Publications
- _Building
Celo is an EVM-compatible L1 with a special focus on enabling global mobile-first peer-to-peer payments while remaining carbon-negative. As core contributors of the Celo blockchain, cLabs proposed transitioning from a standalone L1 to an Ethereum L2 in July. With this article, we first want to highlight Celo’s mission and values to then understand the aforementioned technical proposal and how it would differentiate Celo from existing L2s.
- _Research
Without transaction privacy, everything on-chain is public. Users expose their information and metadata. Most users don’t want that - especially institutional ones. Nevertheless, it is by no means certain that transaction privacy will become an essential feature of public blockchains. This research effort discusses regulatory and usage challenges and the most promising approaches and protocols to combat them. It covers their basic ideas and trade-offs and suggests a categorization of the current landscape of transaction privacy.
- _Investments
Greenfield is leading the latest $7M funding round for Panoptic. We believe that Panoptic is the next zero-to-one innovation in the DeFi realm. By building on top of Uniswap, Panoptic is not only trying to solve the trillion-dollar on-chain options problem but also enabling an entirely new set of possibilities to create novel financial products. Panoptic allows users to short LP positions and to long or short any on-chain asset via multi-leg options. It can ultimately increase the earnings of liquidity providers which deposit their LP positions into Panoptic to earn additional yield.
- _Investments
We're thrilled to share that Greenfield is leading Stroom's $3.5M seed funding round. Stroom, based in Kiev, Ukraine, stands out with an innovative approach: their liquid staking protocol allows seamless provisioning of channel liquidity in BTC to the Lightning Network and earning fees through yield-bearing DeFi-enabled lnBTC tokens on Ethereum, all without running a node.
- _Research
We at Greenfield believe blockchains and tokenization will transform global capital markets via an emerging internet-native financial system. This research effort is the first in a series to illustrate the motivations, advantages, challenges, and solutions that define the emerging transformation in global on-chain capital markets. We start things off by _1 framing problems in the traditional financial markets on a high level that led to _2 the emergence of public blockchains, the critical advantages of which for capital markets will be laid out. Furthermore, _3 challenges for realizing these advantages will be discussed, while _4 arguing that the space has made significant progress since previous hype cycles.
- _Investments
At Greenfield, we are committed to supporting founders who are building the infrastructure for tomorrow’s decentralized work environment. This is why we are excited to announce our lead investment into Opolis as part of their latest $6.6M funding round with further participation by Tim Draper (with Draper Associates), NEAR, Polygon Ventures, among others. Opolis is a next-generation decentralized employment platform empowering independent workers in both Web2 and Web3 to become masters of all things employment. With Opolis, they maintain freedom and flexibility, while replicating the safety and security of traditional salaried jobs.
- _Research
Bitcoin-related projects are an integral part of our pipeline and our portfolio - such as Sovryn and Foundation Devices. Over the last months, we have extensively looked into the Lightning Network space. In this post, we highlight the latest Bitcoin and Lightning Network developments. A special focus is placed on recent enablers and catalysts, introducing some relevant players, and discussing outstanding challenges that now offer particular opportunities for builders.
- _Building
Vega is a crypto derivatives protocol built on top of a performance-optimized, application-specific blockchain that aims to allow truly decentralized trading without sacrificing aspects that impact the experience like latency. In this article, we cover the characteristics which make Vega well-suited to become the derivatives layer for crypto: The occasion for this update is solemn: the launch of the Vega Mainnet!
- _Research
How is Crypto Europe doing? To find out exactly that and take the pulse regularly, we have launched the State of European Crypto Report. The key message of the first edition: Regulation is the core topic for 2023 - and is likely to boost the European ecosystem.
- _Investments
While Web2 companies may use many advertising methods to drive users to their services and products, the same tools and strategies often don't work in Web3. This is where DappBack, a Web3-native platform for community engagement and user acquisition, comes in. We are excited to co-lead DappBack’s $2.5M seed round with IOSG Ventures.