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Anvil Launches DeFi Protocol for Letters of Credit

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Payments remain the big unsolved use case of the internet. When we buy something online, we generally use a traditional payment method, like a credit card, which isn’t “native” to the experience. Your ability to transact with a merchant is verified by a third-party (like a bank), which raises costs and adds a lot of inconvenience for buyers and sellers.

Despite the huge growth of commerce online in the last three decades, most transactions occur outside of the browser. Marc Andreessen, who created Netscape, has referred to this as the internet’s “original sin.” “One would think it was the most obvious thing to do to build into the browser the ability to spend money, but you may have noticed that didn’t happen,” he said in 2019. “I think the original sin was that we couldn’t actually build economics, which is to say money, at the core of the internet.”

This matters because the cost is massive and borne by all of us. Economists have calculated the total cost of retail payments in the United States at as much as 2% of GDP, which is almost as much as the U.S. defense budget. Merchants frequently cite the cost of processing credit cards as some of their highest operating expenses, which is why many will ask you to pay additional charges to use a card in a store, or place a minimum on the amount one should spend. The United States, for all its ingenuity, has some of the highest social cost of payments in the developed world, numerous studies show.

We tend to forget that bitcoin was first proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto as a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” because a lot of crypto today isn’t focused on this use case. But maybe the next iteration of crypto development will help fix that.

That’s certainly the hope of Tyler Spalding, the founder of an Anvil, a new decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol that reconceptualizes credit, which is the basis of all monetary systems.

How it works

Anvil is a system of Ethereum smart contracts that manages collateral and secures credit. It lets individuals and companies create letters of credit (LOCs) in lieu of traditional forms of money. You use it by locking up ether or USDC in the Anvil vault and receive an LOC for the specified amount. In effect, the system is a lot like a bank check that’s cashed against your account, except there’s no paper, delays or worries about whether the money will clear.

Spalding sees Anvil as a new form of money collateralized with crypto. “By issuing transparent and generalizable credit, Anvil provides sustainable liquidity — essentially creating trusted money for the global economic system,” he said. “Permissionless decentralized technologies can transform how collateral is managed by making the process more secure and more transparent.”

At the protocol level, there are no fees to transact with Anvil, Spalding said, and the technology is open-source. It’s community owned with 60% of the governance token distribution to partners and users, who can vote on operational matters. Spalding, who previously co-founded Flexa, a blockchain-based payments network, sees use cases for Anvil in traditional loans, DeFi counterparty credit (for exchanges or liquidity providers), asset bridging and payments. Three partners have indicated they want to build services using the protocol: Amdax, a digital asset trading and custody provider; Empowermint, which provides retail cash loans; and Flexa, which is using the protocol for asset collateralization against payments on its network. Because Anvil is open-source, these partners use the protocol freely, building their own services.

Anvil has no investors. The protocol was bootstrapped by Spalding and his collaborators over two years of development. Its systems were audited by Open Zeppelin and Trail of Bits, and Immunefi organized two bug bounty programs to find flaws needing to be fixed. Spalding feels comfortable that the system is safe for its ambitious aim of disintermediating banks from the payments and traditional credit-issuing process.

“We’ve been doing it a long time. We love this stuff,” Spalding said of his goal of bringing native payments to the internet and atoning for Andreessen’s original sin. “We want to get other people to get to use this. It’s a real-world use case. That’s the only thing that matters to me.”

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Circle Valuation Is ‘Outside Our Comfort Zone,’ Initiate at Underweight: JPMorgan

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Wall Street heavyweight JPMorgan (JPM) initiated coverage of stablecoin issuer Circle (CRCL) with an underweight rating and an underwhelming $80 price target.

The shares were trading 4.5% higher at around $189 at publication time.

Circle is well positioned, the bank said, and its USDC stablecoin has an «early-mover advantage,» with growing use cases in payments.

«We think highly of the Circle management team and are confident in the outlook for outsized stablecoin and USDC growth,» analysts led by Kenneth Worthington wrote.

Still, the analysts see the company’s market capitalization as elevated, and initiated coverage with an underweight rating. The stock priced at $31 a share in its initial public offering (IPO), and hit a record high of $299 last Monday.

Other Wall Street analysts were not as bearish. Broker Bernstein initiated coverage with an outperform rating and a $230 price target, saying Circle was an «investor must-hold.»

«CRCL is building a market-leading digital dollar stablecoin network, with a strong regulatory edge, liquidity headstart and marquee distribution partnerships,» analysts led by Gautam Chhugani wrote.

Bernstein is also bullish about the wider stablecoin market, and expects total market cap to reach around $4 trillion in the next decade from $225 billion today.

Rival broker Canaccord Genuity started coverage of Circle with a buy rating and a $247 price target.

The firm’s analysts view the issuer of USDC as «having many of the key attributes that could make it a long-term winner in this potentially very large and new market for truly digital money.»

Read more: Circle Mania Grips South Korea as Retail Investors Pile Into Stablecoin Play

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Popular Financial Advisor Ric Edelman Says Investors Should Allocate Up to 40% of Wealth to Crypto

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Prominent financial advisor Ric Edelman says investors should consider putting as much as 40% of their wealth into cryptocurrency, a bold recommendation that reflects how far digital assets have come in recent years.

“Today I am saying 40%, that’s astonishing,” Edelman told CNBC’s Crypto World on Friday. “No one has ever said such a thing.”

Edelman, founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, has been active in crypto for over a decade. He first urged investors to allocate part of their portfolios to bitcoin BTC in 2018. In his 2021 book “The Truth About Crypto,” he described even a 1% crypto allocation as “reasonable” for most people.

Now, Edelman believes the case for crypto exposure is far stronger, pointing to what he called a “massive change” in the industry over the past four years. In particular, he highlighted growing political support for digital assets, especially following the election of U.S. President Donald Trump.

“Today, all those questions have been resolved,” Edelman said, referring to regulatory uncertainty and institutional hesitation. “It’s radically changed and is now a mainstream asset.”

Edelman’s firm, Edelman Financial Engines, manages nearly $300 billion in assets. Though traditionally known for retirement planning and wealth management, the firm’s growing attention to digital assets mirrors a broader trend among financial institutions embracing crypto as a legitimate asset class.

Even though Edelman described crypto as the “best investment opportunity of the decade,” he acknowledged that a 40% allocation may not suit everyone, suggesting a more conservative 10% for those with lower risk tolerance.

Edelman’s recommendation marks one of the most aggressive calls from a mainstream financial figure to date. Most financial advisors in the U.S. are currently recommending well under 5% to their clients.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.

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BitMine Immersion Stock Triples as It Raises $250M for Ether Treasury, Adds Thomas Lee to Board

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BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) has secured $250 million via a private placement of common stock and will use the funds to launch an ether (ETH) treasury.

When the deal closes, expected July 3, the Las Vegas-based miner said it will rank among the largest publicly traded holders of ETH.

The financing, priced at $4.50 a share, brought together investors including Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Kraken, Galaxy Digital and Republic. Cantor Fitzgerald advised lead investor MOZAYYX, while ThinkEquity placed the deal.

BitMine justified its choice of ether as a primary reserve asset saying Ethereum currently leads in stablecoin payments, tokenized assets, and decentralized financial applications.

“By having a direcT ETH treasury position, the company has access to native protocol-level activities, such as staking and decentralized finance mechanisms, on the Ethereum network,” the company wrote.

The move also reshapes BitMine’s leadership. Fundstrat founder Thomas Lee, long known on Wall Street for his crypto research and bullishness, was newly appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Lee said the round reflects “the rapid and continued convergence of traditional financial services and crypto” and set a new key performance metric for the company: ether per share.

SharpLink Gaming (SBET) is one of the few other publicly traded companies creating and ether treasury, having recently boosted it to 188,478 ETH. Most other companies creating crypto treasuries focus on bitcoin (BTC).

BitMine’s shares have more than tripled in premarket action to nearly $14.

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