about before getting involved. 0:38 Bitcoin and Our Financial System 1:24 Our Centralized Financial System 1:59 What is DeFi? 2:22 DeFi Components 4:16 – DAI explained 5:51 – DEXs explained 6:33 – Decentralized money markets 8:06 Money Legos 8:56 DeFi Advantages and Risks 10:02 Conclusion For the complete text guide visit: https://bit.ly/2R35g6Z Join our 7-day Bitcoin crash course absolutely free: http://bit.ly/2pB4X5B Learn ANYTHING about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies on our YouTube channel: http://bit.ly/2BVbxeF Get the latest news and prices on your phone: iOS – https://apple.co/2yf02LJ Android – http://bit.ly/2NrMVw2
Two months after the Covid-19 pandemic froze the IPO market, financial services software company NCino has filed for a public offering.
The Wilmington, North Carolina-based startup is seeking to raise $100 million in an IPO, it announced Monday. A regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission did not disclose how many shares the company planned to sell, or at what price. The company declined to comment beyond a press release, citing SEC regulations.
The announcement comes as other tech companies are weighing up their potential futures on the public market since Covid-19 battered the economy. Some have seen great success: Shares in ZoomInfo, a cloud-based sales and marketing software firm, surged 62% on its first day of trading, making it the largest tech company debut of 2020. But other tech firms battered by the pandemic, such as Airbnb, are yet to announce whether they will proceed with planned IPOs.
Launched in 2012 by executives of North Carolina-based Live Oak Bank as a spin-off venture, nCino provides Salesforce-based software to improve loan and deposit processing, among other financial services. The company, which employs more than 900 people, has raised a total $213 million from investors including Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures and T. Rowe Price. Insight holds a 46.6% stake in the company, company filings show.
Led by CEO Pierre Naudé, nCino now has more than 1,100 corporate customers, mostly banks, including Bank of America and Santander, the company said in its SEC filing. In recent months, the company’s software has been used by these customers to process more than $50 billion in Paycheck Protection Program funding using its software, and handled hundreds of thousands of requests from small businesses seeking loans.
According to nCino’s SEC filing, known as an S-1, the company generated $138 million in the fiscal 2020 year, with $27.8 million in losses, up from $91.5 million revenue on $22.3 million in losses in 2019.
The company will list on the NASDAQ market under the ticker “NCNO.” The deal will be underwritten by Barclays, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Bank of America Securities and KeyBanc Capital Markets.
I’m a staff reporter at Forbes covering tech companies. I previously reported for The Real Deal, where I covered WeWork, real estate tech startups and commercial real estate. As a freelancer, I’ve also written for The New York Times, Associated Press and other outlets. I’m a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, where I was a Toni Stabile Investigative Fellow. Before arriving in the U.S., I was a police reporter in Australia. Follow me on Twitter at @davidjeans2 and email me at djeans@forbes.com
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