​​Persistence (XPRT) has started registration for public sale. Further public sale details will be revealed over the coming days. Persistence is building a suite of financial products aimed at providing accessibility & liquidity for the traditional and crypto assets. The incentivized testnet is expected in Q1 and mainnet release in Q2 this year.

​​DAOventures (DVG) token metrics. ​​DAOventures (DVG) announced new public sale date, February 15th. The sale will take place on Polkastarter platform. Whitelisting is open till Feb 9th.

​​BT Finance (BT) got exploited with flash loans. Around $1.5M drained. This exploit was similar to yearn DAI vault attack few days ago.

​​TORN (Tornado Cash) token has become transferable today. It is available for trading on Uniswap already. 5% of total supply has been airdropped to early users of Tornado.Cash ETH pools and 10% will be available for mining on the platform. Tornado Cash is one of the largest privacy solution on Ethereum atm.

​​The Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge (AEB) is now live. Users can seamlessly move assets like WBTC, AAVE, UNI, and LINK between the two ecosystems. According to the recent blog post nearly $1M has moved from Ethereum to Avalanche during first 4h.

​​Marlin and Ankr partner to make low-latency DeFi trading more accessible.​​ According to the recent blog post, Ankr will help users run Marlin nodes and gateways with its 1-click deployment solutions. Eventually, more block producers will start sending and receiving blocks from Marlin while full nodes operating on Ankr infrastructure will gain access to a low-latency transaction relay benefiting DeFi traders and arb bots alike.

​​Yearn Finance (YFI) has restored its yDAI vault. Following the recent exploit Yearn has opened a Maker Vault with YFI from the treasury to mint 9.7M DAI and make the yDAI vault whole.

​​Elrond parters with Exeedme to create new opportunities for gamers. According to the recent blog post, blockchain-based eSports platform Exeedme will accept eGold payments via Maiar. The collaboration will enable Maiar users to seize opportunities in the Exeedme ecosystem via top ups, purchases, bets, or subscriptions made on the platform.

​​Razor partners with Web3API to provide an enhanced UX for developers using Razor’s Oracle network. This partnership will enable Razor to use Web3API standard instead of creating multiple SDKs for different languages. This will help developers use Razor in any of the languages supported by Web3API, significantly improving their user experience.

​​Matic rebrands to Polygon and expands its tech scope to become layer 2 aggregator or Ethereum’s Internet of Blockchains. In addition to the currently implemented Matic PoS Chain and Plasma Chains, Polygon aims to offer other scaling solutions such as zkRollups, Optimistic Rollups, Validium, inter-chain communication protocols and data availability solutions. MATIC token will remain the native asset for the network.

​​Pangolin, a first DEX on Avalanche and its token PNG to be launched today. All PNG tokens will be distributed to the community, in a model known as a “fair launch.” PNG is capped at a supply of 538M tokens. 95% of tokens are dedicated to the community treasury, where they will initially be used to fund liquidity mining. 5% (26M tokens) are dedicated to a community airdrop to UNI and SUSHI holders that had tokens on December 7th, 2020.

​​OptionRoom partners with Litentry to accelerate the adoption of Aggregated DID. According to the blog post OptionRoom will link to the Litentry Aggregated Identity service to allow field experts to prove their identity and will aggregate governance data together with DID data to setup a trust score factor in certain fields for the oracle as a service users.

​​KuCoin has enabled deposits/withdrawals for USDT and USDC on Algorand. KuCoin will be the first trading platform to support USDC on Algorand. As part of this campaign USDC and USDT on Algorand will be available for staking with 12% APR.

​​CEX tokens pump week.

​​Polkamarkets has closed $625K private fundraising round. Moonrock Capital, Morningstar Ventures, NGC Ventures, Astronaut Capital and Spark Capital are among investors.
Polkamarkets is a gamified prediction market on Polkadot that aims to deliver MVP in Q1 and release the product in Q2 this year. Public sale date TBA.

​​Public Mint will have a public sale on Polkastarter. Date and details TBA. ​​Public Mint has closed $2.5M strategic investment round recently. It bridges traditional fiat and crypto, offering a complete platform for synthetic fiat, which is fully collateralized, regulated and FDIC insured.

​​OpenDefi will launch UniFarm Cohort 2 on February 13. UniFarm offers an opportunity to stake one token but get to farm many. After successful first try, UniFarm pool will offer the following tokens for staking: MATIC, ZEE, TVK, ROUTE, NORD and ORO. During the staking period (90 days) users are able to get the maximum APY and earn rewards from each participating project.

​​DuckDao has shared two projects that will have public fundraising via DuckStarter platform. DuckStarter is a new token sale launchpad. Vortex DeFi (a Polkadot powered DeFi web interface) and Shadows Network (a hub for issuing, trading, lending synthetic assets) will be the first projects available on the new platform. Dates and details TBA.

​​Ankr has launched ankrETH/ETH pool on Curve. ankrETH is a staked ETH with over 30,000 staked ETH. Users can earn ONX and ANKR by providing liquidity to the pool. CRV rewards will become available from midnight UTC.

​​Some of the recent private fundraising events among blockchain startups you should know about.

​​Mastercard to let merchants accept some cryptocurrencies directly later this year. According to the recent blog post the company is “preparing right now for the future of crypto and payments, announcing that this year Mastercard will start supporting select cryptocurrencies directly on our network.”