I chat with Ken Olling from Meld and their new decentralised finance platform that allows DeFi bank loans and lines of credit.

#DeFiJuly Decentralised Finance for the Month of July

This month I'll be concentrating on interviewing, reviewing and generally learning more about decentralised finance (DeFi). It is a space that I generally missed out on during 2020 when DeFi became a thing and decentralised exchanges such as Uniswap became very popular and yield farming became a source of income for many.

I have lined up interviews with more decentralised exchange platforms such as ADAX, Mirqui, and Sundaeswap that are bringing new ideas and features to the Cardano ecosystem, Oracles services and wallets just to name a few.

You'll find these interviews right here on the audio podcast and even more extra content on our YouTube channel.

Grayscale Cardano Buy In

Grayscale includes Cardano as one of their product offerings for their tradable trust fund product called Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund and has made Cardano it's 3rd largest holding in this fund making up 4.26% of the overall fund.

Who is Grayscale?

Grayscale is the worlds largest digital asset investment firm in the world holding more than $40B in digital assets which now also includes Cardano.

Why is this big news?

Traditional investors that want exposure to the crypto markets but want the ease of what they have experienced in investing and want to continue investing the way that they always have without the need of setting up wallets, worrying about seed phrases and so forth. The traditional investor wants to just call up their broker and start investing, not having to worry about wallets, KYC or AML processes. Regular investors or speculators such as ourselves hold all the assets for ourselves and are completely responsible.

If we lose these, it's our fault and we have no one to call upon. With the investment funds provided by Grayscale, they do all of this as a trust fund all managed by the fund managers.

Secondly, investing in a publicly traded trust fund allows for tax breaks in a tax friendly way whereas investing directly in Bitcoin doesn't in many countries.

Thirdly, trading cryptocurrencies is very insular and you can't trade crypto against Apple or Tesla shares. Listing it as a tradable trust fund allows for this and more flexibility in how investors can access markets.

It originally filed for the Cardano Trust in early 2021, which meant it was only a matter of time before it offered it as a product to its potential investors.

Cardano makes up 4.3% of the Grayscale digital large cap fund which holds $348.9M worth of crypto assets including:

Bitcoin 67.9% 0.00044916 BTC
Ethereum 24.9% 0.00263041 ETH
Cardano 4.3% 0.71064735 ADA
Bitcoin Cash 1.0% 0.00046156 BCH
Litecoin 1.0% 0.00160744 LTC
Chainlink 0.9% 0.01052955 LINK

This now makes it possible for traditional investors to get into Cardano via traditional stock market investment methods. As a result of the listing, there was a clear price increase as speculators are expecting even more movement in the markets as large investment funds start opening positions in the fund.

All of this coming in before the Alonzo hard fork and the introduction of smart contracts makes it a very bullish scenario for Cardano.

World Mobile Token Sale Launches

After a bit of a tricky KYC process to get on to the system, I finally managed to get into the long-awaited token sale for the World Mobile token sale.

Daedalus Flight 4.2.0 Released

A new version of the Daedalus Flight wallet has been released as a test with a few new features and fixes.

Native token improvements

New list view and search filter to make it easier to navigate a wallet with a large collection of tokens or NFTs.

Wallet Multi-signature public key

A new function for multi-wallet transactions has been added which enables the viewing of wallet multi-signature public keys used for shared wallets and multi-party transactions.

Sharing addresses

The issue of not being able to add notes when sharing receiving addresses as a PDF document has been resolved.

Sending native tokens using Trezor hardware wallets

The issue of failures when sending multiple native tokens using Trezor hardware wallets (when multiple native tokens with the same Policy ID were sent) has been resolved.

SundaeSwap merge with CardStarter

SundaeSwap, one of the first projects to announce the creation of a decentralised exchange on Cardano is merging with CardStarter, a decentralised accelerator.

Meld DeFi Bank Loans, Interview with Ken Olling

The video interview I did with Ken covers the idea and purpose of Meld, how it will work and how users will benefit from it.

The audio podcast talks more about his back story, venture into starting Meld and why he wanted to start it. I encourage you to watch the video and listen to the accompanying audio podcast to get a better understanding of what Meld is and the passion behind the project.

Check out the Meld project at:

https://meld.com

Follow them on socials:

• https://twitter.com/meld_labs
• https://t.me/MELD_Global
• https://discord.gg/DuVjzG8qHb

If you're delegating to their pool, do not delegate to pool 4, 'MELD4', as it is a fake pool created by a scammer trying to leverage the brand of the pool and steal delegations.

https://adapools.org/search?query=meld