Digital asset lender DrawBridge Lending (DBL) announced that it received funding from cryptocurrency commercial bank Galaxy Digital. A fiat-crypto lending and investing service DrawBridge announced in a press release published on Aug. 8 that it received funding from Galaxy Digital, further strengthen DBL’s fiat-crypto lending and investing capabilities. Furthermore, the two firms reportedly plan to jointly develop a co-branded special-purpose loan funding vehicle to provide structured financing against institutionally held crypto assets. Michael Novogratz, CEO and founder of Galaxy Digital, commented on the development: “The institutionalization of digital assets is still relatively nascent despite increasing momentum and interest from a …
Dutch bank ABN AMRO announced that it is launching a blockchain inventory tracking platform dubbed Forcefield in a press release published on May 17. Per the announcement, the platform is an Internet of Things solution that allows the monitoring of physical trade inventories with sensors and near-field communication chips. Forcefield was developed over the past year as a stand-alone product and became an independent company following a successful proof-of-concept that was conducted with consulting firm Accenture. The bank claims that the system can lead to more secure physical handling processes and a reduction of costs in the management of commodities …
United Kingdom startup Acre Software raised about $6.5 million to apply blockchain technology to the mortgage and insurance application process for advisers, a press release published on April 4 states. Per the release, nearly three-quarters of UK mortgages are facilitated by advisers, and the company aims to help them retain their position by matching the speed of an end-user service. Acre reportedly uses blockchain to store all the data about mortgage advice immutably. The investment reportedly comes from UK financial adviser Sesame Bankhall Group (SBG), which, according to the release, has more than 11,000 advisers in the country. Owler estimates …
In the past year, we’ve seen the crypto economy undergo exponential expansion as heaps of money poured into various cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), nonfungible tokens (NFT), crypto indices, insurance products and decentralized options markets. The total value locked (TVL) in the DeFi sector across all chains has grown from $18 billion at the beginning of 2021 to $240 billion in January 2022. With so much liquidity in the ecosystem, the crypto lending space has also grown a significant amount, from $60 million at the beginning of 2021 to over $400 million by January 2022. Despite the exponential growth and the …
Digital asset lending platform Celsius has become the first pool delegate from the centralized finance market to deploy a crypto-centric lending service on Maple Finance, utilizing the latter’s smart contract and blockchain infrastructure to facilitate a $30 million pool to institutional investors. Celsius succeeds existing pool delegates BlockTower, Orthogonal Trading, Maven 11 and Alameda Research in partnering with Maple on such an endeavor. The introduction of wrapped Ether (wETH) is set to complement the existing accessibility to trade Circle’s native stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC), enabling investors to utilize the asset across an array of trading components, including staking, lending and …