Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter.
As the crypto community filled its crypto stockings for the holiday season, the Grinch emerged to gift a grimacing fate to two DeFi platforms, stealing their festive spirit and a whole lot of dollars.
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Binance VC arm leads $60M round in cross-chain protocol Multichain
Binance Labs, the venture capital side of global crypto exchange Binance, facilitated a $60-million capital funding raise for cross-chain router protocol Multichain. Other notable participants included Sequoia China, IDG Capital and Three Arrows Capital.
Amid Multichain’s corporate rebrand from AnySwap last week, analytical estimates placed the protocol’s total value above $5 billion and reported over 300,000 users on the platform. The funds raised will be utilized across various domains, including research and development of crypto algorithms, audits, security and general ecosystem growth.
In addition to the capital support, Binance has also pledged to develop a broader relationship with the protocol, announcing that Multichain will be officially recommended as a tool to bridge bToken across chains through Binance’s smart contract platform, the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
BSC expressed high praise of Multichain, noting that it is “one of the biggest routers on BSC.” Zhaojun, a co-founder of Multichain, stated that the protocol connects “more public blockchains and crypto assets than anyone else, with lower transaction fees, shorter bridging time and higher security levels.”
Thanks Binance Smart Chain @BinanceChain for promoting #Multichain as officially recommended bridge#Multichain‘s top priority is to guarantee the security of on-chain assets https://t.co/CEocRygXzq
— Multichain (Previously Anyswap) (@MultichainOrg) December 20, 2021
Related: Binance to launch $1B fund to develop BSC ecosystem
Interlay raises $6.5M to accelerate Bitcoin DeFi interoperability
DeFi infrastructure startup Interlay announced a $6.5-million Series A funding round led by venture fund DFG Capital with additional participation from Hypersphere and Nexo Finance, among others.
The funding is set to support the construction of DeFi applications cross-chain to Ethereum, Cosmos and Polkadot, as well as onboard new developers to the team.
Interlay was designed to enhance the interoperability of crypto assets such as Bitcoin (BTC) to networks that typically facilitate DeFi activity such as Ethereum and Polkadot, a vision that the Web3 Foundation understood when it invested in the platform via a grant in March 2020.
Interlay’s core product, a Bitcoin-backed digital asset titled InterBTC, can be utilized within the Polkadot ecosystem for various DeFi activities such as yield farming, lending and acting as a collateral asset. Tokenizing a Bitcoin derivative opens the possibility of…
Read More: cointelegraph.com