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Cosmos Asset Management plans to delist the Cosmos Purpose Bitcoin Access ETF (CBTC) and Cosmos Purpose Ethereum Access ETF (CPET) funds, according to a Nov. 2 letter posted to the securities and derivatives exchange Cboe Australia. In a separate letter, One Managed Investment Funds Limited also informed the Cboe that it will request to revoke the quotation for the Cosmos Global Digital Miners Access ETF.

The three Cosmos funds soon to be delisted each have net asset values under A$1 million. 

Cosmos had filed a letter with the Cboe on Oct. 31 requesting that trading related to the CBTC and CPET ETFs be halted. One Managed Investment Funds Limited also requested a trading halt on the Cosmos Global Digital Miners Access ETF (DIGA) in a separate letter.

Spot crypto ETFs are relatively new in Australia, where the first of these products launched in May just around the time crypto asset prices started sliding.. The Cosmos Purpose Bitcoin Access ETF was one of the first to launch on Cboe Australia, along with bitcoin and ethereum ETFs from Zurich-based 21Shares. Cosmos’ Purpose Ethereum Access ETF launched in June.

The DIGA ETF first launched in Oct. 2021 when Cboe Australia was known as Chi-X.

Cosmos’ intent to delist the funds was first reported by Bloomberg.

© 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.

Tharsis, the developers of Evmos blockchain, raised $27 million at an undisclosed valuation in a token sale round led by Polychain Capital. 

Companies like Galaxy, Huobi and HashKey also participated. 

The team hopes to deploy the newly raised capital toward accelerating the development of decentralized applications in the Evmos network ecosystem, Tharsis co-founder Federico Kunze Küllmer said in a statement. 

“As we look ahead, we’re excited to be empowering dApp builders with the best place to launch their products by enabling native interoperability, aligning developer incentives with the use of their dApps,” Küllmer said.

Launched in April, Evmos aims to position itself as a leading Cosmos-based blockchain that offers compatibility with Ethereum via Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), a computing environment used by Ethereum developers. Tharsis hopes EVM will make Evmos more appealing to Ethereum developers.

Over the last few years, EVM has become the most widely adopted computing standard for developing smart contracts. 

© 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

• Gemini was founded by the Winklevoss twins in 2015 – the company grew from a New York-based Bitcoin exchange to a global crypto-asset services provider
• Gemini was founded on the ethos of asking for permission, not forgiveness, and has been actively working with regulators around the world to obtain proper licensing and comply with evolving regulations (expansion efforts in EU and APAC regions)
• Due to Gemini’s focus on compliance, Gemini exchange and custody had a short select list of supported crypto-assets – the company started to accelerate its asset listing process in early 2021, but the current offerings are still quite limited compared to its competitors like Binance
• Product security has been a key appeal for Gemini products, but this was called into question when IRA Financial Trust sued Gemini for its alleged role in the breach of customer retirement accounts (theft of $36 million of crypto-assets in February 2022)

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Developers of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network have issued a fix for a critical bug that led to downtime for some nodes.

The fix came after a user, identified as Bitmatrix founder Burak Keceli, made a large 998-of-999 multi-signature Taproot transaction — one that required 998 private key signatures to send the bitcoin. This was an abnormally large number of signers, and Lightning nodes failed to support the multisig transaction of that size.

Lightning Labs said the transaction triggered a series of events that completely disrupted the ability for nodes on the network to sync with each other, though it did not result in a loss of funds. As soon as the transaction was made, the network’s nodes rejected the specific block that included it, as well as subsequent blocks that came after it.

Keceli made the same kind of transaction last month, causing similar issues for the network — although due to a slightly different bug.

Keceli knew in advance their transaction would disrupt the network. Rather than disclosing the security bug in a responsible disclosure practice called CVE, short for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, Keceli proceeded to make the transaction anyway. He defended his actions, claiming the act was for the “ultimate good.”

“As a Bitcoin wizard, I summoned chaos theory in the name of darkness for the latter good,” said Keceli in a tweet. “Responsible CVE is weaker magic,” he added.

The Lightning Network is a Layer 2 network designed to get around Bitcoin’s slow transaction speeds and high fees. Users can port bitcoin to Lightning and transact with each other via payment channels at a significantly cheaper price than on the main network. Currently, there is 5,000 bitcoin ($100 million) locked in payment channels, per data from The Block.

© 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.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler touted his agency’s enforcement actions against cryptocurrency firms during a speech in New York City, doubling down on legal moves that have roiled the industry.

In prepared remarks, Gensler told an audience of lawyers that a famous Aristotelian principle guided the SEC’s enforcement actions: “Treat like cases alike.” 

“If you fail to register a security as required, or to register appropriately as an investment company, you violate the securities laws, regardless of the ‘form’ or ‘name’ of the securities involved,” Gensler said. He pointed to cases against BlockFi, Coinbase and other crypto companies to make his point.

“When BlockFi failed to register the offers and sales of a crypto lending product, and made materially false and misleading statements about those securities, we charged them,” he added.

The SEC is made up of “public servants, cops on the beat, uniting public zeal with unusual capacity,” Gensler said at a securities regulation event hosted by the Practising Law Institute. 

Gensler also highlighted cases against Allianz Global Investors, Archegos Capital Management and Infinity Q Capital Management. The SEC accused the companies, and some executives, of operating fraudulent schemes.

“Fraud is fraud, regardless of the types of investors you have defrauded and the types of securities used in the fraud,” Gensler said. 

During his remarks, which extended beyond crypto issues, Gensler urged companies that have violated the commission’s rules to comply with its investigations. Overall, the SEC filed more than 700 actions during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, Gensler said. The agency obtained $6.4 billion in judgments and orders, including $4 billion in civil penalties.

“If you mess up, and people do mess up sometimes, come in and talk to us, cooperate with our investigation, and remediate your misconduct,” Gensler said. 

When it comes to clearer rules for digital assets, Gensler said his agency is working to get intermediaries “up and registered.” The SEC boss said crypto exchanges, broker-dealers and lenders are likely listing tokens that could be considered securities.

“They tend to have dozens if not hundreds to thousands of tokens on them and it is statistically improbable that they don’t have securities,” Gensler said. “It’s so important to get those intermediaries within the investor protection perimeter. We’re talking to significant intermediaries both in what I might call the crypto and incumbents, as well as traditional financial firms.”

© 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.

Goblin Sax, a decentralized autonomous organization for NFT finance, is launching an instant loans service. It acquired instant loans app Fluid, which it will rebrand as Goblin Lend, to build out the product alongside its already existing peer-to-peer NFT lending service.

Formerly known as Gringotts DAO, Goblin Sax is one of several NFT loan platforms that have popped up over the last year that targets NFT holders looking to unlock liquidity without selling their nonfungible tokens. 

Among them, South African company NFTfi raised a $5 million seed round late last year. In November, it issued a loan for $1.4 million over 30 days at 9.69% APR. The collateral was a rare NFT from the generative art collation Autoglyphs.

Goblin Sax was originally a lender on NFTfi but has been looking for ways to evolve. 

“The instant loans app will enable users to click a few buttons and take a loan instantly”, the DAO’s head of integrations, who goes by “Arentweall,” told The Block. They explained that “the base layer is using NFTfi, but I think the user experience is very different from the one on NFTfi, where you first put out your NFT and then wait for someone to offer you a loan.”

Source: @ahkek via Dune Analytics

As floor prices decline, NFT lending platforms have encountered liquidity issues of their own. BendDAO, another NFT finance DAO, had a liquidity crisis in August due to underestimating how illiquid NFTs could be in a bear market when setting its initial parameters. After interest rates on borrowed loans increased, users let go of their NFTs instead of paying back the loans.

Goblin Sax said that NFT projects are looking for more revenue and engagement, while NFT holders want liquidity and floor prices. “We believe Goblin Lend can help create a win-win solution and we want to empower these communities to their next stage of growth,” it said in a press release.

© 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.

Switzerland’s financial regulator will include crypto in its anti-money laundering regulations.

From next year, Swiss citizens will need to confirm their identity when conducting crypto transfers of over 1000 Swiss francs ($1005), the Financial Market Supervisory Authority said in a release. 

Finma reportedly received “numerous responses concerning the specification of the threshold for transactions with virtual currencies.” Despite the concerns raised in the consultation, the monetary regulator went forward with the previously established threshold of 1000 Swiss francs due to “risks and recent instances of abuse.”

The provisions, which will apply to linked transactions over the course of a month, will come into force starting January 2023.

© 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 Zhao says he’d be willing to join Twitter’s board of directors if invited by the social media platform’s new owner Elon Musk. 

 

“Elon’s still deciding about the board, if he asks me to do it I probably will,” Zhao said while speaking at technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal.  

 

Binance recently poured $500 million into Elon Musk’s takeover bid for social media platform Twitter, which closed last week. Despite a rocky acquisition process, Binance’s top boss stuck to his plans to lend financial support to Musk’s $44 billion bid. The crypto exchange was among dozens of outside investors which also included Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, venture capital firm Sequoia and Fidelity. 

 

On the heels of the deal closing, Zhao said Binance plans “to play a role in bringing social media and web3 together in order to broaden the use and adoption of crypto and blockchain technology.” A Binance spokesperson echoed the CEO’s sentiments, saying that the company would create a team to aid Twitter’s use of blockchain technology.  

 

When asked in Lisbon about incorporating crypto into Twitter’s platform, Zhao mentioned allowing for payments, saying that integration would be easy.  

 

But Zhao stressed that Binance is a minority investor in Twitter and he realizes Musk is busy and he will wait for a more detailed plan on how the social media platform can more fully leverage blockchain and crypto. For now the Binance CEO expects Musk has other concerns.  

 

“Musk has a lot of people to fire, lots of things to change,” he said. 

 

And joining the Twitter board isn’t top of mind, said Zhao. “I’d probably do it as a favor. Not something I’m dying to do.” 


Twitter has dabbled with blockchain, albeit not on a significant level. Besides allowing some Twitter users to utilize non-fungible tokens as their profile photo on the platform, the social media company recently announced it was expanding a pilot program called NFT Tweet Tiles to a test group who can experiment with posting non-fungible tokens listed on a handful of exchanges including Magic Eden, Rarible, Dapper Labs and Jump.trade. Users will be able to click on the tweeted NFTs and then purchase them from the corresponding exchange. 

 

Twitter reported earlier this year it had roughly 230 million daily active users. Any moves to incorporate crypto and blockchain across the platform could lead to wider adoption among people who have yet to engage with the, at times, polarizing technology. 

In the last two years one of the topics most popular among Twitter’s English-speaking users has become cryptocurrency. Many well-known crypto and non-fungible token enthusiasts often use the platform to both discuss market moves and promote new digital assets. At one point Musk expressed interest in putting Twitter on the blockchain, according to text messages made public, but then appeared to change his mind. 

© 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.

Web3 development platform Tenderly unveiled its Web3 Gateway, a service it expects will allow software engineers to build tools to forecast transaction results in blockchain applications before users commit to them, potentially saving them from losing assets, the company said.

Web3 Gateway is designed to reduce obstacles for developers integrating blockchain systems into their technology stacks and application layers, Tenderly CEO and co-founder Andrej Bencic and Vice President of Marketing Stela Udovicic said in an interview with The Block.

The Tenderly Web3 Gateway aims to be a versatile tool, built to enable developers to build better user interfaces while reducing the technical know-how related to blockchain engineering and offering a wide array of debugging, documentation, observation, and reporting tools, Bencic said.

“What’s most interesting about it is it provides the transaction transparency and predictability to the end users, who, in some cases might not be as experienced with the space as some of us veterans are,” said Bencic, adding that it allows users “to preview transactions and actually see the differences and the effects of transactions before committing to them.”

The ability to potentially see the ramifications of a transaction before it goes through could prevent users from losing assets to scammers.

Tenderly’s Ethereum engineering platform offers a complete view of software development, according to Bencic. “We cover anything from the development to observability, and finally, providing the infrastructure for that.”

“We are running 50 million simulations per month currently and we have customers who are building that as a backbone of their development,” said Udovicic.

One of those customers is the decentralized finance platform Instadapp, which embedded Tenderly’s tools in production and internal testing environments to reduce time spent on bug fixes by a factor of 10, according to a case study obtained by The Block.

Aside Instadapp, a number of other major crypto platforms use Tenderly, including Binance, Aave, Kyber Network, Yearn, 1inch, Lido, Chainlink, Optimism, Uniswap and Maker, among others.

“When there’s hype and when there’s sort of positivity and optimism about the space in general, that’s when we are seeing most developers come on board as well,” said Bencic. “We, as a space, want to replicate as often as we can,” he added.

“Bringing in the new wave of that web3 convergence is something that is very, very high on our priority list.”

© 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.

Troubled South Asian crypto exchange Zipmex is close to signing a $100 million rescue package with an existing investor — although final hurdles remain before the deal can be completed. 

V Ventures, a venture capital firm founded by Chalermchai Mahagitsiri, son of Thai billionaire and coffee king Prayudh Mahagitsiri, is on the cusp of allocating additional funds in return for a 90% stake in Zipmex, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter and documents seen by The Block. There are conditions attached that could still break the deal, the person said.

Zipmex halted client withdrawals in July due to its exposure to Babel Finance and Celsius, two beleaguered crypto lenders that froze customer funds in June. Zipmex has estimated its total exposure to Babel and Celsius at $53 million. The Block reported in August that Chalermchai Mahagitsiri was among two investors with whom Zipmex was in talks for a bailout.

V Ventures expects to close the deal on Friday if the final conditions can be agreed, the person said. One requirement is that Zipmex’s key executives all agree to three-year employment contracts, which bar them from leaving the company. Another condition is that co-founders Marcus Lim and Akalarp Yimwilai and chief marketing officer Proud Limpongpan sign personal guarantees to make good any losses V Ventures may suffer, the person said.

However, Limpongpan has made it clear that she won’t sign the guarantee, according to correspondence between the executive and V Ventures executives seen by The Block.

Limpongpan declined to comment to The Block, saying “I cannot comment as I am no longer a full time employee of Zipmex and operating as a consultant since the beginning of August.”

Zipmex CEO Lim told The Block in a statement: “Thank you for your interest in our efforts to make our customers whole. As talks reach a critical and sensitive stage with our potential investor, I am unable to comment as all parties are under NDA and we do not want to jeopardize the deal. Will update you as soon as possible.”

Yimwilai and V Ventures did not immediately respond to The Block’s requests for comment. 

The personal guarantees are a last-minute addition from V Ventures, the person with knowledge of the matter said. If unsigned by all executives, the deal could fall through.

Zipmex has until Dec. 2 to sort out its financial problems, having received a three-month moratorium extension from the Singapore High Court in August.

© 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.