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Zebec Protocol, which enables real-time, continuous payments to employees, has launched on Solana. The company also  announced a $5.5 million funding round co-led by Republic Capital.

Zebec Protocol’s first application is Zebec Payroll, a tax compliant on-chain processing system that allows workers to be paid by the second based on their pay rate in USDC or other stablecoins. Employees have the option to withdraw all of the money, automatically convert a portion of their paycheck into top cryptocurrencies or allocate funds to compliant crypto IRA and 401k accounts.

How it works

Payers connect with Zebec using Phantom Wallet, enter the recipient’s wallet address and then start streaming. The recipient receives the funds in their stream wallet and can withdraw that balance to turn into real-world cash. Throughout the process, Zebec handles the money completely on-chain.

The Solana blockchain can power up to 50,000 transactions per second for relatively low fees. Zebec says a new cash stream on the protocol can be established in minutes for a Solana gas or transaction fee of a fraction of a cent.

“What we are basically enabling is making money continuous.” Zebec CEO Sam Thapaliya told CoinDesk in an interview. “Imagine I send you $100 over 10 days, and you’re receiving money every single second. It makes money programmable. It makes money a continuous flow and enables completely new possibilities for how money can function in the world.”

Funding round

The funding round was led by Republic Capital, Shima Capital and Breyer Capital with participation from Launchpad Capital, Meltem Demirors, Resolute Ventures, Infinity Ventures Crypto and Joe McCann.

Thapaliya told CoinDesk that half of the money will go towards increasing Zebec’s developer ecosystem. The rest will help get the product out as fast as possible and with as many features as possible.

“The growth of the digital economy has been hindered by a lack of tax-compliant, frictionless payment processing technologies. Zebec finally makes it easy for anyone to send and receive cash in real-time without intermediaries, delays or risks of non payment,” said Republic Capital co-founder and Managing Director Christian Sullivan in the press release.

What’s next

Zebec’s near-term plans include getting the product out, a private sale in December and a public sale in February, Thapaliya said. The company is also gearing up for its SHIP 2021 hackathon, sponsored by the Solana Foundation, which encourages developers and hackers to build products on the protocol.

The ultimate goal is to take Zebec global. Thapaliya was born during the civil war in Nepal and grew up without access to bank accounts.

“I lived through a couple of dictators, a couple of communist rulers. And the one thing that was not there for us was bank accounts.” Thapaliya said.”

“I hope to make [this product] global so that one day everyone in the world is able to get access to capital in real time without middlemen withholding money and taking cuts,” he added.

CoreWeave, the specialized cloud service provider and Ethereum miner, has raised $50 million from Magnetar Capital to provide high-performance computing infrastructure.

“With this new round of growth financing, CoreWeave will expand its offering to make high performance computing available at the industry’s best performance-adjusted cost on a vastly broader scale,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said in a statement on Wednesday.

The company said its cloud business grew 271% over the last 3 months and expects its total revenue to triple in 2021.

CoreWeave, which primarily provides cloud services, applies computing power unused by its cloud clients to mine Ether. In total, the company operates over 1,200 GH of ETHash [Ethereum’s mining algorithm] equivalent hashrate, making it one of the largest Ethereum miners in North America, according to an emailed statement to CoinDesk.

Galaxy Digital, a leading diversified financial services and investment management company in the digital asset space, served as exclusive financial advisor and sole placement agent for CoreWeave’s financing round.

Magneter was founded by Alec Litowitz, the former principal and global head of equities at hedge fund Citadel Investment Group, along with Ross Laser, former president and managing partner at another hedge fund, Glenwood Capital. The company had $13.8 billion in assets under management as of June 30, according to its website.

Foundry Digital, which is among the world’s top five bitcoin mining pools, launched a new business called “Foundry Staking” to provide services to institutions related to various proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain networks.

“We have made significant investments in engineering talent and PoS infrastructure to replicate our mining success in the fast-growing staking industry,” said Foundry CEO Mike Colyer, in a statement on Wednesday.

Proof-of-stake is the name of the consensus mechanism that requires users to stake an amount of cryptocurrency to become validators, as opposed to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work that requires users to purchase and run mining equipment.

Foundry will tailor its staking business to institutions such as exchanges, wallets, custodians, hedge funds, banks and venture capital firms. It will also provide various white-glove,customizable services for the mining pool’s clients.

Furthermore, the business will collaborate with digital asset prime brokerage Genesis to provide its clients with various treasury management services.

Foundry’s North America-based bitcoin mining pool represents about 13% of total hashrate, with over 20 exahashes per second of mining power, according to network data collected by BTC.com.

Foundry Staking’s range of services will cover 20 blockchain networks including Solana, Helium, The Graph and Horizen, according to a statement on Wednesday.

Foundry is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which is the parent company of CoinDesk.

Cryptocurrency broker Voyager Digital said its loyalty program has driven a sharp increase in funded accounts, which now number 1 million.

• That is a 23-fold increase from the end of last year, when it had 43,000 funded accounts, the company said in a statement.
• The broker reported an increase of 135,000 funded accounts in November alone.
• Voyager Digital also said it has now surpassed 2.7 million verified users.
• “Our strategy of focusing on our loyalty program and on customer acquisition in the September quarter paid off extremely well for us as we continue to gain market share reflected by our increased App Store rankings,” said CEO Steve Ehrlich.
• Another factor in the sharp rise of funded accounts is high profile partnerships with professional athletes Landon Cassill and Rob Gronkowski and a five-year integrated partnership with the Dallas Mavericks.
• Voyager also partnered with Fundstrat and its co-founder Tom Lee, and Market Rebellion led by Jon and Pete Najarian.

Read more: Voyager Digital a Step Closer to Operating in EU After French Regulatory Approval

The main U.S. inflation rate surged last month to its fastest in three decades, according to a Labor Department report Wednesday likely to be closely tracked by bitcoin traders.

The Consumer Price Index for all items rose 6.2% in the 12 months through October, the highest since 1990. Economists had projected an increase in the October CPI of 5.9% over the past 12 months.

Inflation is closely tracked by cryptocurrency traders, since many bitcoin investors say the digital asset – whose supply is limited by the underlying blockchain’s programming – can serve as a hedge against rising prices.

Bitcoin’s price has more than doubled this year, supporting a broad rally in cryptocurrencies, where the total market value of all digital tokens recently topped $3 trillion for the first time.

The bitcoin price hit an all-time high close to $69,000 earlier this week.

As of press time the largest cryptocurrency was changing hands around $67,400 – up 1.4% since the report came out at 13:30 coordinated universal time (8:30 a.m. ET).

Economists say that supply-chain bottlenecks, shipping constraints and even limited warehouse space as the coronavirus pandemic retreats might be helping to fuel higher prices. That’s in addition to a tight labor market that has put upward pressure on wages. Companies often try to pass these extra costs along to consumers in the form of higher retail prices.

There’s also speculation that the trillions of dollars of money-printing over the past couple years by the Federal Reserve and other central banks might be contributing to dollar debasement – further supporting the investment case for bitcoin, since its supply is tightly controlled.

The University of Cambridge is developing a blockchain-based market for trading carbon credits that will support reforestation projects to preserve biodiversity.

• The U.K. university has established the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits where computer scientists and conservation scientists will work together on the project.
• The center will look at how the purchase of carbon credits can be used to fund nature-based solutions preserving biodiversity.
• The marketplace will be built on the Tezos blockchain, chosen because it is a sustainable option.
• A carbon credit is a permit that allows the holder to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas, such as methane.
• The Cambridge project joins other blockchain climate initiatives announced in the run-up to the COP26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland as concern over global climate change has mounted. In July, China introduced a carbon trading system, to be followed by a token-based carbon neutrality project in Singapore in September.
• Earlier this month, the crypto exchange BitMEX bought $100,000 worth of carbon credits, representing 7,110 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, enough to offset its bitcoin carbon footprint for the next year.
• At the end of last year, the Universal Protocol Alliance, a coalition of blockchain companies led by Uphold, Bittrex Global, Ledger, Certik and Infinigold, announced the launch of the “UPCO2″ token.

Read more: The Top Universities for Blockchain by CoinDesk 2021

The governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) believes that the number of Indians reported to be investing in crypto could be “exaggerated.”

• Shaktikanta Das said he is “not so sure about the numbers which being quoted,” in an interview, which was part of financial newspaper Business Standard’s BFSI Insight Summit on Wednesday.
• “With a reasonable amount of confidence, I think the number of participants in the crypto market seems somewhat exaggerated,” he said, but admitted the RBI does not have a completely clear view as it is an unregulated sector.
• Das added that 70% or more of participants had only invested around INR 1,000-INR 3,000 ($13-$40).
• The central bank governor was responding to recent suggestions that adoption of crypto was among the highest in the world with some 7.3% of the population owning cryptocurrency.
• Crypto is a “very serious concern” for the RBI owing to matters of macroeconomic and financial stability, Das had previously said in the interview.
• India’s government looked poised to introduce legislation outright banning crypto earlier this year, but this stance has since softened with suggestions that cryptocurrency would be regulated as an asset class like commodities.

Read more: India’s Newest Crypto ‘Unicorn’ CoinSwitch Kuber in Talks with Government over Regulation: Report

Genopets, a non-fungible token (NFT) “move-to-earn” game where players receive rewards for their real-life actions, is teaming up with Yield Guild Games (YGG) to expand play-to-earn gaming globally, the company announced Wednesday.

YGG is a gaming guild that assembles players who can then earn rewards via blockchain-based economies. A guild makes play-to-earn games accessible by covering initiation costs in exchange for a revenue-sharing agreement.

Genopets said YGG has bought Genopets governance tokens (GENE) worth $25,000 and will be producing YGG-branded Habitat NFTs worth $50,000 to initiate scholars in the Genoverse. GenoPets’ guild model allows players to rent a “habitat,” which is the entry level item required to expedite the earning process.

“Genopets is offering a different kind of gaming experience to YGG’s growing community, that will allow our guild members to move while they play and earn,” YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon said.

While guilds most commonly exist in the GameFi space as third-party platforms, Genopets says building the guild directly into a game makes the process more efficient because of the use of smart contracts.

“Some of these guilds are literally using spreadsheets to keep track of their players’ earnings,” Jay Chang, co-founder of GenoPets, told CoinDesk in an interview. “Our system saves everyone time, and lets the guilds focus more on other things, like the educational component.”

GenoPets completed an $8.3 million funding round in October led by Konvoy Ventures and Pantera Capital. The Solana gaming ecosystem also received a $100 million pledge from FTX, Lightspeed and Solana Ventures last week.

With the progress being made on the Beacon Chain over the past few weeks, I wanted to use this week’s newsletter to give an overview of the CoinDesk validator and its brief history.

About nine months ago when ether was just $1,600, the CoinDesk team deposited 32 ETH to the staking contract to launch our very own Beacon Chain validator, dubbed “Zelda.” Since then, we’ve gained access to insights across the Beacon Chain and the responsibilities that come alongside securing the proof-of-stake network.

This article originally appeared in Valid Points, CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter breaking down Ethereum 2.0 and its sweeping impact on crypto markets. Subscribe to Valid Points here.

While this newsletter showcases weekly graphic updates on the validator’s progress, we wanted to provide a few written takeaways of our results. Furthermore, it’s easy to track our day-to-day activity and rewards on beaconcha.in.

Our total reward balance as of Monday is 1.6165 ETH, averaging 0.0061 ETH in rewards per day. While we have a current estimated annual percentage rate (APR) of 6.97%, new validators will continue to come online and lower the returns until they reach an optimized floor of 3%.

Validator rewards mainly come from participating in three events:

• Attestations: “A validator vote for a Beacon Chain or shard block. Validators must attest to blocks, signaling that they agree with the state proposed by the block.”
• Block Proposals: “A randomly selected validator is tasked with proposing a new block every slot (12 seconds).”
• Sync Committees: “A sync committee is a group of 512 validators, randomly assigned by the Ethereum 2.0 network. A new committee is chosen every 256 epochs, roughly 27 hours.”

Zelda has executed 59,363 attestations and missed only 129. Our missed attestations were mostly a result of a delayed upgrade to Altair, which was promptly solved so that attesting could resume within hours of the upgrade.

Block proposals are few and far between for individual validators because only 7,200 blocks are produced each day and more than 256,000 validators are live on the Beacon Chain, giving Zelda a 2.8% chance of getting a block proposal each day. In fact, we had zero proposals between June 2 and Oct. 5. Thankfully, Zelda has resumed cranking out block proposals, with two during the last month.

Although block proposals outweigh attestations in one-time rewards, over the lifetime of a validator attestations become much more important. Post-Altair, Zelda’s breakdown should consist of 84% attestation rewards, 12.5% block proposal rewards and 3.5% sync committee rewards.

We’ll continue to include weekly Zelda updates in this newsletter, and we’ll provide a deeper dive on our performance to offer a look at our relative validator standings as we get closer to the impending Merge!

Welcome to another edition of Valid Points.

Pulse check

The following is an overview of network activity on the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain over the past week. For more information about the metrics featured in this section, check out our 101 explainer on Eth 2.0 metrics.

Disclaimer: All profits made from CoinDesk’s Eth 2.0 staking venture will be donated to a charity of the company’s choosing once transfers are enabled on the network.

Validated takes

• Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital made a token investment in Parallel, a Polkadot-based lending project. BACKGROUND: Venture capital firms have had differing stances on token and equity investing, causing negative reactions from crypto users and natives. Parallel plans to give the token utility through governance and transaction fees, offering token investors a chance to play a vital role in the ecosystem.
• FTX, Lightspeed and Solana Ventures started an initiative to invest $100 million in Web 3 gaming. BACKGROUND: Blockchain-based gaming has gained traction in both the crypto and gaming communities alongside the rise in non-fungible tokens and the Axie Infinity video game. While scalability and user experience have been a bump in the road for a lot of projects, play-to-earn and in-game ownership have piqued the interest of gamers around the world.
• Reddit further detailed its plans to launch on Arbitrum, a popular layer 2 scaling platform for Ethereum. BACKGROUND: An engineer from Reddit’s crypto team announced the company’s goal of decentralizing social media and onboarding 500 million users into crypto. A vision shared by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Reddit is tokenization’s ability to share ownership, reward positive behavior and allow for community-driven innovation.
• Rocket Pool, a decentralized Eth 2.0 staking service, launched on Monday. BACKGROUND: Similar to other staking pools, Rocket Pool increases accessibility to Ethereum staking to those with fewer than 32 ETH or with lesser technical capabilities. Rocket Pool, however, is also completely trustless and has zero reliance on third parties or multisig wallets. The project also allows stakers to choose their client, which I hope will lead to further diversity across the Beacon Chain.

Factoid of the week

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) on Ethereum have facilitated over $1 trillion in trades over the past 12 months. Uniswap was largely responsible for the adoption, with over $500 million in volume alone.

Open comms

Valid Points incorporates information and data about CoinDesk’s own Eth 2.0 validator in weekly analysis. All profits made from this staking venture will be donated to a charity of our choosing once transfers are enabled on the network. For a full overview of the project, check out our announcement post.

You can verify the activity of the CoinDesk Eth 2.0 validator in real time through our public validator key, which is:

0xad7fef3b2350d220de3ae360c70d7f488926b6117e5f785a8995487c46d323ddad0f574fdcc50eeefec34ed9d2039ecb.

Search for it on any Eth 2.0 block explorer site

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) firm Zilch has announced a $110m Series C funding round led by Ventura Capital and Gauss Ventures. In the process, the company has tripled its valuation from $500 million to $2 billion — another sign that the BNPL boom isn’t set to end anytime soon.

Last month, Berlin’s Billie, a BNPL firm targeted at B2B payments, raised a $100m Series C led by Dawn Capital with participation from Chinese internet giant Tencent and fintech firm Klarna, a leader in the BNPL sector. 

Following in the footsteps of the Swedish giant, Zilch is planning to splash the cash on expanding into the United States, building out from its Miami office. 

Zilch differs from the typical BNPL fare as it was one of the first in the sector to be granted a consumer credit licence from the FCA, the United Kingdom’s financial regulatory body. Its product is also inherently different in that it allows customers to pay at any Mastercard accepting-merchant rather than through integrated checkout options. It hopes that this marks them out from the rest of the BNPL pack. 

“I’m not saying they’re bad businesses but they’re just copycats,” Zilch founder and CEO Philip Belamant told CNBC, in reference to other BNPL firms. “Our view was, you can’t come late to the party and just do something exactly the same way.”

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.