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Every Bank and Fintech Wants DeFi Under the Hood: Alchemy

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Ever since President Donald Trump’s administration signaled favorable crypto regulations, banks, financial institutions and big fintech firms have been looking to bring funds on-chain, and seamlessly offer compliant access to decentralized finance (DeFi), according to blockchain development firm Alchemy.

DeFi, traditionally a way for anonymous users to engage in a complex system of automated lending and borrowing of assets, can bring to a whole new audience of users to conventional finance (TradFi), with the possibility of compliance guardrails in place and abstracting away the headache of dealing in smart contracts.

The common pattern is best described as growing a “DeFi mullet,” according to Alchemy, a picks and shovels provider for blockchain builders that has been described as the “AWS of crypto,” a reference to Amazon Web Services, the ubiquitous cloud computing platform that powers much of today’s internet.

“I see firms like Fidelity, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Revolut and Robinhood, who are all at different stages of evolution, but who all want to allow their users to take their funds, like their USD or like fiat money funds, and then use DeFi tools,” Alchemy CTO Guillaume Poncin said in an interview.

“The common pattern is best described by the term ‘DeFi mullet.’ These are the most interesting use cases, I think, where you can use DeFi under the hood, and the user doesn’t even really need to know that that’s happening,” Poncin said.

A concrete example of this type of thing is the way users of U.S.-listed exchange Coinbase (COIN) can easily get loans in exchange for locking up their bitcoin BTC, a type of margin loan that retail investors don’t normally get access to, Poncin pointed out.

“Now it should be possible for Fidelity to offer these types of margin loans against your money-market fund account, as an example,” Poncin said. “All of this is plumbed into [crypto] wallets and DeFi, so that as a user, it’s just one click. You want a loan against your Vanguard holdings? Here is a loan.”

“I think a lot of fintechs are looking at that as a great proof of concept of what can be done. if you’re tokenizing your money-market fund or tokenizing your other assets, private equity, whatever, eventually what you want is to give your users utility over that. And the utility vehicle is DeFi.”

Alchemy appeared around five years ago, offering a developer platform for firms looking to build large scale blockchain operations. The firm went on to offer programmable links between programs known as APIs, allowing for data indexing, smart contract automation and smart wallets that feel invisible and intuitive, Poncin said. APIs, in effect, put the software plumbing behind the scenes and ease the burden on end users.

“The old school way with blockchain wallets would involve installing Metamask, but that’s a very cumbersome process,” Poncin said. “The new trend is, if you are Nike or Stripe, you want to provide crypto wallets to your users they don’t even know about; they’re completely invisible under-the-hood wallets.”

CORRECT (June 23, 08:52 UTC): Corrects spelling of Revolut in fourth paragraph.

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Coinbase Outpaces S&P 500 With 43% June Rise as Stablecoin Narrative Grows: CNBC

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Shares of Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN) rose 43% this month, making the firm the top performer in the S&P 500 since it joined the index at the end of last month.

June’s run is already the stock’s best since November and caps three straight monthly gains. Coinbase’s shares reached their highest level since their public debut.

COIN hit a $382 high this week before enduring a slight correction, ending the week at $353 and seeing a slight 0.7% drop in after-hours trading to $351.

The wider S&P 500 index rose roughly 5% in June as geopolitical tensions eased.

Washington’s progress on the GENIUS Act, Congress’s first rulebook for dollar-pegged stablecoins, helped shift investor focus from trading fees to stablecoin revenue.

The bill brightened the outlook for Circle, whose shares hit a record high and saw its market cap near that of Coinbase this week.

Coinbase keeps all yield on USDC balances held on its platform and nearly half of other USDC income, equal to about 99 percent of Circle’s revenue, giving shareholders indirect exposure at no added cost, CNBC reported Friday, citing analysts including Citizens’ head of financial technology research Devin Ryan.

Trading, however, remains subdued. Average daily volume on Coinbase has drifted lower since April.

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Robinhood Launches Micro Bitcoin, Solana and XRP Futures Contracts

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Robinhood (HOOD) has introduced micro futures on bitcoin (BTC), solana (SOL) and XRP in the United States., expanding its existing crypto futures offering for its nearly 26 million funded accounts.

Micro contracts need far less collateral than full-size futures, letting traders take directional positions while committing a smaller slice of capital.

The contracts offer traders more flexibility to bet on a cryptocurrency’s future price direction or hedge current positions given their smaller size.

The launch rounds out a futures suite that began with BTC and ETH in January. It also comes weeks after the firm closed its $200 million purchase of Bitstamp and finalized a $179 million deal for Canada’s WonderFi.

Robinhood’s data shows that crypto notional volumes have exploded upward over time, reaching $11.7 billion in May. The figure marks a 36% rise month-over-month, and a 65% growth year-over-year.

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Why is XRP Up Today? Trio of Catalysts Sees Token Outperform Wider Crypto Market

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XRP climbed 5.5% to $2.19 in the last 24 hours after a trio of catalysts converged to help the cryptocurrency outperform the wider cryptocurrency market.

One of the catalysts was launch of XRP micro futures on Robinhood. The contracts offer traders more flexibility to bet on the cryptocurrency’s future price direction or hedge current positions given their smaller size.

Regulatory fog also thinned. On Friday, Ripple withdrew its cross-appeal in its long-running U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit. The SEC sued Ripple back in 2020 over its XRP sales, alleging these violated securities laws. The SEC is expected to drop its own appeal, leaving last year’s ruling, ordering Ripple to pay a $125 million civil penalty to the SEC, intact. The move could lift a lid that had kept some investors on the sidelines.

On-chain data rounded out the bullish setup. The XRP Ledger logged over a 1.1 million active addresses over the past week according to crypto analyst Ali Martinez, who cited Glassnode data.

XRP’s rise saw it outperform the wider crypto market, with the broader CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index rising 1.7% in the last 24 hours.

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