13% of this year's Y Combinator's cohort are crypto startups, up from 6% in the prior batch. The 30 startups in this year's cohort each received a $500,000 investment to develop their ideas. Four of the startups plan to develop crypto wallets, 10 startups will focus on SaaS products, eight are building products specifically focused on DeFi, and seven are NFT startups. Details about the startups in this year's cohort are available in the article.
GameStop and FTX recently announced a new partnership intended to introduce GameStop customers to FTX's community and marketplaces. GameStop will start carrying FTX gift cards in select stores and it may sell other FTX goods in the future. GameStop has its own NFT marketplace and crypto wallet. FTX also recently teamed up with Reddit.
Binance has launched Ethereum staking. Users are now able to stake ETH on the platform and earn 6% APY. Customers will be able to stake with a minimum of just 0.001 ETH. Binance introduced staking in June 2022 and it currently offers the highest APY rate among major US crypto exchanges.
Frax Finance is launching a permissionless lending market that will allow anyone to lend or borrow assets with any token that is part of a Chainlink data feed. Fraxlend will enable users to mint new FRAX through the borrowing and lending process. It will generate additional cash flow that can be used to buy back and burn FXS. Fraxlend will allow users to create custom term sheets for protocol-to-protocol deals on-chain, automating the process and making it more transparent.
Collectives is a social network and community building primitive for web3. It allows anyone to create on-chain social networks with NFTs that are able to evolve with communities and are composable across web3. Collectives can be launched with just a few clicks via a no-code tool. It is now available in beta.
EIP-3525 is a proposal that looks to introduce a standard for semi-fungible tokens. It aims to bring the best of both ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens together to enable the financialization of NFTs. Semi-fungible tokens are NFTs with quantitative factors. EIP-3525 allows NFTs to be fractionalized, opening up new use cases. The framework will allow real-world assets to be tokenized in a way that ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens can not.
Curve Finance is planning to roll out its own stablecoin offering dubbed crvUSD. It recently uploaded the preliminary code for the stablecoin on GitHub. crvUSD will be over-collateralized and the team plans to hold reserves in crypto. The stablecoin is rumored to be released sometime this month.
Coinbase has proposed a plan to MakerDAO where the decentralized lending platform will deposit 1.6 billion USDC into Coinbase Prime in exchange for an annual yield of 1.5%. MakerDAO will not have to pay any custody fees and the protocol will be able to mint, burn, or withdraw USDC in less than six minutes at any time. The deal would provide Maker with an additional $24 million in yearly revenue. MakerDAO has been considering lessening its reliance on USDC since the US government's sanction of Tornado Cash.