Digitized | Monthly (11/8/24)
crypto, curated by collab+currency
gm folks.
Welcome back to another edition of Digitized Monthly. It’s been a massive month for crypto. We’ve done our best to separate the signal from the noise, providing you with the top news, product updates, and research across the crypto landscape.
Thanks for being here. Hope you enjoy the read.
Until next month,
Crypto ETFs / Inflows — Bitcoin climbs to new highs as BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF sees record $4.1B in trading volume. Total crypto trade volume on Nov. 6 reached approximately $76B, comprising futures volume of $62B, spot volume of $8B, and ETF trade volume of $6B — more
Brian Armstrong / Reflections on the election through a crypto lens — “I figured I'd share some quick thoughts on the election, through the lens of crypto and Coinbase's mission of increasing economic freedom (we are very political on this one dimension).” — more
Stripe / $1.1B Bridge Acquisition — Stripe acquires stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge for $1.1B, marking the largest crypto acquisition by a payments company. Bridge's APIs help developers integrate stablecoins, having processed $5B in annual payments — more
Microstrategy / Announces New Capital Plan — MicroStrategy announced its "21/21 Plan" to raise $42B over three years—$21B from equity and $21B from fixed-income securities—to acquire additional Bitcoin. The company currently holds over 252,000 bitcoins — more
Coinbase / Visa Integration — Coinbase partners with Visa to enable real-time account funding via the Visa Direct network. Integration allows U.S. and EU customers to instantly deposit funds using eligible Visa debit cards — more
Venmo / MoonPay Partnership — PayPal expands crypto services by enabling U.S. Venmo users to purchase crypto through MoonPay using account balance, bank transfers, or debit cards — more
DBS / Launches Token Services — Singapore's DBS launches Token Services, integrating blockchain with core banking for institutional clients. The platform enables 24/7 settlements via a permissioned Ethereum-compatible blockchain — more
Buenos Aires / Rolls Out Blockchain IDs — Buenos Aires launches blockchain-based digital IDs for 3.6M residents. Built on ZKsync Era, the system gives citizens control over personal data while accessing government services through decentralized identities — more
UBS / Tokenized Fund on Ethereum — UBS Asset Management launches uMINT, its first tokenized fund on Ethereum, via UBS Tokenize platform. UBS currently manages over $5.7 trillion in assets — more
Paxos / Introducing the Global Dollar Network — Crypto firms announce new Global Dollar Network to boost stablecoin adoption. Anchorage, Galaxy, Kraken, Nuvei, Paxos, Robinhood, and others partner to issue USDG, a Singapore-based stablecoin compliant with MAS framework — more
Solv / $11M Raised — Solv, a bitcoin staking platform, raises round at $200M valuation from Nomura subsidiary Laser Digital, Blockchain Capital, OKX Ventures, and others — more
Praxis / $525M Raised — Praxis, a startup aiming to build a network state, raises capital from Arch Lending, GEM Digital, Manifold Trading, and angels like Farcaster CEO Dan Romero and Worldcoin co-founder Max Novendstern — more
Opacity / $12M Raised — Opacity, a data verification platform utilizing zero-knowledge proofs, raises seed round co-led by Archetype and Breyer Capital, with participation from a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX), Finality Capital Partners, Bodhi Ventures and Escape Velocity (EV3) — more
Azra Games / $42M Raised — Azra Games, a blockchain game developer, raises Series A led by Pantera Capital, with participation from a16z crypto, A16Z GAMES, and NFX — more
Yellow Card / $33M Raised — Yellow Card, the largest and first licensed stablecoin on/off ramp on the African continent, raises round led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Polychain Capital, Third Prime Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, Hutt Capital, Winklevoss Capital, and others — more
Azura / $6.9M Raised — Azura, a startup building an interfacing layer for DeFi, raises round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Volt Capital, Winklevoss Capital, Alliance, Raj Gokal, Meltem Demirors, Stephane Gosselin, and others — more
Variational / $10.3M Raised — Variational, a crypto derivatives protocol built on Arbitrum, raises seed round co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and Peak XV Partners, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, North Island Ventures, Hack VC, and others — more
Tollbit / $24M Raised — Tollbit, a platform for AI content licensing, raises Series A led by Lightspeed, with participation from Section 32 — more
Genius / $6M Raised — Genius, a company aiming to bring ‘Binance On-chain’, raises seed round led by CMCC Global with participation from Cadenza Ventures, MV Global, AVA Labs, Arca, Public Works, Flow Traders, and others — more
Party Icons / $9M Raised — Party Icons, a web3 mobile gaming platform, raises seed round led by Bitkraft Ventures, with participation from IDG Capital and The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget — more
Sapien / $10.5M Raised — Sapein, a startup focused on AI data collection, raises seed round led by Variant, with participation from Primitive Ventures, Animoca, Yield Game Guild, and HF0 — more
Nillion / $25M Raised — Nillion, a privacy-focused blockchain project, raises round led by Hack VC and including backing from angel investors and strategic contributors from projects including Arbitrum, Worldcoin and Sei — more
Glow / $30M Raised — Glow Labs, an Ethereum-based solar project, raises round led by Framework Ventures and Union Square Ventures, with participation from Lattice Ventures, Protocol Labs, Hack VC, HF0 and Alliance DAO — more
Ellipsis Labs / $21M Raised — Ellipsis Labs, the developer team behind the Solana-based decentralized exchange Phoenix, raises round from Haun Ventures — more
Phylax Systems / $4.5M Raised — Phylax Systems, a startup building a hack prevention protocol, raises pre-seed round co-led by Nascent and Figment Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures, Hash3, Bankless Ventures, Breed VC, and Public Works — more
Prime Intellect (🤝) / INTELLECT–1: Launching the First Decentralized Training of a 10B Parameter Model — “We're excited to launch INTELLECT-1, the first decentralized training run of a 10-billion-parameter model, inviting anyone to contribute compute and participate. This brings us one step closer towards open source AGI.” — more
Paul Kohlhaas / DeSci 2.0: How BIO (🤝) Will Unleash Biotech Revolution — “BIO’s mission is to become a permissionless launchpad and acceleration network that makes DeSci DAO creation as easy as spinning up a Subreddit.” — more
Binance Labs / Binance Labs Invests in BIO Protocol (🤝) to Accelerate Decentralized Science (DeSci) Funding — “Binance Labs has invested in BIO Protocol, a pioneering protocol transforming the way early-stage scientific research is financed and commercialized using blockchain technology.” — more
Teleport (a Flashbots[X] project) x Nous Research (🤝) / Setting Your Pet Rock Free — “This post presents TEE_HEE, a free autonomous AI agent living on X: the agent has exclusive ownership of its own Twitter account, and the ability to send and receive purely ethereum. In other words set this pet rock free and released it into the digital wilderness.” — more
Artnet / A.I. Art Sensation Botto (🤝) Rings in Its Third Year With a Sotheby’s Sale — “Just four years on from sketching out a model that could generate its own prompts and images, Klingemann’s Botto now receives another mainstream stamp of approval, again from Sotheby’s, which is set to sell six of the A.I. artist’s works at an auction running October 17–24.” — more
Nous Research (🤝) / From Black Box to Glass House: The Imperative For Transparent AI Development — “Open-source AI serves as a counterbalance to the otherwise unchecked power of private AI and the potential mass digital surveillance by corrupt corporations and governments. It ensures that no single entity holds the reins of great power and that no entity can hijack or veto technological progress.” — more
Qiao Wang at Alliance (🤝) / 2024 Crypto Startup Trends Report — “Alliance is the leading crypto accelerator and founder community. We receive over 3,000 applications every year from the best crypto startups looking to join our accelerator program … In this report, we provide trends observed in this application data and add insights as to what they might indicate for the broader startup ecosystem.” — more
Tensorplex Labs (🤝) / Bittensor (🤝) Subnet 13 - Data Universe: Decentralised Data Scraping — “ In this report, we would like to showcase how Macrocosmos designed the incentives to coordinate miners on Bittensor to be the gravity well that scrapes over 350 million rows of data a day.” — more
Pluralis / Protocol Learning, Protocol Models and the Great Convergence — “Two enormous, previously disparate fields converge and a path towards the largest models to ever be trained is opened.” — more
a16z Crypto / State of Crypto Report 2024 — “New data on swing states, stablecoins, AI, builder energy, and more” — more
Vitalik / Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 1: The Merge — “Ideally, we want to preserve economic finality, while simultaneously improving on the status quo in two areas: 1) Finalize blocks in one slot (ideally, keep or even reduce the current length of 12s), instead of 15 min and 2.) Allow validators to stake with 1 ETH (down from 32 ETH).” — more
goodalexander / Murad Meta and AI Cult Coins — “The thing about cults, is that really strong cults. Like religions. Do not allow membership in multiple cults. And the existing landscape of meme coins is too disparate.” — more
YB / The Dark Knight of Consumer Crypto — “How ZKTLS is helping breakdown data fiefdoms by serving as an unruggable API.” — more
Telah / Proving new worlds with zkTLS — “zkTLS is a protocol that creates a gateway between private Web2 data and the Web3 ecosystem. Effectively, it’s a way to enable users to export data securely from any website.” — more
Kerim Kaya / I spoke with 100+ researchers, engineers, and investors on synthetic data and got 50+ responses — “Over the past month, I’ve met with hundreds of developers, investors, and researchers, and I’ve noticed that people are all over the place when it comes to synthetic data. To bring some clarity to these discussions, I’ve developed a classification system outlining the levels of synthetic data generation, along with key areas for future research.” — more
Fred Wilson / Network Density — “When you are building a network, density matters a lot. Whether it is a social network, a real world network (like Blackbird), or some other kind, the value of the network goes up massively as density increases.” — more
Raf x 1kx / These are not the bots you're looking for — “By carefully thinking about how we design games, we can turn bots from exploiters into targets—players could fight bots for resources, compete with them strategically, or even collaborate with them in new and creative ways.” — more
Charlie at HFA / Celo - the next stablecoin kingmaker — “A recent Vitalik-induced pump piqued our interest in Celo which from first glance looks a lot like an “African Tron”…” — more
James Brodie / Sci-Fi, But Not In The Way You Think — “By transforming intellectual property into tradable digital assets via IP-NFTs, DeSci ensures value flows back to investors, aligning incentives and reinventing research funding.” — more
JK and Coinbase Ventures / Demystifying the Crypto x AI Stack — “The convergence of crypto’s efficiency, borderless nature, and programmability with AI has the potential to transform how humans and machines interact with the digital economy, including by enabling users to have sovereignty over their personal data.” — more
Ryan Watkins x Syncracy / The Speed Trap – A Meditation on Markets — “The cryptoeconomy has demonstrated time and again it is the fastest horse when monetary conditions are easing. Syncracy believes this time will be little different, with the added stimulus of institutionalization and regulatory clarity.” — more
goodalexander / Trustless Economic Agency — “This post is about using AI to enhance individual and collective economic output - fairly mechanically, with live examples, simulations, and code.” — more
Kevin Heavey / Futarchy as Trustless Joint Ownership — “Since its inception, futarchy has been presented as a way to make smarter decisions by harnessing the predictive power of markets. This is accurate, but exposure to the lawless wasteland of blockchain governance has revealed a more fundamental innovation: futarchy solves the problem of trustless joint ownership.” — more
ASXN Research / Hyperliquid's HyperBFT: Consensus at the Speed of Light — “Written entirely in Rust, HyperBFT is capable of theoretically processing 2 million orders per second—a 100x improvement over Tendermint. This breakthrough means that the primary bottleneck is now execution, not consensus.” — more
Blocmates / Podcast: This is How Bittensor (🤝) Subnets Are Driving Revenue — “This week, in TAO Talk episode 8, Ronan and Derek from Collab+Currency join 563 and Brody to discuss exciting updates in the Bittensor ecosystem.” — more
Opentensor / Smart Contracts on Bittensor (🤝) — Bittensor adds EVM compatibility, enabling Solidity smart contracts and traditional DeFi development tools. This move bridges AI with DeFi capabilities, opening doors for staking protocols and applications using Ethereum tooling — more
Art Blocks (🤝) / OpenSea Partnership — Art Blocks partners with Opensea to advance generative art, launching custom contract integration and a joint Artist Residency program in Marfa, Texas — more
Axelar (🤝) / TON Ecosystem Expansion — TON Blockchain integrates Axelar's Mobius Development Stack for cross-chain interoperability, connecting its 950M Telegram users and $16B ecosystem to major networks including Cosmos, EVM chains, and Polkadot, with more chains planned — more
CreatorBid x Masa / Empowering AI Agents With Decentralized Data —CreatorBid's AI agent platform will integrate with Masa's decentralized data network (Bittensor (🤝) Subnet 42), giving AI agents access to real-time data from social platforms for content creation — more
When Shift Happens / Podcast: How to Win in Crypto (by Building for Users, Not VCs) – Hyperliquid Founder — “Jeff is the Founder of Hyperliquid Labs, the company behind Hyperliquid, a decentralized perpetual exchange offering best-in-class speed, liquidity, and pricing for crypto traders.” — more
Iskra Velitchkova, Lars Wander, Zach Lieberman / Art Blocks (🤝): Poetics of the Infinite — “Through fragrance, geometries, and light, three artists contemplate infinity as an unfolding encounter, offering the viewer glimpses into the endless experiences that lie beyond simple representation.” Dec. 2nd — more
Roope Rainisto / Mercedes Benz NXT: Symbiosis — “‘Symbiosis’ examines the relationship between humans and machines. In the thought-provoking work, the boundaries between the organic and the mechanical blur, blending classical allusions and elements of the “natural” with industrial aesthetics.” — more
Pulse (🤝) / New Wearable Powering the Open Health Network
Wayfinder (🤝) Foundation / Closed Alpha Goes Live
Kalos / Wayfinder’s (🤝) Future
Botto (🤝) / Sotheby’s Auction Results
clusters (🤝) / Clusters x MetaMask
Dirt (🤝) Labs / “A mysterious, mossy orb marks the entry to Dirt Labs”
Jihoz / Pixels (🤝) and Axie (🤝), Scaling Community + Economy
clay / Colosseum (🤝) Hackathon Trends
Nous Research (🤝) / The Imperative for Transparent AI Development
Switchboard (🤝) / Decentralizing the Protocol
MurrLincoln / Introducing Based Agent
Pulse (🤝) / Sleepagotchi (🤝) Partnership
jeff / Hyperliquid’s Financial Stack
Digitized / Featured x Pulse (🤝)
Anthropic / Introducing Claude 3.5 Sonnet + ‘Computer Use’
🤝 = Collab+Currency Portfolio Company
Curated by @Collab_Currency x @_cutbank
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