The firm announced its «Borrow» service on Tuesday, saying it will offer loans in U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins against holdings of bitcoin (BTC) held in the Blockchain Wallet. Open to wallet holders worldwide, loans are available immediately after collateral is made available, the firm said.
Blockchain.com, the cryptocurrency wallet and exchange provider, will now let users borrow against their holdings.
While it didn’t specify which stablecoins the loans would be paid out in, Blockchain added the dollar-pegged PAX token to its wallet last year.
The new Borrow product comes after Blockchain opened an institutional lending desk in August 2019 – a service that climbed from $10 million in originations in its first month to $120 million by November, the firm said.
“Institutional and retail investors have the same financial goals – grow wealth and manage risks – but the tools at their disposal are vastly different”, said Peter Smith, co-founder and CEO of Blockchain. “Now, with our suite of trading products and Borrow, retail users can trade like the big guys without selling the crypto they’ve stockpiled or leaving their Wallet.”
Lending has become a fast-growing sector in the cryptocurrency industry, with Blockchain rivals like Binance having already launched similar services. Crypto firms Babel and BitGo announced they had outstanding loans of $380 million and $150 million, respectively, in March.
Investors are eyeing the potential of the crypto lending space, too, with bitcoin and ether (ETH) loans firm BlockFi having raised over $48 million in two funding rounds in 2019 and 2020.
Blockchain previously provided only its wallet (now with a claimed 46 million-plus downloads) and blockchain data streams, but launched an crypto exchange service called The Pit in July.
Brave Browser Adds Access to New Crypto Wallets
More wallet features are on their way to the Brave browser.
Support for native cryptocurrency wallets was added to Brave Nightly per a posting yesterday in the official Brave subreddit, r/BATProject. Brave Nightly is a test and development version of the Brave browser. Brave’s tri-part marketing system rewards content creators, advertisers, and viewers through its token.
The update allows other cryptocurrency wallets, particularly MetaMask, to be used with Brave’s BAT. All transactions first undergo know your customer (KYC) requirements via Uphold, a wallet Brave partnered with for BAT.
Lack of support for other ethereum wallets like MetaMask or MyEtherWallet has been a common complaint on Brave community threads since the token’s launch. This bottleneck was self-designed, however. Brave wanted the cryptocurrency’s use-case, content creation tipping, to take-off. More importantly, perhaps, are the KYC services Uphold provides.
Speaking with CoinDesk, Brave co-founder and CEO Brendan Eich said KYC concerns remain a top priority due to regulatory concerns.
“Brave can’t let fraud bots with Ledgers or Trezors take us to cleaners, and we have to avoid going to jail if some Office of Foreign Asset listed evildoer were to take out BAT that way”, Eich said. “BAT is compliant via Uphold, and I’ll defend that decision readily by citing our growth numbers, publishers, and users.”
Eich said Brave added support for peer-to-peer wallets not to undercut regulators but lead the community forward. Adding wallet support helps adoption while keeping Brave’s nose clean, Eich said:
“We have no illusions that raw crypto is not for most users – it is unusable and way too technical. We do want the users who are able to use it to have integrated crypto wallets in Brave. These users innovate and may collaborate with us, sites and channels, hardware wallet vendors, proxied fullnode services, and even their favorite blockchains at core protocol and implementation levels, to innovate beyond what we alone, or the blockchain projects alone, can do. We like ‘lead users’ and provide extra options for them”
The wallet update comes days after untargeted ads were added on Brave Nightly for 21 new countries including Argentina, Denmark, Italy, Korea, and Singapore.
