Espresso Lands $28M to Become Marketplace For Shared Sequencing

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Daily News:

1) TON Foundation Launches Community Rewards Worth Over $100 million

2) Espresso Lands $28M to Become Marketplace For Shared Sequencing

3) Thunes and Visa Expand Digital Wallet Partnership to Asia and Africa

4) Swiss Fintech nsave Gets $4M to Enable Opening Offshore Accounts

5) LeakSignal Clinches $1.6M to Enhance Cyber in Microservices

TON Foundation Launches Community Rewards Worth $115 million:

• The TON Foundation has launched The Open League, a community rewards initiative for The Open Network (TON) blockchain, distributing 30 million Toncoin, valued at over $115 million, to projects and users within the TON ecosystem starting April 1.

• The initiative follows a successful pilot program that saw a 70% increase in total value locked on decentralized exchanges and a 370% surge in daily active addresses, with rewards distributed through performance-based competitions, token mining mechanisms, airdrops, quests, and liquidity pool boosts.

• The Open League aims to promote ecosystem growth by making crypto accessible and rewarding, with any project able to join by migrating to TON, and lower incentives for projects that perform poorly, while Toncoin is currently trading at $4.05, up over 6% in the past 24 hours

Espresso Lands $28M to Become Marketplace For Shared Sequencing:

• Espresso Systems, known for its shared sequencer solution, has raised $28 million in a Series B funding round led by a16z crypto to continue product development, invest in the rollup ecosystem, and expand its team.

• The company's shared sequencer network is a chain-agnostic, distributed consensus system that prevents any single authority from controlling transaction ordering, enhancing decentralization and trust in layer-2 scaling solutions.

• Espresso's technology, including its proof-of-stake system HotShot, has been integrated with scaling solutions like Optimism, Polygon zkEVM, and Arbitrum, with a fifth testnet, Cappuccino, set to launch in April, aiming to further decentralize and enhance the marketplace for shared sequencing.

Thunes and Visa Expand Digital Wallet Partnership to Asia and Africa:

• Thunes is expanding its partnership with Visa into Asia and Africa to enable Visa to send payments to over 108 digital wallet types and bank accounts in countries like Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

• Thunes will also implement Visa Direct’s push-to-card capability for payouts to eligible Visa cards and accounts across more than 190 countries and territories, addressing the growing popularity of digital wallets.

• This collaboration follows Visa and Thunes' initial partnership in October 2022 to extend Visa Direct’s reach to 1.5 billion digital wallets, with Visa investing in Thunes' $60 million Series C extension round in July of the same year.

Swiss Fintech nsave Gets $4M to Enable Opening Offshore Accounts:

• Swiss fintech nsave, aiming to make banking accessible in countries with unstable banking sectors or high inflation, has raised $4 million in seed funding, co-led by Sequoia Capital and TQ Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, SV Angel, and FONGIT.

• Co-founded by Amer Baroudi and Abdallah AbuHashem in 2021, nsave offers a simple product: a trusted account abroad in hard currencies like the dollar, euro, or pound, in partnership with regulated financial institutions.

• The company is in the early stages of product development and plans to focus on the savings and wealth side of retail banking for the financially excluded, targeting millions of people in economies like Lebanon, where inflation is high and access to savings is limited.

LeakSignal Clinches $1.6M to Enhance Cyber in Microservices:

• LeakSignal, specializing in microservices cybersecurity, has raised $1.6 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round led by Shasta Ventures, with contributions from TFX Capital, Blu Ventures, and Cyber Mentor Fund.

• The company focuses on protecting sensitive data in transit, catering to modern architectures like microservices, serverless frameworks, and large language models (LLMs), addressing challenges not fully met by existing API security, DLP, and DSPM solutions.

• With the new funding, LeakSignal aims to accelerate growth and product development, expanding its evangelism efforts to provide advanced data-in-transit protection tools for platform and security engineers, and has already collaborated with major banks and an international airline.

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