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Clarity Money, the personal finance technology service acquired in 2018 by Goldman Sachs, is closing its doors early next month, the firm said Monday.

The shutdown will take place on March 5, according to an email sent to customers. After that time, “the mobile and web app will no longer be accessible” per the message.

“While it’s the end of a chapter at Clarity Money, our team here at Marcus by Goldman Sachs® can now help you make the most of your money with Marcus Insights: a new suite of smart tools and trackers, inspired by the best of Clarity Money. It’s 100% free to use, even if you’re not already a Marcus customer.”

Goldman acquired Clarity Money in April 2018, adding the startup’s personal finance services to its online lending offering, Marcus. Although the financial details of that deal were not disclosed at the time, subsequent reports indicated that Goldman bought the firm for $100 million.

“We started Clarity Money in 2016 with the goal of helping consumers make better financial decisions and when we joined the Marcus family in 2018, we knew we were making another big step towards this ambition,” the Clarity team said. “Today, we are focusing our people and efforts on a shared mission: to help millions of consumers achieve financial wellbeing by building the best digital banking experience at Marcus.”

© 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.

After a landmark year for the digital asset derivatives space, one market-making firm is expanding its suite of bespoke options.

GSR Trading—one of the longest operating liquidity providers in the space—told The Block that it is now offering bespoke options in Filecoin, Polkadot, and Algorand.

Unlike vanilla options that trade on an exchange like Deribit’s order-book, GSR’s bespoke options are custom-made for larger investors in the market, with GSR acting as the counter-party. 

The development of such structured products has taken place behind the scenes amid the growth of listed options markets run by the likes of CME Group and Deribit. At last check, the aggregate open interest across bitcoin options markets stood at $5.8 billion. 

Such a development speaks to the increased risk-management needs for market participants. GSR reported that it traded more than $1 billion worth of customer bitcoin and other crypto options in 2020. 

“After exponential growth for our bespoke options in 2020, we are excited to facilitate the growth of FIL, DOT and ALGO options markets in 2021, as there is already substantial interest, along with many others,” GSR co-founder and president Richard Rosenblum told The Block in a comment. 

In an overview of the firm’s 2020 activity, GSR said that project teams are more strategic than they were in 2017-18. These teams, the company said, turned to GSR to create custom options contracts to help preserve their capital. 

“The purpose of these instruments is to mitigate risks and optimize balance sheet efficiency,” GSR said. “We predict that these custom options markets will facilitate liquidity and lay the foundation for what will eventually be listed altcoin products on exchanges.”

Elsewhere, the firm is increasing its footprint in crypto mining — where its custom products surpassed an annualized run rate of $250 million by the end of last year. As for its activity across options, the firm’s total daily open interest was larger than CME for 2020. 

© 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.

Crypto exchange Kraken announced Monday that it will run its own Chainlink node to provide spot price data to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and others.

“Running our own Chainlink node will not only provide us with a mechanism to broadcast our Oracle Rates on any blockchain, but we can leverage Chainlink’s built-in cryptographic signing capabilities to provide users with definitive on-chain proof of that data originating directly from Kraken,” said the exchange.

Essentially, Kraken aggregates pricing data from its order books and makes it available on-chain for DeFi apps and other usages. The move is aimed at increasing transparency and reducing price manipulation.

“Given the growth of DeFi and the need for high-quality data feeds to keep it secure, we’re excited to make our exchange data spot prices available to DeFi developers through our own Chainlink node,” said Jeremy Welch, Kraken’s VP of product.

Kraken said its spot prices are updated every minute and can be used to obtain “real-time” data feeds for various DeFi apps, including trading and lending protocols.

© 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.