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Crypto firm Chain signed a multi-year deal to be an official blockchain and web3 sponsor for the New England Patriots football team.

The company also will sponsor soccer team New England Revolution, Gillette Stadium and the nearby center Patriot Place, it said in a statement Thursday.

“The Patriots and Revolution, along with our tech partners, have always strived to be leaders in innovation,” said Murray Kohl, vice president of sales for Kraft Sports + Entertainment, which has partnered with Chain on the deal. “We’ll look to innovate that same way with web3. Our fans will be able to connect with the Patriots and Revolution in ways never before possible.”

Specifically, Chain will help Gillette Stadium build “compelling, one-of-a-kind experiences into this new world,” it said.

The blockchain-based company builds cryptographic ledgers and cloud infrastructure, having raised more than $40 million from backers like Citigroup, Capital One and Visa, according to its website.

Across the world of sports, several other crypto companies have scored big deals. FTX reportedly paid e-sports team TSM $210 million last year to change its name to TSM FTX. That’s on the lower end compared to the $700 million deal that saw the Staples Center in Los Angeles renamed Crypto.com Arena.

Coinbase and FTX, two of the biggest exchanges, both got attention for their ads during the Super Bowl this year. The former featured a QR code on the screen, leading viewers to a giveaway, and the latter ran a two-minute video with comedian Larry David.

More recently, crypto exchange OKX closed a deal with English Premier League champions Manchester City to get its logo featured on the team’s training kit for the 2022/2023 soccer season. 

© 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 anti-money laundering bill introduced in the UK today is intended to make it easier for law enforcement to seize digital assets, as part of a broader crackdown on money laundering. 

“Domestic and international criminals have for years laundered the proceeds of their crime and corruption by abusing UK company structures, and are increasingly using cryptocurrencies,” said National Crime Agency Director General Graeme Biggar in a release touting the bill. “These reforms – long awaited and much welcomed – will help us crack down on both.”

After its first reading of the new bill took place today in the House of Commons, a second reading is anticipated for October 13, the next necessary step for the bill to become law.

The effort is part of a broader crackdown on illicitly gained funds and assets parked in the UK, an issue that came to the forefront following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian oligarchs have long lived in and parked assets in the country, which began sanctioning and seizing those assets – including Chelsea Football Club – as part of an effort to punish Russian leadership and cut off financial means to continue the war. 

In addition to addressing cryptocurrencies, the bill also calls for people registering a company in the U.K. to verify their identities, and amps up the power in the hands of the national registrar, Companies House, to monitor and crosscheck the legitimacy of companies, an effort to limit the use of shell companies to launder money. 

Newly-enthroned King Charles III had promised new anti-money laundering measures while delivering the final Queen’s Speech, an annual agenda-setting address to Parliament, which he delivered on behalf of his recently deceased mother, Queen Elizabeth II. 

© 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

• Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus was largely uneventful from a technical perspective with no major issues materializing during the upgrade. 
• Proof-of-work ETH fork coins are now liquid on a relatively limited basis. 
• Delta-neutral positioning prior to The Merge has begun to rapidly unwind.

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Congress has a shot at finalizing stablecoin legislation this year, says Congressman Warren Davidson, despite midterm elections in November breaking up the legislative calendar.

“There’s an outside chance we find a way to get to consensus on a stablecoin bill this year,” Davidson said at an Electronic Transaction Associations event on September 22. “There’s a chance we get to yes on stablecoins this year. If we don’t, it’s something that I think we can get to with a Republican majority in Q1 next year.”

A Republican from Ohio, Davidson sits on the House Financial Services Committee and is one of the longest-standing advocates for crypto within Congress. He was commenting on the latest development among committee leaders Maxine Waters, D-Cal., and Patrick McHenry, R-NC. 

Despite recent gains by Democrats, Republicans still seem set to win the House of Representatives, though the Senate remains uncertain. 

Draft legislation on stablecoins has begun circulating among committee members after missing its best shot at seeing a vote during the current congressional session, before the August recess.

Of the most recent version, Davidson lamented an excess of discretion given to the Federal Reserve, as well as what he considered overly broad definitions of stablecoins.

“If we could just narrowly focus on the stablecoin text and spend a couple of days hanging out together, we could probably get to language,” 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.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra sees stablecoins as a rapid growth area that regulators will need to monitor for risks to the rest of the financial system.

“A stablecoin, riding the rails of a dominant payments system or a mobile OS, I think that could create ubiquity very quickly,” Chopra said, adding that issues around stablecoins, “are very much being thought through, but certainly not just by the CFPB.”

The Financial Stability Oversight Council, a collection of financial regulatory agency leaders that Chopra sits on in his capacity as CFPB director, meets tomorrow to discuss a report on regulatory gaps in digital assets. Last year the group identified stablecoins as an area in need of increased monitoring.  

Chopra, speaking at the annual Washington conference of the Electronic Transactions Association, a trade group for payments service providers, listed a roster of concerns around stablecoins that has launched them onto the Washington’s radar. That included their resemblance to money market funds and their impact on global financial stability if widely and rapidly adopted for payments. The CFPB director added that high-profile stablecoin experiment Libra, which Facebook backed, brought the payments coins to the forefront for regulators. 

But overall Chopra, whose agency has recently scrutinized Buy Now, Pay Later lending and is expected to release a rule soon related to consumer control over financial data, thought government has become too obsessed with cryptocurrencies.

“We’re in a moment right now where — I say this gently — Washington’s obsession with crypto has come at the expense of really thinking about the entire payments ecosystem,” the CFPB director 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.

Lit Protocol, an open source utility, raised $13 million in new funding, the company announced on Thursday. 

The fundraising round was led by 1kx, an early-stage crypto fund, and included participation from 6th Man Ventures, A Capital and OpenSea Ventures, among others. The company also drew support from nearly two-dozen individual investors, including Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen and Messari founder and CEO Ryan Selkis.

Lit Protocol launched in January with the goal of “building an open source and decentralized network for access control and composability,” according to a company blog post. The cryptography network also announced a new cloud wallet app platform on Thursday.

The protocol’s new cloud wallet app platform is called Lit Programmable Key Pairs, the company said on Twitter.

Each programmable key pair is a “cloud wallet platform owned by the individual, stewarded by a decentralized network,” according to Lit Protocol.

© 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.

3Commas, an automated trading bot platform for crypto, has raised $37 million in a Series B funding round. 

The round was led by Alameda Research, Jump Capital, Target Global and Dmitry Tokarev, CEO and founder of the institutional-focused crypto firm Copper. 

Among the uses of the $37 million was the formation of a subsidiary known as DeCommas, with a focus on automating access to decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.

“We are excited to continue to build technology that democratizes access to the transformational benefits of crypto by relentlessly advancing our technology and offering a suite of developer tools to make 3Commas the destination for investment app innovation,” Yuriy Sorokin, 3Commas’s founder and CEO, said in a press statement.

3Commas raised a $3 million round, with backing from Alameda, in 2020, as The Block previously 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.

Solana’s move-to-earn web3 app Stepn released notable statistics on Thursday to mark a year in operation. 

Users logged over 67 million miles (108,017,738 kilometers) on the app, reaching an all-time high of 1 million users on Jun. 2, 2022 and a total of 4.72 million registered users. 

Stepn also earned more than $26.8 million and $122 million in the first and second quarters of 2022 respectively, The Block previously reported. 

While generating ample revenue this year, Stepn struggled to find the right tokenomic balance at certain points. As The Block Research’s Erina Azmi wrote in April, users who surpassed level 30 lost key ways to burn their tokens, which could lead to the inflation of GST, one of its in-game tokens, if not corrected. 

A breakdown of Stepn’s in-game currencies.

The stakes were high as prior play-to-earn giants like Axie Infinity experienced a drastic decline in users after its in-game token decreased in value due to inflation. Stepn saw its own decline in user in April when the price of GMT, the game’s second in-game currency, fell 80%, reducing with it the game’s monthly users from 700,000 to less than 100,000, Azmi writes. Thus, maintaining stable prices for GMT and GST were crucial. 

Throughout the year, though, Stepn implemented ways to regulate the token supply such as through token buy back and burns that reduced the amount of GMT in July, helping to make its gaming ecosystem more sustainable.

© 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 Helium Foundation has announced the migration of the Helium Network, a decentralized network powering wireless communication protocols, to the Solana blockchain after a successful community vote on the proposal. 

The network, which since its inception in 2019 has run its own Layer 1 blockchain, proposed the migration in August via a Helium Improvement Proposal, HIP70.

The move aims to scale Helium to meet the demands of builders and users, supporting a goal to accelerate the decentralized wireless network of Helium 5G and more than 945,000 Internet of Things (IoT) user-managed hotspot devices.

In a statement, Scott Sigel, COO of the Helium Foundation, said: “We have an ambitious mission of deploying and managing wireless networks at scale and moving to Solana allows us to do that.”

Helium’s migration to Solana is scheduled to occur in the fourth quarter of 2022. The Helium Foundation said it would work closely with the Solana Foundation to ensure a seamless transition.

“Solana and its primary differentiators of scalability, low cost, and energy efficiency are an ideal foundation for Helium to realize its ambitious mission. The Helium community’s vote to migrate to the Solana network is a tremendous endorsement of Solana as the foundation for the next stage of growth for the Helium ecosystem,” said Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder.

The community-approved announcement from Helium’s governing body was made possible after the HIP70 proposal gained 81.41% support from 7,447 votes as the vote came to a close early Thursday. A two-thirds majority was required for the vote to pass, with community members staking HNT tokens to participate in on-chain voting.

Helium’s shift to Solana does not impact HNT, MOBILE and IOT, which will continue to be Helium ecosystem tokens, now issued on Solana. Helium Network applications and governance will also transfer. Once the migration completes, a new version of the Helium Wallet app will be released. Users will also be able to use other wallets in the Solana ecosystem, such as Phantom or Solflare.

The news comes after Helium development company Nova Labs inked a five-year deal with T-Mobile’s 5G services to help fill the gaps in Helium’s coverage.

© 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.

Hyperlane, a startup that helps developers connect applications across different blockchains, has raised $18.5 million from web investment firm Variant.

Galaxy Digital, CoinFund, Circle, Figment, Blockdaemon, Kraken Ventures and NFX also participated in the round, according to a report by Fortune. 

The company, previously named Abacus Network, provides APIs that allow easier communication between different blockchains along with a software development kit (SDK) that can be used to build interchain applications. 

“We think, right now, there’s so much burden on the app developer to understand the nuances of the chain[s], where they can’t spend as much time on building the best app,” founder and CEO Jon Kol told Fortune. “So, we want to give them tools to give the best experience for their users.”

In the same report, Kol said the company is planning to use the funding to build the “Sovereign Consensus.” This allows developers to safely customise an application’s interchain security model. He also said that are plans for APIs for developers to send messages between chains along with another to query information between different blockchains. 

Venture capital firms continue to pour money into startups in the crypto infrastructure space. In August, Haun Ventures led a $24 million round into web3 developer platform Thirdweb. Yesterday, Coinbase Cloud also launched Node, a platform to allow developer to build and monitor blockchain applications from a single platforms. 

© 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.