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Crypto exchange Blockchain.com has introduced a Visa debit card available to U.S. residents.

The card will let users pay with their crypto or fiat balance, giving them 1% back in crypto with every purchase. There are no sign-up or annual fees.

The waitlist for the card had 50,000 sign-ups at launch, the company said. It will be rolled out in more countries starting in 2023. 

“At Visa, we believe for crypto adoption to grow, it’s critical for it to be easily accepted everywhere,” said Cuy Sheffield, head of Crypto at Visa. “We’re excited to partner with leading crypto wallets and exchanges like Blockchain.com to unlock more ways consumers can use their crypto for everyday purchases.”

Other crypto companies have launched similar products, including FTX, Coinbase, and BlockFi.

© 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

• Blur is a new NFT marketplace and aggregator that launched for the public last week.
• Its attempt to solve the royalty dilemma through a unique incentive structure in combination with a streamlined trading experience has already enabled it to capture 43.4% of the aggregator-driven NFT trading volume.
• At the same time, its current strategy raises fundamental questions regarding the sustainability of its incentive scheme, which could be resolved through Blur’s upcoming governance mechanism.

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Oasis Labs, the privacy-focused cloud computing firm and Equifax announced a new partnership on Wednesday. 

Equifax’s identity, fraud, and compliance data — which powers its consumer credit reports software — will be used by Oasis Labs to power its decentralized identity management and KYC product. Today’s partnership will allow the Oasis Network to carry out KYC due diligence and monitoring.

Equifax has highly credible and reliable data as well as being an innovator in the financial service space, Professor Dawn Song, founder of Oasis Labs, said, before adding, “that will help drive more trust in using blockchain technology for real use cases.”

As the world of web3 continues to evolve, so does the need for identity management and KYC solutions to help reduce risk and instill confidence in on-chain transactions, Joy Wilder, U.S. information solutions CRO and senior VP of global partnerships at Equifax, said. 

While Equifax is one of the most well-known consumer credit reporting firms in the U.S., it has come under scrutiny in the past. In 2019 the firm was ordered to pay up to $600 million to settle federal and state investigations into a 2017 data breach of personal information that affected almost half the country’s population.

© 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.

Two Solana-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, Tulip and UXD, have recovered tokens from Mango Markets, a lending protocol that recently suffered a major exploit. This has enabled both projects to start reopening their services, giving confidence back to the Solana DeFi scene.

The projects were affected when Mango Markets suffered a price manipulation attack and lost $114 million in user deposits. Through negotiation efforts, the protocol managed to recover $67 million of the stolen funds.

The Mango Markets team opened claims on Oct. 20, allowing users, including other Solana projects, to recover funds they had lost during the attack. UXD Protocol and Tulip Protocol have recovered their respective funds and taken initial steps to reopen their individual services.

UXD to restart new stablecoin mint

UXD Protocol, which is a decentralized stablecoin protocol on Solana, notified users that it has recovered all assets lost during the Mango exploit. The stablecoin maintains value by allocating funds into third-party investment strategies, including supplying its USDC stablecoin holdings on lending platforms to earn yields. 

UXD had lost access to $19.9 million it had deposited on Mango Markets. Now that it’s claimed back its assets, the team said it will resume full operations, including minting of new UXD stablecoin, which it had paused in light of losses incurred due the Mango exploit. To restart full operations, the team said it would need to reset the “asset liability management module,” a feature that’s used to manage its diverse DeFi investments. 

“UXD Protocol was able to recover all funds that were exposed to Mango Markets. We now have enough capital in the insurance fund to pave the way for the asset liability management module, which will be released very soon,” UXD Protocol founder Kento Inami told The Block.

Tulip reopens user withdrawals

Tulip Protocol, a Solana-based yield aggregator, has claimed and recovered assets worth $2.5 million, which it had staked on Mango Markets on behalf of its users. Tulip functions by letting users deposit funds and allocates them to different protocols as part of “strategy vaults.” 

Tulip Protocol was affected on its USDC and RAY strategy vaults as it lost access to 2.4 million USDC tokens and 68,475 raydium tokens ($30,000) deposited into Mango Markets at the time of the attack. Now the team has restored vault balances to the same state as before the exploit.

© 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.

As the EU’s comprehensive Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation toes the legislative finish line, the EU is turning its gaze to other parts of the blockchain industry — specifically, nonfungible tokens. “NFTs deserve a custom regime,” MEP Eva Kaili, draftsperson on an upcoming report on how to regulate NFTs, said at a Brussels event.

“DeFi has remained out of scope — and NFTs, too. I think we are at the level where we can address that,” Kaili stated, adding that the European Parliament needs to “rethink a regulatory approach on activity-based regulation rather than an entity-based one.”

The European Parliament is in the process of setting up a report, headed by Kaili, which will nudge the Commission to start a legislative process for supervising NFTs. The Parliament has no power to propose new bills, but with a so-called ‘own-initiative’ report, the Parliament can indicate to the Commission that it should cover a certain topic. It could take six months before a concrete report is drafted, the policymaker says.

Kaili — who previously led the 2016 Blockchain Resolution in parliament and the more-recent DLT Pilot Regime, anticipated to kick off in 2023 — wants to make sure Europe is “a player in the global development of this technology.”

NFTs are relevant to an array of sectors, according to Kaili, listing their applications to gaming, art ownership, membership verification, helping remove fraud from the music industry, helping ensure artists’ rights, the purchase of real estate on the metaverse, storing medical records, protection of IP rights and addressing fake news.

“My expectations are very high,” EU Finance Commissioner Peter Kerstens said of the report in the Brussels event. “If there is a strong political indication or wish for an initiative, that may move the Commission into presenting it,” they noted, adding that “if we don’t act on it, we’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

The NFT report reacts to an article in the MiCA regulation, which calls for exploring a bespoke regime on NFTs. The Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy picked up this initiative.

The timeline for the report is not yet defined. However, there are some things that could slow the process down. The Parliament is still discussing the practicalities, such as how many other committees will file an opinion and contribute to the report. 

The NFT report may also face delay due to the 2024 elections in the European institutions. As early as mid-2023, proposals could be tabled ahead of the changing mandates, only to be picked up after the new roles commence by the end of 2024.

© 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.

Sushi DAO, the community that oversees the decentralized exchange project SushiSwap, has voted in favor of a new legal structure that will create three new entities to manage the DAO and the protocol.

Currently, SushiSwap’s administration is split between a DAO made up of community members with voting powers and a project team that maintains the protocol. Under this new arrangement, three new entities will be created: a Cayman Island-based DAO foundation, a Panamanian foundation, and a Panamanian corporation.

The Sushi DAO voted unanimously in favor of the plan. Participants with a total of 11 million voting tokens expressed their support for the new legal structure. Previous comments on the SushiSwap forum stated that the new structure was a way to compartmentalize risk across the three entities since they handle different aspects of the SushiSwap product stack.

What will the entities be responsible for?

SushiSwap’s new DAO foundation will oversee the governance duties usually carried out by a typical DAO. These include administering the treasury, facilitating governance proposals, and on-chain voting, as well as distributing grants to recipients. The DAO foundation may end up being run by Meiji DAO, a new governance architecture under consideration by the community.

The Panamanian entities will oversee the protocol itself. According to a previous governance proposal, the Panamanian foundation will look after SushiSwap’s smart contracts while the Panamanian corporation will maintain the protocol’s front end. The governance proposal also stated that the Panamanian foundation will act as the parent company of the Panamanian corporation.

Jared Grey, SushiSwap’s new Head Chef, told The Block that the project sought advice from Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West before crafting this new structure. The move comes at a time when DAOs have fallen under scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. In September, Ooki DAO became the first DAO to be the subject of a lawsuit from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

With the vote passing, the SushiSwap team now has four weeks to establish the three new entities. All three entities will also enter into service agreements with selected service providers. The Sushi DAO will hold a vote at a future date to select these service providers, the proposal stated.

© 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.

Prometheum will offer digital asset securities trading, clearing, settlement and custody as part of its new alternative trading system, the company said. 

“For too long, digital asset trading has been conducted on unregulated platforms instead of on a platform which works within the current SEC framework for digital asset securities,” Prometheum founder and co-CEO Aaron Kaplan said in a statement. “Prometheum sets itself apart by maintaining the ability to be sustainably compliant under current securities laws, ensuring the multi-layer protections and standards required on Wall Street.” 

Prometheum Ember ATS is a subsidiary of Prometheum Inc. Prometheum ATS is a broker-dealer registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and is a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. 

Digital asset securities supported on the new platform include Flow, Filecoin, The Graph, Compound and Celo. Prometheum will offer institutional customers who join during the launch a 50% reduction on transaction fees for six months. 

© 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.

Bitcoin and ether futures volumes are on track to clock annual lows for October as lower volatility dampens traders’ appetite. 

Bitcoin futures volumes are just $667 billion so far this month, according to The Block’s data dashboard. While the month isn’t over yet, these volumes are far cry from September’s $1.05 trillion — and are on track to come in lower than August, when volumes were eclipsed by ether. 

Ether futures surpassed bitcoin futures in August — registering $1.05 trillion versus $941 billion — as traders placed bets leading up to Ethereum’s switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. However, volumes have fallen since Ethereum’s upgrade, and crypto price action is now primarily dictated by macroeconomic factors.

Ether futures volumes are coming in much lower than bitcoin futures volumes, at just over $500 million so far this month. 

The drop in volumes is primarily linked to the lack of volatility in crypto markets, LedgerPrime’s Laura Vidiella told The Block. “Volatility levels this month are the lowest they’ve been all year, and capital is moving elsewhere, even away from crypto,” she added. 

Moody’s AAA corporate bond yield is showing about 5.41% currently, and these were yielding just 2.72% last year, while the long-term average is at 6.52%, Vidiella said — adding that, since capital is still denominated in the U.S. dollar, traders need to account for the inflation rate and look at the real returns across asset classes.

Source: QCP Capital

For traders that don’t care about U.S. dollar denomination and want to increase their portfolio size by measurement of coin quantity, crypto options have been a good play this year. Even a simple weekly call overwriting strategy could have yielded about 15% across almost any token, Vidiella concluded.

Furthermore, this is just the fourth time in 10 years that the Nasdaq 30-day realized volatility (RV) has fallen below bitcoin’s 30-day RV, BlockFi’s global head of trading, Joe Hickey, told The Block. In the three previous occasions, this has happened — 2015, 2018, and 2020 — low volatility was followed by dramatic moves upward and downward over the next 90 days.

Source: BlockFi

“Following September 2015, bitcoin traded 83% higher over the next 90 days into the first Fed hike of that decade; October 2018 was followed by bitcoin trading 47% lower into a Fed pivot; and in March 2020, we saw bitcoin trade 40% higher into quantitative easing over the next 90 days,” Hickey said.

Based on this, Hickey doesn’t expect low volatility or light volumes to hang around much longer.

© 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.

Compass Mining signed a hosting deal to house around 9,000 of its bitcoin mining machines with data center developer Aspen Creek Digital Corporation.

The company will get 27 megawatts of power capacity out of Aspen Creek’s 30-megawatts site, located behind the meter, drawing power from a solar farm in Texas.

Compass Mining hosts machines from individual clients in facilities across the US and Canada. The company said that it would start deploying machines, including S19 XPs and S19j Pros, to this site starting in the fourth quarter of 2022.

“ACDC’s pairing of cost effective, renewable energy with mining operational excellence is difficult to find in today’s current market,” said Compass co-founder and co-CEO Thomas Heller in a statement.

Just recently Compass saw one of its other hosting partners shut down two sites in Georgia (responsible for 15 megawatts of capacity) due to skyrocketing power costs.

In recent months, the company has tackled a lawsuit, layoffs and the resignation of its CEO and CFO. It also sued one of its other hosting providers, located in Maine, in an effort to recover its miners after claims of missed payments. A judge eventually granted Compass access to the machines, which the miner claimed had been held “hostage.”

Aspen Creek Digital Corporation’s first site was a 6-megawatt high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) in Colorado. It plans to open a third 150 megawatts site (another HPCC) to become operational in mid-2024.

© 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 bear market is taking its toll on some of the industry’s largest VCs.

A16z’s flagship crypto fund dropped 40% in value in the first half of this year, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing people familiar with the matter. This compares to the end of last year, when the company’s first crypto fund, launched in 2018, saw 10.6x paper returns on its investments. 

To date, the company has raised more than $7.6 billion in crypto and web3 startups across four funds, the most recent of which launched in May. At the time, general partner Arianna Simpson said that “bear markets are often when the best opportunities come about” — but the company’s recent investment track record doesn’t seem to back this up. 

In Q4 2021, a16z participated in 26 cryptocurrency and blockchain VC deals. This dropped to 17 apiece in Q1 and Q2 2022. By Q3, they invested in just seven, according to data published by Fortune. 

It’s not just a16z that’s feeling the bite of the bear market. Venture funding has decreased 35% to approximately $6.2 billion between Q2 and Q3 2022.

Update: Clarified that a16z has raised more than $7.6 billion, as opposed to having invested that amount.

© 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.