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Crypto.com has announced a €150 million ($145 million) investment into France to support its operations in the country, including a European headquarters in Paris. 

Along with the establishment of its EU headquarters in the capital city, the investment will also seek to hire local talent to focus on compliance, business development, and product along with funding marketing efforts in the region said the statement released Wednesday. 

Most recently, Crypto.com won approval from the French regulator to operate as a Digital Asset Service Provider (DASP). Along with France, the company also gained regulatory approval in Italy back in July. 

“We are incredibly excited to cement our commitment to France and Europe through the establishment of our regional headquarters in Paris,” said COO of Crypto.com Eric Anziani in the announcement. 

Along with Crypto.com other overseas crypto exchanges such as Luno and Binance have procured licenses in France as the country seeks to establish itself as a hub for blockchain technology. 

Similar to Crypto.com, Binance announced a €100 million ($97 million) investment into the country, calling it “uniquely positioned to be the leader of this industry in Europe”. 

© 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.

Robo-advisor Betterment has launched crypto investment services for its 730,000 advisor and investor customers.

Through a partnership with Gemini, who will act as the crypto custodian for Betterment, customers can now invest in four separate crypto portfolios.

Betterment made its first move into the crypto space through the acquisition of Makara in February. At the time Jesse Proudman, Makara co-founder and then CEO, said the company was developed to bring an easy and accessible long-term investing approach to cryptocurrencies.

Proudman sat down with The Block again this week, in his new role as VP of cryptocurrency at Betterment. He reemphasised the firm’s desire to simplify access to the space, which he said can be “complex and unapproachable” at times. 

Crypto by Betterment will allow users to opt-in to create separate accounts to invest in cryptocurrencies. The investment options include four portfolios, which are modelled on exchange traded funds, according to Proudman.

The portfolios include the Universe portfolio with exposure to BTC, ETH and LINK; the Sustainable portfolio includes ETH, MATIC, XTZ and SOL; a DeFi portfolio including AAVE, UNI and COMP; and finally the metaverse portfolio which has exposure to SAND and MANA.

These are examples of cryptocurrencies in the portfolios and are not an exhaustive list of the tokens available in each portfolio, the company said. Users can also customize portfolios by choosing to remove certain tokens before investing, Proudman added. 

Users own the cryptocurrencies in the portfolios they invest in and Gemini handles the custody. 

© 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.

USDC issuer Circle has backed blockchain developer platform Tatum as infrastructure startups continue to convince investors to part with their cash. 

The $41.5 million round, which venture capital investor Evolution Equity Partners led, also featured participation from Octopus Ventures, Leadblock Partners and the founders of Bitpanda among others, according to a release on Wednesday. A request to disclose its valuation was not met by the time of publication.

Founded in 2018, the platform offers products such as NFT plug-ins for WordPress, software development kits for over 40 protocols and an API that enables speedy NFT minting across eight blockchains. 

“By speeding the development process, Tatum is enabling companies to bring finished blockchain applications into production with an immensely faster time to market,” said founder and chief technology officer Samuel Sramko in the statement. “Tatum is fundamentally changing not only the velocity of development but also the robustness, so that more complex functionality can be more readily accomplished even without the highly technical expertise.”

The company claims to have over 90,000 customers including startups and Fortune 500 companies and is onboarding over 7,000 new customers monthly. It says that the funding will be used to invest in marketing and educational efforts. Other crypto infrastructure companies have also sought to build out educational features — for instance, Alchemy bought the Ethereum developer education platform Chainshot in August. 

Venture capital firms continue to pour money into startups in the crypto infrastructure space. Earlier today, web3 developer platform SettleMint announced a €16 million ($15.5 million) Series A round. In August, Haun Ventures led a $24 million round into web3 developer platform Thirdweb and last month Variant led an $18.6 million fundraise for cross-chain developer platform Hyperlane. Moreover, much of Y-Combinator’s latest cohort compromised of web3 infrastructure startups. 

According to The Block Research, infrastructure firms raised $1.8 billion last quarter — second only to NFTs and Gaming.

© 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.

Offchain Labs, the parent company of the Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum, has acquired Prysmatic Labs.

Offchain Labs made the acquisition to further develop the Ethereum ecosystem. Prysmatic Labs developed and still operates the computer software Prysm, which over 43% of Ethereum nodes use to run the Ethereum network on proof-of-stake.  

Prysmatic Labs will still focus on its Prysm computer software client under Offchain Labs, while the parent company will continue to build its Ethereum scaling solutions Arbitrum and Arbitrum Nova.  

“Prysmatic Labs possesses an incredibly talented team of engineers, and their dedication to the Ethereum community shows via their best-in-class product that is used broadly in the Ethereum ecosystem,” Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder said. 

Both companies remain focused and aligned on building infrastructure to scale the Ethereum network. It was one of the reasons Prysmastic Labs co-founder Raul Jordan stated that this acquisition “made perfect sense.”

Both companies are “fully incentive-aligned with the success of Ethereum,” Jordan further stated. He believes that bringing both teams together under one roof will benefit the aligned mission of both teams in scaling Ethereum.  

© 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.

America’s oldest bank is coming to crypto, and it’s working with several crypto firms in the process.

BNY Mellon received approval from New York’s financial regulator to start receiving select customers’ bitcoin and ether deposits this week, bringing the world’s largest custody bank — with over $43 trillion in assets under custody — into the crypto sphere. 

BNY Mellon has two unique characteristics when it comes to launching crypto services, Caroline Butler, CEO of custody services at the bank, told The Block in an interview. “We are ready to support other assets and are fully interoperable with traditional space, being a bridge between traditional and the digital world is something institutional clients value,” Butler said. 

Butler went on to say the bank backs innovation by collaboration — and, with this in mind, the bank is working with several crypto firms on its crypto offering. The firms include Fireblocks, Chainalysis and Blockdaemon.

The bank will offer direct custody to clients, meaning customers will be accepted based on the bank’s own risk assessment, according to Butler. It will then use Fireblocks’ Multi-Party Computation technology to store customers’ private keys. The MPC technology enables multiple parties — each holding their own private data — to evaluate a computation without ever revealing any of the private data held by each party. 

This means customers’ private keys will be held in BNY and never seen by Fireblocks. This approach to risk management is front and center for the bank, Butler told The Block. 

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis will work with BNY Mellon on compliance monitoring. Specifically, the analytics firm will work with the bank to track where customer assets came from before they arrived in their accounts. 

Fireblocks and Chainalysis are the two main firms BNY Mellon will be working with, while also leveraging other firms, such as Blockdaemon. The New York-based startup builds blockchain nodes that will allow the custody bank to process a high volume of digital-asset transactions. Several firms — including Coinbase, Standard and Komainu — also use Blockdaemon’s services. 

The bank’s head of custody also noted that BNY Mellon has a track record of working with native institutional players in the space, including Grayscale and Circle. BNY Mellon handles fund account and administration functions for the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust since October of last year, while also handling custody for Circle’s USDC reserves. 

© 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.

People must be “prepared to lose all their money” if they invest in crypto, Nikhil Rathi, CEO of the UK’s financial watchdog, said in its yearly review meeting.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) used the online public meeting on Wednesday to repeat the message it has pushed for several years, while also recapping the regulatory measures it has taken to protect investors. 

Responding to questions from journalists and members of the public, the FCA admitted that, current crypto policies are limited beyond gating anti-money laundering restrictions.

These restrictions have still been severe enough that many crypto companies have failed to make the cut — and several firms have decided to shut down their UK operations as a result. While an FCA representative mentioned they support 56 firms based on decentralized ledger technology, there are 246 crypto asset companies currently operating in the UK that are not registered.

The panel of financial executives also expanded on what’s on their agenda regarding crypto regulation in the UK. 

Sarah Pritchard, the executive director for markets at the FCA, outlined three entry points for regulating crypto. Firstly, as a high risk investment, she reiterated that people do not understand the gravity of the risk of losing all their money to crypto. 

The financial supervisor is reminding consumers of this risk through a “scam-smart” campaign to warn consumers. Measures to tackle scam in advertisements are also included in the latest Online Safety Bill.

The system for tackling fraud in the UK is complex and under-resourced, costing the nation £130 billion ($144 billion) a year, according to Richard Lloyd, the interim chair of the FCA as of February this year.

Secondly, for tackling crypto as a means of payment, Pritchard pointed to the FCA’s collaboration between the Treasury and Bank of England to bring out legislation to allow stablecoins to be used as payments. 

Finally, the FCA also recognized the “potential” and “benefits” of blockchain technology in market innovation. Two programs in particular aim to reflect this — namely Innovation Pathways, which guides financial firms launch innovative products, and the Regulatory Sandbox, which lets first test innovative proposals with consumers.

© 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 platform Zerion just raised $12.3 million in a Series B and aims to disrupt the crypto wallet landscape. The round is led by Wintermute Ventures and other backers — including Mosaic, Coinbase Ventures, Alchemy and Placeholder.

Founded in 2019, the Zerion platform enables users to access and manage assets across decentralized finance protocols. Users can connect as many crypto wallets as they want to the platform, and its non-custodial design means users are in charge of their own funds.

The new funds from the Series B raise will be used to further develop the wallet — leveraging advanced data and intuitive design — said the company in a release.

Last year, Zerion raised $8.2 million in a Series A in an effort to turn its web3 wallet product into the primary interface for web3. 

Crypto wallets aren’t ready for web3

Crypto wallets are now forming the basis for individuals’ identities within web3, Zerion co-founder and CEO Evgeny Yurtaev explained to The Block. Yet, existing wallets haven’t changed in terms of what they can do to help the user. 

“A lot of people dismiss wallets [with the] wallets being purely financial and pretty limited in terms of what wallets are capable of doing,”  he said. “But it’s becoming less and less about only trading the few coins that you have and becoming about fun, about NFTs. For some, its games, for some it’s music.” 

Zerion looks to solve some of the key problems that users face with existing wallets, Yurtaev explained. This includes poor support for multiple wallets, limited security checks on transactions and limited transaction-history data. 

“People have this natural limit to how many wallets they can manage,” Yurtaev told us. “Hence, the wallet application Zerion is building is basically the one helping manage all of your identities, all of your data and all of your financial assets.” 

The wallet also differentiates itself in that it’s mobile-first, though the team is currently working on building out a desktop extension. “We started with mobile because we’ve seen the biggest UX pain points in mobile-first,” Yurtaev said. “The wallets that existed on mobile were pretty terrible.” 

Raising a Series B in the bear market

 The cap table for Zerion’s round features a mix of crypto-native investors and traditional players from the venture space. 

“We have team members in 20 countries and we’re 40 people,” Yurtaev said. “For the cap table, we also wanted to try the different kinds of investors just to have a broader view on how things are moving.” 

The funds will provide a runway for about two years, he added.  

The round’s lead investor, Wintermute, also participated in the Series A. While no formal agreement is in place between the two companies, Yurtaev sees synergies forming between both companies’ long-term goals. 

“I think Wintermute is like moving more and exploring at least more consumer-facing applications,” Yurtaev said. “And on our side, we are exploring the tokens and trading side of things because trading is still the biggest part of the transacting within Zerion.”  

Generally, there has been a slowdown in VC activity in the crypto and blockchain at the mid-to-late stages, according to data from The Block Research.  Mid-stage deals fell approximately 63%, from 30 deals in the second quarter to just 11 in the third quarter, according to The Block Research’s third quarter funding recap. 

© 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.

BNB Chain has finished a hard fork upgrade called Moran in an attempt to recover and secure infrastructure following a large hack last week.

The hard fork — a blockchain upgrade that implements a major change to the network’s underlying software — went through successfully at 4 a.m. ET on Wednesday at a block height of 22,107,423. It was mainly executed to implement a software patch that resolved a critical vulnerability exploited by an unknown attacker to steal more than $100 million from BNB Chain’s cross-chain bridge last Friday.

The developer team announced the upgrade with a GitHub post on Tuesday, saying it would carry out a hard fork to deploy a patch and re-enable the network’s “cross-chain infrastructure.”

This cross-chain bridge allows users to transfer assets between the two separate blockchains that fall under the BNB Chain network: Beacon Chain and Smart Chain. While BNB Beacon Chain handles the network’s governance and staking, the Smart Chain is used as an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible smart contract platform to deploy apps. Both of these chains can connect to other third-party chains with the help of Token Hub bridge as well.

During the exploit, the perpetrator forged security proofs, leveraging a vulnerability tied to “iavl hash check,” a security check baked into the bridge. In this way, the hacker was able to mint 2 million BNB tokens out of thin air, worth around $560 million at the time. On-chain data shows that the hacker transferred more than $100 million out to third-party chains including Ethereum, Fantom, Polygon, Avalanche and Arbitrum. The majority of the affected assets (nearly $430 million) remained in the hacker’s wallet on the BNB Chain itself. 

In response to the exploit, the team halted the blockchain, ordering all of its 44 validators — including 26 active validators — to stop operations. The team re-enabled the network later but the bridge itself remained shut until the vulnerability could be fixed. The halt was also an effort to stop the attacker in their tracks and salvage any exploited funds that the attacker had not yet moved out to other chains. 

The latest hard fork today will help BNB Chain restart the bridge’s full operations and secure the network’s overall infrastructure. With this hard fork, the team is expected to move to its next plan of action, which is to conduct governance votes to decide whether to freeze funds held in the hacker’s address on BNB Chain and “auto-burn” them, according to a recent post from the 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.

Blockchain indexer Nxyz has emerged from stealth having secured $40 million in a Series A round led by Paradigm.

Backers in the round also include Coinbase Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners — as well as prominent angel investors such as Messari’s Ryan Selkis and former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan, according to a release today.

Nxyz aims to provide fast and reliable blockchain indexing and data services. The startup is being spun out of the private search engine Neeva.

Founded in 2019, Neeva has raised a total of $77.5 million in funding, according to data from Crunchbase. Its CEO and co-founder  Sridhar Ramaswamy will also become the CEO of Nxyz.

“We created Nxyz so that developers can focus on building at scale, and have the fast and simple method for indexing data they need. I’m convinced this is exactly the kind of innovation needed to help ensure the widespread adoption and success of web3,” said Ramaswamy in the release.

The tool has been built by distributed systems engineers from Google and Neeva and can return blockchain data via its API in less than 200 milliseconds, according to the company.

The funds will be used to expand the Nxyz’s team and expand into different chains.

“Nxyz has a truly superlative team that has built the best data indexing infrastructure for web3, and we at Paradigm are thrilled to support them,” Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm, said in the release.

© 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.

SettleMint, a low-code blockchain platform, has raised a €16 million ($15.5 million) Series A round as it adds Japanese operations to its India, Singapore and EMEA markets.

The round was co-led by venture firms Molten Ventures and OTB Ventures, according to a release on Tuesday. It also featured participation from Allusion, Bloccelerate and the venture arm of Japanese electronics company Fujitsu. The Belgium-based firm declined to share its valuation. 

The company previously raised in January 2020, when it outlined plans for EMEA and APAC expansion along with raising $2 million. A company spokesperson said that its expansion to Japan was motivated by its favorable market conditions and regulatory clarity. It will also use the expertise of Fujitsu to provide knowledge of this market. 

By offering a low-code solution, the startup allows developers with scant knowledge of blockchain to build web3 applications. Its platform includes a suite of tools, frameworks, templates and APIs that are ready to use for developer teams. 

“SettleMint is enabling enterprises to drive real business value from decentralised applications built on blockchain technology,” said Molten Ventures partner Vinoth Jayakumar, who oversaw the deal. “While there is massive demand to implement blockchain solutions and applications, there is an equivalent shortage of blockchain expertise. SettleMint bridges that gap by allowing developers to build web3 products and focus on end-product business use cases, not on underlying complex blockchain infrastructure.” 

Venture capital firms continue to pour money into startups in the crypto infrastructure space. In August, Haun Ventures led a $24 million round into web3 developer platform Thirdweb and last month Variant led an $18.6 million fundraise for cross-chain developer platform Hyperlane. 

According to The Block Research, infrastructure firms raised $1.8 billion last quarter — second only to NFTs and Gaming.

© 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.