And so we wanted to have a first-mover advantage in that space. “The reason why we chose the Cardano blockchain was that it was new and had around $40 billion in market cap was not doing anything. “We wanted to build a lending and borrowing protocol on the Cardano blockchain,” Olling said. This is also far more environmentally friendly than mining other cryptocurrencies, as they are not using enormous amounts of electricity. The blockchain is a record of all transactions, but rather than validation by anyone who performs the proof-of-work, transactions are validated by consensus proof-of-stake. One of Cardano’s innovations is the ability to support high-transaction capacities, fast transaction times, and low transaction fees, through a system of proof-of-stake.Ĭardano is not minable. A decentralized cryptocurrency keeps track of all transactions by all addresses on a peer-to-peer shared record. And then when the fundraising was complete, we could airdrop tokens, based on a mathematical equation on the amount of tokens that people had staked.” Built on Cardano Meld is going after the unbanked consumers.Ĭardano is a third-generation cryptocurrency, which tries to improve on second-generation cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and first-generation cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. And that would be our formal way of fundraising.
“And instead of getting the staking rewards, which is what you would normally get, they would get the Meld token. “So we could build these stake pools to allow people to stake the way they would normally in a layer one blockchain,” Olling said. He said they realized that the Cardano blockchain could enable something novel. “We saw that the typical way of raising money was heavily skewed towards institutional investors, aka normal people are not allowed to participate.” “We wanted to create as fair a way of raising our money as we could,” Olling said. Meld raised another $35 million through an additional private token sale. That helped the company raise $10 million for its own funding round. Token holders staked more than 620 million ADA, the tokens for the Cardano blockchain, which was the equivalent of around $1 billion. Meld was the first company ever to carry out an ISPO. Olling started Meld in late 2020, and the company launched its ISPO, a new kind of crowdfunding, on July 1, 2021. It already claims close to have about 40,000 token holders for its $MELD tokens. Meld set this fundraising up over a period of months and worked on creating a community of supporters. We are very excited to provide unique financial products and services to our customers in the months to come as Meld tokens become widely-shared across different exchanges.” The ISPO Supporters staked $1 billion for the Meld ISPO. “Offering a way to stake cryptocurrency as collateral against a fiat loan is powerful for so many reasons - not the least of which is sheltering highly-volatile cryptocurrencies from a forced sell during a market bottoming out.
“We are excited to offer billions of people a new way to access powerful financial instruments, products and services - but even better and more innovative thanks to the power of the Meld protocol,” said Olling. Meld aims to help them by providing a range of financial tools and solutions built around leveraging cryptocurrency assets as collateral for fiat or crypto-based loans, said Ken Olling, CEO of Meld, in an interview with VentureBeat. More than two billion people in the world don’t have bank accounts or are so poor they don’t need them. It has created a non-custodial, decentralized lending and borrowing protocol that is aimed at leveling the playing field between financial haves and have-nots. Singapore-based Meld has raised $45 million via the ISPO as well as a separate private token sale. One of the things Meld does is let people use cryptocurrency as collateral for getting loans in fiat (traditional currency such as U.S.