Kyros Ventures joins force with Aura Network to build the Internet of NFTs

Kyros Ventures is pleased to announce our strategic partnership with Aura Network, an unparalleled scalable Layer 1 blockchain solution designed for NFT adoption. We are excited to help the Aura Network team realize its vision as the epicenter of the NFT ecosystem development. 

Aura Network is a Layer 1 blockchain with the main focus of popularizing NFTs across various industries. As a pioneer in NFT infrastructure, its vision is to create a one-stop destination for minting, evaluating, querying, and transacting NFTs.

Aura Network has three primary features as a universal framework: a one-stop destination for developing new NFT use cases, a multi-chain platform supporting both crypto and traditional businesses, and an infrastructure layer to integrate metaverse applications. With four core layers of infrastructure, currency, dApps and OpenAPI, the Aura ecosystem promises to enhance efficiency by solving the scalability problem without compromising security.

Riding on the NFT adoption waves, Kyros shares the same vision with Aura Network to build an NFT-centric infrastructure that promotes developers, while at the same time, break through to reach a more mainstream set of end users. Kyros will be supporting Aura Network in educating users on this new applicable technology and looking forward to expanding Aura Network’s presence in the Vietnam market as a pioneer builder in the Internet of NFT.

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About Kyros Ventures 

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities.

For further information, please visit Kyros Ventures

About Aura Network 

Aura Network is a layer-1, NFT-centric blockchain that focuses on expanding the use of NFTs across various industries. Our vision is to create a one-stop destination for minting, evaluating, querying, and transacting NFTs, to become a pioneer NFT infrastructure for the future. Aura Network focuses on building a sovereign blockchain that is optimized for NFT use cases.

For further information, please visit Aura Network

Episode 4: Seeking alpha with Alpha Finance Labs

Recovering from the exploit, Alpha Finance is coming back strongly with various updates and new product lines. Joined us last Thursday, Tascha Punyaneramitdee, the co-founder and CEO of Alpha Finance Labs, also shared her view on NFT from a perspective of DeFi yield farming.

What’s on wait? Beta Finance, one of the first projects incubated by Alpha Launchpad. Follow us in our seeking alpha journey.

Kyros Research’s Quarterly Report – Q1 2021

The Big Picture

  • Bullish momentum continues to rule the market sentiment throughout the first quarter of 2021. The total market cap soars 144% from $787B to $1,919B in Q1, 2021, according to Coingecko.
  • Institutional sector participation in the market marks all-time-high (ATH) with several public firms and investment funds that either announce Bitcoin investments or launch cryptocurrency products.

Institutional Investor

  • Network effect has passed onto institutional investors on Bitcoin in 2021 with a large wave of adoption (Figure 1). Joining forces with Grayscale, Square and MicroStrategy, Tesla did not only add Bitcoin into its balance sheet but also allowed its users to purchase Tesla cars by Bitcoin. The institutional adoption continues to spread like wildfire, in the context of highly-concerned global economic status post-Covid-19.

Figure 1: Bitcoin Mass Adoption in QI/2021

  • Grayscale, for the first time in the past 3 years, has added 5 new tokens into its investment product lines, providing indirect access to crypto for accredited US investors and institutions (Figure 2). The latest batch includes Basic Attention Token, Chainlink, Decentraland, Filecoin and Livepeer. In the meantime, the largest institutional Bitcoin-hodler also expands its current portfolio of existing crypto assets, accumulating a higher stake of those coins’ total supply.

Figure 2: Grayscale holding over coins’ supply

Bitcoin

Figure 3: Bitcoin Price Returns in Q1 & Q2

The Summer Time

  • Figure 3 depicts that Quarter 1 2021 has seen the best return since 2017. The market size is double with bullish sentiment carried over from the second half of last year.
  • Quarter 2 has been a pivotal period of the crypto cycle ever since 2017. Either carrying on the previous bullish momentum or cooling down the bear, crypto summer brings a fresh vibe for new trends. Q2 2017 was the start of the peak half a year later. Q2 2018 marked the market’s second rebound before the crypto winter. Q2 2019 was the best performed season for that year. Q2 2020 witnessed a great recovery from  Black Thursday. Forecasting Q2 2021 from a limited dataset would not be a piece of wise advice, yet a green quarter can be the modest expectation.

The Trillion-Cap Assets Universe

  • Bitcoin market capitalization has surpassed the 1 trillion USD mark for the first time ever in the last quarter. The next milestone for Bitcoin is Silver before achieving its ultimate goal, e-Gold (Figure 4). 
  • Needless to say, Bitcoin was the best-performer among the trillion cap asset universe in the first quarter of 2021. The cryptocurrency skyrocketed 102%, with the market cap finishing the first bullish round at 1.1 trillion USD.

Figure 4: Bitcoin among other trillion cap assets

Ethereum Challengers

  • The second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum is on the right track for its potent network upgrade, the eth2.0 staking event. At the end of Q1 2021, the total staked Ether reached 3,611,147 ETH, equivalent to $6.7B or 3.13% of the total circulating supply.  

Polkadot

  • Polkadot has risen as one of the most competent Ethereum challengers. Figure 5 depicts how the ecosystem’s public awareness has grown. The Google search trend for “Polkadot” keyword peaked twice in the first three months of 2021. Correspondingly, DOT price reached ATH in late February.

Figure 5: Polkadot Price vs. Google Search

  • The Polkadot ecosystem has expanded rapidly in many aspects. More and more wallets now support Polkadot with respect to the rising demand from the users, which also explains why the quantity of multi-chain wallets already outnumbered that of Polkadot-only wallets in the ecosystem (Figure 6). That is not to mention the fact that the project is still under development for its fully functional mainnet.

Figure 6: Polkadot-supported wallets 

Binance Smart Chain 

  • The next candidate for an Ethereum-challenger title is Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Daily transactions of BSC have surpassed Ethereum for the first time in Quarter 1, 2021 (Figure 7). Since then, it continued to perform well and ended up almost 3x over Ethereum on the metric.

Figure 7: Daily transaction on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain

  • BSC’s flagship, PancakeSwap, also surpassed Uniswap, SushiSwap, and Curve to be ranked as the top 1 Decentralized Exchange (DEX) by 24h volume. All of these achievements have contributed largely to upward demand pressure on the price of BNB, the utility token of the BSC ecosystem. As the result, BNB marketcap has passed Tether and Cardano to be the top 3 biggest altcoins, following Bitcoin and Ethereum, for the first time since the inception.

DeFi

  • Following the trend of 2020, DeFi is still on fire. The Total Value Locked (TVL) in DeFi platforms has almost tripled since the beginning of the year, reaching nearly 65 billion dollars in both Ethereum and BSC. The pie is still growing; no one seems to be eating each other’s piece, just yet.

Figure 8: TVL on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain

  • As Figure 8 demonstrates, Ethereum is still the dominant player when it captures $51.5 billion in total economic value, quadrupling that of BSC at the end of March. Meanwhile, BSC has risen as an ideal protocol for DeFi projects, proved by its escalating TVL from just a few million to now $13 billion, and that seems to be just a start.
  • According to the leading explorer DappRadar, there are 4764 Dapps in the crypto space, 46,5% of which are running on top of Ethereum, while BSC is a home for 276 dApps or 5,8% of the pool. However, BSC looks more ‘DeFi-focused’. Out of 503 DeFi projects, 33,2% is based on Ethereum while 41,4% uses BSC. In summary, despite Ethereum’s adoption being more impressive, BSC is still a redoubtable challenger in the DeFi corner.

DEXs

  • Without DEX, the DeFi greenfield would never have taken the spotlight for 2020. Thus, the year of 2021 is undoubtedly the right time for DEX to mature and possibly become mainstream. With optimized usability, deeper liquidity, and emerging composability, the DEX ecosystem is as strong as ever.

Figure 9: Monthly DEX volume (source: Dune Analytics)

  • Figure 9 points out that DEXs have already processed more transaction value in Q1 2021 than all previous periods combined. Notably, the volume hit ATH of nearly $77B in February, carrying on the exponential growth momentum. In the Ethereum-powered DEX sector, Uniswap represents more than double Sushi’s volume, gaining around 50% of the market share (Figure 10).

Figure 10: Top DEX volume in Q1 2021 (source: Dune Analytics)

  • February also marks the highest-ever level of monthly revenue for Ethereum miners, roughly half of which has come in the form of transaction fees. The revenue numbers reflect the price of ETH, which exceeded the $2000 mark briefly this month. Data collected in Figure 11 shows that, for the first time, Ethereum miners have brought in more than $1 billion in revenue for the month of February.

Figure 11: Ethereum miner revenue in Q1 2021

Scaling Solutions

  • Despite its burgeon, the DeFi ecosystem is in somewhat of a bottleneck crisis, as more and more projects are developed and launched on the Ethereum network with growing transactions’ volume, causing gas fees to skyrocket. The good news is that a group of layer-two (L2) scaling solutions has already bloomed around Ethereum. They are offering variable avenues to scale Ethereum for the mass. A variety of L2 models is displayed in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Ethereum scaling solution model

  • Layer-2 protocols are perhaps the greatest hope for Ethereum devotees at the moment. In short, layer-2 chains operate on top of the Ethereum mainchain but function in a much more efficient way with drastically reduced transaction fees and a few-second transaction speed. One such Layer 2 technology is rollups, which take much of the burden of computation and storage out of the blockchain, utilizing it just for its security sake.
  • Figure 13 mapped out many projects inheriting L2 technology in which the cutting-edge ZK-Rollup technology is well-positioned to be a leader. Overall, as long as Ethereum block space is expensive, scaling solution demand is still high.

Figure 13: Ethereum scaling solution map

NFT 

  • Well-known since 2017 with the CryptoKitties phenomenon, NFT segment silently exists alongside other crypto major trends for years. Covid19 seems to be a catalyst for NFT frenzy in Q1 2021. From art, trading cards to music and other collectibles, things are now on a digitizing trend when offline exhibitions, concerts or auctions have found it hard  to cope with social distancing situations. 

Figure 14: Crypto art market share in Q1 2021

  • Figure 14 shows how well Nifty Gateway is dominating the marketplace for the crypto art segment. Following up are SuperRare and Foundation. 
  • Meanwhile from the  NFT sales from projects’ point of view, we have the major names including NBA Top Shot by Dapper Labs, CryptoPunks, Hashmasks, etc. (figure 15) The all-time sales boom matched with their impressive market cap growth up to 1800% in Q1 2021. The rise of these projects aligns closely with how well the relevant traditional market is transforming into digital. NBA Top Shot is an example. Partnership with NBA and NBA Players’ Association was a crucial milestone in the sport NFT field and blockchain industry as a whole. One successful case will lure a gigantic wave of adoption because nothing can bring people together better than sport.

Figure 15: NFT collectibles market share in QI/2021 

We hope you enjoyed a little journey back to the first start of 2021. A road is still long and time is all we’ve got. In an unpredictable world like crypto, nothing is certain. Trade responsibly, and we look forward to another lookback in the next quarters!

Kyros Ventures joins commander Enex.Space in its journey into the crypto space!

Kyros Ventures is happy to be assisting Enex.Space in its first journey into the crypto space. We understand the importance of a good start and would be more than happy to help out such a potential project. 

Enex.Space is a DeFi platform built on the Enecuum blockchain that unites regular mobile and desktop devices into a powerful blockchain network. Enex.Space utilizes its native ENX token to represent overall liquidity on the AMM DEX and facilitate trading operations. Enex.Space consists of liquidity pools, a treasury fund called “Commander ENEX,” and other yield farming opportunities via the “Space Drop”, “Space Harvest Farm”, and “Space Station” functions of the platform.

Kyros Ventures will be participating in Enex.Space’s Private Round with a 12-month unlock term. Although Enex is just in the beginning phase of its development, Kyros is eager to see the advantages its features can bring to the table in the near future. Thus, we decided to invest in ENX private round sale, along with expanding its reputation to the Vietnamese crypto market. Vietnam is surely an ideal location for a crypto start as we are prioritizing blockchain technology development. 

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About Kyros 

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities. For further information, please visit: Kyros.Ventures

About Enex Space

Enex.Space is a DeFi platform powered by the Enecuum blockchain and built by Trinity Lab. Enecuum aims to bring cryptocurrency into the mainstream by incorporating mobile and desktop device users into a blockchain network for decentralized, fast, and low-cost applications. The Enecuum Network combines the Trinity Protocol combination of Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Activity (PoA), and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithms to deliver a hybrid form of consensus, powered by the ENQ token, that allows users to create custom tokens on top of it. For further information, please visit Enex.Space

Kyros Ventures joined in Mixsome fundraising round of $2.7M

Bringing blockchain technology to mass adoption has always been one of the biggest goals that any crypto project wants to achieve. A solution to decrease the complexity of this technology is needed to draw more mainstream users. Thus, Kyros Ventures decided to partner up with Mixsome to encourage simplifying blockchain usage. 

Mixsome is the industry’s leading DeFi Flow tool to assist in the development and creation of Decentralized Finance solutions. Mixsome will help streamline the application of DeFi and address 3 core issues of accessibility, complication and usability. 

Some of MixSome’s solutions include: 

  • Fiat-Crypto: Easy to use application with fiat to DeFi on-ramp. 
  • Investment flow: Mixsome has built-in processes that allow you to smoothly navigate DeFi markets and find your desired product.
  • Investment strategies: Custom, predefined, and trending DeFi strategies.
  • Data Science: AI-retested strategies yield the highest returns.
  • Risk / Reward profile: Mixsome’s tools allow traders and investors to find the perfect flow and determine a winning strategy.
  • Put / Call option: Automatically hold your position at a specific rate to protect it from liquidation or increase leverage based on market movement.
  • Lower cost ratio: Mixsome allows taking advantage of lower-cost ratios compared to buying DeFi tokens separately.

Kyros Ventures invested in Mixsome’s fundraising round of $2.7 million, along with many industry leading investors Alphabit, Genblock Capital, Coin98 Ventures, Spark Digital Capital, CMS, 4 Seasons Ventures, Blocksync, Iconomy, A195, Jun Capital, Master Ventures and GBIC.

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About Kyros

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities.

For further information, please visit: kyros.ventures

About Mixsome

Mixsome is a DeFi tool that helps create and optimize DeFi strategies by allowing customers to mix different DeFi protocols and tokens into customized token baskets. Customers can set up a different number of DeFi protocol tokens, and then Mixsome mixes it into the same transaction, allowing customers to benefit from DeFi growth and yields by building custom strategies simply and conveniently. Furthermore, customers can create different strategies simultaneously and manage their risks without sacrificing potential yields.

For further information, please visit: mixsome.cash

Kyros Ventures partners up with Raze Network, heading towards cross-chain privacy

Kyros Ventures is happy to be supporting the development of a secure blockchain ecosystem through our partnership with Raze Network. 

Raze Network is a second-layer protocol that will provide cross-chain payment privacy for the entire DeFi stack of the Polkadot ecosystem. The core technical module of the Raze Network is a second-layer anonymous payment for the DeFi ecosystem. This module will be imported as a substrate-based smart contract which will serve as a universal plug-and-play infrastructure for Polkadot which allows the user to hide one’s account address and financial information before participating in the DeFi stack.

Some of Raze’s highlighted products include: 

  • Private Transaction: RAZE token is meant for enabling the privacy of on-chain transactions between the recipient and destination addresses and transfer any token between any blockchain.
  • Secret DeFi Bridge: Users can hide their trading history as RAZE is compatible across all DeFi products, which are fully compatible with Uniswap, AAVE, Compound and DeFi ecosystem on Polkadot and Cosmos
  • Anonymity Mining: The access to the liquidity pool always stays anonymous and secure, to mine RAZE in a truly private way.
  • RazeVM Integration: Allow builders to deploy the privacy-preserving functions with an open protocol connected to all DApps. 

Kyros’s vision aligns with Raze Network regarding the path towards a more secure blockchain ecosystem, providing privacy-conscious users with more powerful tools to make more informed financial decisions, especially when it comes to privacy protection. Kyros will be assisting Raze in executing its development plan to the Vietnamese market. 

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About Kyros

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities.

For further information, please visit: https://blog.kyros.ventures

About Raze Network

Raze Network is a Substrate-based, cross-chain privacy protocol for the Polkadot ecosystem. It is built as a native privacy layer that can provide end-to-end anonymity for the entire DeFi and Web3.0 stack. The Raze Network applies zkSNARKs to the Zether framework to build a second-layer decentralized anonymous module. It will then be imported as a substrate-based smart contract. The objective of Raze Network is to enable cross-chain privacy-preserving payment and trading systems, while protecting the transparency of your assets and behaviours from surveillance. For further information, please visit: https://raze.network

Kyros Ventures invests in Rage.Fan, uniting sports fans in the decentralized world

Blockchain technology is covering more and more real-life usage, not only in the consumer market but also within the entertainment fields. Fan-based tokens have been the new rising trend for crypto holders who are also interested in sports. Realizing this potential in blockchain’s growth, Kyros Ventures has decided to invest in Rage.Fan, a fan-first fantasy & uNFT sports platform. 

Rage.Fan is a fan-first decentralized fantasy sports platform where players will have the opportunity to acquire action cards based on NFTs to earn additional in-game points. Players will partake in an Augmented Reality based Token hunt platform to collect $RAGE coins. The platform will also host a one-of-kind Sports Oracle offering reliable secure off-chain sports data.

The platform has designed a unique native token system to support the fan-first and simplified user experience with its Rage.Fan token $RAGE. 

Some of the $RAGE token utilities include: 

  • Staking tokens
  • Game mining by earning higher rewards for playing more
  • Social media mining by promoting Rage.Fan
  • Referral mining by referring others
  • Virtual mining by participating in virtual games

Kyros Ventures will be supporting Rage.Fan’s entry into the gaming market by collecting sports fans from across our network in general and in Vietnam specifically. We are highly interested in the idea of applying sports knowledge and awareness to earn advantages in the decentralized world. Kyros looks forward to Rage.Fan’s innovative sports Oracle, uNFTs, and GeoNFTs revolutionize how sports fans engage with the platform.

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About Kyros Ventures 

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities.For further information, please visit kyros.ventures

About RageFan

Rage.Fan is a fan-first on-chain fantasy sport and quizzing platform built on blockchain technology, where sports fans can use their skills, knowledge, and situational awareness to earn rewards and feel more connected to the sports they love. Using blockchain technology, Rage.Fan aims to create a permissionless, decentralized, and transparent gaming experience for all sports fans while removing the inherent inefficiencies of traditional centralized applications. For further information, please visit rage.fan

Kyros Ventures invests in XFai’s DeFi oracle

Kyros Ventures announces its strategic investment into XFai, a DeFi platform that aims to challenge the current norm of how tokens are offered to the public, allowing for a fairer, easier, and more transparent way for investors to get on board and benefit through a one-step liquidity mining process.

The venture capital is set to unlock the bustling Vietnamese cryptocurrency market for XFai, inviting a wider community to take part in the upcoming XFai LGE (Liquidity Generation Event).

XFai provides a fundamentally revolutionary idea for investors to get involved in DeFi. The XFai LGE is set to become a new standard within the DeFi space on how to offer the project tokens to the public, leveraging the power of public participation to not compete amongst themselves to get involved, but rather work in harmony to support the project. Moreover, XFai’s DLO (DEX Liquidity Oracle) charts the order book and the liquidity depth on a centralized exchange to adjust the liquidity on a DEX such as Uniswap, creating an efficient environment for traders to participate in the market with minimum slippage. 

Kyros Ventures’ latest involvement in XFai represents the participation of more than one hundred thousand cryptocurrency investors in the Vietnamese market and the wider community. Kyros Ventures comes with a long-running experience in blockchain and marketing, with substantially successful portfolio projects such as Polkastarter, My Neighbor Alice, Serum, and FTX. XFai is Kyros Ventures’ newest involvement in its continued venture in cutting-edge innovations within the DeFi space.

Mr. Thuat Nguyen, CEO of Kyros Ventures shared his views on XFai:

“Decentralized exchanges, the backbone for the DeFi industry, have reached the tipping point with 30-day volume at its ATH of $65B recently. The field yet grows at the fastest pace due to liquidity inefficiency that hinders smaller tokens from merging with the rest of the DeFi ecosystem. By providing a revolutionary liquidity management tool altogether a seamless experience to end-users, XFai’s DEX liquidity oracle reshapes all aspects of decentralized trading space. Kyros strongly believes that XFai will go beyond the frontier of DeFi to pioneer in the future of finance.” 

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About Kyros Ventures

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities.

For further information, please visit: www.kyros.ventures

About XFai

XFai develops tooling for the DeFi space, graphing it to build game-changing products. The XFai DLO is set to invite mid and small-cap tokens to start earning APY on their token holdings, while the XFai LGE is set to become industry-first in providing a more efficient, transparent, and fair way for everyone to get involved at an early stage. The LGE for XFai’s native token, XFIT, is set to launch during the first week of April. We invite everyone to join the DeFi revolution, spearheaded by XFai.

For further information, please visit: www.xfai.com

Kyros Ventures confirms its faith in Decentralized Money Market protocols with the Konomi Network partnership

Interoperable Money Markets, powered by Polkadot

Konomi targets crypto users looking into investing, trading, and managing assets in an efficient way. It is currently deployed as an independent blockchain using the Substrate framework. At launch, it will support functions in trading, deposits, and lending. As the Polkadot parachains are launched and interchain communication protocols live, Konomi could support more financial products specific to the Polkadot ecosystem.

The Konomi IDO is set on 16 March through Polkastarter, and they’re seeking to raise just $200,000, with 0.5% of the total supply being sold. The TGE will be taking place in mid-march, and a public test-net will be launched soon too. 

Kyros will help Konomi enter the Vietnamese markets

Through this collaboration, Kyros Ventures will help Konomi Network make inroads into the Vietnam market and surrounding regions. Specifically, Kyros will leverage our in-depth knowledge and understanding of the Vietnamese crypto communities to introduce Konomi’s asset management solutions to local investors and traders. As TGE grows nearer, Kyros will explore other collaboration opportunities between Konomi Network and our partners’ network both domestically and abroad.

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About Kyros Ventures

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities.

For further information, please visit: Kyros.ventures

About Konomi Network

Konomi Network is a decentralized liquidity and money market protocol for cross-chain crypto assets. Its product matrix fulfills user demand in liquidity, borrowing/lending, and more advanced trading products in a decentralized way. KONOMI blockchain is built using the Substrate framework and supports smart contract development to seamlessly integrate with existing DeFi protocols. Konomi offers better blockchain infrastructure due to the base layer consensus, virtual machine, and more scalable system architecture.

For further information, please visit Konomi.network