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A sign of the times at Token 2049 in Singapore last week: A woman could be seen handing out a smartly produced print magazine about The Merge that must have cost a pretty penny to make. Its patron? Singapore-based crypto lender Zipmex, now bankrupt. 

Six months of calamity in the crypto sector have done nothing to dampen its boosters’ spirits, however. Despite the turmoil and the bad news, more than 7,000 of them were out in force at the city state’s Marina Bay Sands resort. Mixed in with the schmoozing and the spectacle of Formula 1 were fleeting moments of reflection and evidence of lessons learned. Mostly, though, it was partying as usual. 

On the fundraising trail 

With the conference getting underway, Pantera Capital boss Dan Morehead, in town for the event, informed Bloomberg of plans to raise a new $1.25 billion fund to plow into the blockchain sector.  

Morehead wasn’t the only fund manager in Singapore courting fresh capital. Rumors abounded that Arthur Cheong’s DeFiance Capital is seeking $100 million for a new liquid token fund. Sure enough, the news broke on Sept. 30. DeFiance previously billed itself as a “sub-fund” of Three Arrows Capital, the bankrupt hedge fund that had borrowed money from a significant portion of Token 2049’s exhibitors — but later distanced itself for fear creditors would come after its assets.  

The Block also got its hands on a deck for CVP NoLimit Holdings, a token-focused fund that is also pitching investors to raise $100 million. The fund is a partnership between China-focused private equity firm ClearVue Partners and NoLimit Holdings. Its founding partner Gin Chao previously led Binance’s venture arm. Strategy-wise, it will target Layer 1 blockchains before their tokens go live, according to the pitch deck. The Block contacted ClearVue Partners for comment, but did not receive a response.  

One investor that also sees a bright future for new Layer 1 chains is Dragonfly Capital. The venture firm announced an investment in Aptos Labs during Token 2049, adding an undisclosed amount of capital to the $350 million pile it has already amassed this year. While further details of the investment could not be pried from Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi, he did at least impart a zesty comment.   

“The place in the pantheon they’re trying to attack is what Solana wanted to be,” Qureshi said in an interview. “They want to be super high throughput, super high performance, super low latency. Now, they’re doing that in a different way than Solana is, and they also had the benefit of seeing what Solana did badly.” 

Lessons learned?  

The Block also caught up with Aleksander Leonard Larsen, co-founder and COO of Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis — another business that has been “learning from mistakes,” after a year that saw it lose $540 million to a hack and considerable momentum in terms of active users and token prices.  

With the original Axie Classic game now shelved, the stolen funds returned to users, and a new game in the form of Axie Origins ready for lift-off, Leonard Larsen is feeling optimistic. He is also feeling hard done by.  

“I’m excited to show people more of what we’re building,” he said. “People in this space might misunderstand what Sky Mavis and Axie is about and don’t really see the big picture. I feel like a little bit of an underdog story, again, which has historically been very good for us.”  

One goal, he added, is to show people that Axie is “more than just that play-to-earn that everybody is getting to know us for.”  

Gaming — the kind underpinned by blockchain technology — was a particularly prominent theme in Singapore. It was the word on many a founder’s lips.  One young entrepreneur described plans to gamify spending — “spend-to-earn,” effectively. He had already secured two chunks of seed-stage funding.  

Gaming was also front of mind for David Shin, head of global adoption for at Klaytn Foundation, booster of a blockchain by the same name. Klaytn is the chain developed by Kakao, the Korean internet giant. With its governance council of prominent tech and crypto companies, its model is a little like the structure employed by Facebook’s Libra before regulatory pressure forced that project to crumble.  

“Our focus right now is gaming, metaverse and creator economies. For the metaverse we’re looking at a lot of entertainment use cases,” said Shin.    

 Originally built as a Solana-focused platform for NFT trading, Magic Eden told The Block that its long-term goal is to expand to other chains, including Ethereum. The company raised $130 million in June. Since July, Magic Eden has been making investments in the crypto gaming sector. Why? “We want to form strong partnerships with developers in our ecosystem,” said Tony Zhao, who looks at partnerships and investments for the firm. “We want to people to feel comfortable working with us.” 

One crypto gaming developer described a new method of community-building involving tech that can identify when two players of the same game also frequent the same coffee shop. Sound a bit dystopian? “All the best stuff is!” he said.  

In the shadow of 3AC 

Given the extent of the carnage stemming from the collapse of Terra and 3AC — whose co-founders Zhu Su and Kyle Davies lived in Singapore before running into trouble — it is perhaps unsurprising that some attendees were feeling smug about boasting a clean bill of health. The custodians, in particular, were putting on a brave face.   

Hex Trust, an Asia-focused firm with $6 billion under custody at peak prices, was Terra’s custody partner — yet the firm took no losses when the whole ecosystem flamed out in May, according to co-founder and CEO Alessio Quaglini.   

That’s despite the fact that custodians often lend out — or deploy in other ways — the assets they safeguard, and Hex Trust was no exception. Its loans were over-collateralized, Quaglini said, but in some cases that collateral appears to have been held in luna or terraUSD — Terra-based tokens that saw their value vaporized to hear zero in May. How, then, did Hex Trust not take a hit?  

“If you’re a custodian, you’re usually very intimate with the client,” Quaglini said. What that means is that Hex Trust was acutely aware of the risk of a so-called death spiral taking hold of Terra-town, and had the levers needed to liquidate its collateral quickly if forced to.  

Not all custodians were quite so lucky, though they do seem to have fared better than other lenders. Take Singapore-based Matrixport, a crypto app that offers a range of investment products and custody tools. Cactus Capital, its institutional custody business, looked after $10 billion at peak prices — down to $6 billion-$7 billion currently. The firm had given a loan to 3AC that was 120% collateralized, and liquidated the hedge fund when it failed to meet a margin call in the summer. The liquidation came too late to avoid some losses, however, with Matrixport recovering around 80% of the loan, according to founding partner and chief operating officer Cynthia Wu.  

Exchanging places  

No company at Token 2049 projected confidence in a crypto bounce back quite so loudly as OKX, the Seychelles-headquartered exchange operator.  

Earlier this year, crypto companies were splashing cash on big-ticket marketing campaigns involving stadium rebrands and prime-time Super Bowl slots. Then the bear market set in, and marketing budgets — as well as staff — were slashed across the sector.  

OKX, which radically rebranded from OKEx in January, is still very much on the offensive.  

Earlier this week, it signed up Olympian snowboarder Scotty James as its latest brand ambassador. James joins a cast of OKX-affiliated sports stars and teams that already features golf ace Ian Poulter, Formula 1 driver Daniel Ricciardo, Ricciardo’s team (for now) McLaren, and English Premier League champions Manchester City.  

The OKX-F1 link was on display at Token 2049, where one in every three attendees sported a bright orange McLaren cap. OKX hosted several events featuring Ricciardo, Lando Norris and team CEO Zak Brown. Ricciardo even took part in a fireside chat at the event in which he was asked, repeatedly, to compare race driving to crypto trading. “It’s something that all athletes deal with, ups and downs, highs and lows,” Ricciardo said. Somehow there was no mention of crashing.  

OKX global chief marketing officer Haider Rafiq talked through the firm’s audacious bid for eyeballs. “OKX has gone through quite a transformation over the last eight to nine months,” he said, adding that it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing this year. “They’re not cheap deals but what I will tell you is we were absolutely willing to walk away from the table if they became about money.”  

The expenditure seems to be paying dividends, with OKX consistently ranked as one of the largest crypto trading venues by volume, according to CoinGecko data. 

But the 800-pound gorilla in the region — indeed, globally — is still Binance, which has been besting crypto-only exchange rivals for years and now boasts around 80% market share, according to The Block Research’s data.  

The Block spoke with Gleb Kostarev, vice president and regional head of Asia at the ambiguously headquartered exchange. Mostly, he is focused on blazing a trail to licenses in what is a very fragmented market in terms of regulation. Binance, in fact, announced registration and the opening of a local office in New Zealand on the final day of the conference.  

Unlike in the Middle East and Europe, where it has regional hubs in Dubai and Paris, Binance has yet to establish a headquarters in Asia. “We would like to do that at some point, because we think that sooner or later there will be strong competition between countries in Asia to attract crypto businesses,” Kostarev said.  

One stumbling block for Binance as it attempts to work through the concerns of regulators in places like Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia is the issue of where liquidity comes from. “For example, in Malaysia, there is segregated liquidity,” said Kostarev, meaning trading can only take place between local counterparties. Binance is pushing back against this. “Global liquidity is one of the best user protection tools, because if you have access to global liquidity, it means that users can buy and sell at a better price,” Kostarev said.  

Another Seychelles-based exchange that could be found touting its wares at Token 2049 — for the first time in a while — was BitMEX. The firm is on the comeback trail, as it has been ever since its co-founders were hit with charges that they had illegally operated a crypto derivatives platform and violated anti-money laundering rules in the U.S.  

CEO Alexander Höptner has been diligently working on a plan to re-establish BitMEX as a force to be reckoned with ever since he took over in January 2021. That plan involved branching out beyond derivatives trading and, at one time, the purchase of a small German bank. BitMEX faced another setback in March when the deal fell through — but Höptner isn’t ruling out a second bite at the apple. “It’s too compelling not to try again,” he said in an interview. 

No phrase could better encapsulate the mindset of the many startups and investors jostling for position in Singapore last week. Down but not out, they appeared united in their belief that crypto prices, NFT sales, and startup valuations would all rebound — even with reminders of the crises that so recently rocked them ever-present.  

© 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.

Episode 95 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded at live at Converge with The Block’s Frank Chaparro, Circle’s CRO Kash Razzaghi and TBD’s Co-Founder & COO Emily Chiu.

Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblockcrypto.com.

TBD, the crypto focused arm of Jack Dorsey’s Block, is partnering with Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, to unleash the power of stablecoin payments onto the next billion crypto users. 

In this episode of The Scoop, Circle’s Chief Revenue Officer Kash Razzaghi and TBD’s Chief Operating Officer Emily Chiu discuss their new partnership, and explain how their companies’ synergy is going to make it easier to move value back and forth between crypto and the real world economy. 

According to Chiu, the crypto industry is lacking a way to exchange crypto for real world items:

“The minute you nexus upon the real world and commerce in the real world, you need to solve these really hard problems that haven’t yet been solved in the space. That’s what TBDex does, and we see USDC and stablecoins as a critical bridge for facilitating these transactions.”

One of the first use-cases will be a remittance function that enables payments between the US and Mexico, a corridor that sees billions flow a year. 

TBD hopes its digital identity solution will put users in control of both their identity and data as well as who they share it with. As Chiu explains, these digital identity solutions will hopefully promote global economic empowerment: 

“Regardless of what identity you have, you can create a self-sovereign identity wallet regardless of who you are, there’s no intermediary and you need permission from in order to start transacting and engaging with the global economy.

During this episode, Chaparro, Chiu, and Razzaghi also discuss:

• How this partnership will improve remittances
• When TBD’s products will launch
• Why businesses can also benefit from using stablecoins

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Tron

About Tron
TRON is dedicated to accelerating the decentralization of the internet via blockchain technology and decentralized applications (dApps). Founded in September 2017 by H.E. Justin Sun, the TRON network has continued to deliver impressive achievements since MainNet launch in May 2018. July 2018 also marked the ecosystem integration of BitTorrent, a pioneer in decentralized web3 services boasting over 100 million monthly active users. The TRON network completed full decentralization in December 2021 and is now a community-governed DAO. | TRONDAO | Twitter | Discord |

© 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.

Aleksander Leonard Larsen feels hard done by. Based on the events of 2022 thus far, that’s understandable.  

The Sky Mavis co-founder and chief operating officer is just six months removed from seeing more than half a billion dollars’ worth of crypto drained from Ronin, the blockchain his company built for gaming developers. The incident was, to some extent, out of his control.

So too, he feels, are the criticisms that have dogged Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis and its marquee title Axie Infinity, perhaps the world’s most popular crypto-based game. Detractors argue Axie’s “play-to-earn” model has led to the exploitation of workers — many of whom had lost day jobs during the pandemic — in Southeast Asia.  

“It’s mind-boggling to me,” he said in an interview at Token 2049, a crypto conference in Singapore on Sept. 29. “It’s unfair, but I guess that’s just the way it is when you’re getting the attention of the world.” 

Now armed with a shored-up Ronin and a brand-new game, Leonard Larsen feels like an underdog again. He’s dead-set on showing the world that Axie “is more than just that the play-to-earn that everybody is getting to know us for.” 

A whirlwind year 

Even by the standards of turbulent crypto markets, Sky Mavis has had a whirlwind 12 months.   

At its heart, Axie is a turn-based game that pits teams of Pokémon-like creatures (known as Axies) against each other. These critters take the form of NFTs, and through Axie’s gameplay loop, players can earn two types of tokens — AXS and SLP. They can also burn SLP to breed new Axies, or cash their tokens out.  

While riding high last October, Sky Mavis bagged $152 million in a fundraise led by Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the firm at around $3 billion. At that time, Axie boasted 2.7 million daily active users. It became so expensive to begin playing the game at one point that so-called “guilds” began forming to lend out Axies and offer guidance to new players.  

“We didn’t anticipate that it would become so big, so fast, and what happens there is if you’re not careful you lose control of your own narrative,” Leonard Larsen said. “So, you would have middlemen in Axie that are going out and selling this to their friends as a get-rich-quick scheme… It’s a common problem I feel within crypto.”  

Sky Mavis had considered shutting down the guilds, which sprung up independently, but ultimately avoided doing so. 

Then the frenzy subsided. By May this year, the number of daily active users had dropped to less than 1 million. The game’s tokens have also declined sharply in value, according to CoinGecko data. In June, Sky Mavis announced that it would be shuttering the classic version of Axie to focus on the launch of a new game, dubbed Axie Origins. 

“The Axie Classic game that we released early in 2020 had kind of run its course. The quality of that game could only go so far,” Leonard Larsen said. The way he tells it, Axie Classic was merely an experiment — and its popularity caught even Sky Mavis off guard. The team was not, for example, running any “live operations” — meaning the game was not being regularly updated with new features or in-game events. Indeed, it was while Sky Mavis was busy developing Origins that Classic blew up, Leonard Larsen said.  

“There was also all this pent-up demand from the last two years when we had been building community,” he added. “The game wasn’t necessarily what people were there for — it was everything that was surrounding it.” 

Ronin under siege 

In March, roughly $540 million in funds belonging to Axie Infinity players was drained from Ronin, the Ethereum-linked sidechain developed by Sky Mavis. The U.S. government tied the exploit to North Korean cyber-crime group Lazarus, and The Block later revealed that the hackers gained control of Ronin’s validators using a fake job ad. 

This highly sophisticated “spear-phishing” attack gave the hackers access to four out Ronin’s nine validators, which fulfil various functions in blockchains, including creating transaction blocks and signing transactions. The hackers then took control of the crucial fifth node using the Axie DAO, a group set up to support the gaming ecosystem. Sky Mavis had asked the DAO for help dealing with a heavy transaction load in November 2021. 

One obvious question occurred, after those details had come to light in July: Why did Sky Mavis concentrate power in the hands of so few validators? 

“It’s related to trade-offs. Everything we do is trade-offs,” Leonard Larsen said, adding that at one point Ronin had more than $1 billion of ether in total value locked (TVL). “These are very big numbers compared to a chain that’s so young.” 

He added, “Obviously, looking back at it, I wished we would have focused more on security. It was a hard lesson to learn.” 

In April, Sky Mavis announced it had raised $150 million in a round led by Binance. The proceeds, it said at the time, would be used alongside the company’s own funds to reimburse users affected by the exploit. After coming to a sudden halt at the time of the hack, Ronin’s Ethereum bridge relaunched in late June — by which point all user funds had been restored.   

Later, in July, The Block revealed that Binance had scaled back its investment in Sky Mavis. Because Sky Mavis had been able to stabilize and recover funds from the hack, it could make users whole without the exchange operator’s assistance, a Binance spokesperson told The Block at the time.  

Asked about this puzzling sequence of events, Leonard Larsen said, “The raise is still happening, but it’s a different type of… vehicle than was initially intended, so there’s a little bit of back and forth there. But overall, the commitments that were made at the time was critical for Sky Mavis to even be able to get some time.” 

He confirmed, however, that the round, as announced in April, “did not close.” He declined to go into further detail on exactly why Binance scaled back its investment, simply adding,: “When the commitments were made, it was very critical. Having those conversations, getting support from Binance was very, very important at the time.” 

Sky Mavis currently has a financial runway of around 10 years, according to Leonard Larsen, an eye-catching length of time for a business still so young. This, he explains, factors in all the tokens on its balance sheet, which represents a sizable cache. Axie Infinity generated $1.3 billion revenue in 2021, Leonard Larsen said.  

Does he feel at ease, with so much dry powder behind him?  

“It’s obviously different from what it was, because we had literally the freedom to do almost anything that we wanted at one point,” Leonard Larsen said, seemingly alluding to the suppressed state of token prices.  

“Now we need to be more I think careful, generally speaking, about how we are looking at the space,” he continued. “But I don’t feel relaxed. I feel like I want to win more.” 

What’s next for Axie? 

How then will Axie — which has amassed one million downloads for Origins in pre-release mode — reinvent itself?  

A new runes and charms system has been introduced to encourage players to spend money inside the game during each of Axie’s “seasons,” which last six to eight weeks. In Origins, SLP can be burned to get runes and charms — which can be equipped to make Axies more powerful — whereas before it could only be burned to breed Axies. The runes and charms can be normal, rare or mystic. But after each season, they vanish, meaning players will have to burn more SLP if they want to continue decking out their Axies.  

“We have designed it in a way so that the economy is more sustainable and able to handle these users, especially when we look at the SLP ratio being burned,” Leonard Larsen said. “There are things inside the game that are circulating out of production on a, let’s say, six to eight weekly basis. So that really means that for people to compete they need to commit more capital by that season, and then spend money to be able to earn something.” 

Sky Mavis also plans to launch a virtual land-based game — one similar to 4X games but with NFTs infused — later this year.  

What’s more, the restored Ronin chain is once again open for business. Sky Mavis had increased the number of Ronin validators to 17 by mid-August, and added an 18th in the form of Google Cloud in September. Besides its own Axie games, Sky Mavis also wants to bring third-party gaming studios onto the chain. Specifically, those focused on mobile games that haven’t yet issued a token.  

The first batch of external studios to begin building on Ronin will be announced before Christmas, and Leonard Larsen said he wants to position the chain “as a Layer 1 for gaming projects specifically.”   

More importantly, though, he hopes that in the coming months he can once again seize control of the Axie narrative.  

“I feel like a little bit of an underdog story, again, which has historically been very good for us,” he 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.

Advisory firm Teneo, the liquidator of bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), moved Starry Night Capital’s more than 300 NFTs yesterday.

In a statement shared with The Block on Wednesday, Teneo said, with the cooperation of pseudonymous NFT collector VincentVanDough (VVD), it is now in possession of certain Starry Night Capital NFTs — and that the rest are being transferred to it.

Starry Night Capital, an NFT investment fund, was launched in August 2021 by VVD and 3AC founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies. Yesterday, for the first time in four months, Starry Night’s address witnessed a transfer of more than 300 NFTs — worth 625 ETH (around $840,000) — to a new address.

Teneo said VVD co-operated with the firm “in an effort to protect the value of these assets for the benefit of all relevant stakeholders and has sought to ensure that no Starry Night Portfolio assets would be disposed of improperly, or without sanction of the BVI Court if required.”

Starry Night’s portfolio includes NFTs from collections such as Rare Pepe, Fidenza, CrypToadz and works from creator XCOPY.

Teneo said it will eventually sell all of Starry Night’s NFTs with the likely help from VVD. “More details about the disposal process will be shared at a later date,” it added. Teneo went on to say that if any investor of Starry Night Capital is impacted by the matter, or has questions about the liquidation process, should contact the firm.

Starry Night had planned to raise $100 million at the launch of the fund in August. Roughly $45 million had already been raised by September, VVD told The Block in an interview at the time.

VVD, Zhu and Davies have known each other for over a decade. “I have been friends [with them] on a personal level outside of crypto for ten years now, so I’ve known them for a long time,” VVD said at the time. His role in Starry Night Capital was to curate NFTs and Zhu and Davies handled the rest of the operations.

© 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.

Institutional crypto platform Anchorage Digital has partnered with five new Asia-based institutions as it makes a push into the region. 

The partners are cryptocurrency exchange Bitkub, asset management firm Dream Trade, blockchain investment firm FBG Capital, venture firm IOSG Ventures and digital assets financial services provider Antalpha, said Anchorage in a release. 

It had also previously partnered with internet infrastructure provider GMO-Z.com Trust Company in the region. 

Founded in 2017, Anchorage was the first crypto bank to receive a federal charter in the US, which means it is regulated by the OCC. This is the highest order charter that banks can get in the US, Diogo Mónica, Anchorage’s co-founder and president, told The Block.  

To have a charter creates a very high burden for firms because of the level of transparency and maturity required to meet the charter’s requirements, he added. 

Many clients in Asia have selected Anchorage because of its strong regulatory status in the US, the company said. 

“We appreciate Anchorage’s attention to regulatory compliance and vetting of the digital assets they support,” said Will Chiu, Antalpha’s chief investment officer in a statement. “Through their combination of crypto-native fluency and understanding of traditional finance needs, they continue to support us in expanding the adoption of digital assets.” 

Institutions double down

Anchorage provides institutions with integrated financial services and infrastructure solutions such as custody, staking and trading services.  

The startup most recently raised $350 million in a Series D funding round led by investment firm KKR. Investors included traditional players such as Goldman Sachs and Thoma Bravo as well as crypto native firms such as Alameda Research and Blockchain Capital. 

“We work with institutions and what we see is that institutions have very long-term horizons, they are not stopping these partnerships,” Mónica said. 

Anchorage also recently announced that it will be the preferred custodian for buzzy new layer one blockchain Aptos, which is still currently in testnet stages. Mónica is also an angel investor in Aptos. 

“By partnering with Aptos, we’re actually helping make sure that the next generation of layer 1 blockchains are taking these proper [security] considerations and that will only spur future growth in the industry,” Mónica told Coindesk in an interview. 

© 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.

Celsius Network confirmed that co-founder Daniel Leon stepped down this week, Bloomberg first reported.

Leon’s departure followed the resignation of former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, who left the company in late September. Mashinky stepped down when the company’s creditor committee called for his removal after the lender halted services and declared bankruptcy in July. 

Court documents showed Celsius held liabilities that totaled an excess of $6.7 billion, and it has a deficit of $2.8 billion, with the company’s remaining assets estimated to be worth around $3.9 billion.

Now, the final dates have been filed for the bankrupt lender to auction or sell off its remaining assets. FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has already considered bidding on these 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.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s move to unveil a charge against reality TV star Kim Kardashian over her endorsement of a little-known cryptocurrency sparked headlines worldwide.

The announcement also triggered a significant but short-lived jump in the price of that cryptocurrency, called EthereumMax, according to market data. 

The EMAX token rose from $0.000000004232 to $0.000000009605 on Oct. 3, 2022 — a 126% increase, according to the crypto price tracker CoinGecko. The token has since fallen to $0.000000005544, still 31% above what it was before the SEC’s charge. 

As The Block reported this week, Kardashian was accused of unlawfully touting a crypto security. “This case is a reminder that, when celebrities or influencers endorse investment opportunities, including crypto asset securities, it doesn’t mean those investment products are right for all investors,” Gary Gensler, chairman of the SEC, said in a statement. 

Under U.S. rules, celebrities or other figures must disclose payments or compensation received for an endorsement. Kardashian agreed to pay $1.26 million — or 0.07% of her $1.8 billion net worth for the charge, and may she not endorse crypto asset securities for three years. 

© 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.

Almost all bitcoin mining stocks tracked by The Block trended upwards, some above 20%, as bitcoin climbed over $20,000.

The cryptocurrency was trading at around $20,200 at market close, according to data from TradingView.

Core Scientific’s stock rose 24.09%, followed by SAI.TECH (+21.77%) and Cipher Mining (+19.66%).

CleanSpark and Riot, which announced Tuesday a month-over-month hash rate growth of 21% and 16.7%, respectively, were up by 8.49% and 5.56%.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Tuesday, Oct. 3:

© 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.

Elon Musk wants to move forward with the acquisition of Twitter, documents filed Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirmed after earlier reports surfaced that the deal was back on.

However, that’s only if the Delaware Chancery Court stays the Twitter vs. Musk case, according to a letter from Musk’s lawyers.

“The Musk parties provide this notice without admission of liability and without waiver of or prejudice to any of their rights, including their right to assert the defenses and counterclaims pending in the action,” the letter reads.

The social media company sued Musk in July for backing out of the agreement to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Now, Musk, the billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX, wants to proceed with the terms of the deal first put forward on April 25. 

Twitter said that the intention now is for the deal to close at $54.20 per share.

“We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC,” the company 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.

A new Ethereum Index Fund launched by Fidelity Investments provides its clients exposure to ETH, according to a document the firm filed with the SEC on Sept. 26.

The fund launched by the multi-trillion dollar asset manager is accepting minimum outside investments of $50,000 and showed just over $5,000,000 in reported sales, CoinDesk first reported.

News that Fidelity might soon provide crypto offerings to retail consumers spread across the wires earlier this month.

Fidelity helped establish routes to crypto markets in 2018 when it launched a bitcoin trading business aimed at institutional investors and hedge funds. In 2020, Fidelity launched a bitcoin index fund that, last May, surpassed $125 million in investments.

© 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.