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Bitcoin miner Core Scientific will need extra liquidity to keep operations going past November 2023 — and it’s facing a steep uphill battle to do so.

“The ability to raise funds through financing and capital market transactions is subject to many risks and uncertainties and current market conditions have reduced the availability of these capital and liquidity sources,” the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. “Substantial doubt exists about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern through November 2023.”

The miner also posted revenue of $162.6 million in the third quarter, down 0.9% from the previous period. Net loss was $434.8 million, compared to $862 million in the second quarter, and a total of $1.7 billion in the first nine months of the year.

The company had already warned that it might run out of cash by the end of the year and that it would not make payments in late October.

Core’s woes reflect the struggles of the industry, which has faced rising power costs combined with decreased bitcoin prices and higher mining difficulty. Compute North has already filed for bankruptcy, while Argo said it was facing negative cash flow.

Core says it has taken steps to cut operating costs, eliminate and delay construction expenses, and reduce and delay capital expenditures, while it also attempts to increase hosting revenue. It has hired law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges and financial advisor PJT Partners to help find alternatives to improve liquidity.

“The Company and its advisers have begun to engage in discussions with certain of its creditors regarding these initiatives,” it said in the filing. “Among possible alternatives, the Company may explore liability management transactions, including exchanging its existing debt for equity or additional debt, which transactions may be dilutive to holders of the Company’s common stock.”

It may also pursue additional financing, asset sales or bankruptcy protection. Core is by far the largest company in the industry by computing power. It is both a hosting provider for third parties and a bitcoin miner itself.

Core recognized that it has opened itself to a host of lawsuits. A number of law firms are now pursuing class action lawsuits, including Johnson Fistel and Schall Law Firm, which both claim that Core made “misleading statements” to the market. It is also involved in a legal dispute with the mining arm of bankrupt Celsius over claims of missed payments.

The company said last month that it had about $1 billion in debt, with some of its biggest lenders including BlockFi, investment banking firm B. Riley, crypto financial services firm NYDIG and Anchor Labs. As of Oct. 31, it had 62 BTC and roughly $32.2 million.

© 2022 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 price of the Curve DAO token (CRV) rallied significantly today in what appears to be a squeeze on a publicized short bet.

Data from CoinGecko shows the CRV price fell sharply this morning from $0.53 to $0.40, a decline of about 25% to the token’s lowest level in two years. The sharp fall was followed immediately by a massive spike of more than 50% that saw CRV go as high as $0.61.

CRV is currently trading at $0.60 as of the time of publishing, posting a 17% price gain in the last 24 hours.

The volatile price action for CRV appears to be connected to a major short position on the token that saw a trader borrow a total of 92 million CRV from the DeFi lending platform Aave using $57 million in USDC as collateral. The trader had been selling the CRV tokens, as previously reported by The Block, which could have been responsible for the initial decline earlier in the day.

The price recovery now puts the short seller in danger of liquidation. Data from the trader’s profile on portfolio tracker DeBank shows the initial loan on Aave now has a health factor of 1.08. 

Debt positions go into liquidation when the health factor, which represents the value of borrowed tokens against the worth of the collateral deposited, dips below 1.

The short seller will face liquidation if CRV rises above $0.63, but the trader can prevent this from happening by posting more collateral on Aave.

© 2022 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.

A new lawsuit looks to represent FTX’s international users using California’s laws against false advertising. 

In a case filed in a district court in San Francisco, Canadian citizen Elliott Lam is suing FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, and the Golden State Warriors.

Lam v. Bankman-Fried takes aim at FTX’s massive advertising blitz, including sponsorship deals with stadiums and professional sports teams, particularly the Golden State Warriors. The case argues that the ad campaign presented FTX and, particularly, its yield-bearing accounts, or YBAs, as safe investments.

“Defendants’ claims that YBAs and FTX were viable and safe for investing in crypto are untrue due to the house of cards nature of FTX’s business and movement of funds, as evidenced by the immense collapse in fall 2022,” the complaint reads. The case leans particularly heavily on California’s False Advertising Law, which may explain why it takes aim at the Golden State Warriors rather than, say, the Miami Heat or the Washington Capitals.

The case is not the first of its kind. Last week, another class-action targeted celebrities who endorsed FTX, including Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Larry David and Steph Curry, the Warriors’ star point guard. 

© 2022 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.

Alexey Pertsev, the creator of the crypto mixer Tornado Cash, will be detained in a Dutch jail for another three months, Pertsev’s wife Ksenia Malik confirmed.

Dutch authorities arrested Pertsev in August after the U.S. sanctioned Tornado Cash’s alleged role in laundering money and use by North Korean hackers. Pertsev’s September appeal was rejected and he was forced to remain in jail until Nov. 22. Now, he must remain incarcerated until at least February. 

If Pertsev, a Russian national, were to be released, he may be sent to fight in the war against Ukraine, The Block reported Malik as saying. She had also previously confirmed that Tornado Cash’s developer is indeed Pertsev. 

Tornado Cash pools the funds of multiple users before redistributing, or mixing, them. The mixed crypto is often harder to trace, and so hackers looked to Tornado Cash to launder their stolen money. 

Last year, for instance, the crowdfunding platform DAO Maker was hacked, and someone laundered more than $500,000 worth of the stolen funds through Tornado Cash.

© 2022 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.

Asset managers Apollo Global Management and Hamilton Lane are launching investment vehicles on the blockchain using technology developed by fintech company Figure.

The investment firms will leverage Figure’s Digital Fund Services (DFS) platform, which will support on-chain fund subscriptions as well as ongoing fund operations and administration, Figure said in a statement. 

Investors will also benefit from DFS’s universal passporting feature, which enables an anonymized record of verified know-your-customer credentials to be stored on-chain and used across multiple funds, the company said.

Figure is a fintech platform that provides financial services through its own blockchain Provenance. It was founded by Mike Cagney, who previously founded the personal finance company Sofi.

The startup, last valued at $3.2 billion, announced a partnership with Apollo to collaborate on a series of blockchain-enabled initiatives in July 2021. The alternative asset manager, which oversees $523 billion in assets under management, recently partnered with crypto custodian Anchorage Digital, which will store a large majority of the digital assets the firm handles for its clients.

Christine Moy, a former top executive in JP Morgan’s crypto team, joined Apollo in April as a partner to head up the investment firm’s digital-asset strategy.

Tokenized funds

Hamilton Lane, which has $823.9 billion in assets under management, also recently tokenized three funds in partnership with Securitize.

Several other investment firms have also been exploring the use of blockchain technology to improve investment offerings. Private equity giant KKR has been looking at tokenizing funds on the Avalanche blockchain, while UK investment manager Abrdn joined the Hedera network’s governing council.

Clients on Figure’s DFS platform will benefit from its alternative trading system for secondary transactions of blockchain-based fund interests, which creates the opportunity for improved liquidity, the company said.

© 2022 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 developers of decentralized exchange Curve Finance have released code and official documents for Curve’s soon-to-be launched decentralized stablecoin called crvUSD.

While an official announcement from Curve is still pending, the repository published on the projects’ official GitHub account shows the project is all set to finish work on its crypto-backed stablecoin that’s soft-pegged to the US dollar.

Per the whitepaper, authored by Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov, crvUSD will have similar functionality to MakerDAO’s stablecoin called DAI. Matching DAI, it will be overcollateralized with crypto assets. 

The whitepaper states that users will be able to mint the stablecoin by depositing excess collateral in the form of a cryptocurrency loan in a reserve, a mechanism called a collateralized debt position (CDP).

The stablecoin will also rely on a novel algorithm dubbed Lending-Liquidating AMM (LLAMMA), which will work to continuously liquidate and sell the deposited collateral to better manage potential collateralization risks.

Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov first hinted the project was working on a stablecoin in July. The stablecoin will complement Curve DAO tokens (CRV), the native token of Curve, which are issued as rewards to liquidity providers on Curve Finance. CRV tokens can be locked to participate in governance and receive protocol revenue.

© 2022 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.

Argentina’s shock loss to Saudi Arabia today was heard around the world and even spilled over into crypto. 

The Argentina fan token offered through partnerships with Socios crashed 23% over the past day. The token was changing hands for around $7.20 before kick-off in Argentina’s first fixture of the FIFA World Cup.

However, following Lionel Messi and company’s surprising loss, the token plunged 30% to $4.96. The token was trading at $5.29 at 10:00 a.m. ET. 

ARGUSDT chart by TradingView

Argentina is only one of two international teams — along with Portugal — to offer fan tokens. Portugal’s token is down 0.7% today, with Cristiano Ronaldo’s team set to play Ghana on Thursday in their opening fixture. 

Last week, the Chiliz blockchain appeared to benefit from the impending FIFA World Cup. The native coin of Chiliz, the home of socios and sports fan tokens, rose last week ahead of the World Cup.

The token dropped 7% today. Chiliz peaked at 27 cents on Saturday, surrendering gains since. 

CHZUSD chart by TradingView

While Argentinians were licking their wounds, NFT investors were busy bidding on The Saudi’s NFT collection. The collection is not tied to the Saudi Arabian government. 

The floor price — the cost of the cheapest item in the collection — rose 2.8% over the past 24 hours. Meanwhile, according to Nansen analytics, the trading volumes soared over 2,100% in the same period.

The Saudi’s NFTs dashboard

© 2022 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.

Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao met with investors in Abu Dhabi last week in an effort to raise cash for a crypto industry recovery fund, Bloomberg News reported, citing sources.

Zhao met with potential backers including entities affiliated with United Arab Emirates National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed; details on the size of the fund and projects to support have not yet been decided, and it could be several weeks before the fund is established.

A Binance spokesperson told Bloomberg that the meetings were focused on global regulatory matters and how Middle Eastern regulators “could lead the globe by exploring more aggressive proof of custody requirements.”

Zhao said last week that Binance was forming the industry recovery fund “to help projects who are otherwise strong, but in a liquidity crisis.” He’s also called on other exchanges to adopt six principles, including avoiding excessive leverage, to ensure trust in the wake of the collapse of rival exchange FTX.

© 2022 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.

Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC) has partnered with ComTech Gold to enable blockchain-based trading of physical gold bars.

ComTech will deposit physical gold bars in DMCC-approved vaults, according to an announcement on Monday. DMCC is the largest free-trade zone in the United Arab Emirates. These gold bars deposits will also be registered on Tradeflow, an online platform created by the DMCC to track the provenance of physical commodities kept in its vaults in the UAE.

The actual tokenization will happen on the XDC blockchain network with the creation of ComTech Gold Tokens, or CGO. Each CGO will represent one gram of gold stored in a DMCC vault. Every gold bar deposit will carry a Tradeflow warrant for additional security and transparency.

Both partners say they are hoping to simplify the gold trading market. The aim is to use blockchain technology to create an investment-grade product for gold. With CGO tokens, the DMCC and ComTech say investors do not have to worry about storing and transporting physical gold bars. Tokenization also makes it easy for investors to trade fractional shares of a single gold bar, the announcement stated.

The UAE ranks fourth on the list of global gold consumption behind China, India, and the United States. Gold consumption in the UAE reached 12.5 tonnes in Q1 2022, a 50% increase from the previous year.

© 2022 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.

Magic Eden has added support for trading of non-fungible tokens on the Polygon network, a move that will boost its ability to work with gaming projects on the network. Rather than acting merely as a venue for NFT trading, the firm wants to expand and capitalize on the emerging blockchain gaming niche on Polygon.

Magic Eden is the largest NFT marketplace on Solana by trading volume. Earlier this year, the project went multi-chain, first releasing its marketplace on the Ethereum blockchain in August. 

Polygon is now the third blockchain that Magic Eden has integrated after Solana and Ethereum. Polygon, a proof-of-stake sidechain running parallel to Ethereum, allows for cheaper transactions for Ethereum-based applications. 

By leveraging Polygon, the Magic Eden team noted that it is able to support game developers that want to integrate NFTs. “Given Polygon’s popularity amongst game developers as a low cost EVM-compatible chain, integrating Polygon will continue to cement Magic Eden as the go-to web3 gaming platform,” Zhuoxun Yin, co-founder of Magic Eden said.

Magic Eden explained it wants to work with game publishers in the Polygon ecosystem via a new launchpad. In fact, several game publishers, including Bora, IntellaX, nWay, Block Games, Boomland, Planet Mojo, and Taunt Battleworld have agreed to release NFT-based gaming projects on Polygon via Magic Eden’s launchpad.

© 2022 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.