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This Week in DeFi - March 4

This Week in DeFi - March 4

This week, Electric Capital raises $1b for Web3, 1inch intros P2P swaps, Nested raises $7.5m, and VALR gets $50m for crypto in Africa

March 04, 2022

To the DeFi community,

This week, Electric Capital announced $1 billion in capital split between two funds, $400 million for VC investments and $600 million for investing in crypto tokens. The crypto-centric funding will be used to bolster projects in DeFi, decentralized infrastructure, and the NFT space, while also supporting participation in DAOs and helping grow Web3 participation.

1/ @ElectricCapital has raised $1 billion in new capital, our largest fundraise yet.
The web3 economy built on top of the programmable money stack will be one of the defining disruptions of the 2020s.
Where are we going to invest $1 billion?
mirror.xyz/electriccap.et…
🧵👇
— Avichal - Electric ϟ Capital (@avichal)
4:43 PM • Mar 1, 2022

1inch added support for P2P swaps on all supported chains, creating a potential new option to compete with OTC desks or other trades that can’t support large trades without significant slippage. Sharing addresses is also done via URLs instead of 1inch backend infrastructure, ensuring the tool remains permissionless and censorship resistant.

1/ It’s time to broaden the scope of DeFi services available to our users!
🦄 #1inch is happy to introduce a #P2P feature, which facilitates 🛡️ secure #crypto swaps between individual users.
Read more ⤵️
blog.1inch.io/1inch-adds-a-p…
— 1inch Network (@1inch)
3:03 PM • Mar 3, 2022

Nested Finance raised $7.5 million in a preliminary funding round including famous British investor Alan Howard. Nested also released details on its upcoming Nested Portfolio, an NFT serving as a unique identifier for customizable baskets of DeFi, CeFi, and NFT positions as well as copy trading and social sharing capabilities.

🎉 Our fundraising news is out: thanks to our institutional partners for their support including @CMTDigitalLtd, Republic Capital (@joinrepublic) @KeneticCapital, and Alan Howard's family office.
💯 Get ready for our next updates about our legendary team of angel investors!
— Nested 🧩 (@NestedFi)
3:46 PM • Mar 2, 2022

And South African crypto exchange VALR raised $50 million in a Series B round that they claim as the largest ever for an African crypto company. Funds will go towards expanding VALR to additional countries in Africa and beyond, hiring additional developer and administrative support, and building additional exchange products and features.

VALR, a cryptocurrency exchange based in South Africa, has raised USD 50M in what the company says is the largest funding round ever for an African crypto firm.
The funding values VALR at USD 240M, more than 10X its valuation in July 2020 when it raised USD3.4M in its Series A.
— Mwango Capital (@MwangoCapital)
3:02 PM • Mar 3, 2022

Financial inclusion is a key component of the overall value proposition of cryptocurrencies and the Web3 ecosystem, even if other aspects often grab the headlines. Providing crypto services to parts of the world that have been largely left out of the traditional financial system presents unique challenges and opportunities, but presents probably the strongest option for making a positive impact on the greatest number of people, allowing them to live a more stable and comfortable life, without giving up culture that makes them unique or requiring relocation to a more advanced urban setting.

With new sanctions emerging and governments taking crypto questions more seriously than ever, the temptation remains to try to fit the digital asset industry into boxes created for legacy finance. But to do so would be to artificially constrict an orders-of-magnitude jump in the efficiency of moving value around the world, potentially locking out those that have been physically distant from centers of capital for another generation, at least.

Freedom and stability are fragile, and too often taken for granted in western economies, where access to financial tools is reasonably robust and capital seems abundant. But humanity has a duty to extend those assets beyond our borders, for the sake of empathy and because it will make the world a more vibrant, accessible, happy place to live. Crypto can’t solve everything, but its potential is limited more today by our imaginations than by the capabilities we now possess. Let’s make the most of them.

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