The bitcoin fund has 24 unnamed investors and was originally registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018. It originally raised $31 million from three investors, and in 2019 it raised an additional $54 million from six other investors. The fund has grown to $190 million since.

Blockchain technology firm Bison Trails announced its support for features of Eth2 ahead of Ethereum’s planned upgrade.  In an announcement on Monday, the firm said it would support features such as ETH staking and automatically managed validator notes on the upgraded blockchain. A founding member of the Facebook-led Libra Association, Bison Trails provides blockchain infrastructure services to firms.  Ethereum’s transition this fall will move the network from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake one in order to improve scaling and reduce power requirements. Bison Trails said helping Eth2 launch was also an opportunity to secure the chain and earn staking rewards.  The firm noted its software would manage client infrastructure automatically, thereby removing the need to manually manage participation when network requirements change.  Bison Trails recently signed a deal with NEAR Protocol, the claimed “Ethereum Killer,” to host its validator set.

The Kyber Network’ KNC token has seen its price rise over 650% so far this year thanks to an upgrade that will be introduced into the network this month, allowing users to stake tokens and earn ETH rewards while participating in governance.

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Oxfam Ireland, a Belfast-based charity fighting global poverty, has received a €1 million ($1.1 million) grant to fund the next phase of a blockchain aid distribution project. Oxfam is piloting the Ethereum-based platform with Ethereum venture studio ConsenSys and Australian tech firm Sempo in the South Pacific Ocean nation of Vanuatu, according to an Irish Times report. The project, UnBlocked Cash, was awarded the grant from the European Innovation Council in a competition called Blockchains for Social Good to run the second phase of the [pilot.In](http://pilot.In) June 2019, Oxfam announced that it had spent a month completing phase one of the  pilot, using MakerDAO’s stablecoin DAI as a vehicle for helping disaster victims. The project aims to deliver aid in the form of “smart vouchers” to disaster areas and uses stablecoins like MakerDAO’s DAI to enable cheap cross border [transactions.In](http://transactions.In) the first phase of the pilot, 200 residents in the villages of Pango and Mele Maat on the island of Efate received tap-and-pay cards, each loaded with about 4,000 vatu ($50) in DAI, according to Australian news outlet Mickey. The cards were used for payments across a network of local stores and schools, with 32 vendors in total.The second phase of the pilot will include more than 5,000 participants and 100 vendors, according to the Times. Oxfam pitched the project to a jury in Brussels and was one of 24 projects picked from 178 applications, the charity said.Oxfam claims the project has cut delivery times for aid by 96% and cut transaction costs by 60%.The grant will also allow Oxfam to scale the project across the Pacific region and explore its potential in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, the Times report said."Future plans seek to address the needs of over 2.7 million disaster-exposed and vulnerable people across the Pacific Region, as well as expanding use across the Oxfam Confederation, which reached 22.3 million people, across 90 countries, in 2018 alone,” Oxfam Ireland’s Director of Programme Niamh Carty said in a written statement.

A bitcoin exchange-traded fund may never receive approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but an even stranger crypto investment vehicle finally has: a blockchain transferred fund.  On Monday, Los Angeles-based money manager Arca began selling shares in the “Arca U.S. Treasury Fund,” an SEC-registered closed-end fund whose digital shares – ArCoins –  trade atop the Ethereum blockchain. The fund invests a majority of its assets in short-term U.S Treasury bills and notes. The company told CoinDesk it received a “Notice of Effectiveness” on July 6. The launch marks the first time the crypto-skeptical SEC has allowed a fund represented by cryptographics tokens to enter the investment markets under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Arca has been pushing for various forms of the ArCoin proposal for nearly 20 months, as shown in regulatory filings. “Our announcement today is a ground-breaking and transformative step toward the unification of traditional finance with digital asset investing as this new category of regulated, digital investment products is made available to investors,” said Arca CEO Rayne Steinberg in a press statement. Executives have previously heralded their proposed fund as a pace setter for a hybrid digital asset class. ArCoin marries perhaps the investment world’s least risky asset, Treasurys, with blockchain, the up-and-coming tech backbone they believe will lend efficiency and security to the trading and settlement process. Specifically, Arca’s digital development wing, Arca Labs, chose the Ethereum blockchain, one of the largest public blockchains in the world and the landing site of many novel crypto assets, including so-called digital securities like ArCoin, which uses the ERC-1404 protocol, according to the June 24 prospectus. ERC-1404 is a more restrictive derivative of the popular ERC-20 interoperability protocol. The main difference is that ERC-1404 restricts where holders can send a token to a collection of whitelisted addresses. That’s a crucial point for regulators wary of letting tokens outside their scope.

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five at the end of this month, and the EEA is planning a half-day seminar where its 100-plus member organization will go into more detail about its future plans. Outgoing EEA lead Ron Resnick is leaving the group to focus on the InterWork Alliance token initiative. The EEA’s new horizons were also hinted at by John Whelan, chairman of the EEA board of directors and head of digital investment banking at Banco Santander.   Read more: Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Launches Testing Ground for Blockchain Interoperability “It’s a good time to broaden the tent for all those businesses using Ethereum tech in all its various facets, whether big companies doing private permissioned, or other businesses beginning to pop up doing DeFi,” Whelan said in an interview. DeFi growth With $2 billion in crypto assets now committed to DeFi, the EEA could perhaps play a role in educating the traditional financial world about possible opportunities, Whelan added. “At some point [DeFi companies] will cross into the realm of mainstream finance, and it may well be that regulators would like to have a single point of contact in the business community and we could imagine the EEA growing into that kind of role as well,” Whelan said. Asked what sort of standards might be applied to the Wild West world of DeFi going forward, Burnett, a director of the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization, said he wouldn’t want to speculate. “Personally, I think it’s not my place. It’s not always obvious what is useful as a standard and what is not appropriate,” he said.

Entrepreneurs in the white-hot arena of decentralized finance have used cryptocurrency technologies to build automatic systems that might someday challenge or even supplant traditional banks and exchanges. Now, DeFi is taking on the asset-management industry, and already launching a range of new investment products designed to capitalize on its own success. You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. We follow the money so you don’t have to. You can subscribe here. One such project is PieDAO, a so-called decentralized autonomous organization conceived and developed by a group of DeFi developers headed by Berlin-based DexLab . Earlier this year PieDAO raised about $5 million through a sale of digital tokens, known as DOUGHs. The network went live in March – just as bitcoin and most traditional financial markets like stocks were crashing due to the spreading global pandemic. The PieDAO platform, a decentralized application built atop the Ethereum blockchain, produces its own incarnation of digital tokens called “pies.” They work like tokenized investment funds whose value is linked to a basket of other digital tokens, which in turn are sourced from a decentralized liquidity pool known as Balancer. In April the project rolled out its first pie, called BTC++, which is backed by tokenized versions of bitcoin. And stakeholders in the project have since pushed out a second pie called USD++, backed by U.S. dollar-linked stablecoins. But PieDAO’s first real push toward full decentralization started last month, when investors were allowed to start buying DOUGHs directly from the project in exchange for ether, the native token of the Ethereum blockchain, with a minimum deposit worth roughly $500. For now, DOUGHs aren’t publicly traded. Such tokenized vehicles have been described by analysts as the digital-asset version of exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, a type of investment vehicle in traditional financial markets that can be traded like stocks. “It’s very fascinating to see more experiments to re-invent financial applications we have never seen before,” Soravis Srinawakoon, co-founder and CEO of Band Protocol, a cross-chain data oracle for the DeFi space, wrote in a Telegram message.  Pie chart showing assets in basket backing PieDAO's BTC++ tokens.Source: PieDAO PieDAO isn’t the first ETF-like provider for the digital asset space. The Set Protocol, also on Ethereum, allows users to invest or even create their own baskets of assets called “Sets,” which like Pie are fully tokenized. Another option, according to a report Monday from the cryptocurrency analysis firm Delphi Digital, is the sDEFI token from Synthetix. But PieDAO takes the tokenization concept a step further, since the DOUGHs give holders the ability to influence the investment vehicle’s management – on matters ranging from the weight of the underlying investment indices and methods for asset-rebalancing, to the level of fees charged and when to pay out a cut of those fees. The issuance and transfer of the DOUGHs works to democratize the governance of the investment vehicle, roughly analogous to the way shareholders can own stock in a money-management company. So far, only 131 addresses hold DOUGHs, covering the original token holders – including founders, core developers and early investors – as well as new buyers, according to block explorer Etherscan. DexLabs CEO Alessio Delmonti, who according to his LinkedIn profile previously worked as a mobile-app developer, told CoinDesk in a direct message via Twitter that the plan is to sell DOUGH tokens currently held in a reserve fund to new buyers. The goal is for 75% of the total supply to be distributed by early 2021, up from just over 50% now, he said. “Ultimately it is up to the DAO to vote the proposal in for final distribution,” Delmonti said. The project’s white paper still hasn’t been published because it’s still in “active writing and currently under consideration of the community,” he said. PieDAO’s community members are already holding discussions on plans for new pie tokens, according to Delmonti. There’s a Google spreadsheet that summarizes some of the proposals, including new pies backed by baskets of DeFi-related assets, such as tokens from the ChainLink, MakerDao and Compound projects. “PieDAO is an interesting solution which essentially combines DAOs and DeFi, to create a new way to manage and create crypto index funds,” analyst Alex Gedevani wrote in Monday’s Delphi Digital report. While still small, DeFi is one of the fastest growing corners of the digital-asset industry. Total value locked (TVL) in DeFi applications – a proxy for how much money is actually put into the systems – has roughly tripled this year to the equivalent of about $2.1 billion, according to analytics site DeFi Pulse.  Chart of total U.S. dollar value locked in decentralized finance protocols.Source: DeFi Pulse This market exuberance has contributed to a doubling this year in ether’s price. The frenzy surrounding another DeFi project, the lender Compound, whose market capitalization shot up to $1 billion within a week of its public release last month, from less than $10 million initially, according to CoinGecko. Skeptics of the projects have also pointed to the risks of putting money into these little-tested tokens, which can be prone to malicious exploits along with rampant speculation and mispricing. The PieDAO tokens already trading have benefited from this year’s gains in cryptocurrency markets; that’s true for BTC++, for example, since its price generally tracks bitcoin.  Price chart of PieDAO's BTC++ tokens.Source: CoinGecko For now, the project is still tiny even by the standards of the nascent cryptocurrency industry; the market value of BTC++ is about $1.4 million currently, and it’s $2.7 million for USD++. For comparison, bitcoin, the oldest and largest cryptocurrency, has a market value of about $173 billion, and No. 2 ether’s is $27 billion.  The cryptocurrency industry is replicating businesses long dominated by Wall Street and banks, from margin loans and derivatives trading in digital-asset markets, to blockchain-based payment and lending systems. Asset management is another frontier; the thinking is that many ETF-style investment vehicles will eventually be tokenized for trading in faster, cheaper and more customizable digital-asset markets.  And the cryptocurrency industry isn’t waiting around, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission having thus far refused to approve a bitcoin ETF.