https://www.theblock.co/post/243981/genesis-trading-sees-establishment-land-grab-for-crypto
Genesis Trading thinks Q2 will be remembered as the time when the establishment came running on a “land grab” for crypto.
Author: MK Manoylov
Grimes says she’s sad about crypto, despite banking millions from NFTs: Wired
Claire Boucher, a musician known professionally as Grimes, earned more from her 2021 NFT collection than her entire music career.
Blockchain Ventures leads $8.2 million seed round for web3 security startup Cube3.ai
Cube3 uses machine learning to prevent malicious blockchain-based transactions from occurring in real-time.
Novogratz goes ‘Tubthumping’ with Chumbawamba, says crypto can’t stay knocked down
Novogratz said that Galaxy would “fight like cats and dogs” for market share, should a spot bitcoin ETF be approved.
Anchorage, Bitmain to get equity as part of Core Scientific bankruptcy plan
Crypto platform Anchorage and crypto miner Bitmain opted to get paid back in equity for the debt Core Scientific owes.
1kx leads $5 million seed round for generative art NFT platform fxhash
fxhash intends to use the funding to grow its team and prepare a major platform upgrade in the next six months.
Curve Finance exploiter returns $8.5 million in stolen funds
https://www.theblock.co/post/243267/curve-finance-exploiter-returns-8-5-million-in-stolen-funds
Across three batches, the Curve Finance exploiter returned a total of 4,820 alETH worth $8.5 million back to the protocol.
Cash App bitcoin sales jumped 34% in Q2 to $2.4 billion
https://www.theblock.co/post/243117/cash-app-bitcoin-sales-jumped-34-in-q2-to-2-4-billion
Payment company Block, Inc. said that bitcoin sales on its Cash App platform jumped 34% in the Q2 from the same period last year.
Arkham Intelligence sets $46,000 bounty for last year’s FTX exploiter
The bounty hunter must identify the culprit with thorough research, cited sources and other evidence as support.
Binance promotes Kristen Hecht to Deputy Chief Compliance Officer
Hecht will work with the firm’s Chief Compliance Officer Noah Perlman to ensure the firm mitigates financial crime risk.
Consensys sued over MetaMask intellectual property: CoinDesk
https://www.theblock.co/post/242826/consensys-sued-over-metamask-intellectual-property-coindesk
In a lawsuit, entrepreneur Joel Dietz claims to have started working on a browser-based crypto wallet called Vapor.
Genesis Digital Assets launches three new bitcoin mining data centers in South Carolina
Genesis Digital Assets, also known as GDA, has launched three new data centers in western South Carolina to expand its bitcoin mining power.
German authorities probe Worldcoin project over privacy: Reuters
https://www.theblock.co/post/242287/german-authorities-probe-worldcoin-project-over-privacy-reuters
Bavaria’s State Office for Data Protection Supervision has been looking into the Worldcoin crypto project since last year.
Sequoia cuts back size of crypto fund, WSJ says
https://www.theblock.co/post/241835/sequoia-cuts-back-size-of-crypto-fund-wsj-says
Sequoia Capital has cut back the size of its crypto investment fund to $200 million from $585 million, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar.
The venture capital firm also cut back an ecosystem fund that invests in other venture funds to $450 million from $900 million, according to the report. Sequoia told investors about the cuts in March, saying they were being made to reflect market conditions that have been typified by a prolonged downturn.
The company plans on focusing on backing young startups with the pared down crypto fund as opposed to larger companies that have faced challenges given current conditions, according to the report.
Sequoia Capital reshuffle
The two funds affected by the cuts were first announced in 2022. Its first-ever crypto-focused fund had planned to set aside up to $600 million for investments in “liquid tokens.”
The firm recently parted ways with two crypto investors amid a VC team reshuffle, Bloomberg News reported earlier this month. Last year, it was forced to write down its investment in the failed crypto exchange FTX to zero.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Proposal to burn large part of Kin supply closes with full support
Kin Foundation, the organization behind the protocol Kin, has concluded a vote that will see a vast percentage of total KIN supply burned.
The vote concluded on July 27 at 10 a.m. ET after a three week voting period. Ted Livingston, founder of the messaging platform Kik, proposed to fully decentralize the Kin protocol on July 6.
Two parties hold vast swathes of the cryptocurrency that has a total supply of 10 trillion. After the vote, Kin Foundation will burn 4.96 trillion of its KIN reserves, and Kik will burn another 2.1 trillion afterward.
The total 7.06 trillion tokens to burned makes up almost 71% of the total supply.
‘No inflation, no foundation, and no website’
“This would make Kin the only meaningful cryptocurrency on Solana that is fully decentralized, with no inflation, no foundation, and no website. This could be a new and exciting era for Kin,” Livingston wrote in the proposal.
The KIN token traded at $0.00001829 at 10 a.m. ET Thursday. In the three weeks leading up to the burn vote deadline, the coin saw a notable increase with the peak price of $0.000029 on July 23.
Kin has a fully diluted market capitalization of $175.5 million, according to the crypto price tracker CoinMarketCap.
The path to shut down
Ted Livingston saw the burn of trillions of KIN tokens as necessary for the future of the protocol, explaining his reasoning in the July 6 proposal.
“My proposal is for Kin to go all in on decentralization by burning the Kin Reserves, putting the Kin Foundation on a path to being shut down,” Livingstone wrote. “This would not only make Kin one of the fastest cryptocurrencies for developers to build with, but also one of the safest from a regulatory perspective.”
The Kin Foundation enacted a test burn of 1 billion KIN in May.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Azuki NFT prices down 65% in the month following Elementals drop: Nansen
Prices of Azuki NFTs have decreased 65% since the Elementals launch in June, according to data from Nansen.
On June 26, the day before the Elementals drop, Azuki prices were hovering around 15 ETH ($28,250). In the month that followed, the floor price plummeted to 5 ETH ($9,724) as of July 27.
Azuki trading volume also fell 78% this month.
Azuki Elementals drop
Azuki launched a new NFT collection called Elementals on June 27 that saw 10,000 anime-inspired avatars airdropped to existing Azuki brand holders. Another 10,000 were to be offered up from sale, but the collection sold out before the public had a chance to buy an NFT.
Azuki acknowledged missteps in the launch, stating “we missed the mark.” Despite the community controversy, the Elementals drop netted Azuki $51 million in sales — the highest trading volume for the collection since May of 2022.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Securitize launches tokenized security in Europe
https://www.theblock.co/post/241382/securitize-launches-tokenized-security-in-europe
Securitize, a blockchain firm specializing in the tokenization of real-world assets, has started issuing tokenized securities in Europe that represent equity in the Spanish real estate investment trust Mancipi Partners.
The shares will be tokenized on the Avalanche blockchain, and secondary trading is set to begin in September.
The rollout comes nearly a month after Spain’s General Secretariat of the Treasury and International Finance approved the firm to deploy digital asset securities to a small number of businesses and investors under supervised “sandbox” conditions
Once the sandbox period expires after around six months and the firm gets the go-ahead from the European Union Pilot Regime, Securitize plans to issue, manage and trade tokenized securities in Spain and the EU more broadly.
European businesses
“Securitize is now the first firm to be able to issue and trade tokenized securities in both the U.S. and Europe, and is the first firm to do so under the EU’s new pilot regime for digital assets,” Barcelona-born Securitize co-founder Carlos Domingo said in a statement. “European businesses will be a major beneficiary of this innovation, giving businesses a new way to raise capital through primary capital raises, and obtain potential tax benefits and liquidity through secondary trading.”
In May, Securitize partnered with the asset manager Hamilton Lane to bolster investor exposure to tokenized security offerings.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Generative art platform Highlight launches on Ethereum
https://www.theblock.co/post/241179/generative-art-platform-highlight-launches-on-ethereum
The generative NFT art platform Highlight has launched on Ethereum.
Highlight allows users to create, test and mint computer-generated art as NFTs. It nixes creator fees so that artists keep 100% of the funds from a sale, with buyers paying a small fee.
“Highlight will be the first open platform for generative art on Ethereum,” Highlight CEO Nathaniel Emodi told The Block. “It includes zero creator fees, self-owned contracts, open editions — a first for generative NFTs — and lots more. We’re partnering with some of the world’s best-known generative artists on upcoming drops, including Melissa Wiederrecht, James Merrill, Holger Lippmann, Leander Herzog and many others.”
Highlight funding
Highlight has raised $11 million in funding to date, with a funding round occurring in May of 2022. Katie Haun of Haun Ventures led the round, which had additional participation from 1kx, A_Capital, SciFi VC, Floodgate, Coinbase Ventures, 35 Ventures, Polygon Studios, Mischief VC, DAOJones, Offline Ventures, Gokul Rajaram, Lenny Rachitsky, WME, Method Management and ThreeSixZero.
“Over the next year, we’ll continue to make Highlight the most accessible and inclusive platform for on-chain generative art. This includes providing support for credit card payments, email sign in, physical print orders and other convenient features that grow the overall size of the crypto art community,” Emodi said.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Dogecoin spikes 9% after logo appears to find way back to Musk’s Twitter
Dogecoin mania made a comeback on Tuesday after a logo for the popular meme-based cryptocurrency seemed to find its way to the profile of Elon Musk’s rebranded Twitter account.
The price of the world’s seventh largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization rose 8.9% to $0.08 at 4:39 p.m. in New York, according to CoinGecko. That’s the highest price since April, with trading volume surging to more than $1.7 billion.
The rally took place as the symbol “Д appeared in a part of Musk’s Twitter profile that’s usually used to signify a location. It was placed right behind the new “X” logo for the company.
Musk, who bought the social media platform last year, also retweeted a user who goes by pseudonym “DogeDesigner.”
Doge’s steady rise
Musk’s tweets have long been known to influence the price of dogecoin. The cryptocurrency surged earlier this year after Twitter briefly changed its logo to a meme of a Shiba Inu dog that’s associated with the token, only to crash more than 8% after it was removed.
Dogecoin’s market capitalization currently stands at $11.4 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. It’s the third best preforming token tracked by the platform over the past week, rising 18.9%.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Avalanche Foundation creates $50 million incentive program to purchase tokenized assets
The Avalanche Foundation will use up to $50 million to purchase assets tokenized on the Avalanche blockchain in a move meant to showcase the utility of creating on-chain digital representations of “real world” things.
Dubbed “Avalanche Vista,” the program will consider assets across the full liquidity spectrum including equity, credit, real estate and commodities.
“Asset tokenization isn’t just the future of capital markets, it’s a critical driver of the present,” Ava Labs president John Wu said in a statement. “The groundswell of momentum across institutions building on-chain has been astounding, and the Avalanche Foundations is taking a big leap forward with this initiative.”
The initiative follows recent milestones in the field, including Securitize’s tokenization of an interest in a flagship KKR fund, the Avalanche Foundation said, also pointing to the launch of a marketplace for asset-based securities called IntainMARKETS.
Propelling the Avalanche ecosystem
“The $50 million allocation reflects the Avalanche Foundation’s commitment to driving forward a financial system that’s more accessible, efficient and cost-effective through the use of Avalanche’s novel consensus mechanism, unique Subnet architecture, and technical innovation,” the foundation said.
“It intends to accelerate the growth of tokenization and its role in on-chain finances by demonstrating the merits of applying blockchain rails to historically more manual and operationally intensive use cases, including asset issuance, settlement, transfer and administration,” it added.
Avalanche Vista is not the first fund designed to propel the blockchain’s ecosystem forward. In 2021, a $180 million DeFi investment program was launched alongside Aave and Curve to draw in more asset and decentralized applications onto the Avalanche blockchain.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Arkham Intel Exchange goes after Do Kwon crypto wallets with first bounty
The controversial Arkham Intel Exchange approved its first ever bounty hunt on Monday, after two crypto sleuths found evidence of crypto wallets belonging to Do Kwon.
The platform had posted a bounty requesting more information on the former Terraform Labs CEO and now international fugitive. An anonymous blockchain sleuth and a pseudonymous one who goes by ErgoBTC won a payout of 9,519.26 ARKHM, worth about $4,950, for successfully completing the bounty and gaining approval from the platform.
Terraform Labs saw its stablecoin TerraUSD and cryptocurrency Luna collapse in May of 2022 in one of the largest collapses ever in the industry. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Do Kwon with securities violations for allegedly selling unregistered transactions of crypto asset securities, failing to provide full and truthful disclosures and repeating misleading information to investors.
Arkham Intel Exchange
Launched on July 10, Arkham Intel Exchange incentivizes users to find on-chain data via a bounty system. Anyone can seek information by posting a bounty, though the submissions must be approved by the platform.
If successful, bounty hunters earn the reward, and whoever posted the bounty keeps the information for 90 days before it’s disseminated to the Arkham community.
The platform has stoked controversy in the crypto community, with some critics arguing that the platform could be used to dox innocent people.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Scaramucci offers liquidity lifeline to tech unicorn investors, former employees
Anthony Scaramucci, founder of the investment firm SkyBridge, has an offer for tech shareholders that might need some cash.
“We at SkyBridge are buying secondary shares from early investors and former employees of tech unicorns,” Scaramucci wrote on Twitter Monday. “If you own shares in a tech unicorn and need liquidity, please DM me and I will connect you with someone on our team.”
The move could be related to SkyBridge’s $50 million recovery fund launched in February. The “Uniform Recovery Fund” is aiming to acquire shares from distressed investors of up to 15 firms, Reuters first reported.
SkyBridge did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Block.
In July of 2022, SkyBridge established a web3-focused investment fund that would offer a mix of traditional venture and growth equity.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Founder of defunct Midas Investments launches new DeFi investment platform Locus Finance
Iakov Levin, f0under of the defunct custodial crypto investment platform Midas Investments, has launched a new decentralized finance platform.
Locus Finance will give users access to high yield-bearing tokenized vaults, the company said in a statement. Locus will initially offer three yield-bearing products pinned on Ethereum staking, DeFi growth and Arbitrum trading.
“Investors don’t want to worry about blockchains, protocols, transaction costs, and daily portfolio management,” Levin said in a statement. “They need specific exposure in a set-and-forget style. Vaults represent a unique approach necessary for maturing the retail yield market, allowing for optimal wealth generation for retail investors.”
Founded in 2018, Midas Investments amassed over $250 million assets under management at its height in 2021. However, after market conditions turned in 2022, Midas lost over $50 million.
Levin announced the closure of Midas Investments in December of the same year.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Side Protocol raises $1.5 million in pre-seed funding to grow cross-blockchain liquidity network
Side Labs, the startup behind the interconnected liquidity provider Side Protocol, raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding.
The funding was done through a simple agreement for future tokens sale, in which the token’s valuation totaled $30 million, the firm’s co-founder Shane Qiu told The Block. Participants include Hashkey Capital, KR1, Continue Capital, Symbolic Capital, Informal Systems, Dora Ventures, Charles Lu, Harry Halpin, Eric Chen, Mirza Uddin, Siddhartha Dutta and Vincent Niu.
Side Labs intends to use the fundraise to expand its team and guarantee adherence to legal and compliance standards while building out the Mesh Liquidity Network, which aims to eliminate bridges and intermediary tokens for cross-blockchain asset exchange through a network of liquidity hubs.
Mesh liquidity
Within the next month, Qui said that Side Labs intends to launch a private testnet with a select group of members of the firm’s backers and community members, in addition to building out a public testnet that explores user rewards, mesh liquidity, staking and governance and other features. Within six month, the firm aims to launch the first version of its mainnet followed by a V2 testnet introducing zero-knowledge technology. Finally, Side Lab intends to launch its V2 mainnet with ZK technology to give L1 and L2 protocols mesh liquidity within the next year.
“Mesh liquidity represents a natural progression in the evolution of inter-chain asset exchange,” Qiu said.
Qui previously worked as a research at Binance Labs, the venture capital arm of the crypto exchange giant Coinbase.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams suffers Twitter breach
The Twitter account of Hayden Adams, creator of the DeFi crypto exchange Uniswap, was breached on Thursday afternoon, with several tweets sent from the account containing links to scam websites.
“Hayden’s account was hacked,” The Uniswap Foundation said in a tweet. “Do not click this link – or links in similar tweets which might go up.”
A suspect tweet sent from Adams’ account had called on UniswapX users to check if they were eligible for gifted $UNI tokens by going to a site hosted in Russia. That website had been registered the day of the hack, a Twitter user noted.
The message claiming to gift $UNI tokens has since been deleted, although subsequent tweets sent from the account as late as 4:43 p.m. in New York continued to appear to contain scam links.
Uniswap did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Block.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Polychain Capital raises $200 million for fourth fund: Fortune
https://www.theblock.co/post/240369/polychain-capital-raises-200-million-for-fourth-fund-fortune
Web3 investment firm Polychain Capital has raised $200 million in the “first close” of its fourth investment fund, Fortune reported.
The firm still plans to raise $400 million for the fund.
The firm also cut three of its research members due to new investing priorities, according to the report. Polychain declined comment to the publication.
The Block first reported news of the fourth fund in March.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
TeraWulf to increase bitcoin mining capacity with new Bitmain hardware
Bitcoin mining firm TeraWulf will increase its self-mining hashrate by 58% with the purchase of 18,500 Antminer S19j XP bitcoin mining machines from crypto mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain for $53.4 million.
The new machines will be deployed at the company’s Lake Mariner facility in New York, the company said in a statement.
“Our planned expansion with S19j XPs will further establish TeraWulf as one of the most efficient mining fleets in the sector with a fleet efficiency of 25.7 J/TH,” said Nazar Khan, co-founder and COO of TeraWulf. “Coupled with a realized average cost of power of 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour and average availability in excess of 98%, we are not only expanding hashing capacity with this order but simultaneously positioning TeraWulf for increased profit margins ahead of the next halving.”
TeraWulf paid a deposit for the new machines and will receive the miners in equal batches split between October, November and December.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
FalconX and CF Benchmarks partner to provide regulated access to crypto derivative markets
Digital assets prime brokerage FalconX is partnering with UK-based crypto index provider CF Benchmarks to provide access to regulated crypto derivative markets via swaps, options and non-deliverable forwards that settle to single asset reference rates.
“Derivatives benchmarked against resilient and regulated indices are the primary route institutions take to gain exposure to the crypto asset class,” CF Benchmarks CEO Sui Chung said in a statement.
The contracts provide exposure to bitcoin settled against the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate, and to ether settled against the CME CF Ether-Dollar Reference Rate, according to the statement.
“Regulated derivatives are critical instruments for institutional investors to safely access digital assets,” FalconX chief product officer Baris Cetinok said.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
DeFi mortgage startup PWN raises $2 million in funding
https://www.theblock.co/post/240115/defi-mortgage-startup-pwn-raises-2-million-in-funding
DeFi mortgage protocol PWN raised $2 million in funding, reaching a valuation of $42 million, the firm’s Chief Marketing Officer Tereza Starostová told The Block.
Backers included Digital Finance Group, IQTEC, Starkware, Nethermind, Safe Ecosystem Foundation, Dialectic, Next Web Capital, Patricio Worthalter, Christoph Jentzsch, Danny Ryan, Tim Beiko, Alex Van de Sande, Lefteris Karapetsas, Luis Cuende, Anthony Sassano and Eric Conner.
Dialectic, and angels Patricio Worthalter, Tim Beiko, Will Harborne, Kenneth Ng and Chris Waclawek previously funded PWN.
PWN plans to use the funds to build out its DAO to help give control of decentralized mortgage financing over to its community, as well as to deploy EVMs, collateral value assessment improvements, customized loan flow and other accessibility features, Starostová said.
Growing demand for loans
“With growing adoption of cryptocurrencies and the rise of the crypto-native movement, the demand for these loans will only increase,” PWN co-founder Josef Je said in a statement. “An infrastructure-building protocol like PWN represents an undeniable opportunity enabling DeFi mortgages at scale.”
PWN is a peer-to-peer platform that allows individuals to back loans using digital assets, such as cryptocurrency and NFTs, as collateral. Borrowers can use any ERC token as collateral without the risk liquidation before the loan expires.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
CoinFund to back early crypto startups with fresh $158 million: Bloomberg
Web3 investment firm CoinFund has raised $158 million to invest in early-stage crypto startups, Bloomberg reported.
The raise is 26% greater than the $125 million CoinFund had intended to amass after receiving more interest than originally expected for what will be its fourth seed fund, CoinFund CEO Jake Brukhman told Bloomberg.
The company intends to focus on startups at the intersection of crypto and AI, according to the report.
“Some of the more consumer stuff is a little bit in a lull, like if you look at the NFT space,” Brukhman told Bloomberg.
© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.