Numerai Raises $3M in Another NMR Token Sale With Union Square Ventures, Placeholder

Numerai has sold an additional $3 million in NMR tokens to a slate of investors led by Union Square Ventures on the strength of its latest product, Erasure. 

The 17th-largest dapp in terms of value staked on it, Erasure currently holds $2.1 million worth of crypto, according to DeFi Pulse. Erasure provides a way to have a market for information that enables the buyers of information to have more confidence that what they are getting is real. In March, Numerai released an easy way for users to interact with the protocol called Erasure Bay. 

“Erasure Bay is demonstrating that you can trust other people online if they’re willing to put some cryptocurrency at stake and let you burn it if they misbehave. We did not expect all these weird use cases but we’re into it,” Numerai founder Richard Craib, who also invested in the round, wrote in a press release.

So far it mostly seems like people have been experimenting with the platform as it builds a user base. Here’s a simple $5 bounty seeking those interested in 20th-century philosophy. Here’s one of Numerai’s investors paying for a valuation model for the token.

Some interesting bounties remain outstanding. For example, there’s a $2,000 offer on the full Jeffrey Epstein deposition video – still unfulfilled. 

All stakes on Erasure are held in NMR but for simplicity’s sake users participate using dai (DAI). 

Numerai’s core business remains that of operating a hedge fund. It has thus far used its technology to buy analysis from the open market that it uses to drive its own investment decisions, but the creation of Erasure Bay creates a new way to drive value and use for the NMR token. 

In March 2019, the startup announced an $11 million token sale led by Paradigm and Placeholder. Placeholder and Union Square Ventures were again involved in the latest round, along with CoinFund and Dragonfly Capital.