FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

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

The cryptocurrency fell below $20,000 in the morning, trading at around $19,500 by market close, according to data from TradingView.

TeraWulf was down by 23.60%, followed by Argo Blockchain (-23.02% on Nasdaq), which said earlier in the morning that it plans to raise $34 million.

Iris Energy was down 15.68% after announcing in its monthly operational update that it is looking at “potential M&A” opportunities.

Notably over the week, SAI.TECH’s stock rose 78.93%.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Friday, Oct. 7:

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.

NFT company Dapper Labs has issued warnings to users who have “connections” to Russia that funds held in their account-based crypto wallets have been frozen as part of a set of fresh EU sanctions against Russia. 

Dapper has been forced to prohibit clients with Russian ties from accessing what funds they have held in their wallet “irrespective of the amount,” according to an email posted to Twitter and separately reviewed by The Block. 

The EU banned crypto payments from Russian accounts as part of a broader sanctions package this week, as previously reported. Dapper Labs is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.  

Twitter account @Crypto_Braniac, which says it is based in Moscow, posted a copy of the Dapper letter to Twitter Friday afternoon, tagging the NFT company. 

The Block obtained a copy of the letter from a client who is not Russian but previously resided there. 
 
Dapper did not immediately respond to a request for comment.  
 
The correspondence, which apologizes for “any inconvenience,” states that clients will be able to view their NFTs but will not be able to sell or transfer them to other wallets. The letter again cites the EU’s recent financial sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in February. 

The sanctions announced Oct. 6, which toughened restrictions on crypto payments from Russian accounts, counts as the eighth round of EU sanctions against Russia. This round also eliminated the previously established cap on wallets of €10,000 ($9,741), implemented in April.

© 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.

Since the collapse of the TerraUSD, the algorithmic stablecoin that catastrophically lost parity with the U.S. dollar earlier this year, the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) maintained it would follow through with efforts to compensate users with losses.

However, it would appear the wait for compensation may yet drag out as LFG cited “ongoing and threatened litigation” as reasons to postpone distributions to users with losses. The group added that there is no current established timeline to resolve the issue while the legal issues remain outstanding, according to a Twitter thread on the subject.

Once a reserve that held upwards of $60 billion in assets, in the wake of TerraUSD’s fall, the LFG’s total reserve balance stands at just over $105 million, according to records. 

The news comes amid the continuing investigation into Terraform Labs, the company that oversaw the development of the Terra network. Authorities in South Korea arrested the company’s head of general business operations, though a judge later threw out that arrest warrant. Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon was recently ordered to surrender his passport by South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

© 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.

Leading staking service provider Lido will now support the bridging of assets to Layer 2 protocols, it  announced on Twitter.

Lido allows users to stake ETH and receive staked ETH (stETH) in return. The new changes to Lido introduced wrapped staked ETH (wstETH), a token that can be bridged to Layer 2 networks Arbitrum One and Optimism, and that will accommodate ease of integration across DeFi partners while preserving the unique properties of stETH, according to Lido. Guides are offered to users, with instructions on how to wrap stETH for wstETH.

To incentivize participation, on Oct. 7, 150,000 LDO tokens will be allocated on a monthly basis to fuel wsETH rewards across partner networks, beginning with mining liquidity incentives across DeFi platforms including Beethoven X, Balancer, Curve Finance, Kyber Network and Velodrome.

Layer 2 networks Arbirtum and Optimism have seen a surge in transaction volume since they launched in 2021, with both recently peaking above 200,000 daily transactions, data from The Block Research show.

By integrating with Layer 2 networks, Lido users can avoid congestion, and high gas prices on the Ethereum network, and can instead process them on adjacent networks designed to operate alongside Ethereum. This will help manage transaction volume from the blockchain.

© 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.

Quick Take

• ConsenSys Software Inc. was founded officially in 2020 after it spun out from the larger ConsenSys AG (now known as “Mesh”; founded in 2014 by Joseph Lubin) – ConsenSys AG (now Mesh) has been involved in allegations related to business assets and fair distributions
• ConsenSys Software Inc. manages and develops the ConsenSys product suite, which includes Infura, MetaMask / MetaMask Institutional, Codefi, Diligence, Quorum, Truffle and ConsenSys NFT
• ConsenSys raised $200 million (Series C) in November 2021 and $450 million (Series D) in March 2022 – the latest raise values ConsenSys at +$7 billion USD

This research piece is available exclusively to
members of The Block Research.
You can continue reading
this Research content on The Block Research.

Bitcoin miner Iris Energy considering possible mergers and acquisitions opportunities as the firm plots its growth plans.

Those also include other options such as “ongoing organic expansion,” the company said in a statement Friday.

Last month, it signed a deal with investment banking firm B. Riley for the option to sell up to $100 million in ordinary shares. “The Company continues to monitor funding markets and advance prospective capital opportunities,” it said.

There’s been plenty of talk of consolidation in the bitcoin mining industry lately, and companies like CleanSpark already have been leveraging market conditions to scoop up thousands of mining machines at discounted prices, as well as mining sites.

Iris Energy increased its average operating hash rate in September by 24% month-over-month to a total of 2.729 exahashes per second (EH/s). At the same time, it mined 325 BTC, an 8% increase.

The two weren’t proportional “due to an increase in the average difficulty-implied global hash rate during the period, which was also the primary driver behind the increase in the Company’s electricity costs per Bitcoin mined during the month,” the statement said.

Mining difficulty jumped 9.26% at the end of August, the largest increase since January. Current estimates point to another major hike coming next week.

Iris said that its development works across Canada, the USA and Asia-Pacific have the potential to support over 1 gigawatt of power capacity, beyond the 795 megawatts previously announced.

The company has three sites in Canada and one being developed in Texas, which is slated to reach 600 megawatts, after an initial build-out of 40 megawatts. All of them are “powered by 100% renewable energy,” according to the company.

© 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 could spend over $1 billion on investment deals by the end of the year.

Despite the market downturn, the exchange could spend a significant amount of cash on investments in the next three months, exchange CEO Changpeng Zhao told Bloomberg in an interview. 

Beyond these investments, Binance has made investments in 67 projects, with a total investment of $325 million. Binance’s VC arm has invested in various projects, including multiple investment in Aptos, the company founded by ex-Meta employees. 

When asked about acquiring crypto lenders, Zhao said: “Many of them, they just take a user’s money and give it to somebody else. There’s not a lot of intrinsic value. In that case, what’s to acquire? We want to see real products that people use.”

We’re likely to see more market consolidation, Zhao noted, concluding that “there’s a lot of risks and a lot of pain, but also a lot of opportunity.”

On Thursday, an attempted hack almost drained $560 million in BNB tokens from the BSC Token Hub, the network’s cross-chain bridge, with an estimated $100 million to $130 million successfully siphoned to other chains before the BNB Chain was halted for several hours — the blockchain restarted this morning.

© 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 years-long wait for creditors of the long-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox may be one step closer to completion, according to a memo. 

Trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi wrote that Mt. Gox creditors will have until Jan. 10, 2023, to register with the so-called MTGOX Online Rehabilitation Claim Filing System and create accounts on crypto exchanges to receive disbursements for their claims.

“The deadline for Selection and Registration is January 10, 2023 (Japan time); any creditor who wishes to receive Repayment must complete Selection and Registration on the System by such deadline,” the translated memo reads. 

It’s not clear how many exchange venues have been designated by Mt. Gox’s creditors to assist in repayment to creditors. Bitstamp said in a statement that it was among those appointed. 

Distribution would not occur on Jan. 10, stressed a source familiar with the situation, who expects distribution to occur sometime next year. A majority of creditors approved a draft rehabilitation plan last November, and in a public letter dated Oct. 4, Kobayashi announced court approval of amendments to the rehabilitation plan.

“The purpose of the amendments is to enable rehabilitation creditors to receive repayments under the Rehabilitation Plan smoothly, fairly, and safely, and to clarify matters that had not been made entirely clear in the Rehabilitation Plan,” Kobayashi wrote. “Therefore, the amendments have no adverse effect on rehabilitation creditors.”

© 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 prices plummeted following the lowest monthly job figures out of the U.S. since last December. 

The U.S. added 263,000 new jobs in month of September, above expectations of 255,000 and below the previous month, when 315,000 jobs were added. Bitcoin dropped below $20,000 following the news, losing about 2% in the last hour to trade at $19,623, according to data via Coinbase.

The U.S. non-farm payrolls are released on the first Friday of every month as part of the employment situation report, and measure the number of new jobs in the U.S., excluding farm workers and several other job categories. The unemployment rate fell to 3.5%, below expectations of 3.7%, according to todays report. 

The DXY Dollar index, which measures of the value of the U.S. dollar relative to a basket of foreign currencies, rose immediately after the release. 

Traders will now be looking toward next Thursday’s inflation print, with the U.S. releasing consumer price index (CPI) data for September. CPI came in hotter-than-expected in August, causing an uptick in volatility in crypto markets. Last week’s PCE inflation data also sent markets lower, as core PCE came in above expectations at 0.6%.

© 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 Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is stepping towards initiating a digital rupee pilot and indicating key features in the central bank digital currency (CBDC), according to a 50-page report released on Friday.

The Indian central bank says it will launch a pilot Digital Rupee program “soon,” and will communicate about its features and benefits “from time to time.” Some key features, however, have been cautiously revealed. 

The report distinguishes between retail and wholesale use cases, for consumers and for bank-to-bank transfers, and suggests that both may be introduced. 

It also discusses several issuing models, especially one where a wholesale CBDC would be account-based and issued by the central bank, while the CBDC for consumers would be token-based and managed by an intermediary. 

Additionally, RBI calls for “reasonable anonymity for small value transactions” to stick to a non-interest-bearing coin that resembles physical cash.

The technology behind the digital rupee is not yet set in stone. The RBI is leaving the door open to adapt to the decentralized technology as it evolves. 

The report explores different possibilities and aims to raise awareness about CBDCs, with “compelling reasons” that make a national digital currency “as attractive as cash if not more.” However, the concept note is also wary of the risks and seeks to take on the pilot program step by step.

© 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.