[PRESS RELEASE – Singapore, Singapore, 11th May 2021]

Raze Network, the first Polkadot-based privacy protocol, is bracing to engage community members with our first testnet. Early birds will be able to provide feedback on the quality, function, and overall experience of the Polkadot-based privacy protocol.

This huge milestone clears the way for ‘Razers’ and collaborators to easily test drive the newest features and allows plenty of maturation time for these new features to be fully tested.

Our team already started designing the user interface of the privacy protocol we promised to launch. However, we want to resort to the collective wisdom of our community on how to actually bring this to realization, thus launching this UI Community Voting Campaign.

The beta testnet marks the latest step forward in Raze Network’s overall mission to enable the broader community to contribute to the evolution of our trustless decentralized privacy protocol.

Raze Network’s applications present the decentralized finance (DeFi) community with a cross-chain middleware solution on Polkadot for concealing transactions when operating on decentralized exchanges.

With a clear vision and solid use-case, the protocol-based solution leverages the Polkadot ecosystem to offer the required privacy layer for the crypto sphere. The privateness protocol aims to guard anonymity for all the DeFi stack on the Polkadot.

To achieve higher participation during the testnet, Raze Network is organizing a number of events, competitions, and challenges to encourage participants to actively test critical components of our ecosystem. Specifically, we will airdrop 1,000 $RAZE tokens to 10 lucky voters based on how many entries they generated to vote for the best UI style.

$RAZE is set to be the lifeblood of the Raze Network, designed as a utility token to represent participation in the ecosystem.

The launch of Raze Network’s UI testnet comes on the heels of several other recent milestones, including a robust set of developer resources and partnerships that continues to expand.

Just in April, we announced the strategic listing of Raze token on the popular DeFi platform, Uniswap. This listing closely follows our completed triple IDO event on three launchpads.

Interestingly, apart from going live on DEX exchanges, $RAZE tokens will also soon be listed on several tier-1 centralized exchanges.

This networked testnet release allows Raze to continue working with our partners towards the mass adoption of decentralized applications and smart contracts.

Since its inception, Raze Network sought to develop an infrastructure that is easy to understand and smooth to navigate. One where even new users can reap the benefits of a cross-chain middleware solution for anonymous transactions, payments trading, and mining.

Although the token launch is done, the real work starts. Most recently, we have completed the development of mint, transfer, and redeem contracts in Solidity. Currently, we are testing how to deploy these contracts on EVM.

Also, the major front-end and client modules that can invoke the aforementioned contracts have been developed.

About Raze Network

Raze Network is a Substrate-based cross-chain privacy protocol for the Polkadot ecosystem. It is built as a native privacy layer that can provide end-to-end anonymity for the entire DeFi stack. The Raze Network applies zk-SNARKs to the Zether framework to build a second-layer decentralized anonymous module.

It will then be imported as a Substrate-based smart contract. The objective of Raze Network is to enable cross-chain privacy-preserving payment and trading systems while protecting the transparency of your assets and behaviors from surveillance.

Coinbase’s mobile application has become the most popular app on iOS in the US. With its rise to the top, it has surpassed some highly utilized applications like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and more.

Coinbase Tops US iOS Chart

According to data from SensorTower, the mobile application of the largest US crypto exchange has taken the first spot in terms of the most popular free apps on iOS in the country.

The app enabling users to buy, sell, or simply hold various digital assets has climbed with several spots in the past few weeks.

As of writing these lines, TikTok – the Chinese video-sharing social networking giant that saw the light of day in 2016 takes the second spot.

Further down the list is YouTube, followed by other social media giants like Instagram and Facebook. Interestingly, Robinhood’s app is not even in the top ten. The iOS application of the financial services company takes the 12th spot.

It’s worth noting that the top 50 free iOS applications have two Coinbase representatives. The exchanges’ wallet app is the 46th most popular application, which places it ahead of Uber, Google Drive, and Microsoft Teams.

Coinbase’s Rise

Taking the aforementioned first spot only validates Coinbase’s popularity boost in the past year or so. The company took full advantage of the ongoing crypto bull market, which has seen prices exploding.

Consequently, the firm reported a massive increase in terms of user base, volume, and revenue in the first quarter of 2021.

These impressive results came shortly before Coinbase became a publicly traded company. As CryptoPotato reported in mid-April, the firm’s shares (COIN) launched on the giant US exchange – Nasdaq.

Although some of the early backers sold off their stocks and prices suffered in the month that followed, Coinbase only intensified its aggressive expansion. In the latest endeavor, the firm agreed to acquire Skew – the popular crypto analytics company.

Virtue Poker, the decentralized poker platform built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, will hold an initial DEX offering (IDO) on SuperStarter. The announcement follows a successful round in which VP closed funding worth $5 million.

Virtue Poker to Hold an IDO

Founded in 2016 within ConsenSys, Virtue Poker is an Ethereum-based decentralized poker platform enabling peer-to-peer networking aiming to operate as an “online poker site that’s safe, honest, and fund.”

After a few years of development, the project announced the upcoming IDO in a press release shared with CryptoPotato earlier. The statement reads that VP has partnered with SuperFarm’s recently released launchpad SuperStarter.

Apart from handling the IDO procedures, SuperFarm will be involved in other initiatives following the event, such as integrating non-fungible tokens into Virtue Poker.

“We are excited to be helping spread NFT adoption to new types of ecosystems and use cases. Virtue Poker makes for an excellent partner for our recently introduced SuperStarter platform, showcasing its enormous benefits to the SuperFam community and the high caliber of projects wishing to integrate NFTs in their stack.” – commented Elliot Wainmann – Founder of SuperFarm.

According to the announcement, VP will put a small portion of its native coin (VPP) for sale on SuperStarter. Future token holders can stake their assets to run Justice Nodes and earn 50% of the platform’s fees.

Additionally, they will access marketing initiatives, save on fees, and “shape the development of the Virtue Poker platform.”

Ryan Gittleson, Founder and CEO of VP, noted that his project was built on Ethereum because the latter enables the creation of a “provably fair and easy-to-access poker platform,” which could be “revolutionary for the multi-billion-dollar online poker industry.”

Securing $5M Funding

Before the IDO announcement, Virtue Poker completed a strategic investment round of $5 million in April 2021. Apart from Consensys, other prominent names that took part included Pantera Capital and DFG Group.

Furthermore, the statement highlighted that the Poker Hall of Famer Phil Ivey is a stakeholder and a spokesperson for the project.

Virtue Poker also touched upon the license it received from the Malta Gaming Authority. After working together for “nearly two years in establishing a regulatory framework,” VP became the “first and only blockchain-based company” to receive such a license from MGA.