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Bitcoin mining stocks rose by double digits on Monday, as the coin soared past $20,000 and the crypto market in general rallied.

Except for momentary peaks, Bitcoin has generally been trading under $20,000 since late August. As of market close, it was priced at around $20,300.

BTCUSD Chart by TradingView

Argo Blockchain’s stock rose by 36.23% (on Nasdaq), followed by Core Scientific (+22.46%), CleanSpark (+18.49%) and Hut 8 (+17.17%).

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Tuesday, Oct. 25:

© 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.

Reddit may have demonstrated the best way to introduce the masses to the world of blockchain: Avoid complicating things with talk about cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens. 
 
The social media and discussion platform recently released a collection of “Collectible Avatars” users can either claim or purchase. Reddit also appeared to purposely avoid using blockchain terms like “crypto” and “NFT” in the main portion of its sales presentation of the digital collectibles. 
 
The net result is that since Reddit launched its NFT marketplace in July, users have created about 3 million crypto wallets, a company executive recently said. That’s several hundred thousand more than the 2.3 million active wallets held on OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace, which has been in operation for nearly five years. Subtracting the number of active OpenSea wallets —again, the most popular NFT marketplace— by the number of Reddit wallets suggests that Reddit’s strategy may have helped encourage as many as half a million or more people to buy an NFT for the first time.

Reddit’s seemingly simple approach to describing the digital avatars and how they can be claimed and traded has demonstrated a different, if not simplified, way for an established technology company to introduce users to web3 products like cryptocurrency and NFTs. Reddit NFTs have generated more than $6.7 million in total sales volume, according to crypto analytics platform Dune. 

The platform allows users to buy their Reddit avatars with regular fiat currency rather than cryptocurrency.

 
Reddit “seems to have paved the way for mainstream adoption,” according to The Block research analyst Thomas Bialek, who added that the social media network may have largely steered clear from using “NFT” in most descriptions of the avatars as a way of avoiding controversy. 
 
“’NFT’ is a dirty word right now, for better or worse,” said Sasha Fleyshman, an NFT fund manager at Arca, a digital assets investment firm.  
 
Falling cryptocurrency prices have caused a lot of heavily-promoted NFT collections to lose significant value in recent months. Many people who bought NFTs when prices were high have subsequently seen the value of their digital assets sink dramatically. 

“Reddit’s Collectible Avatars have proved to be an easy-to-understand and fun introduction to NFTs and cryptocurrency,” said Barney Chambers, cofounder of Umbria Network, a company helping people migrate fungible assets between cryptocurrency networks. Chambers agrees that Reddit’s strategy of staying away from “crypto jargon” appears to be paying dividends.  
 
Many of the platform’s users have been commenting in forums about how buying a Reddit avatar represented the first time they have ever purchased an NFT. It also appears having a unique digital avatar to use as your profile picture is attractive to many of Reddit’s roughly 50 million daily active users.  Twitter also allows users to use NFTs as their primary profile image.
 
“Whether they like to admit it or not everybody likes the idea of rarity, having something no one else has,” said Fleyshman.  
 
Reddit both made a limited-edition collection of avatars available to users and allowed people to purchase avatars, part of The Creator Collection, crafted by individual creators. Users can buy, trade and sell the avatars which are “are powered by non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Polygon blockchain.”
 
Besides potentially onboarding tons of people to web3 by getting them to sign up for their first crypto wallet –called “Vaults” on Reddit— the platform’s avatar strategy has also caused Polygon blockchain volumes to surge in recent days. 

 

Some gaming executives like Stardust co-founder and CEO Canaan Linder believe this direct approach of describing web3 applications with straightforward terms like “collectibles” or “games” will help facilitate a smoother transition into the next era of a blockchain-enabled internet, or web3.
 
“I think that decontextualization; that these are just games, these are just collectibles, these are just items you can take from one game to another, it is going to make this technology so much more accessible,” said Linder, whose company provides tools for building blockchain games.

“I think what we are starting to see is that how we frame and phrase and deliver that technology, how we speak of it, is just as important as the technology itself,” he also 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.

Decentralized exchange Pancakeswap has passed a governance proposal for deploying it on the newly launched blockchain, Aptos.

The pending launch will be Pancakeswap’s second on another blockchain, following its deployment on Ethereum. As part of the proposal, Pancakeswap’s token CAKE will be natively integrated into Aptos, along with four of its DEX primary features.

Pancakeswap is joining a trend of projects that expand to multiple blockchains using their native tokens, as new bridging platforms enable this kind of growth. Being able to use native tokens on other chains versus synthetic or “wrapped” versions lets DeFi apps operate on multiple chains.

The team will roll out swaps, farms, pools, and initial farm offerings by the end of November.

The Aptos and Pancakeswap teams will work on establishing Aptos projects and assisting with their growth on its platform, a representative from Aptos told The Block. Pancakeswap will also set up liquidity pools for Aptos’s native token, APT.

Aptos went live on Oct. 12 and currently has over $15 million deposited across all the applications in its ecosystem, according to DeFiLlama.

Pancakeswap originated on BNB Chain and is the second-largest decentralized exchange by trading volume, according to The Block’s Data 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.

Internal Twitter research shows that the social media platform is struggling to keep its most active users, Reuters first reported.

Those so-called heavy tweeters are responsible for 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue even though they represent less than 10% of monthly overall users. And they have been in “absolute decline” since the pandemic started, the company’s research revealed.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has bid $44 billion to buy Twitter, later took back the offer, arguing that the company didn’t provide sufficient information about its user base. Musk said this month that he still wanted to buy the social media platform, after backing out of the deal in July and being sued by Twitter.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted in May.

The research also showed that cryptocurrency and “not safe for work” (including nudity and pornography) are the highest-growing topics of interest among heavy users, while news, sports and entertainment topics have decreased. 

However, it also noted that crypto might not be a growing topic in the future and that interest has dwindled since June after hitting a peak in late 2021.

© 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 climbed above $20,000 for the first time since Oct. 6 as Coinbase shares climbed over 12%.

Ether also rose past $1,500, along with TradingView’s crypto total market cap index, which was up by more than 6% as of publication time.

Except for momentary peaks, Bitcoin has generally been trading under $20,000 since late August. Bitcoin was trading at $20,298 and ether at $1,495 at 3 pm ET.

BTCUSD Chart by TradingView

Traditional markets climbed during Tuesday’s trade, with the S&P 500 up 1.38%, Nasdaq up 1.99% and Dow Index up 0.88%.

Crypto stocks were also buoyed by today’s market performance. Coinbase shares were trading at around $74.30.

Coinbase Gobal by TradingView

© 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.

Decentralized finance company Thala Labs raised $6 million to build on buzzy new Layer 1 blockchain Aptos. 

The seed round is co-led by ParaFi Capital, White Star Capital and Shima Capital, according to a company announcement. Other investors include Beco Capital, LedgerPrime, Saison Capital and Infinity Ventures Crypto. 

What is Aptos?

Thala Labs is a new organization focused on deploying DeFi products on Aptos, a new blockchain co-founded by Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh, both of whom previously worked on Meta’s Diem project. 

The Aptos blockchain raised $350 million from investors this year including FTX, a16z and Multicoin Capital. It launched its mainnet only last week alongside public trading of its native token APT, which experienced a rocky first week of trading.

The chain uses Move, a programming language that builds on top of Rust — the language used on the Solana blockchain. Aptos is already luring some developers away from the Solana network. 

“At Thala, we are focused on building scalable, decentralized, and innovative DeFi primitives first for Aptos,” said Adam Cader, founder of Thala Labs, in a statement. “This fundraise validates our internal vision, the excitement around Aptos, and more broadly, the innovative Move programming language.” 

A decentralized stablecoin do over 

Thala Labs is currently building an over-collateralized decentralized stablecoin called Move Dollar that aims to solve the decentralized stablecoin trilemma: peg stability, security, and capital efficiency. 

TerraUSD, one of the most prominent attempts to create a decentralized algorithmic stablecoin, imploded in May when market volatility triggered a depegging event, ultimately wiping out around $40 billion in market value. 

“Thala’s unique vertical integration between its stablecoin subsystem and the AMM will streamline liquidity throughout Aptos’ ecosystem,” said Carl Hua, chief technology officer and investment partner at Shima Capital, in a statement. 

The 12-person team at Thala Labs will use the new funds to accelerate hiring and increase the number of security audits it has received. The startup has already completed an audit from Aptos Labs auditor Zellic. 

© 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.

European Commissioner Peter Kerstens called on the crypto industry to help come up with solutions on regulating decentralized finance, as the European Commission’s investigation in the matter gains momentum. 

“If you want us to come up with great solutions come and talk to us,” the senior adviser to the Commission’s financial department and co-head of the fintech task force said. Kerstens made his remarks on a panel in Brussels organized by a European crypto advocacy group. “If you have bad solutions, we already have plenty of those ourselves.”

The EU’s latest project for overseeing crypto assets is almost coming to a close, as the Markets in Crypto-Assets framework is expected to be adopted by early next year. The regulation focuses on regulating cryptocurrencies as well as centralized entities, such as exchanges and other service providers. The legislative text calls on the European Commission to come up with guidelines on how to regulate DeFi 18 months after MiCA rolls out. DeFi was mostly excluded from the MiCA drafting process.

“We need to think more imaginative about how DeFi can be captured in legal concepts, if it is necessary,“ Kerstens said. The regulator added that for DeFi to develop into its potential “the best thing to do from a policy view is to do nothing at all — maybe.” 

Kerstens said that even without third parties to go bankrupt or organize scams, there still are risks to DeFi. Mango Markets, which is built on decentralized platform Solana, suffered a $100 million loss from a hack, for example.

Defi represents a shift in paradigm from centralized finance in terms of account keeping, Kerstens said. “If you want to regulate that, you need a paradigm shift in regulation.”

The European Commission has bolstered resources to research ways to supervise DeFi. It released a bid to study an “embedded supervision” of the Ethereum platform earlier this month. After that, the Commission revealed a new academic report outlining a series of bespoke policy proposals.

A more hawkish approach may come from different crypto legislations in the pipeline. The EU’s Anti-Money Laundering regulation saw amendments from the European Parliament looking to implicate DeFi, DAOs and NFTs.

As Europe’s financial authorities iron out the details on implementation of MiCA provisions over the next 18 months, new conversations may arise on how to define decentralization, and when an entity falls into the category.

© 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 judge in the Southern District of New York has declined to strike the term “insider trading” and suppress evidence from an FBI raid in the fraud case against the former OpenSea product manager accused of illegally using his position to make a profit on the posting of non-fungible tokens to the platform.

Nathaniel Chastain filed to strike the term “insider trading” from the indictment against him and bar the Justice Department from further using the term in a Sept. 30 filing, claiming it was, “inflammatory, unduly prejudicial, and irrelevant to the crimes charged,” in his argument. 

Judge Jesse Furman also denied Chastain’s motion to suppress evidence that came from an FBI search of his home. The defendant argued that the search violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure and Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination due to the way the search was conducted. 

The DOJ’s case contends that Chastain turned a profit on NFTs he knew would be listed on OpenSea’s homepage due to his position at the firm, essentially profiting on insider information. While the alleged activity is similar to the securities violation of insider trading, the DOJ levied wire fraud charges against him due to uncertainty over whether an NFT constitutes a security, though prosecutors maintain he committed acts similar to insider trading. 

A third motion to subpoena OpenSea remains open. Chastain wants documents from his former employer that he says could show that executives were aware of the activity, and whether the information he allegedly used to turn a profit is considered “property” of OpenSea. 

Furman’s order said he would further explain the reasons for the denials at a Thursday conference. That conference will also set the schedule and length for a future trial.

© 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.

Amberdata, a company that provides blockchain and crypto data for institutions, has bought out crypto options analytics provider Genesis Volatility. 

The deal allows Amberdata to expand its focus on decentralized finance by offering support for DeFi options protocols such as Frikton, Ribbon and Lyra. It will also seek to enhance Genesis Volatility’s analytics interface with Amberdata’s on-chain, DeFi, and market data. 

While the company did not disclose the terms of the deal to The Block, according to a source familiar with the matter the crypto options analytics platform was acquired for mostly equity in Amberdata. 

Amberdata raised a $30 million round in May from investors such as Nexo, Coinbase and Nasdaq Ventures. 

The Genesis Volatility deal follows recent acquisitions in the crypto space, numbering sixty last quarter. Earlier week, Spanish crypto platform Bit2Me bought out software studio Dekalabs and earlier today, NFT platform Exclusible purchased U.S. metaverse studio Polycount. 

© 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 plans to honor his financial commitment to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter even as the prospective deal faces a potential challenge from Washington, Bloomberg reported.

When asked during a conference Tuesday in Saudi Arabia whether he would stand by it, Zhao responded: “I think so.”

Officials with the Biden administration are considering whether to subject the Twitter deal to national security reviews — along with some of Musk’s other ventures — as Bloomberg reported last week.

Officials are reportedly concerned with the number of foreign investors that pledged funds.

Binance agreed to contribute $500,000 to Musk’s $44 billion bid. The crypto exchange is among dozens of investors that also include Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, venture capital firm Sequoia and Fidelity.

Musk said this month that he still wanted to buy the social media platform, after backing out of the deal in July and being sued by Twitter.

© 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.