QuickNode raises $60M in Series B to advance blockchain adoption

  • QuickNode is a Web3 platform developing tools and software solutions designed to accelerate blockchain adoption.
  • The company raised its $60 million series B in a round led by 10T Holdings.
  • QuickNode plans to use the funds to grow its team and scale its activities and tools.

QuickNode, a blockchain infrastructure provider helping to power the Web3 ecosystem, has raised $60 million in a Series B round.

10T Holdings, a digital assets-focused mid to late-stage equity fund, led the round, according to details in a blog post published on Tuesday. 

The funding round also attracted participated from Seven Seven Six, a venture capital fund co-founded in 2020 by Alex Ohanian. Other investors who have backed QuickNode’s latest round include Tiger Global and QED Investors.

The mission is to power Web3 growth

Per QuickNode, the funding will help spearhead further adoption of the blockchain technology across the Web3 industry.

With this funding, we will further solidify ourselves as the most performant blockchain development platform and accelerate our mission to support Web3 developers in building the foundation for a decentralized, globally connected future,” the QuickNode team noted.

QuickNode, founded in 2017, continued to see growth in 2022 despite the broader crypto market downturn that resulted in the collapse of some leading crypto-focused companies.

After raising $35 million in its series A round in October 2021, the blockchain platform grew its team by 300% while the user base expanded 400% in 2022. The company plans to use the capital injection to grow its team further and make inroads across new markets around the world.

“The Series B round, led by 10T, provides our tree with sufficient nutrients, allowing us the ideal opportunity to continue building and shipping useful, meaningful & innovative products which will power the Internet for decades to come,” Dmitry Shklovsky, co-founder of QuickNode said in a statement.

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Swiss Bank Cité Gestion hires digital assets firm Taurus to tokenize its shares

  • Cité Gestion is the first bank to tokenize its own shares.
  • The bank has partnered with digital assets firm Taurus in issuing tokenized shares.
  • The tokenized shares have been created in accordance with Capital Markets and Technology Association (CMTA).

Cité Gestion, a private Swiss private bank, has partnered with digital assets firm Taurus to tokenize its own shares. The move shows the bank’s intentions to delve deeper into blockchain technology.

The move is the first by a traditional bank to issue shares as ledger-based securities under Swiss law.

Digitization of company shares

Taurus will be responsible for issuing the tokenized shares and also performing asset servicing of the securities.

In a statement by Taurus after the bank’s press release, Taurus said:

“Taurus believes that digitization of private assets and securities is becoming the new standard in the digital asset industry.”

Cité Gestion shares tokenization comes after another investment management firm Hamilton Lane (HLNE) announced it was partnering with digital asset securities company Securitize to tokenize three of its funds. Hamilton Lane’s announcement followed a similar one by investment giant KKR in September which announced it was tokenizing its Health Care Strategic Growth Fund using Avalanche (AVAX/USD) blockchain.

Following the CMTA standards

Cité Gestion followed the standards of the Capital Markets and Technology Association (CMTA) in tokenizing its shares to ensure it was compliant with the law.

The deputy CEO of Cité Gestion, Christophe Utelli, said:

“Taurus and the application of the CMTA standards ensure that an adequate risk management framework is at the heart of the process.”

Most important, the tokenized assets were created using CMTAT, an open-source smart contract published by the CMTA, and it is recorded on the Ethereum blockchain.

Taurus, the firm responsible for issuing the tokenized shares was launched in 2018 and it has a securities license which it obtained from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority last year. It has been involved in the tokenization of fifteen companies so far.

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Samsung expands mobile wallet app to 8 more countries

  • Samsung has announced it will roll out its Samsung Wallet mobile app to another eight countries.
  • The Korea firm launched the app in June 2022, and expanded it to 21 countries before the latest announcement.
  • The wallet app integrates with the Samsung Blockchain Wallet for cryptocurrencies.

Samsung Electronics has announced that its unified mobile wallet application Samsung Wallet will now be available in eight more countries.

The South Korea-based tech giant revealed it would be rolling out the wallet app across Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Canada, India, Malaysia and Taiwan. Support for the Samsung Wallet in these countries will go live by the end of January.

However, the company noted in a news release that the exact timing of the launch will vary and depend on user devices and the specific market.

Samsung’s mobile payments platform grows

Samsung launched the wallet app in 2022, with support since its unveiling in June having increased from an initial seven countries to 21 countries by the date of the latest announcement.

Currently, the Samsung Wallet app is available for Samsung Galaxy users in Korea, UK, the US, Bahrain, China, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Norway, Oman, Qatar, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Vietnam, and the United Arab Emirates.

More than a payments platform, the app also integrates with the Samsung Blockchain Wallet and comes with safety features enhanced by Samsung Knox, an inbuilt proprietary security platform.

So, while Samsung’s wallet app is not crypto-specific, users with supported devices can leverage it to do things like keeping tabs on their digital assets portfolio. The wallet allows for this via an interface that enables access to cryptocurrency prices across multiple exchanges.

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Former FTX.US president raises $5 million seed round for new venture Architect

  • Former FTX president Brett Harrison has announced his new project has raised $5 million from investors.
  • Backers include Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures and SV Angel among others.
  • Architect is buildig new institutional-grade trading technology.

Brett Harrison, the former FTX.US president, has raised $5 million in a seed round funding for his new crypto project for institutional investors.

The new platform is a decentralised finance (DeFi) venture dubbed Architect and has been in stealth development since last September.

Architect raises $5 million in seed round

An announcement Harrison released on Friday stated that Architect had secured the $5 million investment from some of the top venture investors within the crypto space, including Coinbase Ventures and Circle Ventures. 

Other investors to back the former FTX.US president’s startup Architect are SALT Fund, Third King Venture Capital, Motivate Venture Capital and SV Angel. SkyBridge Capital’s Antony Scaramucci has also invested in the new crypto software project.

Architect is building trading software that aims at streamlining the crypto markets. According to Harrison, Architect will make it easier for large investors to enter and explore both centralised and decentralised crypto markets.  

Architect will build institutional-grade trading technology that streamlines crypto market structure, making it easier and safer for firms and large traders to access decentralized protocols and centralized exchanges alike,” Harrison tweeted.

A report by Bloomberg noted that Architect plans to hire some of the talent that worked at FTX as they eye the launch of Architect within the next few months.

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Fun Over Profits: NFT Gaming Takes the Stage


Key takeaway

  • The Play to Earn model became the starting point in the NFT gaming development but created a sustainable concept – NFT games are not for fun. They are for making money only.

  • Players do not support P2E games since making money during the red market is more challenging, and these games cannot offer anything interesting. 

  • A new branch of industry is emerging that listens to users and develops games emphasising engagement and emotions. 

  • Combined with the best traditions of WEB 2.0 games, the use of NFT becomes the realisation of an exciting tool that allows players to immerse in addictive gameplay and unleash their creativity while engaging in the game.

NFT space continues to battle user attraction and retention

The NFT direction has kept the crypto industry in good shape for several years. It has evolved from funny cats into a global trend that responds to all market circumstances and user requirements.

We have all witnessed the birth of NFT gaming and its several cycles of hype. The most powerful impetus for the jump was the appearance of good Play to Earn model implementation, where enthusiasts could earn thousands of dollars by completing in-game tasks. Not surprisingly, this motivation attracted a lot of users and started a vast P2E craze, where projects claiming to develop a game received large trading volumes.

Their essence is approximately the same –  users need to buy in-game objects, resources, and various virtual items to start playing. The cost of these virtual items ranges from a few cents to hundreds of dollars, but you can buy them only with in-game currency. Then, users who have purchased the necessary characters and resources begin to compete with each other and complete tasks, receiving rewards in the form of in-game currency that can be converted into real money.

The idea of such games is excellent. It’s a win-win story for both game creators and players. However, the problem was that many of these games were not fun to play. Many of the early P2E games had rudimentary gameplay, basic graphics, and nothing more than rewards. The biggest challenge has always been user attraction and retention. And as soon as the crypto market bounced into the red zone in 2022, many P2P games focusing only on earning rewards began to lose users rapidly. When the game is not very fun, and players are kept only by receiving crypto rewards against a falling market, the attraction steadily goes to zero. 

Investors in 2023 are looking for more than clone NFT games

Thus, the current Play to Earn games are only a transitional stage, a link in the evolution of the entire gaming industry because it is impossible to exclude the NFT influence on the global gaming market. Already, unique NFT-based games are emerging that focus on gameplay and appeal to traditional players. They combine the best traditions of WEB 2.0 games and WEB 3.0 technological possibilities. 

Investors in 2023 are looking towards something other than clone NFT games with only promises and cute websites. Now everyone is thinking about the players, the gameplay, and how to keep users from getting bored, immersing them in a unique world that captivates them for a long time.

Using the example of the Chainers project, which is powered by Polygon, you can trace an improved model for creating NFT games. The team’s mission is to create a fascinating and addictive gameplay that will make Chainers stand out from other NFT games. Crypto game creators are interested in emotional connection with their players and develop strategies based on the users’ interests. In this context, NFT gives much more than just a few cents from some NFT elephant. 

Chainers is a crafting story based on the creative economy and a fancy design, which traditional players worldwide appreciate. Players don’t need to buy their first asset to explore their adventures. The free-to-start concept immediately removes the barriers and lets them into the unique world of NFT gaming, which includes full self-expression, rich design, the ability to play by your own rules and get tremendous pleasure from completing various tasks. The team is on track with their roadmap and has already implemented several features that scale the Chainers community. The developers’ task is to provide value to the players already at the first release stage and not to make them wait until the long process of developing the game is completed.

In addition to the free NFT avatar, the community is attracted by the daily NFT free giveaways that provide unique assets to upgrade the character. In the near future, players will also have an AR feature with which everyone can let out their Chainer into the real world. Of course, the NFT game will include a marketplace and its own tokens, but the main release is the Chainers MMO game. It is worth noting that Chainers already has a strong community of more than 60k members. It consists of creators, musicians, artists, and other NFT enthusiasts. They united by a joint mission – to create their new world, get unique skins for their characters, and unleash their creativity by participating in grandiose events with crypto prizes. 

Fun defeats the volatile nature of the crypto market and becomes a driver for the development of NFT gaming.  

The gaming industry has always been at the forefront of technological innovation, and NFT-enabled games are no exception. This direction is rapidly developing, growing, and changing people’s attitudes toward digital assets and creativity. The future of NFT is a world of colourful ideas. Although technology is constantly improving and is already very different from basic projects, this sector is becoming more significant.

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