MONEY MOUNTAINS: The Avalanche Foundation has closed a $230 million funding round led by Three Arrows Capital and Polychain Capital. The money will go towards jumpstarting liquidity in the network’s burgeoning DeFi ecosystem. In another sign of increasing competition among alternative layer 1 blockchains, Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital raised $100 million for an Algorand Fund.

BILLION $$$ BOOTSTRAP: Hedera Hashgraph’s rotating governing council of 23 organizations has earmarked 10.7 billion HBAR tokens worth $5 billion to accelerate network adoption. Half of that stash will go to the newly established HBAR Foundation, an independent organization looking to bootstrap DeFi, NFTs, CBDCs and gaming on the distributed network.

INDEPENDENCE DAY: A week after El Salvador adopted bitcoin as legal tender, demonstrators have set fire to a “Chivo ATM” (used for exchanging dollars and BTC) and have brandished signs such as “No to Bitcoin” in the nation’s capital. The protests have taken place on the nation's day of independence and seem largely targeted towards President Nayib Bukele.

BE FRANK: Franklin Templeton is seeking to raise $20 million for what appears to be the investment firm’s first blockchain venture capital fund. Registration documents show the fund has raised $10 million from a single sale thus far, but do not disclose what type of assets or businesses the $1.5 trillion asset manager will target. Franklin is hiring “crypto traders and researchers” and knowledge of public blockchains like Algorand, Ethereum, Solana, Stellar and Tendermint is a plus.

THE MUSIC BIZ: RCRDSHP, a digital collectibles platform for electronic music, closed an initial $5 million funding round led by Dapper Labs and notable NFT collectors Metakovan and Twobadour. The marketplace will run on Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain, which is known for hosting the popular NBA Top Shot series of digital collectibles. Meanwhile, Nashville, Tennessee-based Solo Music is launching the Solana network’s first NFT music marketplace.

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Space Is the Place for Crypto

Look up. You can’t see them right now, but if you read this email the day or two after it was sent, there will be four human lives hanging above you. Last night, the Inspiration4 crew reached their cruising altitude of 360 miles above Earth, farther away than the International Space Station or Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a crew composed entirely of non-astronauts, a first, on a trip beyond our atmosphere financed by a payments billionaire.

Why are we taking this orbital interlude in a crypto newsletter? Because the links between crypto and space are growing thick. As the “space economy” is increasingly privatized, it appears as though crypto moguls are determined to be a part of it. Not only that, the two industries are mirrors: real excursions into the weird, great beyond now that the government no longer has a complete monopoly on money or space.

There are three basic ways crypto and space interact: crypto is a funding source for novel space programs and companies, space is a place to deploy infrastructure to improve crypto networks and crypto could become the monetary standard of future extraterrestrial settlements. There’s nothing inevitable about space colonization or the mass adoption of crypto, but we’re living in a window of time where both can be established.

Yesterday, the Winklevoss twins led a $650,000 seed round into space trade publication Payload. As Axios media reporter Sara Fischer noted, space is currently a $350 billion market. Some 400 space companies were founded in the first two decades of the current century. This capital expenditure is likely to continue, it’s almost assured crypto will play a role.

At the start of next year, for instance, Geometric Energy Corporation plans to launch a 40 kilogram cube satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket headed towards the moon. It’s a trip that reportedly will be funded in full by dogecoin. When announced, SpaceX executive Tom Ochinero said that “DOGE-1” mission “will demonstrate the application of cryptocurrency beyond Earth orbit and set the foundation for interplanetary commerce.”

Then there’s early Bitcoin Core engineer Jeff Garzik, whose SpaceChain corporation is working to integrate space and blockchain technologies. The whole idea is to take advantage of the trustless nature of blockchain to facilitate deep space communication and commerce.

Blockstream, the Bitcoin infrastructure juggernaut, plans to build a floating web of satellites that will make it possible to beam BTC payments across the world, without using the internet, and eventually wherever humans go. This strengthens the Bitcoin network, moving it beyond the reach of nation state attacks and other Earth-bound risks.

Of course, not all explorations end up where intended. In 2018, Ethereum venture studio ConsenSys acquired the asteroid mining startup Planetary Resources and pivoted the firm’s attention to building cosmic blockchain tools. ConsenSys saved the firm from insolvency after failing to secure another round of financing.

But after launching a blockchain-based, crowdsourced satellite-tracking project called TruSat in 2019, the company's prospects dimmed. Last year, ConsenSys auctioned off the firm’s hardware – someone bought a vacuum chamber for $9,100 – and open sourced its intellectual property.

It’s another world, and where it goes is left for the dreamers.

–Daniel Kuhn

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X World Games: NFTs as an Asset Class

One asset class that is causing excitement is non-fungible tokens (NFT). These digital assets are immutable and exchangeable, offering a store of value and potentially a source of revenue. Creators around the world are flocking to platforms to stake their claims in this new ecosystem.

One such up-and-coming platform is X World Games (XWG), a decentralized gaming ecosystem built on the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum. Players and creators can obtain X World Games (XWG) tokens through a variety of innovative games. The first game launched on the platform is Dream Card, which offers digital, collectible and customizable characters and NFTs that can be traded with XWG tokens.