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Interchain Accounts is the biggest upgrade to Cosmos since Stargate

The protocols would enable nearly all aspects of data-sharing between blockchain protocols, such as oracle data, governance voting, etc.

On Thursday, the Interchain Foundation, a nonprofit steward of the Cosmos ecosystem, announced the release of Interchain Accounts.

The Inter-Blockchain Communications protocol (IBC) enables an entire blockchain to control an account on a separate chain. It is the largest software upgrade to the Cosmos ecosystem since Stargate. To date, there are 38 projects utilizing IBC, including Terra, Crypto.org Chain and Gravity Bridge, with 8.4 million transactions in the past 38 days.

With Interchain Accounts, one blockchain can access the application features of another blockchain, such as staking, voting, swapping tokens, etc. “Enabling composability in IBC allows innovation in distinct applications to be deployed without needing to upgrade the entire Interchain,” said Charleen Fei, IBC product lead at the Interchain Foundation.

The same day, deBridge, a cross-chain interoperability and liquidity transfer protocol, announced the launch of its mainnet. Through deBridge, users will be able to transfer assets and data between blockchain networks starting with Ethereum, BNB Chain, Heco Chain, Arbitrum, and Polygon. For example, Solana users can interact with protocols in Polygon directly from their Phantom wallets without switching wallets or networks.

Similar to Cosmos' Interchain Accounts, projects can also integrate with deBridge's infrastructure to tap into the various cross-chain opportunities the protocol enables, such as asset swaps and transfers, governance voting, farming strategies, nonfungible tokens, oracle data, and much more. DeBridge has been audited by Halborn, Zokyo, and Ackee Blockchain and maintains an ongoing bug bounty program on Immunefi.

In addition to its public mainnet, deBridge is launching its official partnerships with decentralized exchange aggregators 1inch and ParaSwap for cross-chain swaps. DeBridge uses a lock and mint approach that continuously validates the current state of the protocol and checks if the total supply of the wrapped asset is entirely backed by its collateral.

If a wrapped asset loses its peg, security monitoring can automatically pause the protocol. Validator nodes also continuously update the state of the token balances on each supported blockchain and never allow total withdrawals of an asset to exceed its total deposits.

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Solana based cross-chain exchange Saber raises $7.7M to expand team and tokens

Saber has raised $7.7 million in a seeding fund round, and is rated as the second platform on Solana in terms of total locked value (TVL) with $185.77 million.

Solana-based cross-chain exchange Saber raised $7.7 million in a seed funding round.

The platform launched last month and enables the cross-chain exchange of stablecoins and wrapped assets. Saber Labs, the development team behind Saber, announced the funding round on July 28.

The development team is currently a three-person unit and the firm will use the funds to hire around seven more staff members this year. It will also expand support to more assets on the exchange.

The round was led by venture capital firm Race Capital, with participation from billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya's Social Capital, Jump Capital, Multicoin Capital and the Solana Foundation.

The seed round was also backed by angel investors such as FTX's Tristan Yver, OKcoin's Jason Lau, Stacks' Ryan Shea, Curve Finance's Julien Bouteloup, and Terraform Labs' Jeff Kuan.

Saber co-founder and CEO Dylan Macalinao noted on Twitter:

“For DeFi to reach millions of users and trillions in value, we need a blockchain that can handle mass scale. Due to its low transaction costs and high performance, we believe Solana is that blockchain.”

The firm’s website claims that the platform offers “low slippage trading, even at large volumes.” Saber also offers liquidity based passive yield returns from transaction fees.

According to data from DeFi Llama, Saber has the second highest total value locked (TVL) on Solana with $185.77 million. Automated market maker (AMM) Raydium is currently sitting at the top with $572.21 million in TVL at the time of writing.

Solana is aiming to be a much more scalable competitor to the Ethereum network and it has been gaining attention in 2021 with dozens of DeFi projects launching on the platform since March.

Related: Metaplex NFT marketplace launches on Solana

Cointelegraph reported on June 9 that Solana Labs, the team behind Solana raised $314.14 million through a private token sale, which was led by top crypto venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.

At the time of the $314.14 million token sale, Anatoly Yakovenko, founder and CEO of Solana Labs said the aim was to onboard one billion users on the network:

“The next phase is onboarding a billion users. Solana was built from the ground up to accommodate this scale.”

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