FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

The Twitter account for Singapore-based non-profit Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) refuted a CoinDesk report and denied the creation of wallets after May 2022.

“LFG hasn’t created any new wallets or moved $BTC or other tokens held by LFG since May 2022,” LFG tweeted, along with the treasury’s BTC address that showed no activity beyond the indicated timeframe.

LFG refuted a report in which CoinDesk cited analytics platform CryptoQuant and claimed a wallet created for LFG on the Binance exchange on Sept. 15. In the following days 3,313 BTC were transferred to crypto exchanges, KuCoin and OKX, CoinDesk reported.

South Korean authorities reached out to exchanges OKX and Kucoin in an effort to freeze the 3,313 BTC in question, according to Coinbase.

The news comes as Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon, continues to defy South Korean courts that have issued a warrant for his arrest. Interpol yesterday issued a Red Notice for Do Kwon, but he appears to remain at large. 

© 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.

Atomyze US, a blockchain platform aiming to tokenize metals, is shutting down.

“Due to circumstances outside of our control, Atomyze (US) LLC has decided to shut down its operations and has entered a process to unwind the company,” CEO Jeanine Hightower-Sellitto told The Block in an email.

The firm was founded in 2020 with backing from Russian metal miner Nornickel, Forbes reported. It launched a beta version of its product in February of this year with tokenized platinum and palladium.

Atomyze’s model essentially would take in metal from the asset provider and hold it in a secure vault, Hightower-Sellitto said in an interview with Kitco News. Token holders would own the actual metal via the digital title, which would be “fully redeemable.”

“We’re bringing efficiency to ownership of physical materials,” Hightower-Sellitto said then. “So rather than having to go through the logistics of buying spot material on the open market, the OTC market, dealing with logistics to ship it, insurance, getting your own storage facility for it, you can actually own physical material through digital title.”

The company was hoping to target institutional investors and planning to extend its product across other types of commodities and physical assets.

“We do intend to bring a whole host of metals to market that you really can’t invest in through an ETF or through a futures contract today,” Hightower-Sellitto said. “There really isn’t any viable options for cobalt, for example, but there is huge demand for cobalt and huge interest from the investment community in that type of product.”

Atomyze Russia, which is a separate entity from Atomyze US, launched its first digital token backed by palladium produced by Nornickel, Reuters reported in July. It had gotten a greenlight from Russia’s central bank in early 2022.

“The emergence of Russia’s first industrial token marks the entry of the Russian economy into a new period — the era of tokenization,” Interros Holding President Vladimir Potanin said in a company statement quoted by Reuters. Interros Holding is both an investor of Atomyze and Nornickel’s largest shareholder, it also reported.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Most bitcoin mining stocks tracked by The Block rose on Monday.

The coin surpassed $20,000 earlier in the day, but it fell back to roughly $19,000 at around 12 p.m. EST, according to data from TradingView.

Argo went up by 13.04% on the London Stock Exchange, followed by BIT Mining (+11.62%), Greenidge Generation (+8.54%) and TeraWulf (+6.67%).

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Tuesday, Sept. 27:

© 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 California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation accused nearly a dozen crypto and decentralized finance entities of operating like Ponzi schemes and violating state securities laws.

The regulator issued desist and refrain orders against 11 entities, it announced in a press release on Tuesday. The move comes a day after the California regulator issued a cease and desist against crypto lender Nexo, part of an array of legal actions against the company by multiple states. 

“The entities in today’s actions are classic examples of high yield investment programs,” the department said, noting the entities had referral programs that were structured like pyramid schemes. “These schemes often target the latest investment vehicle of opportunity and have previously targeted oil and gas investments, cannabis investments and others.”

The department issued desist and refrain orders to Cryptos OTC Trading Platform Limited, Elevate Pass LLC, GreenCorp Investment LLC and Metafiyielders Pty Ltd. Others targeted include Pegasus, Polinur ME Limited, Remabit, Sity Trade and Sytrex Trade. The department also issued orders to Vexam Limited and World Over the Counter Limited.

All 11 entities are accused of offering and selling unqualified securities, while 10 allegedly also made material misrepresentations and omissions to investors.

The department claims nine entities were soliciting funds from investors to purportedly trade crypto assets on their behalf, while one solicited crypto assets to develop metaverse software and another claimed to be a decentralized finance platform.

© 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.

Ether derivatives soared leading up to The Merge, following the upgrade some metrics are still up on bitcoin and traders appear to be optimistic.

Ahead of The Merge, ether derivatives set milestones left and right as traders bet on Ethereum’s network upgrade. Open interest in ether options surpassed bitcoin open interest for the first time in August, as ether hurtled past $8 billion to an all-time high. 

The surge was linked to the emergence of new, more complex strategies among traders positioning themselves ahead of Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake, according to LedgePrime, a digital asset trading firm and a subsidiary arm of crypto exchange FTX. 

Meanwhile, the volume of ether futures eclipsed bitcoin futures during August. The Block’s Lars Hoffman attributed this to the carry play ahead of The Merge.

The volume of ether traded notionally on Deribit between Sept. 1 and Sept. 14 was a little more than $5 billion, LedgerPrime’s Laura Vidiella told The Block. Moreover, a significant portion of this volume came from institutions.

Block trades, a privately negotiated purchase or sale of large blocks of digital assets settled over the counter (OTC), are typically made by institutions as they’re useful for buying or selling vast amounts of cryptocurrencies without slippage affecting an asset’s market price.

As institutions tend to use block trades, these are a useful indicator of institutional activity, which accounted for a significant portion of the trading volume leading up to The Merge.

Beyond The Merge

While the price of ether has fallen since The Merge, the majority of derivatives volume trading occurred directly after the upgrade. 

Block trades made up about 40% of volume post-Merge, which was expected given that volatility fell Vidiella told The Block last week. Deribit’s volatility index fell from 116 on Sept. 14 to 95 on Sept. 17, while it’s currently at 95 according to The Block’s Data Dashboard.

Funding rates, or payments made between traders based on the difference between perpetual contract prices and spot prices, are a good indicator of investor sentiment.

Depending on open positions, long or short, traders pay for or receive funding — negative indicates traders are short, and positive implies traders are long.

Ether funding rates went negative in August, plunging to a range of around -21% on Binance to -24% on Huobi following The Merge.

Rates appear to be trending towards neutral, with rates around -5% on Huobi and -1.49% on Binance today, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard.

Furthermore, ether options open interest remains above bitcoin’s, $6.8 billion to $5.8 billion, at the time of writing.

While the volume of ether options, $11 billion, was marginally behind that of bitcoin’s, $11.6 billion, this month-to-date. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Diana Sinclair, an 18-year-old NFT artist, has signed on with the talent representative United Talent Agency (UTA), The Hollywood Reporter first reported. 

Sinclair has created work covering Black identity, racial inequities and social injustice. Late last year, Sinclair provided the video for a previously unreleased Whitney Houston track that sold as an NFT for $1 million on the Tezos-powered marketplace OneOf.

Following her signing with UTA, Sinclair is set to auction nine of her NFTs at the art auction house Christie’s. The auction will be open for bidding between Sept. 28-Oct. 11, 2022 as part of the launch for Christie’s 3.0, a platform for on-chain NFT sales, a Christie’s release said.

Sinclair joins other individual web3 artists such as Emonee LaRussa, Vinnie Hager and Andrew Wang, as well as the NFT brands Deadfellaz. 

The popular NFT project CryptoPunks was included in this list, but as UTA’s head of web3 Lesley Silverman told The Block, UTA no longer represents this project after Yuga Labs acquired the CryptoPunk intellectual property.

© 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 European Securities and Markets Agency (ESMA), a European supervisory authority, stated that it will not need to adjust regulatory standards for a pilot trading project using distributed ledger technology (DLT), clearing the next step for experimental tokenized securities trades to take place. 

The regulatory agency published its opinion in a report released on Tuesday. The report says that ESMA will monitor whether further guidance is needed to make sure transaction data is shared in existing records accurately, especially for cancelled or modified transactions. 

ESMA’s announcement comes in anticipation of the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime, which is set to kick off in March 2023. The project experiments with transacting tokenized securities in a monitored, regulated environment as a trial, bringing both traditional financial institutions and new, digital players to take part in the sandbox. 

Following this, ESMA will work on clarifying application of “regulatory technical standards”, on transparency and data reporting requirements, as well as guide stakeholders preparing for participating in the DLT Pilot Regime.

Applications to take part in the project can begin as the launch approaches in March. In the meantime, ESMA’s report indicates that “a significant number of market participants expressed interest in operating a DLT [for market infrastructure] under the DLT Pilot.”

The report included adjustments requested from respondents to ESMA’s call earlier this year. There were worries, for instance, about translating blockchain technology into traditional finance actions.

“Transaction on-chain will not necessarily occur at the same time as the settlement of the transaction,” the report reads.

The DLT Pilot Regime falls under the EU’s digital finance package rolled out in September 2020. The recently finalized Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) regulation is one of the other key regulations within that pod. 

© 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.

Zach Dexter will move up from heading FTX’s U.S. derivatives unit to take over the entire operation in the wake of president Brett Harrison’s departure, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told The Block.

The transition comes as FTX U.S. moves its headquarters from Chicago to Miami. Dexter is a longtime resident of Miami, the person said. He joined FTX U.S. in October 2021 when the company finalized its acquisition LedgerX, where he was CEO.

Harrison, who is based in Chicago according to his LinkedIn profile, announced his resignation from the president role earlier today. He said he will transfer his responsibilities and move into an advisory role at the company over the next few months.

FTX U.S. did not immediately respond to The Block’s request for comment. 

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted earlier today about the move to Miami and the city’s mayor, Francis Suarez, welcomed the exchange operator.

FTX U.S. had been looking to move to Miami since last year, The Block reported. The company already had name recognition amongst the city’s sports fans after last year securing the arena naming rights of the National Basketball Association’s Miami Heat for $135 million over 19 years.

Miami has caught the attention of crypto firms like Blockchain.com and eToro due to its business-friendly mayor and attractive tax environment.

© 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 NFT marketplace giant OpenSea has adopted support for the Layer 2 network Optimism. 

This move onboards NFT projects based on Optimism, such as Apetimism, Bored Town, Motor Headz and Optichads, the firm announced on Twitter. 

Adding Optimism-based NFT projects brings the number of supported blockchains on OpenSea up to six, after the company supported Arbitrum on September 20 of this year. 

OpenSea’s move to add support for Optimism follows a series of other changes to the marketplace, such as integrating the NFT scarcity tool OpenRarity and automatic indexing for Solana-based NFTs. 

Optimism is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling protocol built on Ethereum. Optimism launched its governance token OP on May 31 of this year, followed by an exploit in which a hacker stole 20 million OP and sent 1 million of that to Vitalik Buterin’s wallet.

© 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 committee representing customers and creditors in the Celsius bankruptcy process says it called for the removal of CEO Alex Mashinsky, according to a new court filing.

The Committee of Unsecured Creditors was conducting its own investigation into the firm and its leadership. Those findings led it to demand that Mashinsky be removed as CEO and Celsius leadership begin an orderly transition.

After receiving information from Celsius’ leadership as part of its investigation, the committee concluded that allowing Mashinsky to stay as CEO was “unacceptable and not in the best interests of the estates,” and added that, “new executive leadership was required,” the group’s lawyers wrote in a court filing today. 

Mashinsky announced his resignation this morning, a move that the committee characterized as “a positive step” to allow the bankruptcy process to move forward. 

© 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.