Correction (12:10 UTC, May 5 2021): Clarified that Rogozinski no longer has an official relationship with WSB.

The founder of a Reddit group responsible for rallying retail traders against large institutional hedge funds is planning to release a decentralized application (dapp) he says will help tackle “market manipulation” in traditional finance.

Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of the WallStreetBets (WSB) community has been working with blockchain and fintech experts to create exchange-traded portfolios (ETPs) to “fight back against corrupt institutions and to end dependence on them altogether,” according to a press release on Wednesday.

Portfolios will be governed under a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) community consensus within which the dapp’s own $WSB token will allow holders to vote on various issues.

If token holders wish to change the weight and exposure of a particular stock, they may do so during voting cycles using $WSB tokens to influence a particular portfolio, according to the release.

WSB became a household name this year after attempting to stymie short-sellers on Wall Street by short squeezing them to “near bankruptcy.” While the cryptocurrency and WSB communities may share some views when it comes to traditional finance, all discussion related to crypto is currently banned on the subreddit. A WSB moderator said the “negatives outweighed the positives” when it came to discussing crypto because as the subreddit primarily focuses on stocks.

Importantly, while Rogozinski founded the original WSB community, he was removed by Reddit administrators last year for attempting to monetize the community, an individual familiar with the company’s decision said.

See also: What Really Happened When Robinhood Suspended GameStop Trading

The current community moderators said that “this person has had no relation to wallstreetbets over the past year.”

“The amalgamation of blockchain technology with financial markets is the next logical step for finance,” said Rogozinski. “It will result in stronger, more democratized markets and will empower individuals around the world.”

Venture capital’s excitement over blockchain analytics has spilled over into decentralized finance (DeFi).

Nansen, a DeFi-native crypto tracer, has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Also participating in the round was Skyfall Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, imToken Ventures, Mechanism Capital and QCP Capital.

Tracking crypto as it flows from wallets to exchanges and other platforms has become a whole sub-industry within the digital-asset space, with major funding rounds for Chainalysis, CipherTrace and TRM Labs in recent weeks.

But blockchain analytics is often associated with regulators and law enforcement, meaning that, perhaps unfairly, it has a boomer feel about it. Not so for Singapore-based Nansen.

“Blockchain analytics has been focused on law enforcement, government agencies, tax authorities and so forth,” said Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik. “But our philosophy has always been that people on the ground floor of crypto, the actual market participants, should have access to the best on-chain analytics as well.”

Crypto-tracking boom

Since the explosion of interest in DeFi, Nansen’s take has been to track flows of money between different smart contracts, identifying the hottest yield farming platform, for example. Currently, the platform has labeled some 90 million addresses, equating to about 70% of all on-chain DeFi volume, according to Svanevik.

“As participation in the first truly open global financial markets grows, traders and collectors of all kinds – retail novices, institutional professionals, independent experts and more – will want to understand what the smart money is doing across all blockchains,” a16z General Partner Chris Dixon said in a statement.

It’s worth noting that major blockchain analytics platforms like Elliptic and CipherTrace are highly adept at following fund flows through decentralized exchanges and DeFi pools. Unlike those firms, Nansen isn’t focused on risk scoring per se, but the service provides the data to allow users to make up their own minds, said Svanevik. 

“We don’t have any specific position with regards to regulations on how we think things should develop. We’re not basing our company on some KYC’d version of DeFi coming out in the future,” he said, referring to know your customer rules.

Shinhan Bank, one of South Korea’s oldest modern banks, has joined the Governance Council of a public blockchain network developed by Klaytn, the arm of internet messaging giant Kakao.

According to a press release on Monday, the bank has joined the council to partake in the platform’s blockchain operation. Additionally, Shinhan will develop a number of Klaytn-based digital services for South Korea’s fintech ecosystem.

Shinhan joins a number of existing council members including LG Electronics, Binance and Worldpay, among others. Members act as key decision makers for Klaytn’s business and technical developments, which include the operation of the consensus node network, per the release.

Based on a 2020 report from Ground X, the blockchain arm of Kakao and developer of the Klatyn network, members of the council topped $96 trillion in market value in 2020. The same report shows the network’s number of externally owned accounts created on Klaytn stands at 9.6 million.

See also: South Korea’s Shinhan Bank Builds Pilot Platform for Central Bank Digital Currency

The bank, which began as the country’s first modern bank under the name Hanseong Bank in 1897, has already built a number of blockchain-based financial services. In 2019, Shinhan inked a three-way deal with GroundX and blockchain developer Hexlant to build out the bank’s private key management system for use within its systems.

More recently, the bank built a pilot platform for a potential South Korean central bank digital currency with assistance from LG CNS in anticipation of a digital won.