The Block
Bitcoin‘s price could hit a new all-time high in August, followed by an increase to $100,000 by the time of the U.S. presidential election in November, according to Standard Chartered.
Quick Take There has been a small uptick in the Ethereum withdrawal queue since June 28. The following is an excerpt from The Block’s Data and Insights newsletter.
Quick Take The Bitcoin restaking protocol Lombard raised $16 million in seed funding led by Polychain Capital. Lombard will use the financing to grow out the Bitcoin restaking ecosystem alongside Babylon, a Bitcoin staking protocol. Lombard issues the liquid and yield-bearing representation of staked Bitcoin using the token LBTC to unlock liquidity.
Quick Take The distributed cloud computing firm Prodia raised $15 million in seed funding led by Dragonfly Capital. Prodia builds out a distributed network of GPUs. It aims to provide more efficient cloud computing services at a lower cost by using web3 infrastructure.
Quick Take RedStone has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round from Arrington Capital, Kraken Ventures and others. The round was structured as a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT), RedStone founder and CEO Jakub Wojciechowski told The Block.
Quick Take Four former big tech executives have joined Tools for Humanity, a core contributor to the Worldcoin project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The executives are being brought in to boost Tools for Humanity’s privacy, security, hardware and digital ID divisions.
Quick Take The web3 AI firm raised $8 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital and Borderless Capital. OpenLedger builds out permissionless and data-focused infrastructure for artificial intelligence development.
Quick Take bNVDA, an Ethereum-based tokenized security backed one-to-one by Nvidia stock but not officially affiliated with the chipmaker, was launched for trading on the INX platform on Tuesday for eligible non-U.S. users.
Quick Take Sentient has raised $85 million in a seed funding round to build an open-source AI platform. One of Sentient’s core contributors is Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon. Sentient’s advisor from day one is Sreeram Kannan, founder and CEO of EigenLayer.
Quick Take The Layer 1 blockchain platform Chromia expects to launch its mainnet in mid-July. Chromia aims to make building web3 applications easier by undergirding its Layer 1 blockchain with an SQL-like programming language.
