Blockchain & crypto this week

A look at what’s been happening in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space.

Philanthropy Embraces Blockchain

The NGO space has often faced problems of fraud and graft with the current antiquated technologies and centralized systems making tracking transfers from donor to beneficiary slow and inaccurate.

That’s why the philanthropy space is embracing blockchain. CARE USA, a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty, will deploy blockchain for the first time to provide safe, transparent, and more efficient humanitarian aid.

The non-profit has selected Celo, an open-source blockchain ecosystem focused on making decentralized financial (DeFi) systems and tools accessible to anyone with a smartphone, to leverage the benefits of blockchain technology for the first time in its program in Latin America.

In fact, NGOs and relief organizations are working with Celo to provide blockchain-powered aid delivery. With transactions recorded on an immutable ledger, the Celo blockchain, it is easy to trace funds from their origin to the intended recipients. No one can edit the ledger and the record of transactions is open, accessible and easily auditable.

The advantages of applying blockchain in a world of charitable transfers is becoming popular.

This month, the World Association of Former United Nations Internes and Fellows (WAFUNIF) has joined hands with Proto Gold DAO, a global community-based blockchain technology provider. They will reciprocally support WAFUNIF’s “Let’s Change the World Together” charitable efforts as partners.

CARE International member CARE Ecuador will also use Celo’s cUSD stablecoin as a voucher-based system to create a digitized process to ensure the secure dissemination of its humanitarian aid to Ecuadorian women in need of health services. The cUSD vouchers will be disbursed through the Umoja platform developed by Emerging Impact.

Instant & Low-Cost Token Transfers Across Different Blockchains

Recently, L2s have seen an exponential increase in demand with hundreds of Dapps moving to Polygon to obtain faster transactions and cheaper gas fees. However, the user experience moving into and out of Polygon is complicated, and time consuming.

Thus, Biconomy, a multichain relayer network building infrastructure to simplify the web3.0 experience, launched its Hyphen mainnet. Hyphen enables instant and low-cost token transfers across different blockchains.

The launch of Hyphen will allow users to make USDC transfers between Ethereum and Polygon, facilitating those transfers in a few seconds, rather than the current 30 minute to hours it currently takes.

“On average, to transfer funds from Layer2 to Layer1 blockchains, it can take anywhere from 40-min to 7-days for users to receive their funds,” said Sachin Tomar, CTO of  Biconomy.

“More specifically, it currently takes around 40-50 min to get ERC20 tokens from the Polygon Network to Ethereum via their native bridge. This results in weakened network effects, low composability, and an overall more difficult experience for the end-user. Hyphen solves that problem.”

The Hyphen mainnet launch comes on the heels of an exceptional year, in which Biconomy announced a $9M private funding round led by DACM and Mechanism Capital, the upcoming launch of its native token $BICO, and its expansion to support over 30+ Dapps.

Crypto Funding

Bengaluru and San Francisco-based crypto asset management platform Mudrex has raised US $2.5 million in a seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Village Global, Kunal Shah, Anand Chandrashekharan, and Anjali Bansal.

The company had earlier raised US $750,000 from Y Combinator, Better Capital, Woodstock Fund, and angels like Nitin Sharma and Anupam Mittal. Mudrex platform simplifies crypto investing by providing innovative investment products modeled along the lines of ‘Mutual Fund’ and ‘ETFs’ for long-term wealth creation. The funds raised will help Mudrex in scaling up the team and operations, acquiring global regulatory compliances, and creating innovative products.