In a video update published on 4 June 2023, popular crypto market commentary show “Altcoin Daily,” the hosts provided an insightful analysis of four crypto projects Coinbase Ventures invested in last month. Coinbase Ventures, the investment arm of Coinbase, has a proven track record of identifying promising crypto projects, with previous successful investments including Compound, OpenSea, Synthetix, and Uniswap.
The first project spotlighted is zkLink, which recently completed a $10 million strategic funding round. zkLink is a unified multi-chain trading infrastructure that aims to connect various Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) chains. The project offers a zero-knowledge roll-up backed decentralized trading infrastructure, which could potentially streamline trading between chains. zkLink is built around zero-knowledge roll-ups, an Ethereum scaling approach that mathematically proves the validity of off-chain transactions to save time and fees. This cryptographically secure method of scaling Ethereum is much cheaper and faster. zkLink’s decentralized trading layer connects L1 blockchains and L2 protocols, and developers can use their APIs to create a wide range of products, including order book decentralized exchanges and non-fungible token marketplaces. The project is expected to launch its mainnet in the third quarter of this year.
The second project, Dolomite, completed a $2.5 million funding round. Built on Arbitrum, an Ethereum scaling solution, Dolomite aims to offer composable margin trading and lending. The protocol launched in November 2022 aims to maximize capital efficiency by allowing assets to be used in several ways simultaneously. Assets deposited to Dolomite will earn interest through margin lending by default, but those same assets can be deposited into a Dolomite liquidity pool to earn margin lending interest and liquidity pool fees simultaneously. This innovative approach could potentially make Dolomite a significant player in the decentralized money market protocol space, similar to Compound and Aave.
The third project, Hourglass, recently raised $4.2 million in a seed round. The protocol is building a marketplace for trading time-bound tokens (TBT), which are staked assets in DeFi protocols. This unique concept aims to give users more flexibility with their staked assets. The idea behind the marketplace is to allow users to trade their place in line for their locked-up assets, essentially transferring a user’s ownership of an asset that has been locked in a protocol to another buyer. This innovative approach could potentially revolutionize the way users interact with their staked assets in DeFi protocols.
The final project, PYOR (Power Your Own Research), was part of a $4 million seed round. PYOR aims to offer institutional-grade asset data and insights, serving as a data aggregator for the crypto space. While no coin is involved in this project, the high-fidelity digital asset data and insights provided by PYOR could prove invaluable for institutions and individual investors.
As always, it is worth keeping in mind that investing in crypto projects can be extremely risky, and it’s essential to do your own research and analysis and consider your risk tolerance before making any investment decisions.
Featured Image Credit: Photo / illustration by “Hans” via Pixabay
