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The price of ETH, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, hit a new all-time high on Tuesday.

ETH’s value shot past $1,500, according to data from TradingView. This development comes days after ETH’s previous record-setting high was hit on January 19. 

At time of writing, ETH is trading hands at roughly $1,515, having hit a high of $1,542.

ETH remains the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with today’s price surge driving market capitalization to new heights as well. It now sits at roughly $174.2 billion.

© 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.

Cryptocurrency asset manager 21Shares, formerly known as Amun, is launching a Polkadot exchange-traded product (ETP).

The ETP is set to list on Switzerland’s SIX exchange on February 4, 21Shares announced Tuesday. Once listed, it will allow investors to effectively hold Polkadot’s native DOT token as stock.

21Shares said the product would be the “world’s first” Polkadot ETP. Last week, 21Shares added DOT to its crypto index ETP (HODL), making the token the second-largest constituent after bitcoin. DOT replaced bitcoin cash, said the firm.

Now after adding DOT to HODL, 21Shares said, it is the “perfect timing” to launch the new single-asset ETP tied to DOT.

21Shares offers a variety of ETPs that are listed on European exchanges. CEO Hany Rashwan said the firm aims to launch two to three more “innovative” ETPs on more European exchanges in the foreseeable future.

As for DOT, the token has recently been in the limelight, especially after it briefly surpassed XRP in terms of market capitalization. DOT’s market cap stands at around $16 billion as of the time of writing, while XRP’s is at about $17.2 billion, according to tracker Coingecko.

© 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.

Cboe is a Wall Street powerhouse. 

On a typical trading day, the exchange operator handles about a third of U.S. equity volumes. In derivatives, major Wall Street products such as the VIX and S&P 500 options trade hands every day through its venue. 

Cboe is now trying its hand at the crypto market — again, that is. More than a year after it shuttered its bitcoin futures product, the exchange said that it would re-enter the market through a partnership with crypto data services provider CoinRoutes.  

On today’s episode of The Scoop, Cboe global head of information solutions Catherine Clay lays out the firm’s ambitions to build out a business in crypto market data. Clay also touches on how Cboe’s plans set the stage for a wide range of tradable products, including a bitcoin VIX-like product to an exchange-traded fund. 

“You can even think about creative indices that reflect portfolio allocations with digital assets as a component,” Clay said. “Bringing this real price data in for the creation and calculation of indexes falls very much in line with how we think about educating the investment sphere and giving people some idea about how to construct portfolios for crypto.”

For Clay, the relatively undeveloped state of the crypto data ecosystem harkens back to her time trading internet stock derivatives in the 1990s. 

“It really reminds me of when I was a derivatives trader back in the late 90s trading the internet stock back then that were really volatility,” she said. “I remember standing in the pit where I was the lead market maker for Netscape and Double Click and you could imagine back then there was very little data available to understand where the derivatives—the options— listed on those underlying should be priced and traded.”

In this episode of The Scoop, Clay also discusses

• Her background as a derivatives market maker and how that history informs her view on the crypto world 
• The use case of the real price data it is now distributing through CoinRoutes 
• The importance of data and analytics for a robust crypto market 
• The pent-up demand from issuers looking to create crypto products
• What Cboe’s next steps might be if the SEC approves a bitcoin ETF

© 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.

A pair of former Coinbase employees are launching a new protocol that aims to advance one of the DeFi space’s primary use cases — decentralized lending — in the world’s emerging markets.

Goldfinch, which has raised $1 million from a group of industry stakeholders that includes Kindred Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, IDEO CoLab Ventures and Dragonfly Capital co-founder Alex Pack, is the brainchild of Mike Sall and Blake West. Sall previously worked as Coinbase’s head of product analytics and West was a senior backend engineer for the crypto exchange. The two departed Coinbase last summer to begin building out Goldfinch.

At the heart of Goldfinch’s design is the concept of no-collateral loans. The argument is that a lending system based on collateralization favors those who possess such resources while locking out those who don’t have funds to begin with. “DeFi has a massive opportunity to transform access to capital, but it will only be possible once it can make loans without collateral. That’s what will finally open crypto lending to most people in the world,” the two wrote in a blog post published Tuesday.

The protocol has been running on Ethereum’s mainnet since December, with Goldfinch serving as its first loan underwriter. To date, Goldfinch has underwritten $1 million in loans to about 10,000 end-borrowers, with a focus on emerging markets, according to Sall and West.

Thus far, Goldfinch says it has clinched deals with three companies: Aspire, a small-business finance startup backed by a MassMutual venture arm; PayJoy, a Mexico-based company that finances smartphones; and QuickCheck, a Nigeria-based startup that provides personal loans.

Goldfinch’s protocol is current built around the USDC stablecoin. At its center is a USDC liquidity pool, which lenders — such as those mentioned above — can draw from. The USDC is then exchanged for local currencies and lent out to borrowers. The lenders repay the pool in the form of USDC, which is put in the pool by way of liquidity providers who earn a yield on their deposits. “As the lending businesses make their interest payments back to the protocol, they’re immediately disbursed to all investors,” West and Sall explain in their post.

Over time, the goal is for Goldfinch to serve as a basis for a decentralized underwriting system, which in itself will provide a means for earning yield from the protocol. “This will allow the protocol to scale the underwriting process and onboard new lending businesses entirely through the community, the team wrote.

The project’s emergence comes as the DeFi lending space continues to grow. The Block’s Lars Hoffmann wrote in December that DeFi’s biggest lending protocols had originated nearly $30 billion up to that point in 2020.

Pack told The Block that Goldfinch aims to address “how exactly DeFi will integrate into the real-world.”

“Goldfinch is a lending platform that harnesses the massive energy of DeFi yield-chasers for good, connecting them to under-financed small businesses and individuals all over the world,” he said.

© 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.