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Ethereum-based Layer 2 protocols Arbitrum and Optimism have seen a steady increase in transactions since the beginning of the year.

Both protocols set new all-time highs on transaction counts in September.

One key distinction between the two is that Arbitrum does not have a governance token. Optimism formally announced the launch of its token at the end of April and released it the following month.

Optimism’s transaction count began rising leading up to the governance token announcement. The protocol then saw a surge when the token formally went live across exchanges on May 31. This led to interest and speculation for a potential Arbitrum token launch.

Since then, both platforms have seen a steady rise in transactions and have continued an upward trajectory.

Arbitrum currently has the highest Total Value Locked (TVL) across all Layer 2 networks, with roughly 50% market share. Optimism has a market share of approximately 30%, according to L2Beat.

By contrast, the next closest Layer 2 by market share is Metis, which has a 2.71% market share. Metis announced a 26-week-long incentive program on July 26, leading to a roughly 60% increase in its TVL. However, it has since tapered off to just above the level it was at prior to the announcement. 

Layer 2 networks inherit security from Ethereum and are intended to reduce the cost of transactions. Arbitrum and Optimism are Optimistic Rollups, which have gained the most traction to date. 

© 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 chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission pushed back against those who consider it a less robust regulator than the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Those who describe us as light touch just don’t know the CFTC,” Chair Behnam said Friday at the Financial Markets Quality Conference hosted by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Behnam responded to a question describing the perception of a regulatory “light touch,” which came in the context of the CFTC chair’s push to expand his agency’s authority over crypto spot markets and other intermediaries. 

Despite not currently holding direct authority over digital asset cash markets, the CFTC has brought over 60 enforcement cases against cryptocurrency-related projects, which Behnam cited as the reason he wants more direct authority.

“Every single one of those enforcement actions has been driven by customer complaints or whistleblowers or tips that we have received,” said Behnam. “None of it is driven by surveillance tools or market oversight tools that we retain in traditionally regulated markets.” 

Passage of legislation, introduced by Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and supported by the committee’s top Republican, Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., would allow for more direct market oversight, Behnam said. 

“So what I’ve called for is cash market authority in the digital asset, commodity space, and that would provide us legislative authority over cash markets. These would be the trading platforms, the intermediaries or the broker-dealer,” said the CFTC chair. “The custodians, potentially the data repositories, and those core infrastructure and components of markets.” 

The other major regulator in question is the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose leader Gary Gensler suggested support for expanding the CFTC’s authority into spot markets earlier at the same conference.

Gensler was also among the regulators who voted to recommend legislation to grant U.S. officials more authority over digital commodity markets in a report issued by the Financial Stability Oversight Council last week. 

Behnam acknowledged the CFTC would need more resources to accomplish the hypothetical expanded mission. The Stabenow-Boozman bill includes a user fee mechanism that would bring in more money to the CFTC, which often sees less funding from Congress than it requests. According to Behnam, that would pay for an expansion into the market oversight tools that the agency could use. 

“We need to modernize our data infrastructure,” including AI and machine learning for markets surveillance and enforcement, said Benham. 

© 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.

Components of a sweeping crypto regulation bill authored by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis could land on President Joe Biden’s desk for a signature in the next six months, the senators said on Friday.

“I think six months from now we actually will see at least part of it on the president’s desk,” Lummis said. 

Lummis and Gillibrand released their highly anticipated digital assets legislation in June. The bill is bipartisan — Lummis is a Republican from Wyoming and Gillibrand is a New York Democrat. 

A section of the bill that would give the Commodities Futures Trading Commission authority over digital assets that are considered commodities is “ready” to move forward, Gillibrand said. 

Lummis agreed with Gillibrand’s assessment and said a portion of the bill that deals with stablecoins would be likely to “go next” in Congress. The pair spoke in a pre-recorded session that aired at a financial conference hosted by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business in Washington, D.C. 

The timeline for the digital assets bill is ambitious. Lawmakers are busy campaigning in their districts ahead of the November midterm elections. Just a few weeks later, a new Congress will begin in January. And another bipartisan bill to give the CFTC broader power over digital commodities, drafted by Senate Agriculture Chair Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and the top Republican on the committee, Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., could see a committee vote in what remains of this Congress. 

Gillibrand added that she expects a regulatory framework for digital assets would pass the Senate with broad bipartisan support.

“Sixty, seventy percent will ultimately support regulatory framework. I don’t think there’s a great deal of opposition,” Gillibrand said. “It’s not ideological, it’s just an unregulated industry that is growing in our country.”

© 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.

Investment app startup Stash raised $52.6 million via debt offering after expanding services to include support for eight cryptocurrencies including ETH and BTC,.

Stash raised funds from a dozen investors according to a filing that showed the offering for convertible debt, which is changeable into shares or another form of the issuing entity’s equity, opened on Sept. 6. CoinDesk first reported the news.

In early Oct 2022 Stash announced an expansion of its fully managed portfolio services, launched in January of the same year, to include support for purchases of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Chainlink, Avalanche, Ethereum Classic, Solana, and Uniswap tokens.

Valued at roughly $1.4 billion the company held a $125 million Series G fundraise in Feb 2021, led by holding company Eldridge, with additional capital from investment management company T. Rowe Price.

Stash did not immediately respond to The Block’s request for comment.

© 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.

Flashbots has announced an upgrade that aims to address censorship resistance and concerns over decentralization.

Robert Miller, product lead for Flashbots, discussed solving these concerns earlier this month and said it was working on a decentralized solution. The protocol, known as SUAVE, which has been in stealth development for the last year, was revealed this afternoon.

Flashbots is a service that provides suggested blocks for validators to process while maximizing reward payouts. It is one of the most used third parties for this block production process.

Community concerns have stemmed from Flashbots censoring transactions related to Tornado Cash. More than 50% of Ethereum blocks built today are OFAC-compliant, according to MEV Watch.

The debut of SUAVE comes shortly after Stephane Gosselin, co-founder of Flashbots, stepped down in September after an internal disagreement around its censorship-resistance capabilities.

SUAVE aims to progressively decentralize the block-building process by open-sourcing its code and development, allowing anyone to contribute. It will feature cross-chain and multi-chain support, and work with any Ethereum-compatible blockchain or rollup.

More details about SUAVE will be released in the coming weeks, according to the development team. 

© 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.

Everyrealm, a metaverse content developer with high-flying backers like Will Smith, Paris Hilton and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is launching a “home design” and virtual real estate game aimed at mature gamers.

After more than three years of development, Everyrealm’s new free-to-play game – called Hometopia – will allow players to build virtual homes and communities “alongside friends,” according to the announcement. Players will also be allowed to own that which they create in-game, Everyrealm also said.

The company’ says that Hometopia will be partly based on some of Roblox’s more “popular home design games” like Bloxburg and Brookhaven, which Everyrealm says have been visited more than five billion times.

Everyrealm CEO Janine Yorio calls Hometopia “a gamified combination of Pinterest, Houzz and Wayfair” which is “poised to capture those looking for more adult versions of Roblox interior design games they grew to love as children.” She also says the new game, launching later this year on the Epic Games Store, will appeal to female gamers, an underserved demographic.

Hometopia developer Alex Ahlund, who has worked on mobile games like Design This Home and Design This Castle, hopes the game will achieve success akin to the best-selling PC game The Sims.

In March, Everyrealm announced it had closed $60 million in a S​​eries A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, also known as a16z, which has been investing heavily in metaverse gaming companies.

​​Musical artists The Weeknd and Nas are also investors in Everyrealm. Before changing its name the company was known as Republic Realm.

© 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 Friday.

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

Mawson Infrastructure Group’s stock fell 15.79%, followed by Greenidge Generation (-10.66%), Core Scientific (-10.48%) and Riot Blockchain (-9.86%).

Bitcoin mining stocks also fell over the course of the week — Argo Blockchain by 44.53% on the London Stock Exchange and Greenidge by 35.88%.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Friday, Oct. 14:

An overview of how miners fared over the week of trading:

© 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 notable surge in Canadian bitcoin ownership occurred among those surveyed in 2021, based on findings from recently published research conducted by the Bank of Canada.

As overall Canadian bitcoin ownership in the surveyed group more than doubled, fueled by new investors, researchers said that buyers predominately accessed digital currencies via exchanges on mobile and web interfaces. 

Pandemic-driven increases in savings likely contributed to the involvement of Canadian investors in the bitcoin market, said researchers, with seasonally adjusted household savings up 27% from a 2.4% historic average between 2015 and 2019. 

New owners, who largely see digital currency as an investment according to researchers, tend to hold small amounts, likely due to price increases in the last two years. This point of view appeared to be a common thread between earlier adopters, who bought bitcoin before 2020, and newer buyers, with 63% percent of recent owners and 57% of long-term holders identifying bitcoin as an investment vehicle.

Researchers also found that the greatest increase of bitcoin owners among those surveyed was in the income group of $70,000 CAD (roughly $50,388.00 USD) or more, up from 5% in 2020 to 17% in 2022. In addition there was a 12% increase in ownership among respondents who earned between $30,000 and $69,900 CAD (roughly $21,600 to $50,380 USD), up from 5% in 2020.

In terms of relative awareness, Bitcoin remains a commonly known term, and 90% of respondents said they had heard of the digital currency, matching figures from previous years. However, among those surveyed, 40% of respondents exhibited a low-level understanding of how bitcoin functions, a little over double that of investor blockchain knowledge measured in 2018.

In addition, 66% of respondents who did not own any bitcoin also showed a basic understanding of the blockchain network.

© 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.

Commodities Futures Trading Commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero is proposing a new retail investor definition for her agency, she said during a financial conference on Friday.

“I’m proposing a new definition of retail that divides between household retail, and then professional and high net worth,” Goldsmith Romero said. “Therefore we can tailor rules to one group and the other.” 

As it stands now, the CFTC definition of a retail customer is an individual with total assets that do not exceed $10 million, or $5 million if the individual is entering into an agreement, contract or transaction to manage risk, as long as the customer does not qualify as an eligible contract participant under other regulations. The definition for retail is so broad, the commissioner noted, that it includes people who make less than $50,000 in the markets to hedge funds that make millions of dollars.

“What I propose is that we break that definition of retail in two, and then we can target rules and regulations to regular household people that may not be needed for a hedge fund or a millionaire. And then we can expand access,” Goldsmith Romero said. “There’s a great opportunity to expand access to financial markets.” 

The Democratic commissioner made the comments at the Financial Markets Quality Conference hosted by Georgetown University. Goldsmith Romero appeared with Securities and Exchange Commissioner Mark Uyeda, a Republican appointee. 

The hourlong discussion also touched on digital assets. Washington lawmakers and regulators are paying increased attention to the crypto industry after this spring’s market crash. 

The lack of regulation in crypto markets could lead “the most vulnerable people” to get hurt, Goldsmith Romero noted, because many investors in the United States are used to having consumer protections. Uyeda echoed that view, saying regulation shouldn’t “strangle the market” but help it prosper. 

“You want to invest in a regulated market. I think we just start there. Let’s start at the top. Let’s get it regulated,” Goldsmith Romero 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.

More digital asset firms are looking to register to buy and sell securities.

That is according to Robert Cook, the president and CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the self-regulatory organization that registers broker-dealers and investment advisors in the U.S. 

“We have a couple dozen vendors now whose business model is entirely digital asset securities. And we have at least that many — actually more than that — in the pipeline,” Cook told a conference in Washington, D.C. 

Existing FINRA registrants include brokerage affiliates of major crypto exchanges like Coinbase, FTX and Gemini, as well as a fleet of private investment advisors focusing on digital asset securities. 

Of that pipeline, Cook cautioned that it was on ongoing process, and that not all applications would make it to registration. 

As an industry self-regulatory organization, FINRA self-polices but does not set policy, like the Securities and Exchange Commission. The question of which digital assets are securities and which are commodities is one of the most pressing issues among U.S. markets regulators, as well as firms acting as cryptocurrency intermediaries. 

© 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.