FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

After several tumultuous months out of ministerial office, Rishi Sunak’s coronation as the UK’s next prime minister could mean that plans to make the country friendlier to crypto could be back on the cards. 

Sunak won the backing of Conservative politicians to lead the party after his rivals dropped out. He will become the UK’s third prime minister this year, following Liz Truss’s resignation last week. 

The former Goldman Sachs analyst proved himself open to the possibilities of digital assets when he served as chancellor between February 2020 and July 2022. In April this year, he set out proposals to make the UK a crypto-friendly tech hub — along with plans for an official NFT collection which was dubbed a “poorly judged gimmick” by critics. He also followed the U.S. in making moves for stablecoins to be brought within regulation, paving their way for use in the UK as a recognized form of payment.

The moves came amid a protracted period of confusion around crypto regulation in the UK, as firms waited for verdicts from the financial regulator on anti-money laundering licensing. The process, conducted through the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), forced many companies to consider their place in the UK market, including crypto market maker B2C2, Blockchain.com and wallet firm Wirex, which have all chosen to seek licenses elsewhere. 

These policies followed meetings with top crypto executives and venture capital firms in the U.S. 

The Treasury minister’s meetings log, published on the UK government website, shows Sunak met with Sequoia managing partner Douglas Leone to “discuss the UK’s Venture Capital sector” earlier this year. Previous disclosures also showed that at the end of last year, Sunak visited California and met with representatives from Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as attending a roundtable with companies including Bitwise, Celo, Solana and Iqoniq. 

© 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.

QuickSwap, a decentralized exchange on Polygon, was exploited for $220,000, according to the exchange.

The exploit took place on the Market XYZ lending market, which was the only platform compromised, according to QuickSwap. The attack had initially been linked to Qi DAO — which issues the miMatic stablecoin — by PeckShield. The security and analytics firm later attributed the attack to an exploit on QuickSwap.

The DEX later confirmed that $220,000 had been exploited using flash loans, and QuickSwap lend is now set to close. An update had been promised in the early hours of Monday, but users were left waiting around 12 hours for any clarity on the issue.  

“We are encouraging users with funds deposited in Market xyz’s open markets on QuickSwap to withdraw them now, as we are in the process of closing them down,” QuickSwap wrote on Twitter.

“It is a price manipulation issue. The miMATIC market uses CurvePoolOracle for price feed, which is manipulated to borrow funds from the market,” PeckShield wrote on Twitter.

It appears the exploit used price manipulation to borrow funds at an inflated price, based on PeckShield’s analysis. The exploiter has since bridged the funds back to Ethereum, before depositing them on Tornado Cash — the mixing service that was subject to U.S. Treasury sanctions in August. 

No user funds were compromised according to QuickSwap, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment 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.

The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange will kick off a five-year strategy to develop a new platform for the trade of digital assets, the public stock exchange announced in a press statement.

“We see in the next five years a critical window of opportunity for the integration of the Israeli Stock Exchange in the technological revolution that the world’s capital markets are going through,” Itai Ben-Zeev, CEO of the exchange, said in the statement. Development of the strategy will start in 2023.

The program looks to bolster TASE’s value proposition by establishing a blockchain-based platform that integrates crypto, including “DLT technologies, tokenization of digital assets of various types and smart contracts.”

By implementing innovative technologies into its infrastructure, the exchange hopes to “strengthen the cooperation and the international profile of the stock exchange,” and notes that “these services and collaborations may include the purchase of holdings in foreign exchanges.”

The Israeli Ministry of Finance’s Office of the Accountant General and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange announced last week that they will cooperate to test out digital state bonds — in an ongoing effort to institutionalize crypto in Israel. 

Israel is not the only jurisdiction seeking to digitalize financial instruments. In the European Union, the so-called DLT Pilot Regime is set to roll out in March. The sandbox experiment will encourage both traditional and new-arriving financial players to practice transacting tokenized securities.

© 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.

Crypto custodian Fireblocks is expanding its digital asset payments engine to a wider number of payment service providers (PSPs), after a pilot with Checkout.com that has so far settled $1 billion in payments.

Fireblocks acquired crypto payments processor First Digital Assets Group earlier this year. Now it has set out to give PSPs operating on old rails — using traditional payment systems and 9-to-5 banking systems —  the tools to enable merchants, entrepreneurs and creators to accept, manage and settle digital payments across borders.

“Our ambition in Fireblocks payments and the payments engine is to get all those companies to continue doing what they do today. Just move their rails to faster, cheaper and more transparent payment rails, which means for us, obviously, blockchain,” said Ran Goldi, Fireblock’s vice president and head of payments. “I would say that over the next year we’ll probably go over $10 to $20 billion of merchant settlement.”

The payments engine is essentially the company’s first take on that long-term vision. It includes merchant settlement and soon the addition of cross-border transfers, creator payouts and crypto pay-ins (allowing merchants to accept crypto).

Fireblocks has partnered with FIS’s Worldpay, which earlier this year started offering merchants the option of USDC settlements. Additionally, it has an onboarding queue of about 50 companies for the payments engine.

The way it differentiates itself from other companies in the same space is by allowing PSPs to create whatever payment flows they want within a blockchain-agnostic infrastructure, as opposed to offering a one-size-fits-all product, Goldi said.

“We’re not saying ‘here’s a product, here’s a solution, you’ve got to use these banks or these currencies,'” he said.

That “optionality” is key to Checkout.com, which has introduced settlements in USDC but wants to be able to add other stablecoins or even other cryptocurrencies, said Jess Houlgrave, head of crypto strategy at Checkout.com.

“It’s been incredibly positively received, particularly by crypto merchants,” Houlgrave said of the pilot. “I expect that growth to continue to the point where a very large proportion of our crypto merchants will end up with this.”

Non-crypto-native merchants, on the other hand, see this as a “very different prospect,” but are still interested in how it can be beneficial to their business.

Goldi said that the roughly 175,000 exiting PSPs are mostly still operating on old rails, meaning that merchants have to wait a few days to receive a payment. PSPs using Fireblock’s payment service will be able to automatically convert fiat to stablecoins and send them to the merchant after the transaction is approved.

“Effectively those merchants are now enjoying their cash flow. They don’t have to wait for two, three days to get paid,” Goldi 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.

Web3 publishing platform Paragraph has raised $1.7 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Lemniscap. Other investors in the round include FTX Ventures, Binance Labs, GCR and Seed Club Ventures, according to a company release. 

Founded by Colin Armstrong in 2021, Paragraph is a publishing platform that helps web3 writers, DAOs and NFT communities monetize their content through an all-in-one newsletter service. 

Paragraph aims to challenge legacy publishing giants by offering web3 tools for content creation. Instead of paid subscriptions on a web2 newsletter platform, such as Substack, Paragraph enables content creators and community builders to manage their audience through memberships using either NFTs or ERC-20 tokens. These memberships create new opportunities for engagement — whether that’s gating content with NFTs or rewarding token holders to incentivize growth — according to the company. Creators can either leverage their own NFTs or ERC20 tokens or choose to mint directly on Paragraph for a 3% fee. 

“We actually feel that Substack is ripe for disruption,” said Shaishav Todi, a partner at Lemniscap, in an interview with The Block. “We think a more equitable monetization, ownership and distribution is required.” 

Every introduction Lemniscap made, the funds wanted to invest, Todi also claimed. “We actually made introductions to five or six funds on the first three days,” they said. “By the fourth day, everyone was wanting to invest, and he was oversubscribed.” 

Paragraph has already secured several strategic partnerships with Coinvise, Clubs.link, Unstoppable Domains and Farcaster, the company said in the release.

Seed & Pre-Series A Deal Categories from The Block Research

Leading crypto companies are increasingly becoming interested in media and publication tools. 

Alameda Ventures recently backed Trustless Media, a web3 media company that aims to leverage NFTs to build community-owned content. Meanwhile, Binance Labs’ parent company, Binance, agreed to make a $200 million investment in the news publication Forbes. 

Web3 deals made up 14% of the seed and pre-seed blockchain venture deals last quarter, according to The Block Research.

© 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.

Crypto exchange Bitstamp is expanding its white-label service, which enables institutions to fast-track their digital assets offerings to customers. 

Known as “Bitstamp-as-a-Service,” the white-label offering officially launched in 2021 and rolled out in the US earlier this year. The service enables institutions to develop a retail offering without needing to build out technology and compliance infrastructure or acquire specific licenses. 

One of Bitstamp’s first partners for this service was Revolut back in 2017. 

“In addition to Revolut, in 2020 and 2021 we added a fair number of European financial institutions, including banks, many of whom we were not really allowed to use their name because it’s a true white label offering,” said Bobby Zagotta, CEO of Bitstamp Americas and Bitstamp’s chief commercial officer. 

Bitstamp formally packaged the service when they started to receive a significant number of inbound requests from companies looking to roll out crypto services to clients. 

A new tiered system

Now Bitstamp has expanded its offering, providing clients with three tiers to choose from: exchange, exchange plus and exchange complete. 

The exchange tier offers clients the core building blocks of Bitstamp-as-a-Service while the exchange complete tier provides an end-to-end solution that includes know-your-customer and anti-money laundering operations as well as a global license network for servicing customers in multiple jurisdictions. 

“We’re able to plug into either a very scaled organization or an earlier stage organization in a fairly turnkey way,” Zagotta said. 

Positioning for urgency

Using the tier system is new partner IRA Financial, a provider of self-directed retirement plans, that oversees $3.2 billion in alternative assets. 

“Our clients did over $420 million in crypto trading last year and we expect that figure to accelerate with the Bitstamp-as-a-Service integration,” said Adam Bergman, founder of IRA Financial, in a company release. “It offers the enterprise security and infrastructure to support that growth.” 

In the past partners used to view integrating with crypto services as just upside and an opportunity to expand customer relationships, Zagotta said. 

“Now they see downside if they don’t offer these crypto services,” Zagotta said. “They’re going to start haemorrhaging clients, [they] are going to goto some all-in=one platform and do their banking or their payments or whatever else, somewhere else.” 

“There’s tremendous urgency and they want to move quickly,” he added. 

Playbook for market cycles

As other crypto exchanges publicly clamour for deals and acquisitions surrounding distressed assets, Bitstamp is taking a different tack focusing on product development. 

“We’ve been at this a long time, so we have a playbook for these market cycles,” Zagotta said. “And we’re running our playbook and basically, that playbook is manage our cost base with discipline, but then invest in the product basically. Continue to perfect the client experience and this is a moment where we can do that.” 

The exchange has recently been brought on to assist Mount Gox creditors in the rehabilitation of assets and has also integrated with Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal to provide alternate funding methods on the exchange. 

© 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.

Crypto bank Anchorage Digital is rolling out a new full-stack infrastructure service known as, “build with Anchorage,” to enable companies plug-and-play access to a range of crypto services. 

Anchorage was co-founded by Diogo Mónica and Nathan McCauley in 2017. It enables industry players and institutions access to integrated financial services and infrastructure solutions such as custody, staking and trading services.    

The startup sees the new service is the beginning of a deeper crypto service expansion for companies outside of the crypto industry.  

How does ‘build with Anchorage’ work?

The service is powered by a range of APIs that Anchorage partners can leverage to gain access to crypto payment gateways, crypto financial products and market participation tools. 

Clients will also be able to tap into Anchorage’s team of architects, integration engineers and deployment strategists to design and test their own bespoke crypto solutions and bring them to the market. 

The bank has been quietly building this out with several early partners, which include fintechs such as AngelList and Series Financial, crypto native firms like Moon Mortgage and Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) such as MAYA, Oath Digital, Plutus21 Capital, according to the release. 

“Supporting the purchase of real estate through Bitcoin collateralized mortgage lending is an important use case for digital assets,” said Aaron Nevin, founder and CEO Moon Mortgage, in the release. “Anchorage was the only crypto-native company with the regulatory framework and robust financing program to make this powerful new capability possible, and we are excited to partner with them.” 

‘Every business will be a crypto business’

“Today’s financial services institutions not only want to custody their own crypto balance sheets with us, they want to offer crypto products to their customers or use crypto in novel ways. ‘Build With Anchorage’ enables them to tap into the crypto economy,” said Mónica in the release. “They see what we see: Every business will be a crypto business.”  

Already this year, Anchorage has pushed into Asia with five new partnerships, it has teamed up with AngelList to enable investors to invest in funds with the USDC stablecoin, and it has secured a custodian role with buzzy new Layer 1 blockchain Aptos. 

It’s also navigated the bear market with zero capital losses and without spending a dime of its recently raised $350 million Series D funding, said Mónica in a recent interview with The Block. 

Despite the startup’s success in the bear market, Mónica said he had no intention of exploring the retail market instead choosing to focus on institutional clients. 

“It’s not our business or our DNA,” Mónica said. “I would rather have institutions that come and create new products and build on top of Anchorage and get benefit by proximity.” 

© 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 is “narrowing down” the individual or group behind the BSC Token Hub cross-chain bridge exploit that saw a loss of approximately $570 million earlier this month, the crypto exchange’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, told CNBC.

Binance’s search is being aided by law enforcement. “We’re still actually chasing … helping [authorities] to chase the bad players, working with law enforcement around the globe,” Zhao told the business news channel. “Working with law enforcement is one of the ways that we can try to make the space safe.”

Zhao also noted that, “in this particular instant, law enforcement gave us some tips of who they think it might be,” claiming “we’re actually narrowing down.”

The exploit itself occured on a cross-chain bridge, or a bridge that allows cryptocurrency users to transfer their crypto assets to different blockchains. During the event, Zhao asked validators to temporarily suspend BSC.

Coordination between validators and the updating of node operators ultimately contained the issue.

Binance is the leading cryptocurrency exchange by volume, by a large margin, for both spot and derivatives trading — according to data from The Block Research.

© 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.

FTX users affected by the recent 3Commas-related phishing attack will be compensated up to $6 million, Sam Bankman-Fried said. The exchange’s CEO said on Twitter that this was a “one-time thing” and would not become precedent.

Bankman-Fried’s thread noted the exchange has a huge number of controls in place to help prevent fake FTX sites — which weren’t the cause of this particular issue — from draining users’ accounts. 

The phishing attack used multiple fake websites claiming to be 3Commas, which then phished information by tricking users into connecting their exchange accounts to fraudulent web interfaces. Users’ API keys were then stored by the fake websites and later used to place unauthorized trades on DMG trading pairs on FTX. Third-party browser extensions or malware may also have been involved, 3Commas said in its report.

“In general we can’t compensate for users getting phished by fake versions of other companies in the space,” Bankman-Fried said. “It isn’t FTX and we have basically no control over it.” However, the CEO added that this one time the firm will compensate affected users — though only FTX accounts, he stressed. 

Referencing a standard where hackers or scammers keep 5% of the stolen funds, or $5 million, whichever amount is amount is smaller, Bankman-Fried concluded: “Anyway — maybe a time to try out the 5-5 standard on the 3Commas/phishing scammer! If they send back ~$5.7m (~95%) of the scam within 24 hours to 0xD15ff86129c3Da57756b33827DfFF6D252602284, we’ll absolve them.”

© 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.

Bit2Me, a Spanish cryptocurrency platform, has acquired software development studio Dekalabs. 

While Dekalabs will continue to remain autonomous after the acquisition, the purchase will allow Bit2Me to strengthen its services for private companies and public institutions, according to the release. Named Bit2me Consulting, it offers consulting, development and auditing services on topics such as tokenization, the metaverse, smart contracts, NFTs and DAOs. 

Previously, Dekalabs developed projects for companies such as Telefonica, Bayer and FC Barcelona. 

“We want Dekalabs to continue to operate autonomously, as it has been doing these past few years,” said Bit2me CEO Leif Ferreira. “With this acquisition, we want Dekalabs to take full advantage of the opportunities we see daily at Bit2Me. I think that together with Dekalabs, we can make many companies integrate into the cryptocurrency industry.”

The company did not disclose the terms of the deal in the release nor did it respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. 

Bit2Me is a Spanish cryptocurrency platform that offers trading, wallet, and staking services. It is recognized as a digital assets service provider by the Spanish central bank and has customers in more than 100 countries. 

In July, it was reported that the company signed memorandums of understanding for three acquisitions, including purchasing a 90% stake in a Latin American exchange and buyouts of a fintech company and a software developer. 

Previously, the company partnered with telecommunications giant Telefonica to enable cryptocurrency purchases on its Tu.com marketplace. 

© 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.