Jan 18, 2021 05:27 UTC
| Updated:
Jan 18, 2021 at 05:27 UTC
By Clark
A travel and mapping application with a hundred and forty million users worldwide has raised $50 million to integrate suburbanised finance protocols into its platform.
Leading offline mapping application Maps.me has conducted a $50 million seed funding spherical to engraft suburbanised finance tools onto its platform.
The funding spherical for “Maps.me 2.0” was diode by SAM Bankman-Fried of Alameda analysis and additionally featured participation from crypto venture heavyweights CMS Holdings and Genesis Capital.
Maps.me 2.0 are a wide-ranging application, that includes travel guides, edifice bookings and mapping services, additionally to exchange options and a multicurrency crypto-asset pocketbook providing annual yields of up to eight.
Alex Grebnev, the co-founder of Maps.me 2.0, told Cointelegraph that users are ready to “generate yield on their savings by directly disposal it out firmly to borrowers.”
“We additionally arrange to offer our users the power to trade a large vary of assets that aren’t restricted by geographical boundaries or dealing size.”
Maps.me claims to be the primary “mainstream app” to embrace DeFi, with the appliance speech act a user base of quite a hundred and forty million once eight years of operation. Around sixty million users were active in 2020. Bankman-Fried said:
“By embedding associate degreed democratizing access to yield-earning finance to legion users via an everyday app, Maps.me has the potential to actually propel DeFi thought adoption and convey a groundbreaking technology to the lots.”
The announcement states the platform intends to “break down money silos determined by status or internet worth” through its DeFi integrations. Grebnev any explained:
“The business is watching for a catalyst for the mass adoption of DeFi tools and we’re excited to form this a reality by investment our active userbase as a method to bootstrap a retail community for a brand new innovative DeFi platform on Maps.me.”
“Our long vision is to form associate degree embedded platform that mixes a broad vary of monetary services that offer a better thanks to invest, pay, and travel. we tend to see the power to bundle things like interchange, investing, mastercard, and peer-to-peer payment services — with low fees, no hidden prices, and powerful loyalty incentives,” he added.
Maps.me was launched in 2012 beneath its previous name MapsWithMe and was nonheritable by Mail.ru for roughly $14 million in 2014. On Nov. 2, 2020, Daegu restricted, a member of Grebnev’s Parity.com Group, purchased the app for nearly $20 million.
Grebnev told Cointelegraph that Parity nonheritable Maps.me with the target of building “an scheme that integrated DeFi tools with a platform that had an oversized user base.”
Clark
Head of the technology.