DeFi Technologies Inc. is pleased to announce that further to its press release dated March 25, 2021, it has completed the share exchange transaction (the “Transaction“) with HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd. Pursuant to the Transaction, DeFi Technologies issued ten (10) million common shares of DeFi Technologies to HIVE in exchange for four (4) million common shares of HIVE. No finder’s fees were paid in connection with the Transaction and all securities issued under the Transaction are subject to a four-month and one day statutory hold period.
In addition to the Transaction, HIVE and DeFi Technologies have created a partnership surrounding the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem with specific applications around Ethereum and Miner Extractable Value (MEV). The new partnership, which follows three months of discussions, will enable HIVE with a strategic stake in DeFi Technologies and a broader partnership surrounding the DeFi ecosystem with a specific focus on the Ethereum based MEV space and developments surrounding it.
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MEV refers to the amount of profit miners can extract from reordering and censoring transactions on the blockchain. It has become an important issue over the past year as the DeFi space has grown from US$3B to US$71B in market capitalization. Of the $347.3M of Extracted MEV, 88% comes from DeFi activities (see graph below). As can be seen from data by Coin Metrics, over half of all ETH miner revenue currently comes from transaction fees. By partnering together to take on these activities, individuals get a more capital efficient market to play in, while distributing greater returns to miners for acting more altruistically.
The DeFi sector has appreciated dramatically since 2020 and has reached a tipping point with institutional investors and large enterprises showing increased interest in the decentralised finance sector. In Q3 2020, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) published guidance clarifying national banks can provide services to stablecoin issuers in the U.S. This and other interest from venture capital and financial institutions in the decentralized finance sector is a major step in widespread adoption of DeFi.
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This new strategic partnership presents a significant opportunity to create more value per deployed mining infrastructure for HIVE by leveraging MEV applications. For DeFi Technologies, the partnership gives exposure to one of the largest miners of Ethereum, which is the backbone on which DeFi applications are built and thus serves as a critical component supporting the sector.
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