FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Safe, formerly Gnosis Safe, a decentralized crypto custodian, has announced that its SAFE token airdrop is now live with over 43,000 users eligible to claim the coins.

The airdrop is part of the launch of SafeDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization that emerged following Gnosis Safe’s rebrand to Safe. Eligible users have until 12:00 AM CET on Dec. 27, 2022, to claim their SAFE tokens. Users can claim the tokens on both the Safe mobile and web app.

The airdrop amounts to about 18% of the SAFE token supply of one billion coins. The remaining tokens will be distributed among core contributors, backers, ecosystem guardians, and GnosisDAO.

SAFE token holders will now have voting power on SafeDAO. Token holders can also delegate their voting power to guardians whose interests align with theirs on governance DAO governance issues.

“We are excited to finally hand over the ownership of Safe to the community through the Safe token and SafeDAO,” said Safe co-founder Lukas Schor, adding, “As a public good and fundamental infrastructure for web3, we know that only decentralized governance can guarantee the long-term neutrality of the project.”

The DAO held a community challenge to remove sybil airdrop hunters — people who interact with projects solely in the hopes of claiming future airdrops. They do so by creating many wallet addresses that perform one transaction on these projects so as to qualify for any future retroactive airdrop. These airdrop hunters often sell the tokens immediately upon receiving them, an action that can drive down the price of the coin. SafeDAO announced that it removed over 12,000 addresses tied to sybil airdrop hunters, saving 2.9 million SAFE tokens in the process.

© 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.

OpenSea has paid $200,000 in bounty rewards to two ethical hackers who discovered separate critical vulnerabilities in the NFT marketplace in the last ten days. Each hacker was individually rewarded $100,000.

The first was paid to Corben Leo, a security expert and chief marketing officer at security firm Zellic, who said that he received $100,000 on Monday for having discovered a critical OpenSea vulnerability via the bug bounty platform HackerOne. 

Had it not been found, the critical bug could have been potentially exploited by malicious hackers to steal assets, Leo told The Block. “It was a vulnerability affecting their web services. It would’ve allowed an attacker to compromise OpenSea’s infrastructure,” he said.

Another anonymous whitehat hacker, who goes by Nix, told The Block that OpenSea also rewarded them $100,000 for reporting another critical vulnerability on 19 September, though Nix did not provide additional details.

“The vulnerability report and any details around it are confidential,” Nix said. This bug was also flagged on the HackerOne platform.

A spokesperson for OpenSea confirmed to The Block that these bounties were genuine, adding that respective patches to the vulnerabilities have been issued. They said that the firm was satisfied in seeing the bounty program with HackerOne working as intended.

 “We’re pleased to see the community’s engagement with this program, and even more excited that our average response and patch times have gotten much faster since the program’s launch in October 2021,” the spokesperson said.

OpenSea is the largest NFT marketplace on Ethereum in terms of daily volume. But the platform has previously faced user interface issues and security vulnerabilities that have resulted in loss of user assets.

To deal with these issues, OpenSea entered a program with HackerOne, a crowdfunded ethical hacking platform designed to help companies discover and fix basic vulnerabilities before they can be misused.

As part of the program, OpenSea offers bounty rewards in tiers according to how serious the threat is. For instance, a “low” level smart contract bug can earn a whitehat up to $6,000, while a “critical” one can lead to a prize of up to $100,000 — the exact amount that was awarded in the two instances. The bug bounty program from OpenSea is still live on HackerOne.

© 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.

DAOs are in a precarious position right now — as is anyone who has ever voted in a decentralized autonomous organization that provides any sort of financial service.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC’s) federal civil enforcement action against Ooki DAO in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is a big statement by an agency that wants to show that DAOs are not a viable means of evading responsibility. In fact, they might be a particularly high-risk way of running a financial service. 

It’s not a done deal — the case still needs to go to court — but, if the CFTC has its way, it could have large implications for the hundreds of thousands of people who have voted in DAOs, and for the DAOs themselves. 

We sat down (virtually) with Matthew Nyman, a lawyer who works in the Banking and International Finance practice at CMS London and specializes in cryptocurrency and decentralized finance, to dive deeper into its potential ramifications.

An issue of liability

He started by saying these concerns are nothing new.

“This is something which lawyers and people in the DAO community have been talking about for years now. So that’s why this is just such a huge case,” said Nyman.

Nyman explained that lawyers have already been warning that DAOs could be conceived as partnerships or unincorporated associations, so the CFTC’s latest move did not astonish them  — but they will be watching to see the outcomes in court. 

Nyman noted that he hoped the DAO will have sufficient funds to defend itself, so that both sides of the issue are presented in court and would lead to a fair outcome, rather than letting the CFTC establish a potentially bad precedent.

One question this court case might raise is the issue of liability, Nyman said. He explained that, for an unincorporated association, each member is liable for the actions of any other member of that group — and they all have unlimited liability. Companies were created to protect individuals and reduce their liability. He asked whether this should also apply to DAOs.

The other key issue is whether a group of people operating through pseudonymous wallets connected via software counts as a group of people banding together. He questioned that, if this is the case, do we need a new legal approach to support this?

Caught in a Catch-22

Were the CFTC to get its way, this could place DAOs in a tricky legal situation.

Nyman pointed to one of the issues highlighted in Commissioner Summer Mersinger’s letter of dissent, which disagreed with the way the agency was approaching the enforcement. The fundamental problem is that DAOs, by their very nature, couldn’t be compliant with CFTC rules. This would effectively outlaw this type of construct for any purposes related to financial tools that come under the CFTC’s purview.

“They’re kind of putting the DAO in a Catch-22 situation where just because they’re a DAO doesn’t mean they’re not subject to the jurisdiction of the CFTC. But actually, because they’re a DAO, they probably can’t comply and therefore there’s no way for them to be compliant,” Nyman said.

Yet, while DAOs are largely decentralized, and members can drop in and out of the governance forums and participate as much as they wish — since it’s not just code — there are people that the CFTC can go after. This shows that, if the regulators can find some centralized element involving people in some capacity, they will try to find a way of holding those people liable. “And that’s exactly what the CFTC is doing,” Nyman said.

Nyman added that the issue is a lack of decentralization. He considered that you could have some form of offline governance — such as having individuals upload alternative pieces of code to improve protocols — rather than having token holders vote on what should be approved. This would be more akin to the way protocols are developed, where anyone can hard fork the network and make their own changes.

DAOs have two paths forward

For now, DAOs will need to wait to see what happens in court — and if the Ooki DAO fights back against the charges. If the charges do go ahead in their current form, DAOs offering financial services will only really have two options, according to Nyman.

First, DAOs might take the legal route and set up operations in jurisdictions that support DAOs as legal entities, such as Wyoming or the Marshall Islands. There, DAOs can go into a legal wrapper, he explained — but he asked whether other jurisdictions would respect such entities.

The other option is that DAOs might embrace anonymity and seek to obfuscate activity related to people. “Obviously, it’s a very high-risk legal territory there that will kind of push activity underground,” Nyman said.

The consequence of taking the latter approach is that it would stop DAOs from being able to engage with regulated legal entities. For example, MakerDAO is currently engaging with Huntingdon Valley Bank, a U.S.-based regulated bank founded in 1871, to let the bank borrow dai tokens. This kind of cooperation would not be possible were DAOs to operate fully outside of the regulatory system, Nyman explained.

Still, there is a silver lining to the CFTC’s decision to go after DAOs, Nyman noted: “I think this creates some kind of legal tension, which will motivate people to push for legislative change — because they now have the risk.”

© 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 92 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Sky Mavis Co-Founder and Growth Lead Jeff Zirlin.

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.

Last year, Sky Mavis’ Axie Infinity inspired an entire genre of ‘play-to-earn’ crypto games.

In recent months however, the volume of in-game NFT sales has been in decline as data from The Block shows: 

In this episode of The Scoop, Sky Mavis Co-Founder and Growth Lead Jeff Zirlin explains why he believes the core Axie community is stronger than ever, and how Axie Infinity’s in-game economy will become less reliant on speculative activity.

According to Zirlin, the key to developing Axie’s in-game economy “away from play-to-earn to something that’s more play-and-own,” is to give people reasons to invest in the game for purposes other than pure speculation:

“We need to have emotional spending within these digital economies — people need to be spending for emotions that can be linked to the seven sins like wrath and greed, sloth… it can’t it can’t be everyone just coming in and expecting to get a free lunch.”

Although Axie’s NFT trading volume is down from last year’s highs, Zirlin points out that the current levels are still significantly higher than they were before the bull market mania of last year:

“People poured into Axie because it was the main thing that was working and the best product on the market. Now we’re seeing a return to reality, but we’re still at a much higher zone of adoption than we were prior to all the madness.”

During this episode, Chaparro and Zirlin also discuss:

• How Axie Infinity is impacting the world of esports
• Why Axie’s in-game economy is similar to emerging market countries
• What new game mechanics are being introduced to develop user behavior

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Tron, Chainalysis & IWC Schaffhausen

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 |

About Chainalysis
Chainalysis is the leading blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

About IWC Schaffhausen
IWC Schaffhausen is a Swiss luxury watch manufacturer based in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Known for its unique engineering approach to watchmaking, IWC combines the best of human craftsmanship and creativity with cutting-edge technology and processes. With collections like the Portugieser and the Pilot’s Watches, the brand covers the whole spectrum from elegant timepieces to sports watches. For more information, visit IWC.com.

© 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.

Filip Dragoslavic has been involved in his share of Solana projects. A blockchain explorer, a digital wallet provider and a prize-winning decentralized fund management platform called Solrise. To say he’s a fan would be to state the obvious.  

That was before one of his investors nudged him in the direction of a brand new blockchain, Aptos, that billed itself as cheaper and faster than the rest.  

“We were actually dead set on staying just Solana,” Dragoslavic explained in a recent interview, citing the blockchain’s potential to go “mainstream.”  

But Dragoslavic and his team – drawn by the simplicity of the chain’s technical documentation – hunkered down over a weekend and decided to test out this new chain. Two days later, what was recently unveiled as Rise Wallet was well on its way.  

“We’ve seen that we could do 90% as a proof of concept build just over the weekend,” Dragoslavic said. “We had a fully functioning app as well … everything that we have in SolFlare, that we have been building for the last two years, now we have an app like over the weekend but just as a proof-of-concept.”  

Dragoslavic’s team aren’t the only ones flirting with Aptos. Many Solana developers are window shopping on the blockchain and investors are throwing money at it. FTX, a16z and Multicoin Capital have all contributed to the $350 million Aptos has raised even as other projects saw their funding dry up as the bear market took hold.  

Aptos sets itself apart in several ways. It is built on Move, a programming language that builds on Rust — which is used in the Solana blockchain — and implements novel methods of parallel execution, which is the ability to execute tasks at the same time, making transactions faster and cheaper.   

The Move language also enables Aptos to use a resource model where assets can be subject to restrictions, meaning, for instance, that they cannot be copied or accidently destroyed, helping to avoid some of the common smart contract attacks that occur on existing blockchains.  

“Developing on Solana, especially in the early days, was like a nine out of 10 complexity,” said Dragoslavic, describing his co-founder’s reaction to building on the chain. “Developing on Move in Aptos is like a four out of 10 complexity.” 

Solana’s struggles

It wasn’t so long ago that Solana occupied Aptos’s position as the next big thing in blockchain. Last year, it raised $314.15 million in a private token sale and secured high praise publicly from investors. It was billed as the latest of the “Ethereum killers,” based on its faster speeds and lower costs compared to the more popular Layer 1 chain. Instead, it has struggled with frequent outages and frustrations from developers.   

Venture funding for projects built on the Solana blockchain is now shifting toward non-fungible token (NFTs) and gaming use cases, instead of DeFi trading, according to data from The Block Research.   

Solana funding from The Block Research

“I’m not sure it’s necessarily a move in terms of there’s less money going to DeFi than there used to be,” said Austin Federa, head of communications at the Solana foundation. “There’s definitely a much broader scope of projects that are receiving significant funding on the network.”  

Developers tire of “eating glass”

Aptos was founded by Avery Ching and Mo Shaik, both of whom are refugees from Facebook’s Diem project. It’s only in the testnet stage but has over 100,000 members on its Discord and is supported by over 20,000 nodes, demonstrating its burgeoning developer community.  Then there’s the blue-chip crypto backers that riddle its cap table. 

But Aptos’s momentum is most visible in both the projects and developers, like Dragoslavic and his team, dipping their toes in the chain even as they continue to work with Solana.  

The Solana blockchain explorer and indexing provider SolanaFM is hoping to take full advantage of this trend. The startup recently raised $4.5 million in seed funding and now plans to expand to Aptos alongside continuing to develop on Solana.  

“If the Solana devs are moving towards Aptos, then its users probably move into Aptos as well,” said Fathur Rahman, co-founder and chief operating officer of SolanaFM in a recent interview. “And they get the same experience when they interact with DeFi, NFT or even the explorer because they already know how to interact with it in Solana.”  

The tech stack is what’s driving many developers to Aptos, Fathur said. The developer experience on Solana can be challenging. Backers like FTX and Jump Crypto have supported Solana hackathons to help build out its developer community. Still, Solana’s own CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has equated building on Solana to “eating glass.”  

The founders of NFT trading platform Souffl3 didn’t go that far, but they did call the experience isolating. They left Solana last month, betting on the Aptos ecosystem and rebuilding Souffl3 on the chain.  

“Technically speaking, Move, which is used by Aptos, offers a programming experience that is noticeably less choppy and more intuitive than Rust,” said Alex Funke, Souffl3’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “As Move has a straightforward syntax and a comprehensive stdlib library, it requires far less code during development to accomplish the same goals as Rust.” 

Edith Yeung, a venture investor at Race Capital and prominent Solana backer, notes that while some projects within her portfolio have considered jumping to Aptos for its technical benefits, there are other reasons.  

Aptos announced announced a grant program in June. A spokeswoman for the blockchain said the money has gone to select teams that have shown dedication to the ecosystem over time and that have clear milestones in place to ensure long-term alignment with it.  

“Developers sometimes will be like, ‘Awesome, you’re giving a free grant, let me build on it,’ and they will try it,” Race Capital’s Yeung said. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you are a NFT project or a DeFi project, if you do build something you want there to be enough users, right?”  

Of the projects The Block spoke with, both Souffl3 and Rise Wallet confirmed they did not receive a grant. SolanaFM declined comment.  

The layer 1 wars aren’t over yet

The Solana Foundation’s Federa said it isn’t surprising to see projects expand to Aptos as a multichain future is still top of mind for many projects and founders. Still, Solana is taking steps to make life easier on developers. Work from the Coral team has helped create an easier framework to develop on Solana. Improved documentation and community events are also playing a role in this shift. 
 
Better still, Federa notes, is that the blockchain is designed in a way that can support onboarding multiple languages. Solana will be adding the Move programming language that makes Aptos so appealing in the next six to nine months.  

While Aptos is certainly getting people’s attention, it’s still early days for the nascent Layer 1. Vance Spencer, an investor at crypto native VC firm Framework Ventures, said none of his portfolio companies were looking to jump ship. He’s yet to be convinced by the Aptos hype. 

“Solana tried, Avalanche tried, Harmony, Fantom, all of these different chains,” Spencer said. “There’s a huge incentive for VCs to [say,] ‘We can build an Ethereum killer,’ but the reality is that they just have not worked.” 

Its backers say Aptos wants to be a more generalist blockchain, aiming to enable enterprise scale transactions like NFT trading or micro-payments. Investors view these enterprise use cases as a way to onboard non-crypto native institutions into the space, according to Sharvin Baindur, chief of staff at Saison Capital 

“The L1 wars are still not over,’’ Baindur said. “We are just keeping an eye on everything right now.” 

© 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.com has been given the nod to operate as a Digital Asset Service Provider (DASP) in France by the country’s top financial regulators.

The approvals from the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) and the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (ACPR) come following checks on its procedures for AML and countering the financing of terrorism, according to an emailed statement on Wednesday. 

“The European market is critical to Crypto.com’s long-term growth and success and we are extremely proud to have received AMF approval in France,” Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com, said in the statement. 

French regulators had also approved rival exchange Binance and the Digital Currency Group-owned Luno to operate in the country earlier this year.

This year Crypto.com has pushed for regulatory approvals across the world. In July, the exchange gained approval to operate in Italy. A month later the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority added the firm to its cryptoasset register.

It also recently received registration in Greece from the Hellenic Capital Market Commission and in-principle approval for a Major Payment Institution License from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, as well as provisional approval of its Virtual Asset License from the Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority.

The exchange says it has more than 50 million users worldwide. 

© 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 digital euro issued by the European Central Bank (ECB) “will not be used for commercial purposes,” according to Christine Lagarde, the central bank’s president.

The ECB provides “the guarantee that those payments will not be exploited for commercial purposes,” Lagarde said on Wednesday at a conference in Frankfurt when talking about the possibilities of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) . “This is not the business of a central bank.”

The ECB president referred back to a survey from January 2021, which was rolled out ahead of launching its digital euro investigation, that privacy ranked at the top of European respondents’ list of features expected from a digital currency.

Lagarde said that a digital euro is essentially a bank note “with a little less anonymity,” but she promised that — unlike companies that sell data collected through payments — a European CBDC would protect citizens. 

Any U.S. CBDC would also have a focus on privacy, if adopted, Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, said on Tuesday.

Privacy-protection is one of the four CBDC characteristics Powell named, alongside intermediated, identity-verified and interoperable. However, the U.S. central bank has “not decided to proceed” with a CBDC for now.

The ECB’s digital euro prototype, on the other hand, is in the works. The central bank announced the five partner companies that will help build the trial payment system earlier this month. The evaluation and results of the project are expected in March 2023.

© 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.

OneKey, a crypto hardware wallet maker based in Hong Kong, has raised around $20 million in a Series A funding round.

Announcing the news on Twitter on Wednesday, OneKey said the round was led by Dragonfly and Ribbit Capital. Other investors in the round included Coinbase Ventures, Framework Ventures, Sky9 Capital, Folius Ventures and Ethereal Ventures. Angel investors, including Santiago Santos and Feng Liu, also backed the round.

In addition to the Series A funding, OneKey has also closed a round of “small funding” with participation from IOSG Ventures, according to a tweet from Yishi Wang, core contributor at OneKey.

OneKey claims its code is totally open source. If a crypto wallet doesn’t operate this way, it could hide a backdoor that could compromise the security of customer assets, according to OneKey. “OneKey is, to date, the only hardware wallet in the world that is 100% open source and uses a certified secure chip,” Wang tweeted today.

Founded in 2020, OneKey claims to be the number one hardware wallet in the Eastern Hemisphere. Wang said OneKey has taken custody of billions of dollars in crypto assets and continues to grow rapidly, citing “incomplete 3rd-party statistics.”

He went on to say that many employees at rival wallet makers Ledger, Alchemy and Infura are using OneKey’s devices, citing data from the firm’s shipped orders.

To continue growing, OneKey is looking to add support for more blockchains in the near future. Wang said OneKey will add around 40 new networks per year to cover all public blockchains and “help users stake and store their crypto assets and NFTs.”

There are currently about 30 people working for OneKey and the firm plans to stay lean. “OneKey is very conscious of controlling the burn rate and prioritizing long-term profitability,” Wang said, adding that the firm currently does not have any plans for a native token.

© 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.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen may be leaving office after the midterm elections in November, Axios first reported, without giving a specific source.

The White House did not confirm that Yellen and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese are expected to leave the administration.

Yellen in May cited the TerraUSD collapse in support of new stablecoin legislation; however, she has generally shown restraint in public on crypto regulation guidance.

Deese, who spoke of the benefits behind working with the digital asset community to mitigate risks and harness the benefits of digital assets this month, has drawn criticism as the Biden administration has stepped up enforcement efforts.

Yellen, who has served as Treasury secretary since January 2021, has not said she has any plans to leave the administration, a spokesperson 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.

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is considering bidding on bankrupt Celsius Network’s assets, Bloomberg reported late Tuesday.

The cryptocurrency exchange is also working on closing a $1 billion funding round that has not yet been announced, the business news outlet also reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. 

Now-former Celsius Network CEO Alex Mashinsky stepped down earlier on Tuesday after the company’s creditor committee called for his removal.

Celsius’ native token, CEL, plunged below $1.40 following the news of Mashinsky ‘s departure. However, the digital asset bounced back more than 15% from its lowest 24-hour point after the Bloomberg report, CoinDesk reported late Tuesday. 

FTX won an auction for Voyager Digital’s assets on Sept. 26, with a bid coming in at about $1.4 billion.

© 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.