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The latest price moves in bitcoin (BTC) and crypto markets in context for July 10, 2023. First Mover is CoinDesk’s daily newsletter that contextualizes the latest actions in the crypto markets.

French startup Narval today announced a $4 million seed round led by BlockTower VC.

The company is building what it describes as a “usage platform for web3 wallets,” helping organizations to manage and make use of everything from crypto to NFTs.

“Our key feature is what we call our very granular policy engine that sits on any key storage or custody model and that enables organizations to decide at a very granular level who can do what with digital assets,” Narval’s co-founder and CEO Greg Jessner, a former equity derivatives trading director at BNP Paribas, told The Block.

He said that Narval’s tech could be thought of as, “A simple, functional granular governance layer.”

Existing backers Fabric Ventures and Frst Capital also participated in the raise, after Narval graduated from their shared incubation program, Le Crypto Fellowship. So too did new investors a16z (through its Crypto Startup School), Cherry Crypto, Motier Ventures, Bpifrance and angel investors Sandeep Nailwal of Polygon, The Sandbox’s Seb Borget and Arianee’s Fred Montagnon.

Narval’s team remains small at less than ten people. With the fresh funds, the startup will be hiring engineers and a designer while continuing work on the platform and boosting marketing efforts, Jessner said.

A governance layer for web3

In its announcement, Narval pitched its tech — which gives firms a way to control precisely who can access what digital assets — as a solution for some of the challenges faced by the crypto sector at present. As things stand, it said, “organizations can’t securely use their digital assets.”

The startup highlighted issues such as personal wallet use for organizational purposes and a confusing array of wallet types as prevalent in the industry.

Narval’s governance layer, which comes in the form of an API, aims to give treasury managers a more secure way of navigating DeFi and NFTs.

© 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.

Weekly inflows into digital asset investment products were strong for the third consecutive week, with $136 million entering the market.

Total inflows into institutional crypto investment products for the past three weeks have reached $470 million, fully offsetting the previous nine weeks of outflows, and resulting in a net positive inflow of $231 million for the year, according to CoinShares’ latest report.

The turnaround in fortunes coincides with the renewed race for a spot bitcoin ETF, kicked off by BlackRock’s filing on June 15.

However, trading volumes slowed to $1 billion for the last week, compared to an average of $2.5 billion in the previous two weeks, which may be due to seasonal effects, CoinShares said.

Bitcoin remains the preferred choice among investors, attracting 98% ($133 million) of inflows last week. Ethereum witnessed inflows of $2.9 million over the same period and remains in a negative net flows position for the year, with outflows of $63 million.

Altcoins including Solana, XRP, Polygon, Litecoin and Aave attracted inflows. Cosmos and Cardano saw minor outflows.

Meanwhile, blockchain equities gained the largest inflows in a year at $15 million.

© 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.

On-chain data provider Arkham Intelligence has announced the release of a marketplace that allows people to buy and sell on-chain cryptocurrency data.

Bitcoin has kept its head above the $30,000 line for the last three weeks, but U.S. inflation numbers and jobless claims weigh heavy on investor confidence.

The price of the world’s largest crypto currency declined 0.6% to $30,167 at 6:30 a.m. EDT, according to CoinGecko.

The release of minutes from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s June 13-14 meeting showed officials deemed it “appropriate or acceptable” to have a rate pause in June. However, the minutes revealed a consensus to hike again later this month.

“With headline inflation continuing to drift lower while core inflation remains sticky, don’t expect the narrative to change too much when it comes to this month’s Fed meeting,” Nexo co-founder Antoni Trenchev told The Block.

As macroeconomic conditions begin to tighten, “it’s going to take something more to push Bitcoin through the upper end of the recent trading range at $31,5000,” Trenchev added.

In light of more U.S. monetary tightening, Trenchev advises investors adjust their expectations accordingly. “It might well be that Bitcoin continues to hover around the current £30,000 levels, as it has for almost 3 weeks,” he added.

The degree to which the Fed applies its tightening policies after July is an unknown factor creating “uncertainty for crypto prices and risk assets,” Trenchev said.

Bitcoin tends to march in lockstep with major indices. On Monday, major equity futures tied to the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 fell and European stocks declined ahead of Wednesday’s release of U.S. inflation data. The CPI is expected to have risen to an annual rate of 3.1% in June.

U.S. jobless claims data come Thursday, with unemployment benefits expected to increase to around 249,000, from 248,000 for the previous week.

© 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.

Centralized crypto exchange Binance announced that Arkham (ARKM) will become its 32nd token sale project on its launchpad platform. 

The Arkham token sale, set to take place on Binance Launchpad, has a total hard cap of $2.5 million. Each user is capped at $15,000, equivalent to 300,000 ARKM tokens. The total token supply for Arkham is 1 billion ARKM, out of which Binance Launchpad has been allocated 50 million. This allocation accounts for 5% of the total supply.

Starting from July 11 at 00:00 UTC, Binance will begin a six-day monitoring period to record users’ BNB balances. The final BNB holdings for each user will be calculated as the average of their balances throughout these six days.

Following this, subscriptions will open for eligible users on July 17, lasting for 24 hours, during which its users can commit their BNB on the exchange. On July 18, the final token allocation will be determined, with the corresponding BNB balance being deducted from each user’s account and the equivalent number of Arkham tokens credited.

Arkham operates as a blockchain analytics platform, delivering data on the real-world entities and individuals engaged in on-chain crypto market activity.

Coinciding with the token sale news, Arkham also announced an on-chain intelligence exchange today — enabling users to buy and sell data on the owners of blockchain addresses anonymously. “Arkham’s Intel Exchange finally gives sleuths a way to monetize their skills, and meets the growing demand for on-chain intel in a scalable way,” the company said on Twitter.

The public sale token price will be set at 1 ARKM equal to $0.05. The price in BNB will be determined before the subscription period, Binance said.

Users from Belarus, Cuba, Crimea Region, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, New Zealand, North Korea, South Sudan, Syria, the United States of America and its territories are not eligible to participate in the sale, Binance 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.

The company, 117 Partners, will be a hybrid between advisory and investment, said Braziel.

China is exporting deflation across the Western world. Ultimately this will be good for risk assets as it relates to the end of the global interest-rate increase cycle, one observer said.

A survey conducted by the Bank for International Settlements found 93% of central banks worldwide were engaged in digital currency work in 2022.

Mantle Network has put forth a governance proposal aiming to set up a $200 million ecosystem fund. The intended use of this fund is to support the development of decentralized applications on its Ethereum Layer 2 network throughout the next three years. 

The proposal was jointly put together by the Mantle core team with one of its backers Mirana Ventures. Dubbed MIP-24, the proposal is seeking community approval to allocate $100 million from the Mantle’s $2 billion treasury towards this fund. 

In an attempt to reach the $200 million target, the proposal further seeks to raise an additional $100 million from “strategic venture partners,” it stated.

With current DAO votes at 99.92% in favor of the proposal, it appears likely to be approved. The voting on the proposal is scheduled to conclude on July 15. In 2022, BitDAO furthered the development of Mantle, a Layer 2 network, which now stands in competition with platforms like Optimism and Arbitrum that employ Optimistic rollups. These rollups consolidate transactions on an off-chain layer to boost the scalability of Ethereum applications. 

Just last month, BitDAO made a strategic decision to merge and rebrand as Mantle, with an aim to focus all its efforts on the Layer 2 network. The project maintains one of the largest community treasuries in crypto, holding over 2 billion, including 1.2 billion in Mantle tokens, $500 million in ether and $300 million in stablecoins, according to data from DeepDAO.

In 2021, BitDAO raised $230 million through a private token sale led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Dragonfly Capital, intended to fund cryptocurrency-related projects as a decentralized autonomous organization. 

© 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.