As digital asset markets suffer a broad pullback, cross-chain bridge protocol Ren has announced integrations with EMV-compatible chains Fantom and Polygon that could bolster liquidity across the DeFi ecosystem. In a blog post on Friday, Ren announced that the RenVM bridge now supports the trustless transfer of four popular cryptocurrencies to Fantom, including Bitcoin (BTC), DOGE (DOGE), and ZCash (ZEC). Three additional Fantom bridge assets are coming in as well, including Filecoin and LUNA. Likewise, in a post on Wednesday, Ren announced a similar seven-asset integration with Polygon: Excited to announce the launch of a direct bridge to Polygon by …

A cross-chain aggregator that seeks out the best price for crypto trades has reported positive results following its own token sale. Launched simultaneously on DuckSTARTER, Gate.io, MXC, Bounce, BSCpad, WeStarter, and Cobax, the O3 Labs’ O3 token initial DEX offering (IDO) raised $922,000. O3 Swap sources liquidity from nearly two dozen decentralized exchanges (DEX), finding the best route to the best prevailing rate for trades, communications director Matt Powers told viewers of a Cointelegraph AMA that took place the day of the O3 Swap (O3) token’s IDO. The protocol was built on top of the open-source project’s initial product, the …

Brett Heath, CEO of precious metals royalty and streaming company Metalla Royalty & Streaming, has warned that crypto will “lead the charge into the next financial crisis.” Metalla Royalty & Streaming is a Canadian-based firm founded in 1983 and has a current net worth of almost half a billion dollars. Metalla offers exposure to precious metals through gold and silver royalties and streams. Speaking to financial news outlet Kitco News on Friday, Heath compared crypto to the tech induced crash of the early 2000s and the 2008 mortgage crisis, noting that: “When you look back the last few decades and …

The capital raise was led by Blockchain Capital, Fintech Collective, LongHash Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Continue Capital and Kain Warwick, the founder of DeFi protocol Synthetix. The funds will be used to strengthen Balancer’s role as a core infrastructure provider of the DeFi market. “By allowing for the most flexible and composable liquidity pools in the AMM space, the Balancer Protocol is uniquely positioned as a core infrastructure component for decentralized finance protocols and applications,” said Aleks Larsen, an investor with Blockchain Capital. He added: “We see this aspect of the technology in Balancer as a strong long-term indicator, as protocols …

OVRLand is having a virtual party on May 30 to celebrate the sixth-month anniversary of the earth-size augmented reality metaverse’s launch, and they’ll be lighting a million-dollar bonfire to celebrate. A 1.6-trillion hexagon digital overlay of the earth’s surface, OVRLand is a shared augmented reality where anyone can buy a plot of “land” to host any kind of digital content they want, from 3D art and games to buildings and pretty much anything they can dream up. The highlight of the OVRLand project will be a live “burn” of one million OVR Tokens worth about $1,000,000 at this writing. The …