BLOCKCHAIN WATCH 2/27/17

This is The World’s First Cryptocurrency Issued by a Hedge Fund

Numerai, a San Francisco-based investment firm which uses encrypted crowdsource data for stock market predictions, issuing its own cryptocurrency called the Numeraire, which is the first to be issued by a hedge fund and not a nonprofit or group of developers. “Finance is totally competitive right now. There’s no reason why you’d want to help your friend with a hedge fund if you have a hedge fund,” Numerai founder Richard Craib told Forbes. “But if you both held the same cryptocurrency, and it went up in value together, maybe there would be more collaboration.”

The March of Financial Services Giants into Bitcoin and Blockchain Startups in One Chart

Though the volume of quarterly deals dropped to its lowest point since second quarter in 2014 in the fourth quarter of 2016, the quarter’s top two financing deals featured investments by major corporate and financial services companies. The distributed ledger developer Axoni received in $18M Series A funding from Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, F-Prime Capital, and Thomson Reuters. The latest infographic from CB Insights shows the new leaders of the cryptofinance pack.