Estonian ‘auto liquidation’ DeFi platform Minterest raises $6.5m

September 17, 2021 Coin Telegraph

<div>Estonian 'auto liquidation' DeFi platform Minterest raises .5m</div>

Minterest aims to channel all fees, interest, and revenue back into the protocol for its users.

Decentralized finance protocol Minterest has just secured $6.5 million in funding for a long-term yield optimization platform.

The private fundraising round was contributed to by a number of venture capital companies including KR1, DigiStrats, Bitscale Capital, PNYX Ventures, CMT Digital and others.

The Estonian-based team intends to use the funding to develop the lending and borrowing protocol which it claims is “designed to make DeFi fairer for users.” Minterest uses a buyback mechanism that captures value and passes all of the revenue generated by the platform to its community.

It automates the liquidation process which enables the capture of fees and interest which is recycled back to its users. Some DeFi protocols generate revenue by allowing a small number of users to buy out under collateralized positions at a market discount.

Minterest will use any operating surplus to automatically buy its own native MNT token which is then distributed to its users, according to an announcement. This way, the earnings a user makes are supplemented with some of the protocol’s rewards and revenue which creates potentially higher long-term yields. The protocol has been designed to operate with “flywheel tokenomics” which means value captured is returned back into the system to generate more value.

Minterest founder and CEO, Josh Rogers, explained that this new DeFi project generates value for the entire user ecosystem, instead of extracting it only for the few, adding:

“Through their interactions, users create the value on the platform therefore making their participation equitable and rewarding. Without its community, any protocol would be obsolete, and our model places our community at the centre of the value-creation cycle.”

The protocol will be “audited by highly regarded auditors”, he added but did not specify a launch date.

The new protocol shares its name with a Singapore-based digital investment platform founded in 2017. The Southeast Asian Minterest is more traditionally finance orientated with a mission to offer clients access to alternative investments and diversified investment opportunities.

In other funding news, on Sept. 16, the Avalanche Foundation announced a huge $230 million investment from a venture capital group led by Polychain and Three Arrows Capital. It aims to channel the capital into supporting the growth of the DeFi ecosystem and projects running on its blockchain.

Digital Euro to Handle ‘Almost Unlimited’ Payments, Estonian Central Bank Says After Test

July 28, 2021 Bitcoin.com

Estonian IT company inks $26M crypto mining deal with Bitmain

June 16, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Estonian IT company inks M crypto mining deal with Bitmain

Bitcoin mining

Burfa intends to purchase new cryptocurrency mining equipment from Bitmain to boost its data-center capacity.

Estonian technology conglomerate Burfa is turning to Bitmain to supply key cryptocurrency mining infrastructure to its Narva-based data center, offering a glimpse into the arms race underway for high-performance computing resources.

The $26 million agreement will allow Burfa to double its data-center capacity and secure a steady supply of processing equipment over the coming months. The industrial sector is facing an acute shortage of specialized GPUs and SSDs as more of these resources get gobbled up by crypto-intensive firms that are ramping up Bitcoin (BTC) mining during the bull market.

Burfa will start receiving the new equipment as early as summer, the company announced Wednesday.

"There are clear limits to hardware production and this contract places us among a dozen or so major clients in the world who could secure such a large volume of additional resources,” said Ivan Turygin, the chairman of the board at Burfa. “All others will have to wait until the supply chains are restored back to normal or pay a lot more for the equipment on the secondary market.”

He also said that growing cryptocurrency adoption, as evidenced by the now $1.7 trillion digital-asset class, will serve as a boon to Burfa’s expansion plans moving forward.

Burfa was founded in 2013 as a developer of cryptocurrency mining equipment. The company pivoted to high-performance data centers in 2017 before migrating its operations to the Enefit Technology Park, which is the largest in Northern Europe.

Du Shisheng, the vice president of Bitmain’s mining division, spoke about his company’s long-standing partnership with Burfa:

"The Burfa Group companies have been our long-term and trusted customers. This is also the basis for the current contract, ensuring that Burfa gets state-of-the-art and most efficient technology for developing their high-performance data centers.”

Bitmain is one of the world’s largest makers of crypto mining equipment. The company filed for a public listing in September 2018 but didn’t follow through with its plans. At the time, a publicly-listed Bitmain was earmarked to be worth up to $50 billion.

Estonia