Decentralized messaging protocol XMTP completes $20 million Series B financing, led by a16z crypto and others

By: odaily.com|2025/07/17 21:11:41

Odaily News Ephemera, the developer of the decentralized messaging protocol XMTP, has completed a $20 million Series B financing round led by Union Square Ventures, a16z crypto and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Offline Ventures, Sound Ventures and Distributed Global. After this round of financing, Ephemeras equity valuation is $300 million, while the broader network covering the XMTP protocol that will issue tokens is valued at $750 million.
The XMTP protocol has now been integrated into Coinbases newly launched Base application, upgrading from an optional feature to core infrastructure. The protocol provides end-to-end encrypted communication services and supports secure interactions between wallet addresses. The test network was launched in February this year. Ephemera said it will expand the team size to promote the launch of the protocol mainnet and ecological construction. USV partner Fred Wilson will join its board of directors. (The Block)

-- Price

The era of AI hype has transitioned into an era of utility. As we move through Q2 2026, the market is no longer rewarding "narrative-only" projects. At WEEX Research, we are seeing a massive capital rotation into Decentralized Compute (DePIN) and Autonomous Agent coordination layers. This guide analyzes which AI tokens are capturing institutional liquidity and how to spot high-conviction setups in a maturing market.

Consumer-grade Crypto Global Survey: Users, Revenue, and Track Distribution

The number of active users of consumer-grade encryption has long reached tens of millions, but it is not in the sight of Silicon Valley and New York.

Prediction Markets Under Bias

Why do authoritative narratives always exclude prediction markets?

Stolen: $290 million, Three Parties Refusing to Acknowledge, Who Should Foot the Bill for the KelpDAO Incident Resolution?

The most dangerous scenario right now is that if ETH suddenly drops, Aave's bad debt could snowball even further.

ASTEROID Pumped 10,000x in Three Days, Is Meme Season Back on Ethereum?

「Space Dog」 Triggers ETH Mainnet Price Surge, Sparking SOL Community Anxiety

ChainCatcher Hong Kong Themed Forum Highlights: Decoding the Growth Engine Under the Integration of Crypto Assets and Smart Economy

The guests unanimously agreed that the understanding of Crypto value is shifting from "issuing tokens for the sake of issuing tokens" to pursuing sustainable business models, with a greater focus on capital efficiency, low costs, and 24-hour settlement, among other practical values.

Why can this institution still grow by 150% when the scale of leading crypto VCs has shrunk significantly?

The merger of the two major payment companies, Bridge and BVNK, establishes their industry position and revenue scale.

Anthropic's $1 trillion, compared to DeepSeek's $100 billion

The capital market has no faith, it only believes in the profit and loss statement.

Geopolitical Risk Persists, Is Bitcoin Becoming a Key Barometer?

Liquidity Still Unleashed, Which Force Will Dictate Pricing

Annualized 11.5%, Wall Street Buzzing: Is MicroStrategy's STRC Bitcoin's Savior or Destroyer?

25M Transaction Volume, 17,204 BTC

An Obscure Open Source AI Tool Alerted on Kelp DAO's $292 million Bug 12 Days Ago

AI Agent could potentially become an additional security layer for DeFi investors.

Mixin has launched USTD-margined perpetual contracts, bringing derivative trading into the chat scene.

The privacy-focused crypto wallet Mixin announced today the launch of its U-based perpetual contract (a derivative priced in USDT). Unlike traditional exchanges, Mixin has taken a new approach by "liberating" derivative trading from isolated matching engines and embedding it into the instant messaging environment.

Users can directly open positions within the app with leverage of up to 200x, while sharing positions, discussing strategies, and copy trading within private communities. Trading, social interaction, and asset management are integrated into the same interface.

Simplified Trading Experience: No KYC Required, Opening a Position in Five Steps

Based on its non-custodial architecture, Mixin has eliminated friction from the traditional onboarding process, allowing users to participate in perpetual contract trading without identity verification.

The trading process has been streamlined into five steps:

· Choose the trading asset

· Select long or short

· Input position size and leverage

· Confirm order details

· Confirm and open the position

The interface provides real-time visualization of price, position, and profit and loss (PnL), allowing users to complete trades without switching between multiple modules.

Social-Native Trading: Strategy and Execution Completed in the Same Context

Mixin has directly integrated social features into the derivative trading environment. Users can create private trading communities and interact around real-time positions:

· End-to-end encrypted private groups supporting up to 1024 members

· End-to-end encrypted voice communication

· One-click position sharing

· One-click trade copying

On the execution side, Mixin aggregates liquidity from multiple sources and accesses decentralized protocol and external market liquidity through a unified trading interface.

By combining social interaction with trade execution, Mixin enables users to collaborate, share, and execute trading strategies instantly within the same environment.

Referral Mechanism: Non-institutional users can receive up to 60% fee split

Mixin has also introduced a referral incentive system based on trading behavior:

· Users can join with an invite code

· Up to 60% of trading fees as referral rewards

· Incentive mechanism designed for long-term, sustainable earnings

This model aims to drive user-driven network expansion and organic growth.

Self-Custody Architecture and Built-in Privacy Mechanism

Mixin's derivative transactions are built on top of its existing self-custody wallet infrastructure, with core features including:

· Separation of transaction account and asset storage

· User full control over assets

· Platform does not custody user funds

· Built-in privacy mechanisms to reduce data exposure

The system aims to strike a balance between transaction efficiency, asset security, and privacy protection.

A New Path for On-Chain Derivatives

Against the background of perpetual contracts becoming a mainstream trading tool, Mixin is exploring a different development direction by lowering barriers, enhancing social and privacy attributes.

The platform does not only view transactions as execution actions but positions them as a networked activity: transactions have social attributes, strategies can be shared, and relationships between individuals also become part of the financial system.

Regulatory Background

Mixin's design is based on a user-initiated, user-controlled model. The platform neither custodies assets nor executes transactions on behalf of users.

This model aligns with a statement issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 13, 2026, titled "Staff Statement on Whether Partial User Interface Used in Preparing Cryptocurrency Securities Transactions May Require Broker-Dealer Registration."

The statement indicates that, under the premise where transactions are entirely initiated and controlled by users, non-custodial service providers that offer neutral interfaces may not need to register as broker-dealers or exchanges.

About Mixin

Mixin is a decentralized, self-custodial privacy wallet designed to provide secure and efficient digital asset management services.

Its core capabilities include:

· Aggregation: integrating multi-chain assets and routing between different transaction paths to simplify user operations

· High liquidity access: connecting to various liquidity sources, including decentralized protocols and external markets

· Decentralization: achieving full user control over assets without relying on custodial intermediaries

· Privacy protection: safeguarding assets and data through MPC, CryptoNote, and end-to-end encrypted communication

Mixin has been in operation for over 8 years, supporting over 40 blockchains and more than 10,000 assets, with a global user base exceeding 10 million and an on-chain self-custodied asset scale of over $1 billion.

$600 million stolen in 20 days, ushering in the era of AI hackers in the crypto world

Ethereum's biggest enemy is actually AI hackers

Vitalik's 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Summit Speech: Ethereum's Ultimate Vision as the "World Computer" and Future Roadmap

Ethereum's Two Core Tenets: A "World Computer" + Global Broadcast Channel.

a16z: 5 Ways Blockchain Helps AI Agent Infrastructure

Artificial intelligence makes scaling cost-effective, but it is difficult to establish trust. Cryptocurrency can rebuild trust on a large scale.

Morning News | The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission announced the regulatory framework for secondary market trading of tokenized investment products; Strategy increased its holdings by 34,164 bitcoins last week; KAIO completed a strategic fi...

Overview of Important Market Events on April 20