21/06/2022 Ex-Sushi CTO Raises $8M for NFT Lending Platform Astaria

The platform, led by CEO Justin Bram and DeFi vet Joseph Delong, aims to provide instant liquidity for your JPEGs and should be available to the public by September.

Non-fungible token (NFT) lending platform and liquidity engineAstariahas raised $8 million in seed funding to build during the bear.

The round included True Ventures, Arrington Capital, Ethereal Ventures, Wintermute, Genesis Trading, LedgerPrime, Hypersphere Ventures, The LAO and many others. (Genesis is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which also owns CoinDesk.)

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Astaria allows users to put up their NFTs as collateral to earn instant liquidity. According to co-founder and CEO Justin Bram, the recent dip in NFT sales followed by signals of a bear market makes Astaria’s services attractive for NFT owners looking to earn passive income on their digital assets.

“We’re very bullish on NFTs and bringing real assets in the future,” Bram told CoinDesk, when asked about current trends in NFT markets. “Over the next three to five years our hope is that we will expand well beyond art-based NFTs and profile picture NFTs.”

Users who put their NFTs up as collateral can use Astaria to take out loans in ether (ETH). According to co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Joseph Delong, a crypto veteran who previously led decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Sushi and worked at ConsenSys, Astaria will eventually integrate multiple chains beyond Ethereum to support loans in other cryptocurrencies.

“We know Ethereum will be here in three, five years. We don’t know which other layer 1s [blockchains] will be. We don’t know which layer 2s [companion systems] will succeed,” said Bram on the topic of cross-chain expansion.

The market for NFT lending services has grown over the past year, with companies such asNFTfiandArcadeproviding peer-to-peer lending services. Astaria differs in that it will not mandate two-way approvals, in an effort to make transactions more efficient.

According to Bram, Astaria plans to use the funding round to expand its current eight-person team. He says the platform’s public launch could come as early as September.

Arts

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/06/20/ex-sushi-cto-raises-8m-for-nft-lending-platform-astaria/

Interesting NFTs
Magnetic Forces v3
"El imĂĄn humilla al hierro. Es una teorĂ­a sobre el amor. Magnets humiliate iron. It's a theory about love." --Marco Denevi
taro
conceptual art. drawing and digitally processed
#51552
By OthersideDeployer
RARE BIRD! Fancy!
Uh, hi! I'm RARE BIRD! Fancy!. In high school, I was voted biggest teacher's pet. In my free time, I can usually be found tantalizing or volunteering at the local kitten rescue shelter. I hope we can be pawmates.
The Scion
A young figure caught in a moment of distraction, aware only ephemerally of his unconscious being, as it engages in psychological and psychedelic layer spaces. His right arm casually cradles a moray eel; the figure is comfortable but not truly aware of the potentials for danger in such negligence. His shirt reads “Bello” in Pokemon style font, harkening back to a childhood straddling the millennial threshold. To his right side, out of the unconscious deep, shrouded alien heads propagate as a fractal totem, each new iteration a more sophisticated rendering of emotional masking over the cold mystery of the greys. As the scion of the Budgie-Sattva, the young man, in his distraction, is also simultaneously aware of higher levels of self discovery. To his left a psychological topology sets beneath the oracle side of an 8 ball ,hovering; its message a purest concept of acceptance. The “Scion” lettering is in 80’s HeMan style bold declaration. The lower right side of the painting is like a hybrid of melon, feathers, and seeds. The crystals in the background bring light; conducted, refracted, reflected, and dispersed, to balance the dark shadow of the figure’s physical body. The aura of the scion succeeds in layers to point, with a finger, and the crown chakra, toward a center of a mandala existing as nigh pure application of strokes, in essence painterly abstraction, but also revealing hints of the Aura of migraine, and the bi-hemispherical nature of the brain–noting concerns of the possibility of inherited mental disease. Yet the flourish of chakra as it sets against that center is robust, active, coherent, and reveling against all fear. Fundamentally, the piece speaks to the activation of one’s potential to begin to “Know Thyself”, and find greater awareness out of the enigmas of the mind–as an inculcated seed given to the rich soil of one’s own birthright.