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Indian athlete Sachin Tendulkar, regarded as the “God of Cricket,” has invested in the NFT platform Rario.

Singapore-based Rario said Tendulkar is now a strategic investor and brand ambassador of the firm, in an announcement on Tuesday. As part of the deal, Rario will exclusively offer Tendulkar’s digital collectibles on its platform. The firm did not disclose the investment amount injected by Tendulkar.

Founded in 2021, Rario is a cricket-focused NFT platform, which sells digital collectibles of players and leagues. The firm claims to have partnered with more than 900 cricketers, including Aaron Finch, Faf Du Plessis, Virender Sehwag, Zaheer Khan and Smriti Mandhana, and sold over 150,000 NFTs to date.

Rario is backed by some high-profile investors, including Dream Capital, Animoca Brands and Kingsway Capital, having raised $120 million in a Series A earlier this year.

Rario co-founder and CEO Ankit Wadhwa described Tendulkar’s partnership and investment in the company as “surreal” in a statement. “It is a testament to our vision of making fandom more accessible,” he said. “A world where stars don’t just exist on a distant flickering screen or in a crowded stadium, and fans don’t get to be passive observers but active participants.”

Rario’s NFTs offer some utility, meaning they can be used in the cricket strategy game it has developed in partnership with Dream Sports, called D3 Club. Rario also plans to provide some real-life utilities of its NFTs, including access to exclusive club memberships, deals and discounts on tournament tickets and access to ask-me-anything sessions.

“Fans are an integral part of any sport,” Tendulkar said. “While the on-field action happens for a few hours, fans carry the memories forward and immortalize those moments forever. It is exciting to see NFT technology bringing fans closer to sports, giving them an opportunity to treasure their favorite moments.”

© 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.

Sudoswap is enabling NFT arbitrage between marketplaces since it provides immediate liquidity for NFT sales. 

While this isn’t strictly new, an NFT trader known by the pseudonym Lorem documented, on Oct. 20, their path to arbitraging NFTs, and how it has become a crowded trade. They also provided details of the challenges of fighting against sandwich attacks to carry out these types of trades. In total, this trader made 7 ETH ($9,000) in just over a month, showing the value in this new type of arbitrage — one that may grow over time as more financial tools crop up for NFTs.

“While I’ve been interested and searching for arbitrages for over a year now this was by far the most profitable strategy I’ve come up with, and quite frankly the strategy itself isn’t that complex,” said Lorem in a blog post.

Solving the NFT liquidity problem

Arbitrage is where a trader buys an asset on one marketplace and sells it on another at a higher price — taking advantage of a price discrepancy between the two marketplaces. Typically, this is done for highly liquid assets, like stocks or cryptocurrencies, where the trades can be done simultaneously.

The challenge with NFTs is that the markets are illiquid. NFTs can take days or weeks to sell (if ever). This means an arbitrageur might know they can buy the NFT cheaply on one marketplace and put it up for sale on another marketplace where sales are typically higher — but they don’t know if the token will actually sell. This makes it a risky trade.

Sudoswap changes this by providing immediate liquidity. It works more like an exchange, where there are pools of NFTs available to buy. The NFTs are priced on a bonding curve — similar to Uniswap — where the more NFTs are bought, the higher their prices go. What it means is that traders can instantly sell their NFTs at the price available.

“The overall strategy for this arbitrage is to find NFTs on other marketplaces that can be bought for less than what the sell price is listed as on Sudoswap, and immediately sell the NFT into a Sudoswap pool,” said Lorem.

Facing threats from sandwich attacks

Lorem found that while the strategy worked, he initially faced problems from sandwich attacks — where an MEV bot sees the profitable transaction when it’s broadcast to the network and uses clever techniques to steal the transaction for itself (to the profit of the person running the bot). This surprised Lorem because the amounts were initially quite low.

“I suspected that this may happen but I figured if the profit was low the miners wouldn’t bother, but I quickly learned that they are willing to take any profit if possible,” he said.

Sandwiching is the most common form of MEV trading. It comprises the majority of the MEV volume, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard. Typically, these types of attacks see around $300 million to $400 million in volume per day.

To solve this problem, Lorem used Flashbots, a costly but effective service that lets users get transactions put into blocks in a much more direct way. In one case, Lorem paid 0.3 ETH ($390) to use this service — money that ends up going to the validator that processes the transaction — in order to net a 2.7 ETH ($3,480) gain. 

After a month of doing this strategy, Lorem found the competition had grown to be much stronger. Other arbitrageurs had noticed the opportunity and were competing for the same traders. He said, “Eventually I decided that I was more than satisfied with the profit I’d made, so I called it quits.”

Yet, this may be the beginning of a more efficient and liquid NFT market — although that won’t necessarily stop NFT prices from continuing to slide. 

© 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.

N26, the German neobank valued at $9 billion, has launched cryptocurrency trading tools via a partnership with investment platform Bitpanda. 

Starting today, customers in Austria will be able to trade over 100 tokens, including dogecoin, SOL, AVAX and shiba inu, according to a statement on Thursday. These features will be rolled out to other markets in the coming months. 

These tools are enabled through APIs from Bitpanda’s white-label business that allows platforms to tap into its trading tools. It will be available to access via the trading section of the N26 app’s forthcoming “Finances” tab. 

“While cryptocurrencies have seen a decline in value over the last year, they remain a requested and interesting asset class for investors and a growing part of the financial system,” said N26 CEO Valentin Stalf in the announcement. “Cryptocurrency trading is often the entry point to investing for a new generation of investors who are looking to explore ways to grow their wealth.” 

The Block reported in July last year that the German neobank was working with a “top-tier crypto exchange” on a new trading feature. This was initially pegged for a late 2021 release. 

While N26 has over 8 million customers across Europe, many will have to wait to access the new features. Bitpanda is yet to obtain a license from Germany’s financial regulator, BaFin, meaning that the launch of N26 Crypto in its native country is currently not set in stone. 

“The BaFin license comes with a particularly high priority,” said a Bitpanda spokesperson. “We have been in the process of acquiring the most extensive license for some time now in order to create a serious and regulated environment for investments in digital assets in Germany.” 

Along with Austrian regulatory approval, Bitpanda is also registered with the French, Italian, Swedish and Spanish regulatory authorities — key markets for N26. 

Fintech foray’s into crypto

The move to offer these features represents a border push by fintech firms to offer crypto features, despite current market conditions. Earlier this month, banking platform Step launched a crypto investment platform aimed at its core demographic of minors and young adults. Other neobanks such as Stash and Revolut have also recently sought to expand their crypto offerings via a partnership with infrastructure provider Apex Crypto. 

© 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 founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried — commonly known in the crypto industry as “SBF” — cautioned policymakers from “locking in” decisions that could impact decentralized finance.

The DeFi commentary appears in a 3,800-word “industry norms manual” published on Wednesday afternoon.  

Bankman-Fried’s post came a day after a report by The Block that lawmakers were considering changes to bill authored by Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and John Boozman, R-Ark., and amidst sharp criticism of that bill, which Bankman-Fried supports, by DeFi advocates. The company also faces legal scrutiny from regulators over how effectively it is following financial laws, including an investigation by Texas regulators that could affect FTX’s proposed purchase of bankrupt crypto lender Voyager’s assets. 

“Above all else: figuring out how and where DeFi and things tangentially related to DeFi do and don’t fit into regulatory contexts is a hard problem, and one on which there is not yet firmly settled thought. We should be careful about locking in decisions absent working out a sound and responsible basis for doing so,” Bankman-Fried wrote.

The crypto billionaire said he hopes an industry group would “mull over” the issues mentioned in his draft and eventually “publish an appropriate set of community norms.”

In the post, Bankman-Fried also touts the potential for blockchains to improve traditional financial markets. 

“Tokenizing stocks could help simplify securities settlement, providing a stronger and more equitable market structure for retail,” he wrote. 

FTX will also not list tokens in the U.S. before applying the legal test as to whether a financial asset is a security as set by a Supreme Court decision, a standard operating procedure for most U.S.-based financial institutions. 

© 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.

Fidelity Digital Assets will start offering its institutional customers the ability to transact with ether on Oct. 28, a spokesperson confirmed to The Block.

“Investors will be able to buy, sell and transfer ether, accessing the same operational excellence, robust security, and dedicated client service model provided for bitcoin investments today,” the company told institutions in an email that later circulated on social media.

Fidelity Digital Assets is an independent subsidiary of financial services company Fidelity Investments, focusing exclusively on digital assets. The company launched in 2018 with bitcoin trading and custody offerings and received a trust charter from New York’s financial services regulator in 2019. 

“With the Ethereum Merge completed, many investors are looking at Ethereum through a new lens,” the screenshot posted to Twitter states.

Both Fidelity Digital Assets and its parent Fidelity Investments has revealed a slew of crypto-related announcements in recent weeks.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Fidelity Investments was looking to launch bitcoin trading capabilities for retail customers on Sept. 12. Fidelity Digital Assets, Charles Schwab and Citadel Securities then said they were launching a digital asset exchange called EDX Markets a day later. Fidelity Investments then disclosed that it would launch a new Ethereum Index Fund in a Sept. 26 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. 

Fidelity companies have also posted several roles for crypto jobs in recent months, with open positions including a crypto wallet product owner at Fidelity Digital Assets.

© 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.

Most bitcoin mining stocks tracked by The Block trended downward on Wednesday.

The coin was trading at around $19,200 by market close, according to data from TradingView.

BTCUSD Chart by TradingView

Northern Data’s stock fell 19.54%, followed by Core Scientific (-9.49%), Greenidge Generation Holdings (-8.04%) and Argo Blockchain (-6.02% on Nasdaq).

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Wednesday, Oct. 19:

© 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 companies are locked in a fierce race to bolster their coffers in anticipation of a “prolonged downturn” in financial markets, leading venture capitalists said.

Pantera Capital partner Lauren Stephanian has advised clients to raise more capital to build a “war chest” to ride out the bear market, she said during a CoinDesk conference panel on the state of VC crypto investing and adoption by traditional financial firms.

“Quality companies are still going to get funding, but at a more realistic valuation,” Christine Moy, head of digital assets at Apollo Global Management, said at the same panel.

Venture funding decreased roughly 35% in the third quarter from the previous one, to about $6.2 billion, according to The Block Research. Funding in dollar amount has now declined for two consecutive quarters as web3 asset prices have slumped.

Moy also predicted there will be “more discipline” around building products and finding out how to monetize them.

“With the excitement, and the FOMO and frothiness, everyone just has to get back to really hyper-focus on the basics to survive,” Moy said. The executive left JPMorgan Chase in February where she co-led the 2020 launch of the bank’s blockchain unit Onyx.

Moy noted it is a market with great promise to engage consumers. 

“Every NFT is like a pass to a social community or social club that you can participate in,” she said. “I’ve always thought of NFTs as the possibility of souped-up loyalty points.”

Two Sigma Ventures principal Andy Kangpan is another executive who raised red flags about turbulent markets ahead.

“Certainly runway is key,” Kangpan said. “We’re telling all of our companies that you should not assume that there’s going to be someone there to fund you. You should try to extend your runway as much as you possibly can.”

© 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.

Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Blur is airdropping “care packages” with BLUR tokens to its users in light of its launch.

Blur will send the tokens to “everyone who’s stuck around in the bear market” for the past six months, according to a Twitter post. In order to access the drop, users need to list a single NFT on Blur in the next 14 days. The tokens will then become available in January when it is officially released.

There will be a second “much bigger” airdrop in November for traders who list on the platform.

The company said that its airdrops are a way to incentivize traders to honor royalties.

“Today, royalties are not enforceable onchain and traders already have many zero royalty options,” Blur said in a post. “Even if royalties are not enforceable onchain, we can create an incentive structure that increases royalty revenue in the ecosystem.”

Blur is backed by crypto VC firm Paradigm and has raised $14 million to date. The real-time NFT marketplace and aggregator has been in a private beta phase for the past four months.

Updated for clarity regarding the token launch timing.

© 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 Department of Justice has hit an alleged criminal ring for violating sanctions through the use of shell companies and cryptocurrencies to launder Venezuelan oil sale profits and purchase equipment for the Russian military. 

The Justice Department arrested two participants and indicted five others, according to an Oct. 19 press release. “We are looking to arrest everyone named in the indictment,” a press representative told The Block.

Filed in the Eastern District of New York, the complaint outlines a trading scheme focused around Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., the government-owned oil company that the U.S. sanctioned during President Donald Trump’s tenure, as well as a commodity trading company based in Hamburg and operated by Russian nationals. 

The latter company, Nord-Deutsche Industrieanlagenbau GmbH, allegedly used its position to find parts for Russian military equipment, including Sukhoi and MiG-29 fighter planes. As for the Venezuelan oil company, they sought to monetize their product, which U.S. sanctions have cut off from much of the world market. 

Among a number of alleged violations, the Justice Department says that three of the indicted “consummated a transaction involving 500,000 barrels of Venezuelan oil from PDVSA through Tether (“USDT”), a cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar.”

Elsewhere, the authorities identify a transaction worth over $3 million going between the operators of the companies in the form of unidentified cryptocurrencies. 

One of those arrested, Yury Orekhin, allegedly wrote to a co-conspirator: “No worries, no stress. As soon as we start berthing, we will immediately transfer. USDT works quick like SMS.”

This is not the first time that Venezuela has looked to crypto as a means of profiting from its oil under U.S. sanctions. Its ill-fated cryptocurrency, El Petro, aimed to function as an international stablecoin pegged to the value of a barrel of oil before it too was sanctioned — the first time U.S. sanctions took aim at a digital asset. 

© 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.

An exploited Ethereum Alarm Clock contract has allowed exploiters to receive more ETH-denominated refunds than intended.

Ethereum Alarm Clock is a protocol that allows users to schedule future Ethereum transactions. The transaction scheduling logic it uses occurs in smart contracts.

Blockchain security and analytics company Peckshield reported the ongoing exploit earlier this morning.

Under the exploit, the attacker first calls a cancel() function on the Ethereum Alarm Clock contract with an abnormally high transaction fee. The exploit occurs in the following step, where the transaction fee refund is calculated too high, paying out a higher value than intended.

The end result gives the exploiter a much higher ETH refund because of the higher transaction fee that they set. Under normal circumstances, the user calling the contract would receive back only slightly more than what their transaction fee was, according to The Block Research’s Igor Igamberdiev.

This is a developing story.

© 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.