Injective, the first universal DeFi protocol for cross-chain derivatives trading, has announced the successful public launch of its main network alongside a $120 million protocol incentive program named Astro for traders, market makers and DeFi projects.

A newly minted unicorn, Injective streamlines fully decentralized trading with a fast and secure layer-2 exchange that allows individuals to create unlimited financial markets for assets such as crypto, commodities, NFTs, forex, and much more. Injective enables 24/7 trading and allows its users to trade with zero gas fees. All transactions are entirely transparent and secured by Tendermint-based proof-of-stake consensus with instant finality. Recently, major institutions such as Siam Commercial Bank and Binance have put their institutional weight behind Injective as well as they act as validators for the protocol.

Injective is a Cosmos SDK based chain that enables decentralized trading for a diverse array of financial instruments such as perpetual swaps, expiry futures, and traditional spot markets. Unlike its counterparts such as FTX and dYdX, every component of the Injective is built to be fully trustless, censorship-resistant, publicly verifiable, and interoperable while providing an intuitive user experience comparable to centralized exchanges. 

Injective has already seen substantial levels of adoption with over one billion dollars in daily trading volume across more than 25,000 unique monthly users. Renowned market makers and funds such as Cumberland, QCP Capital, CMS, and Bitlink are all early backers of the project and helped provide advice on the initial design and development of the protocol itself. Injective rose to prominence last year as they became one of the first protocols to list commodities such as gold on the exchange.

To accompany the mainnet launch, Injective is also releasing a $120 Million incentive program named Injective Astro to help promote liquidity and trading on the protocol. To help put this number into perspective, $120 Million will make Injective's Astro program one of the largest liquidity incentive programs within the orderbook DEX space and by far the largest within the entire Cosmos ecosystem.

The program will begin by allocating the funds specifically to market makers and traders who utilize the protocol. Through the Trade & Earn program, traders will be able to earn a rebate for every trade that they place on the exchange rather than having to pay a fee as is the case on all other platforms today. To further encourage user loyalty, Injective has introduced a decentralized VIP system to progressively reward users as they increase participation and volume. This is the first time an exchange VIP system has been implemented fully on-chain with zero intermediaries.

Injective Astro will extend far beyond the trading incentives to further catalyze ecosystem growth through a multi-stage process. Injective Labs also plans on assigning more funds toward incentivizing new projects to build on Injective. So far Injective Labs has publicly backed NFT auction house Burnt Finance which famously worked with Injective to burn Banksy painting and minted an NFT after the act. The news was covered across all major media and the video itself has garnered over ten million views in China alone.

The frontend interface created by Injective Labs called Injective Pro was released last month. Injective Pro restricts all US users in order to properly comply with guidelines set forth by governing bodies such as the CFTC. Uniquely however, developers can build new exchange interfaces on top of Injective which allows individuals to rapidly create region or asset specific exchanges while being able to leverage the powerful backend protocol. For instance, a developer can deploy a decentralized exchange that only focuses on futures trading.

Over the past few months, Injective has taken steps to ensure complete decentralization of the protocol itself. Every transaction on Injective is verified by a decentralized group of validators that currently secure some of the fastest growing projects in the industry today such as Cosmos and Terra. Users can view all trades on-chain via the Injective Explorer regardless of whether the trade was placed via a frontend interface or the institutional grade Injective API. All markets launched on Injective must be approved by a DAO vote from which Injective Labs abstains. All of these aspects empower the global community to dictate the future of Injective.

The launch of Injective mainnet and the Astro incentive program follows the release of the Injective Bridge – an IBC-enabled cross-chain bridge that supports seamless Cosmos and Ethereum-based token transfers. Injective also touts its fast withdrawal times back to Ethereum which currently stands at less than 10 minutes which is far lower than other layer-2 solutions where withdrawals can take up to a week to process.

“Our mission at Injective has always been to build the most powerful cross-chain protocol for completely decentralized derivatives trading. As Injective interconnects new chains, the ecosystem will continue to serve as a DeFi gateway for trading across the multi-chain universe. Injective's Ethereum-native tooling allows users to simply create and trade new cross-chain markets without the typical roadblocks associated with making transactions across distinct blockchain networks,” said Eric Chen, the 23-year-old computer science dropout co-founder and CEO of Injective Labs.

The team at Injective Labs has been building it since 2018 and validated the product  with the largest funds, market makers, and institutional traders. Injective was one of the first projects to be incubated by Binance Labs and recently raised a $10 million round from the likes of Pantera Capital and Mark Cuban.

About Injective

Injective is the first cross-chain protocol built for decentralized finance applications. On the Injective exchange, anyone can access, create, and trade unlimited DeFi markets such as futures and perpetuals. Developers can also build cross-chain Ethereum-compatible projects that are lightning fast and achieve instant transaction finality. Injective is backed by a prominent group of stakeholders including Binance, Pantera Capital and Mark Cuban. For more information please visit https://injectiveprotocol.com/ 

Panel confirms that the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) need not find that a German company owned a US trademark rights to pursue a cancelation action. In denying a California piano retailer’s petition for rehearing, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has expanded on the panel’s prior decision...

Pollen DeFi (https://pollen.id/), the decentralized protocol that facilitates ‘hivemind' weighting of asset pools that back up market-tradable tokens, today revealed their upcoming ‘Incentivised Beta' platform release and details on how the ‘DeFi 2.0' protocol will enable its unique community-managed financial instrument. The ‘Beta' release, which goes live in December, will initially enable users to contribute to the continual balancing and rebalancing of a singular central asset pool that will back up a tradable asset token. The protocol will be open to whitelisted users who can begin building community credibility (in the form of a ‘reputation' score), compete for a position on the community leaderboard, and, in turn, will have a chance to earn mainnet Pollen ($PLN) governance tokens. 

Pollen DeFi aims to push ‘DeFi' into the ‘DeFi 2.0' era by moving beyond institutional imitation and removing centralized “middlemen”; the platform instead empowers user-curated cryptocurrency asset pools that are constantly refined via a merit-based balancing of users' portfolio suggestions. Community members are rewarded for making good decisions and subsequently gain more influence over the dynamically-rebalancing portfolio.  Alternatively, users who would prefer to turn to more qualified traders (based on proven reputation, scored by the platform) can delegate their voting power accordingly. These ‘hivemind approved' asset portfolios then back up ‘asset pool tokens' listed as easily accessible financial instruments capable of outperforming market fluctuations.  

Boosted earlier this year by strategic backers, The Graph and AlphaBit, Pollen DeFi is focused on building the ultimate ‘crypto meritocracy'; the salient, DAO-driven ‘DeFi 2.0' experience leans on the fact that the leadership team merely creates and hones the core technology and UI, ensures platform security, and facilitates user governance and ease of accessibility, while the diversity of opportunities presented within the financial instrument itself result from decentralized, community-contributed portfolio suggestions. Pollen DeFi is powered by two new tokenized assets built specifically with DeFi 2.0 in mind, the Pollen ($PLN) governance token and the native Portfolio Asset Index token ($PAI) which is backed by the total value locked (TVL) of the first and core asset pool on the platform.  Other crypto-communities, influencers, and even top-ranking Pollen DeFi users will be able to propose additional asset pools that will be continually re-balanced by user proposals and support new asset-backed tokens, similar to the $PAI token.

Pollen DeFi's move from Alpha to Beta with a dramatically upgraded protocol design is supported by an already strong community of followers wishing to begin the process of actively contributing to the balancing of the asset pool. Pollen DeFi's open-source protocol and merit-based system empowers the brightest minds in its community and incentivizes them to continually contribute. This means that $PAI token is backed by a continually rebalanced and optimized asset pool which aims to out-smart market fluctuations with overall global community intelligence ideal for the 24/7 nature of the cryptocurrency market.

Pollen DeFi Project Lead and Co-Founder, Philip Verrien, explained, “Our focus has been on rebuilding asset management from the ground up; reducing risk and volatility, while also maximizing yield and creating dynamic opportunity for anyone, regardless of their experience level; [Pollen DeFi] aims to be the embodiment of what we believe will be the next step in DeFi, and reflect the core principles of truly decentralized finance.” Pollen DeFi's community is at the center of it all; Verrien and his team have designed Pollen DeFi to be powerful and easily accessible not only for the experienced crypto traders hoping to receive community accolades and earn $PLN token rewards for sharing their alchemic index ratios, but also, for those crypto-newcomers who are more familiar with curated asset indexes from TradFi and retail crypto environments consisting of pre-vetted coins and tokens - these users will be able to use Pollen ($PLN) governance token or hold $PAI asset pool token to easily be a part of the secure and well-tuned, ‘hivemind-approved' asset portfolio. 

Pollen DeFi focuses on user participation and utility. It is designed to tackle governance and centralization issues commonplace in today's DeFi ecosystem. Focusing heavily on developing community participation incentives, and processes that build toward true decentralization, using the hivemind to put the community in control.

The $PAI token will be the first index token to be launched on the platform with its value tied to the TVL of the core asset pool. $PAI is designed to be a less volatile asset that provides a safer way to participate in the DeFi ecosystem and is designed to weather any market storm as it will be dynamically managed by the community 24/7. $PLN, on the other hand, is the governance token that allows participants to interact with the platform and is rewarded to community members who actively manage the portfolio successfully or delegate to those that do (from a leaderboard). 

Beginning in December, whitelisted users will be able to actively contribute suggestions to Pollen DeFi's first community-managed portfolio and associated asset pool token, Portfolio Asset Index ($PAI); reputation points earned during this part-testnet, part-mainnet ‘Community Release Incentivised Beta' will be ported over as part of full mainnet launch in Q1 2022. This means that whitelisted early adopters who engage with Pollen's ‘Community Release Incentivised Beta' will appear on the leaderboard once the platform is fully live on mainnet.  The Pollen DeFi team will be releasing more information regarding the community release whitelist and details for those that can participate in the coming weeks, in the meantime anyone interested can join Pollen's telegram group (https://t.me/pollen_dao) or follow @PollenDeFi on twitter. 

For more information, please visit pollen.id.

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About Pollen DeFi

Pollen DeFi (https://pollen.id/), is a first of its kind decentralized asset management ecosystem where the community builds and manages crypto asset portfolios together. Decentralized finance is designed to be by the people, for the people, and Pollen DeFi is acknowledging this by building the first, truly decentralized platform for managing tokenized asset pools. The merit-based DAO provides a reputation-based governance protocol with incentives that leverage the community's collective wisdom to curate asset pools. In this system, all users of the platform stand to benefit from the contribution of the best performing participants. Initially, the Pollen DeFi platform and its Pollen governance token ($PLN) will manage a single asset token, the Portfolio Asset Index ($PAI) token. The $PAI token will be managed 24-7 by the community and is designed to be a low volatility ‘DeFi Lego' which can be used in other protocols in the decentralized finance ecosystem. After Mainnet launch, other communities will be able to create and manage alternative asset tokens via the Pollen DeFi platform.

By Judith Rinearson, Jeremy M. McLaughlin, and Daniel S. Nuñez Cohen On 1 November 2021, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG), in conjunction with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Comptroller of the Currency, issued a long-awaited joint “Report on Stablecoins” (Report). Per the press release (and a speech by Undersecretary of […]

On Fintech today, we are please to speak to Carine, President of AST Private Company Solutions. AST is a leading provider of ownership data management, analytics and advisory services to public and private companies as well as mutual funds. AST’s comprehensive product set includes transfer agency services, employee stock plan administration services, proxy solicitation and […]

The orthopedic industry traditionally sees significant levels of intellectual property litigation activity, and this year has been no different. One source of this activity comes from Conformis who has continued to assert patents directed towards surgical planning and patient specific instruments and implants. In 2021, Conformis filed three new complaints, settled one case, and continued another litigation. These cases have involved various companies, including DePuy Synthes, Exactech, Bodycad, Wright Medical, and Medacta.

Decisions and settlements have also been reached in several additional lawsuits relating to diverse technologies, such as bone plates, knee implants, and pedicle screws. TriMed, Arthrex, Medacta, and Zimmer are some of the companies that have been parties to these lawsuits. Alternative forums, including the use of Inter Partes Review, have also continued to play significant roles for both patent holders and challengers.

Several attorneys from Knobbe Martens – including Andrew Douglas, Jessica Achtsam, Michael Christensen, Kregg Koch, Christy Lea and Sabing Lee – presented a webinar on August 26, 2021, to discuss notable decisions from recent orthopedic and spine intellectual property litigations. The webinar was prepared in anticipation of the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the 36th Annual Meeting of the National Association of Spine Specialists and included topics such as:

• an analysis of claim types asserted by Conformis against patient specific implant and instrument technologies and how these claims have been enforced against and challenged by many prominent orthopedic companies;
• how statements made by a patent holder can limit the scope of their claims in litigation;
• how small companies can leverage their patents to derive licensing revenue;
• trade secret issues that can arise at industry meetings;
• how prolific doctor inventors have built and enforced large patent portfolios;
• remedies for IP disputes outside the United States; and
• strategies for using patents defensively as part of a countersuit strategy.

The full webinar is available for viewing at this web link.

The post IP Litigation Remains Active in the Orthopedic and Spine Industries appeared first on Knobbe Medical.

The U.S. Patent Office issued the following 188 patent registrations to persons and businesses in Indiana in August 2021, based on applications filed by Indiana Patent attorneys: Patent No. Title 1 D0929,546 Faucet spout 2 D0929,545 Faucet 3 11,107,702 Method for creating through-connected vias and conductors on a substrate 4 11,107,274 Methods of processing three […]

The post New to the Street August 8th, 2021 | Clubhouse Media Group, FINXFLO, SportemonGo, Gaensel Energy Group, Solar Integrated Roofing, GlobeX Data, RushNet, Sekur appeared first on Exploring the Block.

Comic books have been keeping us entertained for centuries. From Popeye to Superman, these stories reflect the society we live in. However, if we have a closer look at some of their magic powers, we may see some recognisable substances. Could Popeye’s spinach be a substitute for cannabis? Or Superman’s kryptonite, a subtle reference to methamphetamines?

The post 12 Comic Book Characters & Cannabis: From Popeye to the Superheroes appeared first on Sensi Seeds.

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Vigilant Aerospace Systems’ CEO Kraettli Epperson participated in an AUVSI presentation on “Enhancing Operations with Sensors and Other Instruments.” We are happy to share...

This is a guest contribution from Mike Lloyd of Patent-Insights.  Mike has previously contributed articles on the impact, from an Australian perspective, of COVID-19 on international patent, trade mark, and registered designs filings, and on what patent data can tell us about the Australian government’s plan for local manufacturing?  Further details about the author can be found at the end of the article.

There is an increasing realisation that a successful economy is also a smart economy, and a smart economy is strengthened by having companies and organisations innovating and commercialising their inventions.

Luckily Australia is full of companies and organisations doing exactly this.  But who are these companies, and in what areas are they innovating in?

To answer this question with the most recent yet reliable data, I have looked at patent global publication data for Australian companies filed in the 12 months prior to 31 March 2021.  I have chosen this period as it is the latest quarter for which reliable data is available. By coincidence this is also the 12 month period after COVID-19 made its impact known, but maybe it is too soon to fully understand the effect of COVID in this area.

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