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SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) will go live later this month, according to two people familiar with the plans.

An important milestone for SDX, the digital-asset subsidiary of Switzerland’s main stock exchange operator SIX Group, was the receipt of two licenses from Swiss markets regulator FINMA in September.

“SDX is now ready to start operations and they will likely do the first live transactions towards the end of this month,” said one of the people, who has been working closely with SDX.

SDX declined to comment.

A go-live date has been a long time coming for SDX, fraught with delays and changes of leadership along the way.

In August SDX announced that David Newns from State Street would take over as CEO after Tim Grant, formerly of R3 Innovation Lab, left to join Galaxy Digital. The SDX project was originally led by Martin Halblaub, who quit in 2019 over strategic differences.

The FINMA approval cleared the way for SDX, which is built using the permissioned Corda architecture supplied by R3, to operate as an integrated trading, settlement and custody infrastructure for digital assets.

Cadenza Ventures has raised a $50 million crypto venture fund to invest in early stage digital finance and blockchain technology companies. Van Eck Associates anchored the fund with participation from Solana, Dapper Labs and WorldQuant Ventures, among others.

• Cadenza Ventures will invest globally in crypto platforms and blockchain technologies. The initial investments will include Middle Eastern cryptocurrency exchange Rain, Singapore-based crypto platform Vauld, Latin American digital wallet Lemon Cash, Solana-based yield aggregator Tulip Protocol and bitcoin-based game payments system Zebedee.
• “Advancements in blockchain technologies and decentralized finance are creating opportunities for products, platforms, and services that have a massive addressable market,” said Cadenza Ventures Managing Partner Kumar Dandapani in the press release.
• The fund is led by Cadenza Capital Management co-founders and managing partners Dandapani, formerly data science head at Norwest Venture Partners, and Max Shapiro, a veteran of Blue Line Advisors. Founded in 2018, Cadenza Capital Management has previously invested in seed and Series A investments in FalconX, BlockFi, CoinDCX and FTX’s Blockfolio.
• “Venture and private investments like this help VanEck better understand technology trends and to stay ahead of the curve in this rapidly developing area of finance. This enables us to develop and deliver best in class crypto and blockchain focused investment products for our clients,” said VanEck CEO Jan van Eck in the release.

Read More: Solana-Based Yield Aggregator Tulip Raises $5M

Meow has raised $5 million in a seed round of funding from Coinbase Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund and Lux Capital, among others.

Founded by a team of crypto veterans and former Gemini engineers, Meow is focused on developing a compliant-first approach to corporate treasury participation in crypto markets. The company says it can offer some protection from the risks of inflation, as well as provide crypto-sourced yield in fiat (USD), which is the way corporate treasurers are used to operating.

How it works

Corporate treasuries deposit cash and Meow partners with institutional crypto lending desks to make short-term high yield loans. Meow then collects yields and passes part of the returns back to its customers, who can access the funds within three business days.

“There are really innovative ways to potentially get higher yields on your cash from the cryptocurrency markets. Some of those are trading desks in the space … and some are decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols,” Meow co-founder and CEO Brandon Arvanaghi told CoinDesk in an interview. “Right now, to participate with these folks you need all sorts of bells and whistles. You need to custody your own funds. You need cryptocurrency wallets. Just a bunch of nonsense that nobody wants to deal with, especially corporate treasurers.”

On the other hand, Arvanaghi pointed out that corporate treasurers understand cash. “They want to deposit cash and take advantage of these potentially higher yields. That’s what we offer,” said Arvanaghi.

What’s next

Meow is currently in an early access stage of onboarding initial customers, but the company says it’s ready to scale now.

The company currently partners with two banks, Signature and Silvergate, and is in talks with “several” more banks to build out its network.

Meow anticipates raising additional funding in a Series A in the near future.

“We have not even mentioned that [Series A] letter to investors. It’s just there’s a lot of organic demand, which we’re blessed to be getting,” said Arvanaghi. He estimates that the Series A round could happen in about four months.

Fin VC, an asset management firm specialising in B2B fintech startups, has announced the closing of three new funds totalling more than $400m along with a $200m SPAC listing.

Now with more than $1 billion in assets under management, Fin VC plans to focus on investment in fintechs at every stage in their life cycle including pre-seed, Series B, growth and even public listings. 

The Wall Street Journal reported in May that the firm sought $300m for two new funds focused on early stage and growth-stage fintechs. 

With a London Q1 2022 expansion in the pipeline, Fin VC will likely be looking to use the funds to take a slice out of the European fintech pie and add to its burgeoning roster of unicorns. Despite being founded as recently as 2018, the company counts nine unicorns in its mitts including Pipe, Tradeshift and SoFi. Fin VC already invested in a few European startups too including verification firm Onfido and crypto-friendly wallet Numbrs. 

In an announcement on November 8, Fin VC founding partner Logan Allin said, “Fintech is booming across the U.K. and Europe, thanks to innovation-friendly regulation and open banking laws, and we are seeing exceptional entrepreneurs scale and outpace their global counterparts.”

© 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.

Notabene, a provider of anti-money laundering (AML) services for cryptocurrency firms, has raised $10.2 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Jump Capital and F-Prime Capital. Peter Johnson, a partner at Jump Capital, will serve on Notabene’s board of directors.

Crypto exchanges Luno and Bitso, who are Notabene customers, also took part alongside Blockfi, Gemini Frontier Fund, Illuminate Financial, CMT Digital, Fenbushi Capital and ComplyAdvantage CEO Charlie Delingpole. Existing investors Castle Island Ventures and Green Visor Capital also participated.

Crypto compliance has become a sub-sector within the blockchain industry, driven by the likes of global AML watchdog the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Notabene is one of a band of firms focused on helping cryptocurrency exchanges and trading desks become compliant with things like the Travel Rule, a customer-data sharing requirement bringing crypto in line with banks.

That said, Notabene CEO Pelle Braendgaard points out his firm’s mission is not to solve the Travel Rule. It’s really about a bigger picture, he said, which is enabling trusted transactions between people and businesses.

“Compliance is the first part, because regulators want to know you’re not interacting with some North Korean general,” said Braendgaard in an interview. “But for crypto to take off we need to use it for everyday transactions. Like if I’m ordering something off Amazon, I want to know that it’s Amazon I paid. So, the Travel Rule can be seen as a catalyst to bring this layer to crypto.”

As regulatory organizations like the FATF try to encompass crypto’s avant-garde realm of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), service providers like Notabene — born out of the ConsenSys-backed identity startup uPort — were built with decentralized applications (dapps) in mind, said Braendgaard.

“How do we talk about identities in the context of a smart contract or a dapp or anything like that?” Braendgaard said. “Where the parties to a transaction may be intermediated through a smart contract, how do those parties know who they’re interacting with, and how can that be done in a privacy preserving way?”

Argo Blockchain (ARBK), the London-based crypto miner, has filed to raise up to $57.5 million in senior notes that would be due in Nov. 2026, with an interest rate of 8.75%.

• Argo will use the proceeds of the fund for general corporate purposes, and construction and build-out of its Texas mining facility, as well as potential acquisitions or investments in businesses within the cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
• Argo also said that it mined 167 bitcoin or bitcoin equivalent in October with mining revenue of $9.75 million and margin on approximately 86%.
• Argo’s American depositary shares fell slightly in early trading on Monday, while other miners surged amid bitcoin’s rally.

Read more: Argo Blockchain Shares Fall After Workers Accidentally Share Non-Public Information

Undercollateralized lending platform Maple Finance is launching a new pool today designed for permissioned, know-your-customer/anti-money-laundering (KYC/AML) compliant loans.

The decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol announced the pool on Monday morning in collaboration with investment firm Blocktower Capital and prime brokerage Genesis (Genesis is owned by Digital Currency Group, CoinDesk’s parent company).

Sanat Rao, a general partner at Blocktower and the head of its Gamma Point Capital market neutral fund, said that the pool is an initial step towards addressing a massive, underserved market.

“The whole opportunity is, how do you bridge the crypto world and the ‘real’ world, or the traditional finance world? There’s $10 trillion in corporate bonds every year, there’s 50 million small-to-medium sized enterprises in India [alone] and there’s a $300 billion credit gap there,” he said. “Crypto lenders lending to real-world borrowers – we’re excited about DeFi being able to bridge that gap.”

Maple allows users to issue un-or-undercollateralized loans to known entities based on reputation, rather than the traditional model in DeFi which relies on collateral that can be slashed in the event of underpayment. The Blocktower pool is Maple’s first permissioned pool and the protocol’s fourth overall. Current borrowers from other pools include Alameda Research, Framework Labs and Wintermute Trading, among others. The protocol currently has $282 million in total value locked.

Read more: Maple Finance Raises $1.4M for Its Reputation-Based DeFi Lending Platform

Both Blocktower and Genesis went through a KYC/AML process, and the loans, which will run as high as $20 million, will be fully regulated.

Rao told CoinDesk that more borrowers and lenders will be coming to the pool in the coming months, and that lending is the first step towards a larger suite of products potentially including structured products.

Singapore-based crypto mining company Atlas Mining has partnered with Luxor Technology to provide mining pool services, helping expand Atlas’s operations in North America following China’s sweeping crypto-ban.

The partnership comes after Atlas signed a 100-megawatt “colocation capacity” deal with U.S.-based Compute North on Oct. 19, which will expand Atlas’s hashrate, or computing power, to over 3 EH/s starting in the first quarter of 2022.

Atlas will use a portion of the ASIC mining computers that are hosted in Compute North’s facilities, and will leverage Luxor’s bitcoin mining pool for hashrate liquidation, according to a statement on Monday.

On the heels of China’s crypto-ban, mining companies have started a “great migration” to regions outside of China, particularly North America. “The United States and Canada have become a hotspot for relocation, creating new opportunities for North America’s fast-growing mining industry to forge strategic partnerships with some of the largest players in the mining game,” according to Atlas’s statement.

In fact, according to a Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance study published in October, the U.S. accounted for about 35% of the total bitcoin mining hashrate, while Canada contributed almost 10%, setting up North America as the dominant region for bitcoin mining following China’s moves.

The partnership is the latest by Luxor to increase its mining presence in North America. Luxor recently cracked the top 10 list of the largest bitcoin mining pools in the world, with almost 2% of the total network’s hashrate, according to a LinkedIn post.

Matter Labs, the firm behind Ethereum Layer 2 scaling protocol zkSync has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the company said Monday.

• The funding will be used to finance Matter Labs’ business growth, including expanding scientific and engineering teams.
• Other investors in the round included Placeholder, Dragonfly and 1kx, who also participated in the $6 million Series A funding round that closed in February.
• Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, Consensys, ByBit, OKEx, Alchemy, Covalent, AAVE, Paraswap, Lido, Futureswap, Gnosis, Rarible and others also contributed to funding.
• Matter Labs builds zero-knowledge (ZK) proof technology on Ethereum and launched its first public ZK rollup prototype in 2019.
• zkSync version one is a ZK rollup for payments and has been live on the Ethereum mainnet since July 2020.

Read more: A16z Leads $150M Round for NFT Game Platform Mythical Games at $1.25B Valuation

Sequoia Capital is backing a seven-figure token round for decentralized finance (DeFi) lending project Parallel.

The round, which values the Polkadot-based protocol at $250 million, comes less than two weeks after Sequoia pledged to restructure its investing playbook to, in part, more aggressively court crypto plays. Fellow venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) did the same in 2019; it now raises multibillion-dollar funds exclusively for crypto.

Whether Sequoia will move as aggressively as a16z is unclear, though the investment in Parallel speaks to a willingness to invest in early-stage crypto teams.

Parallel is building a fast-growing project on Polkadot, a crypto network that is not yet fully launched.

“We are incredibly excited about the vision and potential of DeFi,” Sequoia Partner Josephine Chen said in a statement. Chen said Parallel is positioned to help “legacy firms” more readily engage in the space.

Milestone! Over 1,000,000 DOT has been contributed from Parallel’s Auction Loan product to @ParallelFi @AstarNetwork @MantaNetwork @litentry @AcalaNetwork @MoonbeamNetwork

Huge thanks to all our supporters! Let’s earn more bonus from Auction Loan:https://t.co/AtU1pPAC13 pic.twitter.com/l3CZN2oQMj

— Parallel Finance (@ParallelFi) November 8, 2021

Parallel is one of the many projects building DeFi toolkits for retail and institutional crypto clients. The startup raised in August at a $150 million valuation. The project has increased its user base 400% in the months since, Parallel founder Yubo Ruan told CoinDesk.

Read more: Polkadot’s Parallel Finance Raises $22M at $150M Valuation

Ruan called this cash infusion a “strategic” round to onboard high-profile backers including Sequoia, Founders Fund and Shima Capital. He said this is one of the first times Sequoia has invested in a token round (it co-led with Founders Fund).

Tokens or no, Sequoia is not exactly a newcomer to crypto.

Its Chinese and Indian arms have dabbled in crypto projects before. The U.S. wing apparently has, too: a review of public filings showed the firm has worked with Coinbase Custody since at least late June. A spokesperson for Sequoia did not immediately comment.