Blockchain Press Releases
Homely Secures Investment from UST to Launch Innovative Homebuyer Platform
LONDON, Aug, 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Homely, the free-to-access digital platform which aims to create a fairer property market for homebuyers and renters, has received its first strategic pre-seed investment, at a valuation in the double-digit millions, from UST, a leading digital transformation solutions company.
Founded in 2021, Homely harnesses technology and partnerships to support people’s homeownership journey by improving their financial position and connecting them to tailored guidance, support, and products.
Homely partners with landlords, renters, and financial institutions to increase transparency and accountability during the rental and buying process, as well as providing incentives and rewards through its brand partners.
The funding will help Homely complete the development of its tech platform and launch its innovative proposition to the market, including activating a number of partnerships with established and trusted brands. This includes the likes of insurance giant Aviva, with both parties currently exploring a partnership.
Homely’s launch proposition includes a new way of buying property that allows immediate access to the housing ladder via Homely Flexible Ownership products which connect prospective homeowners to flexible, institutional, capital.
As a leading global provider of technology and digital transformation services, UST has an established track record of investing in innovative businesses across a broad range of market sectors. UST has helped guide digital transformation journeys for prominent companies including Fortune 500 and Global 2000 clients across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, semiconductor, and technology.
UST will be an integral strategic partner for Homely as the team navigates the UK property market and delivers innovative solutions for renters and homeowners.
Homely benefits from an experienced senior leadership team made up of:
- Lewis Scott, Founder and CEO – Lewis is also VP & Managing Director of Scott Brothers Group, where he has worked with global technology and lower-to-mid-market growth companies on M&A, capital raising, secondary share sales and corporate development.
- Steven Ward, Chief investment Officer – Steven was previously the CEO of HSBC Alternative investment Limited.
- Paul Birkin, Chief Technology Officer – Paul is the former CTO of Global Workplace Solutions at CBRE and former CIO of Experian EMEA.
- Ellis Scott, Head of Mortgages – Ellis is a qualified mortgage adviser and is also Head Mortgage and Protection Adviser at Scottsdale Lifetime Partners.
As well as the core day-to-day team, Homely also has support from a number of advisors with a wealth of industry and business expertise, putting Homely in a strong position to navigate current market challenges and provide industry leading technology solutions.
Lewis Scott, Chief Executive Officer, Homely, said, “UST’s renowned presence as leading providers of digital technology and transformation services, and the depth of knowledge of its experts, aligns particularly well with Homely. As a business we want to offer innovative, data-led solutions to the current issues facing the property market.”
“At such a crucial moment for the property market, this first round capital raise will allow Homely to help more people on their journey to homeownership. When it feels like buying a home, or qualifying for a mortgage, is moving further and further out of reach, Homely is committed to providing innovative solutions, underpinned by technology.”
“As we expand and evolve moving forward, there will be further opportunities on the horizon for investors to work with us and be part of an important journey to help more people become HomeReady. We look forward to working closely with UST and driving forward better outcomes for the UK property market.”
Praveen Prabhakaran, Chief Delivery Officer, UST, said, “We are pleased to join forces with Homely, a truly innovative brand that is using technology to offer modern solutions to longstanding problems within the UK property market. This is truly aligned to our core mission of Transforming Lives and we look forward to playing a significant role in enriching and enabling the homeownership journey.”
Homely’s digital platform will be live and available for consumers to access by the end of 2023.
Founded in 2021, Homely is a free-to-access digital platform which leverages technology and partnerships to help homebuyers and renters to find a home.
Whether you are searching for a rental property or setting out to buy your first home, Homely enhances opportunities and empowers each individual to embark on their journey to home ownership.
Homely believes in making the path to homeownership more accessible and is working with individuals to make this a reality. Homely partners with landlords, renters, and financial institutions to increase transparency and accountability during the rental and buying process as well as provide rewards and incentives through its brand partners.
Bold change requires bold action, enter: Homely.
The Homely offering:
- Rental Journey Progress Feature: Helping renters to track their progress while renting towards home ownership. From pre-renters and students to room renters, low-end rental, mid-end rental and high-end rental, Homely wants to be with you on the journey all the way
- Reporting maintenance issues: The Homely platform allows renters to quickly report any issues with a property directly to the landlord in order for improvements to be made and any issues to be addressed
- Homely’s Flexible Ownership offering: Once in a flexible ownership arrangement with Homely, the individual will have the right to purchase further portions of their property on periodic dates in the future for a small fee at prevailing market value. In the event an individual needs to raise liquidity, there may also be the ability to sell some or all of their holding to Homely, subject to availability. This will also provide landlords with the opportunity to sell their properties to incumbent renters.
- HomelyBricks: A rewards based system which integrates with existing affiliate partners with loyalty and cashback schemes to support their build-up of HomelyBricks which can become benefits or proof points when getting a mortgage
- Debt Consolidation – with Monevo, Homely can help users to consolidate debt and start paying it down in preparation for saving for a deposit
- ExpansionReady: Helping landlords to expand their portfolios, source new financing or remortgage on existing BTL mortgages. Also provide real time information to inform their decision to expand their portfolio
- Mortgage & buying scheme acceptance: Working with lenders to be able to access relevant criteria for the lender to approve and accept mortgage applications in real-time
Media Contacts, Homely
Jamie Till, Libby Wallis or Georgia Turton at Instinctif Partners: [email protected] / 020 7457 2020
About UST
For more than 23 years, UST has worked side by side with the world’s best companies to make a real impact through transformation. Powered by technology, inspired by people, and led by our purpose, we partner with our clients from design to operation. Through our nimble approach, we identify their core challenges, and craft disruptive solutions that bring their vision to life. With deep domain expertise and a future-proof philosophy, we embed innovation and agility into our clients’ organizations—delivering measurable value and lasting change across industries, and around the world. Together, with over 30,000 employees in 30+ countries, we build for boundless impact—touching billions of lives in the process. Visit us at www.UST.com
Media Contacts, UST:
Tinu Cherian Abraham
+1 (949) 415-9857
Merrick Laravea
+1 (949) 416-6212
Neha Misri
+91-9284726602
[email protected]
Media Contacts, U.S.:
S&C PR
+1-646.941.9139
[email protected]
Makovsky
[email protected]
Media Contacts, U.K.:
FTI Consulting
[email protected]
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Blockchain Press Releases
MEXC Announces Listing of Hyperlane (HYPER) with a 165,000 HYPER and 50,000 USDT Prize Pool
VICTORIA, Seychelles, April 21, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — MEXC, a leading global cryptocurrency exchange, announced the Hyperlane (HYPER) listing on April 22, 2025(UTC).To celebrate this significant addition to the exchange, MEXC is launching a special event with a prize pool of 165,000 HYPER and 50,000 USDT for new and existing users.
Hyperlane is the first permissionless, universal interoperability protocol dedicated to building a truly open and decentralized cross-chain communication infrastructure. As “The Open Interoperability Framework,” it enables anyone to freely expand, utilize, and customize the network, allowing developers to easily and securely build cross-chain applications and token bridges. To date, Hyperlane has connected over 140 blockchains, processed nearly 9 million cross-chain messages, and bridged more than $6 billion in volume through its Warp Routes.
$HYPER is the native token of the Hyperlane ecosystem, with an initial total supply of 1 billion tokens. It plays a critical role in securing the protocol through staking, rewarding validators for verifying cross-chain messages, incentivizing user-driven activity, and enabling community governance over protocol development.
To celebrate the listing, MEXC will launch an Airdrop+ event with substantial rewards for users:
Event Period: April 21, 2025, 10:00 – May 01, 2025, 10:00 (UTC)
Benefit 1: Deposit and share 120,000 HYPER (New user exclusive)
Benefit 2: Spot Challenge — Trade to share 15,000 HYPER (For all users)
Benefit 3: Futures Challenge — Trade to share 50,000 USDT in Futures bonus (For all users)
Benefit 4: Invite new users and share 30,000 HYPER (For all users)
MEXC has established itself as a leading exchange by consistently offering users early access to high-potential crypto assets. In 2024 alone, the platform listed 2,376 new tokens, including 1,716 initial listings. According to the latest TokenInsight report, MEXC led the industry with 461 spot listings between November 1, 2024, and February 15, 2025. During this period, the exchange maintained a high listing frequency, consistently ranking among the top six platforms, demonstrating its agility in capturing emerging market trends. MEXC will continue to expand its asset offerings and help users seize timely opportunities in the fast-moving crypto market.
For full event details and participation rules, please visit here.
About MEXC
Founded in 2018, MEXC is committed to being “Your Easiest Way to Crypto.” Serving over 36 million users across 170+ countries, MEXC is known for its broad selection of trending tokens, everyday airdrop opportunities, and low trading fees. Our user-friendly platform is designed to support both new traders and experienced investors, offering secure and efficient access to digital assets. MEXC prioritizes simplicity and innovation, making crypto trading more accessible and rewarding.
MEXC Official Website｜ X ｜ Telegram ｜How to Sign Up on MEXC
Risk Disclaimer:
The information provided in this article regarding cryptocurrencies does not constitute investment advice. Given the highly volatile nature of the cryptocurrency market, investors are encouraged to carefully assess market fluctuations, the fundamentals of projects, and potential financial risks before making any trading decisions.
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Blockchain Press Releases
Introducing Clementine Bridge: Citrea Deploys First Complete BitVM Bridge Design on Testnet
Citrea’s Clementine Bridge marks the first time that a fully programmable layer is tested for settling on Bitcoin.
GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands, April 21, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Citrea, the first ZK rollup to enhance capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace and enable Bitcoin applications (₿apps), has successfully deployed its Clementine Bridge, the first complete BitVM bridge design on Bitcoin Testnet. Citrea has also recently revealed Clementine’s whitepaper, marking the first real-world implementation of a BitVM-based bridge which extends BTC’s utility to decentralized finance in the most Bitcoin-secured and native way possible. With Clementine’s testnet deployment, Bitcoin is for the first time tested for optimistically verifying a fully programmable layer. The Clementine whitepaper is currently the only documentation of how to use BitVM in a bridge design with clear solutions toward a secure and efficient bridge implementation.
Despite being the world’s largest digital asset, BTC has struggled to build relevance in decentralized finance. A secure bridge between Bitcoin and a secondary layer has always been a bottleneck for using BTC in a programmable environment. This problem has forced users to either keep Bitcoin as a passive store of value or rely on custodians for using BTC in financial activities. Citrea’s BitVM-based Bitcoin bridge Clementine solves this by enabling the safest and most trust-minimized way to bridge BTC and extend its utility to decentralized finance.
Citrea’s Clementine bridge marks a historic moment for Bitcoin and a new beginning for BTC’s utility. “It felt like magic when we saw all the bridge components work smoothly in our internal tests and that any malicious act is stopped by a single honest actor,” said Ekrem Bal, Co-Creator of Citrea. “We’re now ready to test Clementine in a real Bitcoin Testnet environment and make it more battle-tested for Citrea mainnet.”
With the introduction of BitVM by a Bitcoin developer Robin Linus, verifying computations on Bitcoin and building Bitcoin-secured bridges became a possibility. Very soon after its introduction, Citrea team became a core contributor of BitVM and later a founding member of BitVM alliance, where BitVM’s fundamental technology of executing a fraud proof of a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof on Bitcoin was developed collaboratively. Although accomplishing a ZK proof verification on Bitcoin was a prerequisite, there were still critical problems to address to implement this fundamental technology securely and efficiently into a Bitcoin bridge design. A detailed breakdown of this can be found in Clementine’s whitepaper.
Clementine’s design and whitepaper introduce novel solutions to two main research topics in BitVM-based bridge implementation, namely Bitcoin chain fork selection and capital efficiency of operators. These topics have been critical to solve as they ensure both the bridge’s security and efficiency. Citrea’s Clementine bridge offers clear solutions to both of these problems:
- Bitcoin Chain Fork Selection: This is related to ensuring that the bridge follows the longest Bitcoin chain. It has been an open research topic where the BitVM creator introduced superblocks approach but its security was later found to be broken. Citrea introduces a new Bitcoin Light Client design that uses succinct Header Chain Proofs of Bitcoin. These proofs are aggregated by operators into a single BitVM proof.
- Capital Efficiency of Operators: This has been another limitation of implementing BitVM efficiently into a bridge design. With Citrea’s approach to non-standard Bitcoin transactions, operators can now process hundreds of withdrawals in parallel with a single collateral. Disproving only one withdrawal is enough to stop other malicious withdrawal processes.
Clementine’s design relies on zero-knowledge proofs, Bitcoin data availability, a novel Bitcoin Light Client design and BitVM. In the case of a malicious act, an honest watchtower provides a proof of the longest Bitcoin chain. Then the operator generates a proof verifying Citrea’s state, watchtowers’ challenges and payout for the withdrawal. If the operator is malicious, it won’t be able to generate such proof, resulting in slashing the operator. Clementine has three main bridge actors to ensure the system’s integrity:
- Signers enforce BitVM spendings by managing peg-ins through presign transactions
- Watchtowers are tasked with monitoring operators and challenging any malicious behavior by sending a proof of longest Bitcoin chain
- Operators, a group of profit-seeking entities, temporarily cover users’ withdrawals and are later reimbursed with presigned transactions.
Citrea: Bitcoin’s Application (₿app) Layer
Citrea extends Bitcoin’s utility without sacrificing its security. With zero-knowledge technology, Citrea enables Bitcoin to function as a fully programmable layer. With its Bitcoin bridge Clementine, Citrea offers the safest and most trust-minimized way to bridge BTC to a fully programmable secondary layer.
For the first time in its history, Bitcoin Network will be able to support diverse on-chain applications and its utility will be extended to decentralized finance.
Apply to Citrea’s unique incubation program ‘Citrea Origins‘ to build ₿apps.
For more information, please visit: Citrea website | Citrea X Account
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PANAMA CITY, April 21, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — BingX, a global leading cryptocurrency exchange, announces the listing of EPT, the native token for Balance.fun, for both spot trading and also on the BingX Xpool. The spot listing will commence on April 21 at 12:00 (UTC) while the Xpool launch will start on April 22 at 10:00 (UTC). BingX users can stake BTC and EPT in Xpool, though new users will have an additional option to stake USDT to win a bigger share of the reward pool that includes 2,000,000 EPT Points. The first 1000 new users who stake a minimum of 100 USDT will also be able to earn an additional bonus voucher worth 100 USDT.
EPT is the governance token of Balance, an AI-powered web3 experience infrastructure designed for the masses. This new digital asset will fuel the new Balance Platform to create an open and inclusive gaming ecosystem for both gamers and developers with fairness at its core. With the integration of AI and blockchain technology, games can be built and marketed more easily while allowing players to benefit from the enhanced and diversified gaming experience.
Users of the existing Epal platform can transfer their EPT tokens to BingX, enabling a reliable method to trade EPT or, alternatively, purchase EPT for governance purposes. Having a solid exchange to further explore the vast world of cryptocurrencies, this new listing further empowers both Epal and Balance users in the process.
Vivien Lin, Chief Product Officer of BingX, shared her thoughts on the new trading option and Xpool listing: “I think providing users with these new trading and early investment options is our responsibility as a responsible cryptocurrency exchange since some of our users rely on us to introduce such projects with such numerous functions across multiple subcategories”.
Visit bingx.com to join the Xpool starting April 22 and start trading EPT on spot from April 21. Whether you’re a gamer, builder, or crypto enthusiast, this is your chance to be part of a new decentralized chapter in entertainment.
About BingX
Founded in 2018, BingX is a leading crypto exchange, serving over 20 million users worldwide. BingX offers diversified products and services, including spot, derivatives, copy trading, and asset management – all designed for the evolving needs of users, from beginners to professionals. BingX is committed to providing a trustworthy platform that empowers users with innovative tools and features to elevate their trading proficiency. In 2024, BingX proudly became the official crypto exchange partner of Chelsea Football Club, marking an exciting debut in the world of sports.
For more information, please visit: https://bingx.com/
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