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Cosmos-Based Defi Protocol Nolus Raises 2.5M to Build the First Cross-Chain Defi Lease

by Blockchain NewsMay 3, 2023

George Town, BVI, May 2nd, 2023, Chainwire

The Nolus DeFi Lease provides up to 150% financing on the initial investment with a lowered margin call risk and access to the underlying leveraged assets.

Nolus, an interoperable application on Cosmos, has secured $2.5 million in pre-seed and seed funding to tackle inefficiencies in DeFi money markets.

The recently concluded $20 million valuation seed funding is backed by Dorahacks, Everstake, Cogitent Ventures, Token Metrics Ventures, and Autonomy Capital, among others, and will allow Nolus to fully complete the technological backbone and further expand the platform both within and outside the Cosmos ecosystem. The Advisory Board members Zaki Manian, Strangelove, and Shane Molidor will ensure Nolus solidify its cross-chain presence.

The novel DeFi Lease solution by Nolus unlocks the full potential of crypto money markets by reducing the industry’s steep over-collateralization requirements, resulting in significantly improved capital efficiency and much more favorable lending options for users. The Nolus DeFi Lease provides up to 150% financing on the initial investment with a lowered margin call risk and access to the underlying leveraged assets through whitelisted yield-bearing strategies. With the added support of liquid staking derivatives, the Nolus protocol will create a cornerstone use case for LSDs for the Cosmos ecosystem in the form of self-repaying loans.

About Nolus

Nolus defines a money market between lenders looking to earn yield on deposited stablecoins and borrowers looking to amplify holdings with more assets than their current equity at lower risk and retained ownership.

The Protocol utilizes a semi-permissioned PoS blockchain built using the Cosmos SDK and a WASM smart contract engine that executes in an isolated sandbox model focused on interoperability, security and performance. Interoperability itself is at the core of Nolus’ offering as the Protocol utilizes IBC and Interchain Accounts to tap into a diverse set of liquidity hubs without creating fragmentation across chains.

After months of testing, Nolus will open its public mainnet in May.

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Contact

Marketing and Communications
Nolus Protocol
comms@nolus.io

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Compound Protocol Halts Supply of Four Tokens Due To Low Liquidity

by Blockchain NewsOctober 26, 2022

After many votes in favour of it, the decentralized lending protocol Compound has decided to pause the supply of four tokens used as lending assets for collateral on the platform.

Due to their low liquidity in the market, Compound protocol recently set out a proposal to the community for halting four tokens, including cZRX, cBAT, cMKR, and cYFI.

According to the Proposal, if these tokens don’t get paused, an oracle manipulation-based attack similar to the one that cost Mango Markets millions of dollars is much less likely to occur on the Compound protocol due to these tokens’ much less liquidity.

Overall, this proposal has received overwhelming support from the community, with approximately 554,126 votes in favour of it, representing 99.99% of the votes. Only a single voter cancelled the proposal by voting against it.

The compound protocol has now fulfilled the proposal and paused these tokens. This means the said tokens will not be available to users to deposit and/or take loans in order to protect the protocol from market manipulation attacks.

Compound founder Robert Leshner, who voted in favour of the Proposal, said in an Unchained Podcast that the Mango exploits served as a wakeup call for lending protocols. Because of that, lending protocols should put it into consideration to review their risk parameters.

“Every protocol has to address the risk parameters assuming that some black hat hacker is going to try to exploit it. It’s a great wake-up call for every DeFi project on every single blockchain to take this as a wake-up call,” said Leshner.

The Mango Markets hack is indeed a caution for protocols in the DeFi ecosystem to take note of. The hacker stole over $100 million from the trading and lending platform after manipulating the price of the Mango Market’s native MANGO token via an oracle price manipulation attack.

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Tagged : Blockchain / Cryptocurrency / DeFi / Protocol / Tokens

Naoris Protocol Secures $11.5 m Funding, Enhancing Web3 Networks Security

by Blockchain NewsJuly 28, 2022

Portuguese cybersecurity protocol Naoris announced on Wednesday that it has raised $11.5 million in a funding round led by Tim Draper’s Draper Associates.

Other high-profile investors, like Holt Xchange, Holdun Family Officer, SDC Management, Expert Dojo, Uniera, Level One Robotics, and multiple angel investors, including some “well-known” NBA stars and tennis players participated in the funding round.

David Carvalho, the founder and CEO of Naoris Protocol, said that the cybersecurity company plans to use the fresh funding to create a decentralised proof-of-security consensus mechanism by the end of 2022 as well as expand and scale its operations.

The executive elaborated that Naoris Protocol will use the capital to develop an AI-based “cybersecurity mesh” that it promises will protect web3 networks better as they grow.

With its blockchain-based cybersecurity mesh, Naoris aims to transform existing web2 networks that are highly centralised into decentralised networks made up of “trusted machines” that can help to validate one another.

Naoris Protocol is trying to solve the current problem whereby today’s computer networks can never be completely secured. That is because an attacker only needs to compromise a single device within any network to gain access to a business’s system. This means that the more a network grows, the more entry points emerge that attackers can easily use to gain access to a network and monitor or steal sensitive information.

Naoris protocol relies on blockchain and its decentralised proof of security consensus mechanism to transform each device into a trusted validator node, which is then tasked with validating all the other devices within the network.

This decentralised technique works because the more the network grows, the more validators there, thus increasing its security. It is a distributed security environment where every device continuously validates every other device in the network. This brings trust across all devices, thus securing a baseline layer and enabling trust and risk mitigation to be enabled in every element of the network. Since each device is basically a security watchdog for every other, they can act in synchronous harmony while enforcing and securely adhering to security policies.

The company says it is chasing to tap a $10 trillion global opportunity — it is estimated that cybercrime will cost businesses worldwide $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.

Carvalho commented: “Our vision is to leverage the cryptographic power of the many through blockchain to fundamentally change how trust happens between devices and applications on the internet.”

Naoris Protocol plans to create and run the decentralised system by the end of this year before rolling out its full product to clients across the Web3, critical infrastructure, banking, healthcare, government sectors, and other industries by mid-2023.

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Tagged : Blockchain / Cybercrime / Cybersecurity / DECENTRALIZE / Finance / Funding / NAORIS PROTOCOL / Protocol

Azuro Closes $4m Funding Round to Build Decentralized Betting Protocol

by Blockchain NewsJune 28, 2022

Azuro, a decentralized betting protocol, announced on Monday that it has raised $4 million in a funding round contributed by participants, including Hypersphere, Gnosis, Merit Circle, SevenX, and Quiet Capital.

Azuro, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) building a protocol for blockchain-based betting, aims to disrupt traditional online betting with a more transparent decentralized alternative.

Traditional betting firms go to great lengths to make betting unfair and opaque, Rossen Yordanov, a core contributor to Azuro project, said in a statement. “The problem is incentive misalignment. Profits are zero-sum, so many betting companies go to great lengths to create unfair and opaque environments for the players,” he stated.

The key mission of the Azuro project is to replace traditional centralized online betting exchanges such as Bet365, 1xBet, 22Bet, MarathonBet, BetWinner, 888sport, Betsson, sportsbooks, and others, which are often seen as predatory and profit-motivated.

In this way, Azuro is working to disrupt the $200 billion betting industry through blockchain smart contracts and web3 technologies to bring full transparency to the sector and increase liquidity in betting markets.

In the recent past, Azuro launched its mainnet on Gnosis Chain. The fund raised will be used to expand it to more blockchains, with Polygon its main target currently, as well as create a non-fungible token (NFT) bets marketplace and add further betting markets, the company said.

Hypersphere co-founder Jack Platts explained why they backed Azuro in the funding raise: “Betting markets are one of the few applications where crypto was always supposed to shine. So far though, none have been able to crack the nut of bootstrapping liquidity for popular betting disciplines. We believe Azuro’s team can finally make that promise true.”

Azuro leverages prediction markets, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), DAO governance, and liquidity pools on its backend to minimize costs associated with the betting process for users.

The latest funding brings Azuro’s total fundraising to $7.5 million. In January, Investors, including AllianceDAO, Arrington Capital, Ethereal Ventures and Delphi Digital led fundraising of $3.5 million for the project.

Decentralized Sports Betting on Blockchain

Betting is a common practice across a broad range of a variety of fields, including the sports industry, casinos, and others. The latest development by Azuro shows the entry of decentralized sports betting platforms is beginning to revolutionize the way people place bets.

Decentralized sports betting is a new type of betting mechanism that is set to revamp how traditional centralized online betting sites operate. Run by profit-oriented individuals, conventional sportsbooks and betting apps are known for charging high fees and taking advantage of users.

Decentralized betting platforms are built on an open-source approach that incorporates blockchain technology. Furthermore, decentralized web 3.0 sports betting services normally don’t have actual business people who run the platform as there is no central authority in charge. In the platform, all users actively participate and decide whether or not to wager against the person who launched the market.

Lastly, decentralized sports betting platforms do not levy exorbitant fees and are regarded as safe because all data is stored on the blockchain, providing another layer of transparency.

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Tagged : Azuro / Betting / Decentralization / Enterprise / Protocol