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Crypto-finance company Amber Group valued at $1B following $100M raise

Cryptocurrency investment platform Amber Group has added $100 million to its coffers following a successful Series B fundraiser, bringing its total pre-money valuation to $1 billion — a major milestone for the firm as it enters its fourth year of operations. 

The cash injection will be used to “expand global operations to meet client demand and develop market solutions for the world’s leading crypto investors and companies,” co-founder and CEO Michael Wu said.

Measures of trade volume and total assets under management showcase Amber Group’s significant growth over the past four years. The company now has over $1 billion in assets under management, with more than $500 billion worth of cumulative trade volumes.

“We’ve had record months over the past quarter across both client flow and on-exchange market-making volumes,” Wu said, adding:

“Since stepping up our on-screen presence, we now account for 2-3% of total trading volumes in major spot and derivative markets and are continuing to see growth. Our cumulative trading volumes have doubled from $250 billion since the beginning of the year to over $500 billion.”

In terms of notional trade volume, Amber Group ranks 21st among global exchanges, according to BitMEX data.

Amber’s assets topped $530 million in 2020, representing a 275% increase from the prior year. At the time, Wu told Cointelegraph that his company has “already proven we can provide institutional-grade integrated crypto financial services.”

In addition to its Series B backers, Amber Group has received direct funding from some of blockchain’s biggest venture funds, including Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Blockchain.com.

Related: Financial advisers lead the institutional push toward crypto adoption

Venture funds have poured billions of dollars into the crypto economy over the past six months, highlighting their conviction in the new asset class. Just this month, Solana Labs finalized a $314 million private token sale, PayPal and Salesforce contributed $14 million to TRM Labs and DeFi exchange dYdX raised $65 million through a Series C fundraiser.

Crypto-finance company Amber Group valued at $1B following $100M raise

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What algorithm is adopted to protect the security of Blockchain?

What algorithm is adopted to protect the security of Blockchain

If you have been following cryptocurrency over the last decade, you must have heard the word “Blockchain”,  the record-keeping methodology behind the Bitcoin network. Blockchain technology is basically a distributed database that keeps a continuous rising list of protected records from external emendation. Approximately 5% of the world population use this technology. But, is blockchain completely secure? Well, this can be estimated by evaluating the workings of a blockchain platform. This article will look into essential aspects of blockchain that make it an efficient and safe platform for digital transactions. 

Table of contents 

  • How does a blockchain network work?
  • Algorithm to protect blockchain security:
  • Private and public key
  • Hashing
  • Peer-to-peer network
  • Zero-knowledge proof
  • Closing thought

How does a blockchain network work?

The blockchain network dwells across a system of nodes. When new transactions happen, the blockchain is ascertained across this distributed system before these new transactions can be incorporated as the following blocks on the chain. Hence, the alliance of nodes is needed to put that block into the blockchain. Each block keeps collections of unique transactions and the outcomes of any blockchain executables.  The blockchain platform is trustable because an exact copy of the series, showing every transaction, is attached to the entire network. If somebody tries to cheat the system, they can be identified easily. 

However, sometimes a few things can go wrong in other areas of a blockchain-based application resulting in loss and compromise. For instance, weak access controls, inadequate communication security, certificate management protections, and loose key. For this reason, blockchain uses several algorithms to increase security and provide each user with a safe environment for carrying out transactions.

Algorithms used to protect the blockchain security:

  • Private and public keys

Blockchain technology makes use of asymmetric cryptography for securing transactions among users. In such networks, each user acquires a private and public key. These keys are created with random strings of numbers that are cryptographically linked. No user can surmise another user’s private key by looking at their public key. All users have an address that is emanated from the public key by utilizing a hash function. These addresses are used for sending and receiving investments on the blockchain, I.e. cryptocurrency. Users can view previous transactions and activities on the blockchain as blockchain networks are shared with all parties.

Users’ identities are kept hidden; Senders and receivers of prior transactions are embodied and implied by their addresses; 

This strategy prevents  a malevolent user from observing a specific address’s past transactions  to disclose information.

Private keys protect users’ identities and keep them secure through digital signatures. Private keys let users access personal wallets and funds on the blockchain; this adds a layer of identity authentication. Whenever individuals send money to other users, they should submit a digital signature produced and provided with the private key. This procedure prevents the theft of funds.

Before building transactions into blocks, blockchains hash every transaction. Hash pointers tie each block to its forebear by carrying a hash of the data in the previous block. Hence, a change made in any transaction will generate a completely different hash, which will then modify the hashes of all successive blocks. To produce a modification across the blockchain, around 51% of the system would have to agree to it. This process is termed a “51% attack.”

However, different blockchains employ different cryptography algorithms. The Bitcoin blockchain utilizes the SHA256 algorithm, which generates a 32-byte hash. Litecoin and Dogecoin both use Scrypt. It is one of the lighter and faster cryptography algorithms.

  • Peer-to-peer network    

In big corporations, an enormous amount of users’ personal data is stocked on solitary devices, which increases the risk of losing data if the system got hacked, mishandled, or lost. Blockchain intends to eliminate this dependence on a central authority. To accomplish this, blockchain works in a way where nodes in a blockchain system can affirm the legitimacy of a transaction instead of a third party.

Transactions between clients like sending and accepting digital money are conveyed to each node in the network. Nodes ensure credibility of transaction, before it gets documented as a block on the blockchain and check past transactions of the sender to make sure he/she didn’t double-spend or spend a more extensive amount of funds than they acquire.

Later on, agreement protocols like verification of work and confirmation of stake are sent by miners. These protocols permit nodes to arrive at an agreement state on the order and sum of transactions. When a transaction gets checked, it is distributed as a block on the blockchain. Users’ protection is expanded through the decentralized nature of blockchain, and no need for a central authority.

  • Zero-knowledge proofs

Zero-knowledge proof is a Consensual decision-making process in which one party confirms to another party that data is credible. In this process, the “prover” does not disclose any data about the transaction. This can be achieved through detailed cryptographic techniques. This maintains the decentralized nature of blockchain while reducing transparency; zero-knowledge proofs reflect nothing regarding a transaction except its validity.

Closing Thought

Through the combined use of different algorithms, blockchains are able to fulfil high degrees of security as a distributed system. However, these fields of knowledge must be appropriately assigned. By understanding the algorithm, a user can become a blockchain expert. A careful symmetry between security and decentralization is essential for building a dependable and effective cryptocurrency network. 

To learn more about Blockchain technology and become a Blockchain expert, check out various courses as well as certifications available with Blockchain Council.

What algorithm is adopted to protect the security of Blockchain?

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Investors cautiously re-enter crypto funds while ETH vehicles show strength

A new report from analytics firm Coinshares shows that while the market dip may not have ended, prices are now at levels where stock market investors are once again showing signs of interest in digital asset funds. 

A report published yesterday from Coinshares shows that multiple funds have begun seeing net inflows after weeks of record outflows in the wake of a crippling, market-wide crypto dip. In totally, legacy markets poured in $74 million into crypto investment vehicles, though not all products showed signs of strength.

While some analysts are calling for Bitcoin as low as $16,000 per BTC, Bitcoin products were among the weakest performers, with $4 million in net outflows. The report notes that altcoins — particularly more environmentally friendly proof-of-stake altcoins — were strong performers, with Cardano, Ripple, and Polkadot funds each seeing above $3 million in inflows. 

The true star of the report is Ethereum, however. ETH vehicles saw a total of $47 million in inflows, making up the majority of net digital asset fund investments and bringing ETH vehicle market dominance up to 27%.

The bullish outlook from investors on the asset comes after a string of bullish reports from academic and institutional finance research desks. Last week both the University of Pennsylvania and Goldman Sachs wrote research arguing for Ethereum as a store of value, in part due to its importance to the DeFi ecosystem.

The world’s largest layer one smart contract platform also has a number of technical advancements and headwinds on the horizon. Layer two scaling solution Arbitrum recently went live with a guarded launch, and the long-awaited gas fee overhaul of EIP-1559 is set for later this year, as well as a likewise much-anticipated transition to a proof-of-stake consensus model.

Investors cautiously re-enter crypto funds while ETH vehicles show strength

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Role of NFT in DeFi

Role of NFT in DeFi

The NFT space has become all about digital art and collectibles. Each featured headline is about some amazingly overrated photoshop collage or GIF, and the zeal surrounding NFTs has become a full-blown trend. New artists, as well as established ones, musicians, and animators are making use of the best NFT and flooding the media and telegram groups with their work promotions. There seem to be enough collectors who are willing to invest in the hype. Everybody wants to get in, but when the hype will fade away, what will be left? 

Well, any certified NFT Expert will agree that an NFT can address far beyond than a piece of art. We are now discovering the token standard being utilized for music rights, admittance to websites, or as a ‘Tokenization’ of real-world resources. This article will look at how NFTs are included in the DeFi space and which roles they play in the world of Decentralized finance projects.

Table of content

  • Introduction of NFTs into DeFi space.
  • Roles of NFTs in DeFi.
       * Solving issue of collateralization.
       * NFT Ownership and DeFi.
       * Solving issue of curve model.
  • Closing thoughts.

Introduction of NFTs into DeFi space

Design patterns in the Decentralized Finance/Defi space are mixing into the Non-fungible tokens/NFT marketplaces in recent times. Much like other DeFi projects before it, Rarible, a creator-centric NFT marketplace, decided to enroll a governance token called “RARI” and put up the steps to ensure that the platform is being regulated by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The token holders of RARI that include collectors and creators, are liable to vote for platform upgrades and actively participate in moderation and curation in the marketplace. RARI also introduced an NFT index  — a portfolio created for NFTs to facilitate collectors who wish to invest in the NFT market but are uncertain of what artwork to choose from.

Since NFTs (non-fungible tokens)  depict the financialization of digital products and services, NFT setups and marketplaces have come to be an undeniable thriving sector of DeFi. Like Ethereum has employed ERC-20s to embody digital assets, NFTs can be comprehended as provable ownership rights for digital art. Due to the closing of art galleries worldwide because of COVID-19 and other cultural occurrences in the online world, Ethereum established a growing place for creators to share their art and interact successfully with an interested community of collectors. Due to this quality of NFTs, they play important roles in DeFi.

Roles of NFTs in DeFi:

  • Solving issue of collateralization

In the art market, an issue regarding the liquidity of the market is a real bug. Everything is subjective here.

Suppose a painting is worth $1million, yet it doesn’t remain very worthy unless somebody is willing to pay for it. In this situation, DeFi and NFTs do combined work to solve this issue. The workings may involve looking for ways to use NFT collectibles and art as collateral against DeFi lending. As traditional arts have been used as collateral in the real world since the beginning, moving it to the crypto world and NFT art, appears to be a logical step forward.

The other way that NFT helps in resolving liquidity issues in DeFi is by applying tokenization of those NFTs. The tokenization will quickly prepare an illiquid asset. For example, a piece of art that is easily tradable.

  • NFT Ownership and DeFi

The use of Defi platforms ingrained with NFTs in the music industry is a revolution for artists. NFT plays a very significant role in facilitating ownership rights and profits to the original creators. Those who own the NFTs will earn a fair share of the streaming revenue yielded by the songs. Maintaining provable earnings through an NFT furthermore functions as an effective form of collateral and can unlock the gates to under-collateralized loans. In the DeFi only space, this facility is currently not possible. Hence, the presence of NFT is a plus for Defi space.

The monetization of creative works using NFTs will proceed to be a considerable part of the NFT space. Still, it will more likely take the form of licensing, copyright ownership, and royalty sharing.

  • Solving issue of curve model

Another prominent example where NFT ownership plays a significant role in   DeFi space is how they work together to resolve the curve model issue. One of the updated versions of Defi protocols that introduced the curve model concerning liquidity pools. The curve model was created to distribute liquidity all across the entire curve, meaning that a large build-up of liquidity was not producing payments for providers.

With the assistance of NFT space, they introduced a facility to select desired custom price sizes for liquidity providers to evaluate their capital to resolve this issue. This boosts their exposure to needed assets and reduces their downside risk.

Closing thoughts

NFTs signify cryptographic tokens which are considered valuable due to their  security and need. With a combination of decentralized financial goods, special financial services can be produced by using these tokens. Possible use cases for this kind of technical innovation involve in-game currencies, investments, or liquidity mining. Indeed, there are endless roles that NFTs can play in DeFi space. There is more to be seen what exciting projects will be appearing soon.

Learn more about NFTs and DeFi and grab an NFT certificate at Blockchain Council. We also provide various online courses and certifications. Do check out for more.

Role of NFT in DeFi

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VORTECS Report: While Bitcoin gained just 10% since Jan 3, this crypto trading strategy netted 2,150% ROI

Bitcoin may be suffering through a succession of negative news stories, but some crypto investors are still celebrating major gains in 2021’s altcoin bull market.

Since January 3 this year, Cointelegraph Markets Pro has been live-testing 42 separate automated strategies based on the proprietary VORTECS™ algorithm developed in partnership with The TIE, a data analytics firm.

Let’s not be humble about this: VORTECS™ has crushed it.

Of those 42 strategies, every single one has beaten the return on investment (ROI) delivered by Bitcoin for hodlers who refuse to part with their BTC.

And even when compared to holding an evenly-weighted basket of the top 100 altcoins, 88% of those strategies come out ahead.

What’s more, the most successful strategies — whether based on the time between an entry position and a hypothetical exit, or exiting a position based on crossing a new score threshold — have delivered in excess of 2,000% returns as of May 22 — even after multiple pullbacks in the crypto asset class. In fact, the most successful of all (Buy 80 / Sell 80) has generated returns of 2,150%.

That compares extremely favorably with the strategy of holding Bitcoin (10% ROI) or the basket of altcoins (226% ROI) since January 3.

In the chart above, which is based on exiting a position at an arbitrary time (24 hours, 48 hours, 96 hours or 168 hours) all VORTECS™ strategies beat Bitcoin… and only one failed to beat the altcoin basket.

In this second chart, based on exiting at a second score threshold, all VORTECS™ strategies beat holding Bitcoin, and only four failed to beat the altcoin basket.

So what is VORTECS™ — and why is it consistently outperforming the wider crypto market?

What is VORTECS?™

The VORTECS™ Score is an algorithmic metric derived from historical analysis of crypto markets.

For each one of the ~200 crypto assets supported by Cointelegraph Markets Pro, the algorithm is hunting for moments in time that resemble the current marketscape — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Specifically, it’s looking for patterns that have consistently led to significant changes in price in the past.

Those patterns include a variety of factors: Volume, Outlook, RealPrice, Tweet Volume, Elevation, Confidence, and Sentiment… or VORTECS™ for short.

Volume: A measure of how much of an asset is traded across supported exchanges.

Outlook: A measure of whether the current market conditions are favorable or not, compared with historically-similar conditions.

RealPrice: A composite price derived from an average of prices across relevant exchanges, discounting outliers based on low volume.

Tweet Volume: A measure of the absolute and relative number of tweets about an asset over the past 24 hours.

Elevation: A measure of how far up or down an asset’s price moved following historically-similar market conditions to those observed currently.

Confidence: The degree to which current conditions are similar to historic conditions, with higher confidence also including the consistency of asset price moves following those conditions.

Sentiment: The positivity or negativity of the chatter on Twitter surrounding the crypto asset, derived from a complex proprietary algorithm developed by The TIE.

The algorithm combines all of this raw data into a VORTECS™ Score, which is designed to identify the general health of the market for a particular crypto asset. A high score suggests that in the past, conditions similar to those we see right now have often led to increases in the price of that asset. The higher the score, the more confident the algorithm is that these scenarios have been consistent.

Like any trading algorithm, that doesn’t mean it’s a crystal ball — in fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite. Whereas fortune tellers look into the future, VORTECS™ looks into the past.

But it turns out that examining the right elements of history provides keen insights for crypto traders who are seeking an edge.

How Markets Pro measures the VORTECS™ Score’s performance

Cointelegraph Markets Pro testing tracks the price of an asset when the score crosses a threshold (for example, a score of 85) and then measures the price again when it crosses a second threshold (which could be another score, or could be measured in hours). The difference between the first and second prices is the gain or loss that the algorithm tracks… and there’s more detail on that here.

So even though a human couldn’t trade exactly this way, by applying a consistent set of standards it’s possible to establish whether an algorithm is operationally successful or not. And the verdict is very clear: VORTECS™ has consistently and significantly outperformed the crypto market as a whole since live-testing began earlier this year.

And perhaps just as importantly is the fact that even with a major pullback in the overall value of the crypto markets, which lost close to a trillion dollars in value at the low point this week, the performance of all the VORTECS™ strategies tested continued to outperform the benchmark currency, Bitcoin, by a significant margin.

Using the VORTECS™ Score

Remember, the score is not a prediction of how an asset price WILL change over time, but an analysis of how asset prices HAVE changed over time when faced with similar market conditions.

So the VORTECS™ Score, while it is weighted to take account of the size of asset price change in the past, will not tell you HOW MUCH an asset may change.

It will also not tell you WHEN it will change — in fact, the algorithm is deliberately fuzzy on time, meaning that it is normalized and smoothed to ensure that abrupt outliers (such as a sudden viral tweet) don’t abnormally affect the overall trend.

While the algorithm is generally oriented to a 12-72 hour timeframe, testing revealed that efforts to “time the market” precisely introduced an element that was not supported by historical data.

So let’s take a look at an example score of 85.

This is a high score which means that there is some combination of these factors:

  • The algorithm has found market conditions in the past that look similar to current market conditions
  • Those historical conditions often led to an INCREASE in asset price over the next 12-72 hours, approximately
  • The price changes in the past have been significant
  • The algorithm maintains a high level of confidence that the set of conditions it’s looking at are similar enough to suggest that the overall direction of this asset’s price is currently bullish, or positive.

The 1,500+ crypto traders in the Cointelegraph Markets Pro Discord group, which is available exclusively to members, have used these scores in a wide variety of ways to enhance their understanding of the current market health for dozens of crypto assets.

And while massive ROI numbers like 2,150% are at the extremes of VORTECS™ success, it is worth noting that the mean ROI from all score-based strategies is 642%, while the mean ROI from all time-based strategies is 638%… both of which are significantly higher than the benchmarks set by BTC (10%) and altcoins (226%).

Cointelegraph Markets Pro is available exclusively to members on a monthly basis at $99 per month, or annually with two free months included. It carries a 14-day money-back policy, to ensure that it fits the crypto trading and investing research needs of subscribers, and members can cancel anytime.

Important Disclaimer

Cointelegraph is a publisher of financial information, not an investment adviser. We do not provide personalized or individualized investment advice. Cryptocurrencies are volatile investments and carry significant risk including the risk of permanent and total loss. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Figures and charts are correct at the time of writing or as otherwise specified. Live-tested strategies are not recommendations. Consult your financial advisor before making financial decisions. Full terms and conditions.

VORTECS Report: While Bitcoin gained just 10% since Jan 3, this crypto trading strategy netted 2,150% ROI

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