Mark Cuban, Balaji Srinivasan, Tiny Capital, Compound, Inflection, Portico Ventures, Capital 6, Rasool Rayani and Kamunting Street Capital also participated in the funding round for the Victoria-based programmable-data platform for decentralized finance, or DeFi. Tiny Capital is also an investor in The Logic. (The Logic)
Talking point: DeFi is attracting interest from the finance sector and big corporations alike. It takes Bitcoin’s vision of a decentralized, peer-to-peer currency to its next logical step, using blockchain-powered software to enable borrowing, lending, trading and creating financial products like derivatives, all executing automatically without intermediaries. There’s big money to be made (and lost) from these new financial products, and DeFi provides traders with data about the ecosystem. Meanwhile, another Version One portfolio company—NBA Top Shot maker Dapper Labs—participated in a US$6-million seed round for Infinite Objects, a startup that makes hardware allowing people to physically display their NFTs.