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MicroStrategy could sell up to $500 million in class A common stock and could buy more bitcoin.

A new prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says the firm has entered into an agreement with agents Cowen and Company and BTIG to sell up to $500 million in stock with a possible eye towards acquiring more bitcoin.

“We intend to use the net proceeds from this offering for general corporate purposes, including the acquisition of bitcoin, unless otherwise indicated in the applicable prospectus supplement,” the filing said. “We have not determined the amount of net proceeds to be used specifically for any particular purpose.”

MicroStrategy began adding swaths of bitcoin to its balance sheet under former CEO and bitcoin bull Michael Saylor. The billionaire stepped down from the company last month, but continues to chair the investment committee. Incoming CEO Phong Le said the firm still plans to hold bitcoin for the long term. The comments came as MicroStrategy revealed impairment charges of more than $900 million due to the wider crypto market fallout and plunging price of bitcoin.

“We have not set any specific target for the amount of bitcoin we seek to hold, and we will continue to monitor market conditions in determining whether to engage in additional financings to purchase additional bitcoin,” said the business strategy portion of the filing.

Bitcoin was trading up 10%, above $21,000, at the time of publication.

Separately, Saylor is facing a suit from the Washington, D.C. attorney general over alleged tax fraud. MicroStrategy is also named in the suit for allegedly aiding Saylor.

© 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.

Singapore-based digital asset company Amber Group recently reduced staff, citing bearish cryptocurrency market conditions.

As headcount adjustments occur on a quarterly basis, this year approximately 5-10% of jobs at the company have been cut, according to co-founder Tiantian Kullander, Bloomberg reported.

The layoffs come following the bull market of the last cycle, during which many companies experienced an explosion of growth, Kullander told Bloomberg.

Amid last year’s bull run, Amber Group increased staff from 200-300 to approximately 900 employees Kullander said. Earlier this year Amber Group saw a $3 billion valuation after a $200 million raise from Temasek Holdings PTE and others, and in May the company sought to obtain additional funding to bring that valuation to $10 billion, Bloomberg reported.

Now it appears that growth may have tapered off as intense market action stalls. The company said it is reducing headcount in some job functions but is hiring for roles it considers a higher priority.

Currently Amber Group lists 18 job openings on LinkedIn across the U.S., Singapore, Hong Kong, and UK.

© 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.

Quick Take

• The Ethereum network is just days away from the merge, where it will finally transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus after years of delay
• The upgrade includes major changes to Ethereum’s monetary policy that are expected to bring network issuance closer than ever before to becoming net deflationary
• In part one of this two part series, we will look at some of the key moments that brought the network to this critical moment, as well as the projected impact of the new issuance scheme 

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Bitcoin mining stocks went up on Friday, some by double digits, as the coin’s price jumped up from $19,400 the day before.

Bitcoin was priced at around $21,200 at market close, according to data from TradingView.

Argo Blockchain’s stock rose 14.16% (on the London Stock Exchange), followed by Hut 8 (12.82% on the Toronto Stock Exchange) and Riot (10.72%).

CleanSpark was up by 6.42% after announcing that it agreed to purchase a facility in Georgia from Mawson Infrastructure Group, while the Australia-based company fell 12.09%.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Friday, Sept. 9:

© 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 collapsed cryptocurrency LUNA, governance token of the Terra ecosystem, has more than tripled within the past 24 hours.  

The performance of Terra (LUNA) according to the crypto price tracker TradingView.

The spike sent the token’s market capitalization to a shade under $1 billion, jumping to $995 million from $321 million — a 209% increase, according to the cryptocurrency data tracker CoinGecko. 

The performance of Terra (LUNA) according to the crypto price tracker TradingView.

While there’s no direct explanation for Terra’s meteoric jump, The Block Researcher Keven Peng suggests that it could be tied to ATOM’s activity.  

ATOM, the main token for the ecosystem of blockchain Cosmos, saw a spike early Friday morning. Terra (LUNA) is built on top of Cosmos. So LUNA’s increase might be a secondary effect of Atom’s increase.  

The LUNA crash from over $65 to less than $1 in May of this year destabilized the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin ecosystem and spread to other crypto ecosystems such as NFTs, Terra founder Do Kwon is adamant that the Terra ecosystem can recover.

© 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.

Community Labs, an Arweave-native software development company and venture studio focused on data storage in the Arweave ecosystem, announced a $30 million strategic investment round on Thursday.

The investment round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Among the other investors were Arweave, Bain Capital Crypto and Blockchain Capital.

Arweave is one of the largest decentralized data storage providers in the industry , and it enables the permanent storage of on-chain data. In blockchains, immutability – the ability for a blockchains’ history to remain permanent and unalterable – is fundamental in ensuring trust, correctness and proper functioning of decentralized networks.

Community Labs was founded by 19-year-old Tate Berenbaum, who is now on leave from the University of Virginia to pursue this business venture.

Community Labs believes permanent data storage is “one of the least known yet most impactful advancements to society,” it wrote on Twitter.

The strategic investment will primarily be geared toward furthering this belief by building and funding teams working toward leveraging on-chain data storage in unique and novel ways.

Community Labs said it is currently working with one project called Execution Machine, which is creating a solution for trustless and serverless application development. What this means is that by using Execution Machine and Arweave, builders and users are able to create and use native web user experiences, while abstracting away crypto native tools such as wallets and transactions.

Although Arweave offers and is known for its data storage offerings, Berenbaum also believes there is unlocked potential using Arweave for financial use cases, such as chains like Ethereum and Solana.

© 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 former Microsoft executive will join JPMorgan as a senior payments executive in the bank’s payments group, CoinDesk reported.

Tahreem Kampton will focus on the future of payments, including the digital ecosystem and blockchain technology. JPMorgan did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The move comes months after JPMorgan announced a major investment in technology, including talent acquisition. The bank said in January that it planned to boost the $12 billion it spent on technology in 2021 by as much as 20% this year. 

Kampton worked at Microsoft for more than two decades serving as the company’s head of foreign exchange and commodities, and later as corporate treasurer and chief investment officer, among other roles.  

© 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.

Bloccelerate aims to raise $100 million for its new investment fund, the venture capital firm said in a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Seattle-based VC raised $20 million for the new fund as of Aug. 25, according to the filing. It’s the latest in a string of venture capital fundraising and spending for the digital asset space, undeterred by the slump in cryptocurrency prices over the past several months. Bloccelerate did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The firm focuses on blockchain products and services and has invested in Ethereum, BlockApps and Maker. It participates in Seed, Series A and Token investments.

Bloccelerate was founded in 2018 and announced the close of its first $12 million fund in Dec. 2020.

© 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.

Quick Take

• Venture capitalists invested $1.8 billion in crypto startups in August — the lowest total since April 2021.
• Twenty new VC funds launched in August, including from Insignia Ventures Partners, DBA Crypto and CoinFund.

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Quick Take

• In this bi-weekly series, we look into some of the most interesting data and developments across the Layer 2 blockchain landscape, from DeFi and bridges to network activity and funding
• The release of Nitro promises significantly lower fees, the result of certain technical improvements that also boosts the rollup’s performance
• Metis has recently started a builder incentive program, the Metis Marathon, which aims to onboard developers and, hopefully, more users along with it
• dYmension, a modularization framework for rollups deployed on Cosmos, has announced its development timeline and proposes how app-specific rollups could be a potential scaling solution for Cosmos

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members of The Block Research.
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