PANews reported on May 22 that, according to The Block, Kelp DAO, a Ethereum liquidity re-stake platform, raised $9 million in a private sale Token sales round, valuing it at $90 million. The funding round was led by SCB Limited of the Bahamas and Laser Digital, the encryption arm of Nomura Global, with a joint investment of $3.5 million, with other investors including Bankless Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures, Draper Dragon and others. Kelp co-founder Amitej Gajjala said the round was completed in March, when Kelp's total Lock-up Position (TVL) was about $300 million, which has now increased to about $961 million. Kelp plans to use the funds to expand its liquidity stake services on Blockchain such as Bitcoin, Solana and BNB Chain, and expects to launch 1-2 new chains in the third quarter of this year.

Odaily Planet Daily News South Korea's digital bank KakaoBank cooperated with Thailand's financial technology group and Siam Commercial Bank Holding Company SCB X to establish a consortium to apply for a virtual bank license from the Bank of Thailand. SCB X plans to hold a majority stake, with KakaoBank holding at least 20%, and the consortium plans to attract more partners to the alliance. Among them, Ant Group has cooperated with South Korea's Kakao Pay to provide payment services in the Thai market. Sittipong Kittiprapapong, general manager of global merchant cooperation of Ant Group in Thailand, refused to answer whether Ant Group would join the consortium. (Bangkok Post)

According to TechCrunch, on May 16, the generative artificial intelligence startup Together announced the completion of a $20 million seed round of financing, led by Lux Capital, Factory, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Robot Ventures, Definition Capital, Susa Ventures, Cadenza Ventures and SCB 10x participated. In addition, several well-known angel investors also participated in the investment, including PayPal co-founder Scott Banister and Cloudera founding employee Jeff Hammerbacher. It is reported that Together was established in June 2022 by Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Re and Percy Liang to create open source generative artificial intelligence models and services. Currently, Together is building a cloud platform for running, training, and fine-tuning open-source models. One of Together's first projects, RedPajama, aims to foster an open-source set of generative models. Other achievements of Together include GPT-JT and OpenChatKit.