[PRESS RELEASE – Please Read Disclaimer]

Mar 3, 2021 – Polkadex, the decentralized exchange (DEX) built for Web3 and decentralized finance (DeFi), has raised $3 million in seed and private investment rounds from LD Capital, Kenetic Capital, OkEx capital, NGC, QCP, AU21 Capital, CMS Holdings, OKEx Capital, PNYX Capital, Genesis Block Capital, JRR Group, Cluster VC, GBIC,  Momentum 6 and Outlier Ventures. The proceeds will be used to fuel Polkadex’s growth and become the first orderbook based DEX in the Polkadot blockchain ecosystem.

Polkadex offers the functionality and performance of a centralized exchange, but with a better user-experience, fully decentralized security, and technological advancements no other DEX has achieved. Some of these achievements are onchain market-making, perpetual liquidity mining, and feeless transactions, which eliminate frontrunning and all “gas fees” associated with existing exchanges.

The DEX Optimized for High Frequency Trading

Trading volume on DEX’s has rapidly grown to over $70 billion, but the industry is still hampered by low liquidity, slow processing, high costs, and a poor user experience. Polkadex addresses all these problems and intends to fully unlock the financial trading markets using the most advanced blockchain infrastructure of Polkadot. Especially noteworthy is Polkadex’s trading time, that will support high-frequency transactions. Polkadex aims to become a parachain to bridge liquidity from the ecosystem and also derisk its security and consensus to Polkadot.

Polkadex optimizes the high-frequency trading environment through synchronous trading operations powered by Polkadot. Polkadex allows Automatic Market Maker (AMM) to pool together and interact with an orderbook. AMMs aggregate liquidity across DeFi pools and process fee-less transactions in parallel at high speeds. Retail and day traders also have access to advanced trading tools, including bots, customized trading algorithms, API data links, and advanced market orders.

The Polkadot Ecosystem Funding Wave

Polkadex will distribute its ERC-20 token, PDEX, through an initial token offering in the first half of 2021. Polkadot projects have been especially popular with investors and developers, with hundreds of new applications being built for the platform, making it the most active nextgen Web3 blockchain infrastructure.

“Polkadex is one of the most promising projects among our portfolio. Compared with Ethereum-based DEX such as Uniswap and Sushiswap, Polkadex leverages Substrate’s technical advantages: cross-chain transaction support and high scalability to build the next-generation DEX unlocking the full potential of users‘ digital assets for trading. I was impressed by Polkadex’s team. Polkadex’s team consists of blockchain professionals with wide industry exposure. They are smart, aggressive and hardworking. I firmly believe that Polkadex will be one of the best performing projects in 2021,” commented Li Xi, Managing Director of LD Capital.

Gautham J. CEO of Polkadex: “The support and trust we have received from the Polkadot ecosystem is further testimony to the problems we are trying to solve. We are on the cusp of creating a new era in Defi”

About Polkadex: Polkadex is a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer orderbook-based cryptocurrency exchange for the Defi ecosystem in substrate. With Polkadex, you get the same trading functionality and performance of a centralized exchange, but with the added benefits of better user-experience and fully decentralized security.

For more information, contact us via:

Website: https://www.polkadex.trade/

Telegram: @Polkadex

Twitter: @Polkadex

Medium: Polkadex

Just a few days after nearing $53,000, bitcoin has found itself on the receiving end of another nosedive to just north of $46,000 as the US stock market continues to suffer.

The altcoins have also suffered lately, with Ethereum dropping below $1,500 and BNB struggling at $220.

BTC’s Correlation with US Stocks Takes it South

After recovering from its week-long correction, BTC was riding at about $53,000 on March 3rd. However, the asset has since failed to double-down on its gain and reversed the trajectory rather quickly.

This led to breaking below the coveted $50,000 price tag as reported yesterday. The bears didn’t stop there and continued putting pressure in the past 24 hours as BTC dropped to roughly $46,000.

Although the cryptocurrency has regained some value to $47,000, it’s still almost 5% down since yesterday. This could be related to bitcoin’s recent high correlation with the US stock markets, which have been losing steam this week.

The three most prominent US stock indexes, namely the Dow, the S&P 500, and Nasdaq, all closed in the red yesterday after a highly-volatile trading day.

Interestingly, though, data from CryptoQuant suggests that institutional investors have continued adding BTC portions to their holdings even as the price suffers. The analytics company caught another sizeable withdrawal from Coinbase to custody wallets of over 12,000 bitcoins (about $580 million).

Alts Suffer, ETH Drops Below $1.5K

The alternative coins have followed their leader south with substantial price declines since yesterday. Ethereum leads with a 6% drop, and the second-largest cryptocurrency has lost the $1,500 price level.

Cardano (-5%), Binance Coin (-8%), Polkadot (-10%), Litecoin (-7%), Chainlink (-11%), and Bitcoin Cash (-7%) are also well in the red. Ripple is the only exception from the top ten as XRP has stayed at approximately the same price level as yesterday.

More losses are evident from PancakeSwap (-14%), Polygon (-12%), NEM (-11%), Basic Attention Token (-11%), Synthetix (-11%), Curve DAO Token (-11%), Fantom (-11%), Voyager Token (-11%), Algorand (-10%), and more.

Ultimately, the cumulative market capitalization of all cryptocurrency assets has decreased by $110 billion since yesterday to $1.450 trillion.

American basketball team Dallas Mavericks will now accept payments for tickets and merchandise in Dogecoin via the leading cryptocurrency payment processor, BitPay.

Prior to the announcement, it already supported payments in cryptocurrencies, including BTC, BCH, ETH, USDC, GUSD, PAX, and BUSD. Its billionaire owner and Shark Tank star, Mark Cuban, cited the ‘very important’ reason behind the newest addition.

All Bark And Some Bite

Meme-inspired Dogecoin is finally getting some utility to go with the massive hype of recent. The digital asset, which features the face of the Shiba Inu dog from the “Doge” meme on its logo, has been added to the list of payment options on Dallas Mavericks’ online shop.

As a result, the team’s fan base, Mavs Fans for Life (MFFLs), can now purchase game tickets and merch using dogecoin.

According to the Dallas Mavericks, the decision is purely consumer-centric and is targeted at leveraging cryptocurrencies to “expand business sales opportunity, reduce high fees and increase payment transparency and efficiency.” Mavs’ billionaire owner and bitcoin skeptic-turned proponent Mark Cuban revealed the ‘earth shattering’ reason for accepting dogecoin payments.

“The Mavericks have decided to accept Dogecoin as payment for Mavs tickets and merchandise for one very important, earth shattering reason, because we can! Because we can, we have chosen to do so. We have chosen to do so because sometimes in business you have to do things that are fun, engaging and hopefully generate a lot of PR. So we will take Dogecoin, today, tomorrow and possibly forever more. For those of you who would like to learn more about Dogecoin we strongly encourage you to talk to your teenagers who are on TikTok and ask them about it. They will be able to explain it all to you,”

While institutions are just getting caught up in the bitcoin frenzy, Dallas Mavericks is one of the early institutional adopters. The Dallas-based NBA hotshot started accepting bitcoin payments nearly two years ago and has continued to align itself with newer developments in the digital space.

Fun Over Intrinsic Value?

Mark Cuban’s reason for accepting dogecoin payments is based on the digital assets’ central theme – fun. He told Forbes last month:

“Dogecoin is less than a dime. You can buy $1 worth or $10 worth and have fun watching it all day”

He further stated that the digital currency has no intrinsic value, adding that he bought some for his son for educational purposes.

His earlier comments have led to strong suggestions that he is solely interested in reaping off the PR surrounding dogecoin of late.

Bitcoin Over Gold, Cuban Tells Schiff

Mark Cuban was quick to rebuff anti-bitcoin remarks made by the gold proponent and Chairman of SchiffGold, Peter Schiff, this week. The agelong precious metal advocate took a jab at wall street bitcoiners, tweeting that he never knew smart investors could be “dumb enough to buy bitcoin.”

In response, Cuban correctly pointed out that while a technology-backed store of values like crypto are dynamic and can transition into advanced applications, gold is simply static.

Let me help Peter. Gold is hyped as much as Crypto. Do we really need gold jewelry? Gold can make you a ring. BTC/Eth are technologies that can make you a banker, allow friction free exchange of value and are extensible into an unlimited range of biz and personal applications https://t.co/pJPdEAl5gq

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) March 2, 2021