FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Minted, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace accelerated by Cronos Labs, launched on Thursday and said it had entered into a tie-up with exchange giant Crypto.com.

While other NFT marketplaces exist on Cronos, Minted allows blue-chip NFT projects such as Moonbirds, Otherdeeds and other popular NFTs that are often Ethereum-based to be listed alongside Cronos-based ones. The platform will support over 10 million NFTs across 2,800 projects.  

As part of its partnership, Minted will facilitate all secondary trades of Cronos-based NFTs originally sold on Crypto.com.  

The marketplace allows users to list their Ethereum-based NFTs for a reward in the form of $MTD, the platform’s native token. $MTD can then be staked for a certain amount of time to earn yield on it. Popular NFTs, such as Moonbirds and Otherdeeds, or rare NFTs earn the user greater rewards than others.  

Other NFT marketplaces have offered users rewards for listing NFTs in the past, such as Looksrare. However, Looksrare saw high amounts of wash-trading before fading from popularity, The Block previously reported.  

A Minted project manager who pseudonymously goes by Marco, told The Block that the platform has parameters in place to deter users from milking rewards. One such way is to incentivize users to price their NFTs fairly rather than charging too much or too little for it. If they list the NFT as two times the floor price, they get one times the points, Marco explains. But if they list it as 1.1 times the floor price, they get twice the points. 

In all, Minted intends to be multi-chain with Ethereum and Cronos from the start, and to deliver a more deliberate experience for users, Cronos managing director Ken Timsit told The Block.  

“The idea is just to build more carefully a set of features for creators, for brands and for users that offer an NFT experience that’s more curated and careful.”  

© 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 Ethereum Foundation discussed possible dates for The Merge on a Consensus Layer Call today, as it prepares for one of the most anticipated events across the industry and in Ethereum’s history.

The Merge will move Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake. It’s split into two upgrades: Bellatrix and Paris. The second part is when The Merge fully occurs. Paris will happen when the network reaches a certain total terminal difficulty (TTD), which relates to the network’s hash rate.

During the call, the core developers debated which dates would be most suitable to target and consensus fell roughly on dates for the two main upgrades. They found agreement on the 144896 epoch for the Bellatrix upgrade, meaning it would land on September 6. The date for Paris that they currently would like to target is September 15.

These dates are not definitive and may get tweaked in the coming days and weeks. Some of the dates may also change due to block times and hash rate fluctuations. The developers added that the foundation will put out a blog post on August 23 with data on client releases.

The Merge is planned to take place after the Bellatrix mainnet upgrade but before the end of September. If the Ethereum hash rate drops significantly — which would result in slower block times and push back the expected time for The Merge — then there might be a manual override.

The Merge aims to solve many of the core problems the industry faces today with security, scalability, and environmental sustainability being the three core issues.

The discussions on timelines came shortly after a successful Goerli testnet merge on August 10, which was the final step that needed to occur successfully before mainnet launch.

© 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.

Jito Labs, a crypto startup building infrastructure to mitigate the negative impact of maximum extractable value (MEV) on Solana, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round.

Jito Labs said Multicoin Capital and Framework Ventures co-led the round. Other investors included Alameda Research, Solana Ventures, Delphi Digital and Robot Ventures. Jito Labs shared the news with The Block on Thursday, 

Angel investors, including Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Coral founder and former Alameda Research engineer Armani Ferrante and Solana Foundation’s head of communications Austin Federa also backed the round.

MEV refers to the maximum value that can be extracted from block production over the standard block reward and gas fees by including, excluding, and changing the order of transactions in a blockchain. Jito Labs is building tools to enable Solana validators and stakers to gain MEV as opposed to trading bots, co-founder Lucas Bruder told The Block.

Trading bots often run algorithms to detect MEV opportunties and capture them. On Ethereum, for example, nearly $675 million in MEV has been withdrawn since January 2020, according to data from Flashbots, a research and development organization that works to mitigate the negative impact of MEV on Ethereum On Solana, that figure is around $60 million for this year thus far, said Bruder. As Solana’s ecosystem grows, it will result in higher MEV, according to Bruder.

Among Jito Labs’ tools is the first third-party validator client for Solana called Jito-Solana, which it says will help validators and stakers earn more rewards using a bot mitigation system.

Jito Labs can be compared with Flashbots. Like Flashbots, Jito Labs will also offer “bundles” to group transactions in order to reduce network congestion and fees.

Overall, Jito Labs aims to improve the speed and finality of transactions on Solana as well as rewards for validators and stakers. The infrastructure the firm has developed is currently being audited by Neodyme and is expected to go live within the next two months, said Bruder.

There are currently six people working for Jito Labs and Bruder plans to hire around 5 more people in the near future.

The Series A round brings Jito’s total funding to date to $12.1 million. The firm previously raised $2.1 million in seed capital which hadn’t been announced before today.

© 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.

Tornado Cash saw a massive decline in deposits and an increase in withdrawals after it was sanctioned by the US Treasury.  

Since the sanctions came down, just $6 million has been deposited into the protocol, according to data from The Block Research. This represents a 78.5% decline compared to the same length of time during the previous week. 

At the same time, users have rushed to withdraw their funds, resulting in increased volumes overall. Since the sanctions were announced, $62 million has been withdrawn from the protocol, decreasing the amount of crypto held in its addresses by 15%. Out of that, $14.7 million was withdrawn in the first three hours alone. 

The sanctions have had other impacts on the protocol’s users. Circle has frozen $75,000 of USDC that was sitting in the addresses, crypto infrastructure services have started limiting access to the protocol and the decentralized exchange dYdX has started blocking accounts tied to it. 

Beyond this, one user appeared to protest the sanctions by sending small amounts of ether from sanctioned wallets to wallets belonging to notable crypto individuals and celebrities, including Jimmy Fallon, Logan Paul, Randi Zuckerberg and Shaq. 

© 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.

Bitcoin miner Hut 8 reported a net loss of C$88.1 million (about $69 million) and 17.8% decline in revenue to C$43.9 ($34.3 million) in the second quarter of 2022.

The company’s financial results were affected by the lower average bitcoin price and increased average power costs, it said in a report published Thursday.

“We have been anticipating market volatility for nearly a year and took proactive measures to successfully navigate the current downturn through the balance of the cycle,” said CEO Jaime Leverton.

Hut 8 grew its hash rate by 9.5% to 2.78 exahash per second (EH/s) as of the end of the second quarter. It has also ramped up capacity at three of its sites in Canada (North Bay, Drumheller and Medicine Hat).

The company mined 946 Bitcoin in the second quarter and increased its bitcoin holdings by 14.6% to 7,406 BTC.

The miner has also been growing its high-performance computing business, which accounted for $4.7 million of its revenue last quarter.

© 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 trading app from Structure.fi is landing in El Salvador as it hopes to expand access to crypto and traditional investing to people worldwide.

Structure.Fi aims to remove barriers to investing, Structure.fi’s president and co-founder Bryan Hernandez told The Block in an interview. The platform is designed to combine crypto assets with tokenized stocks and ETFs without any minimum requirements or transaction fees. 

The company, which says it is participating in the British Virgin Islands’ regulatory sandbox, closed a $20 million funding round in December that included seed funding from Polychain Capital and proceeds from a sale of its $STXR token. The company was founded in 2020 by alumni of MIT and Jump Trading, according to its website.

“El Salvador will be the first official jurisdiction that we go to, but our goal is to cover the globe in as many countries as possible, Hernandez said. The company is working on getting the regulatory compliance to operate in each country — it supports 98 so far — and working to get the word out about the app in key markets. It also mentions Mexico, Nigeria and India as countries it is prioritizing in its rollout. While the Structure app is not geo-restricted, it goes through KYC/AML protocols and cannot be fully used for trading in every country. 

The Structure app allows users to invest in crypto assets, and plans to roll out a feature in the next month or two that will allow users to “tokenize” stocks like Tesla or Apple on a blockchain. Structure.fi hopes this will make it easy to trade between stocks and crypto assets like bitcoin or ether. The Structure app supports 28 stock tokens and 37 crypto tokens, according to its website. 

According to the company, “every tokenized asset that its users access on the platform is backed 1-to-1 and held in Structure.fi’s custody.”

El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has focused the country’s crypto ambitions on bitcoin, which he made legal tender in the country alongside the US dollar last September. However, Structure.Fi’s press release features a statement from El Salvador’s Presidential Commissioner for Strategic Projects Cristian Flores that highlights decentralized finance (DeFi). 

“The decentralization of finance is the next logical step for the crypto revolution, along with the access to the internet and the infrastructure provided by blockchain,” Flores said in the statement.“DeFi will bring prosperity to El Salvador and beyond,” he added. 

Hernandez clarified in an interview with The Block that there is no official partnership between Structure.Fi and El Salvador’s government at this time. Rather, the app is now available for people there to use. The startup has been working on blockchain education initiatives with the government, a spokesperson told The Block.

© 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.

Investment giant T. Rowe Price has appointed Blue Macellari as its head of digital assets strategy.

She will be leading both the development and implementation of the firm’s crypto strategy, according to a post on LinkedIn on Wednesday, which ended with the words “this is what adoption looks like.” 

Founded in 1937, T. Rowe Price is an American investment firm with over $1.3 trillion assets under management. It offers a range of investment products across equities, fixed income and the alternative asset classes. 

Macellari joins T. Rowe from Dunamis Trading, a crypto hedge fund where she helped launch a “market neutral” crypto trading strategy, according to LinkedIn. She previously worked as an emerging markets strategist and specialist at a range of investment firms from Elliott Investment Management to TD Securities and Lone Star Funds. 

Compared to some other investment firms, T. Rowe has been more cautious on crypto. For example, Fidelity, which oversees $4.2 trillion, launched a digital assets arm as long ago as 2018. News of Macellari’s appointment came as BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment manager, launched a product offering institutional clients exposure to spot bitcoin.

A spokesperson for T. Rowe told Blockworks in April that current client mandates were not well suited for investing directly in digital assets. This spokesperson’s comments came as part of a wider discussion on a T. Rowe survey, which found that 40% of 2,000 children believed crypto is the future of investing. 

The company’s CEO, William Stromberg, shared a similarly cautious perspective in an April 2021 interview with the Baltimore Business Journal. He said “it’s early days” when it comes to offering crypto investing to clients but acknowledged that the firm was researching the space. 

T. Rowe Price didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Block. 

© 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.

Decentralized communications platform Satellite IM announced it has closed a $10.5 million seed round. 

Leading the round are Framework Ventures and Multicoin, according to a release on Thursday. Other investors include Solana Ventures, IDEO CoLab, Hashed and Pioneer Square Labs Ventures. 

Founded in 2020 by Christopher Hogan and Thomas McArdle, Satellite IM is a decentralized communications platform that enables peer-to-peer private messaging.  

The startup is planning to provide early access to its desktop application this summer, which will support 4K video chats and the sharing of up to 4GB files, according to the release.  

The desktop application is built on top of InterPlanetary File System, which is a peer-to-peer storage network. 

Satellite IM’s protocol is also Ethereum virtual machine compatible, and the platform is made such that developers can build on top of it and easily integrate with multiple layer 1 blockchains, per the release. 

“Discord is trying to serve too many different types of communities with diverse sets of needs,” said Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, in the release. “Satellite is going to serve crypto communities by offering best in class crypto-native features, along a credibly-neutral, decentralized back end.” 

In the fall, Satellite IM plans to release its mobile-native application called UpLink. 

The startup eventually plans to implement a revenue model that is similar to what is applied by the Apple app store, according to a spokesperson for the company.

Developers will be able to build applications in the system and access Satellite’s user base in return for a cut of the revenue, they added.

© 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.

Investment manager BlackRock has launched a private trust offering US-based institutional clients exposure to spot bitcoin.

The trust will be available to US-based institutional clients and will be BlackRock’s first product that offers direct exposure to the price of bitcoin.

“Despite the steep downturn in the digital asset market, we are still seeing substantial interest from some institutional clients in how to efficiently and cost-effectively access these assets using our technology and product capabilities,” BlackRock said in a statement.

On August 4, BlackRock announced a deal with crypto exchange Coinbase to offer institutional investors access to crypto, beginning with bitcoin. BlackRock, which manages around $9 trillion of customer funds, will use Coinbase Prime to provide the service.

This comes just a year after BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said that the asset manager was seeing very little demand for digital assets.

Earlier in 2021, BlackRock filed that its Global Allocation fund had gained some exposure to bitcoin, through CME’s bitcoin futures offering. This came two months after two BlackRock funds, including the Blackrock Global Allocation Fund, indicated in regulatory filings that they would potentially obtain exposure to crypto markets by way of CME’s bitcoin futures product.

© 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.

Slope Finance says there is no “conclusive evidence” tying the major Solana hack to the wallet’s own security flaw, according to a statement by the Solana wallet provider on Thursday. It is still investigating the attack but said that auditors are nearing their conclusions.

Slope wallet users — and others — were victims of a malicious exploit earlier in August that led to the theft of over $4 million in solana (SOL) tokens from more than 9,000 addresses. Solana researchers traced the hack to a vulnerability in the Slope mobile wallets where seed phrases were stored in plain text.

Even though Slope acknowledged there was indeed a vulnerability, it remains skeptical that this was the cause of the hack.

According to Slope, while the security flaw did exist, the number of wallet addresses drained in the attack exceeded the number of Slope’s compromised addresses. Plus it only found that 1,444 of its compromised addresses were drained, far fewer than the total number that were drained.

The Solana wallet provider also stated that, despite the vulnerability, access to the server — where the seed phrase information was stored in plain text — was protected by end-to-end encryption. This server also had an additional three-factor authentication protocol set up for granting access, the statement added.

Based on these reasons, Slope said, “there is no conclusive evidence from the auditors to link the Slope vulnerability to the exploit.”

Slope said its investigations did not find any additional security issues. As such, the wallet provider says the latest patched version of the Slope wallet is safe for use. Slope did, however, decry the events of last week in its statement adding that the existence of the security flaw alone was enough to put user funds in danger.

“This is nowhere near the security standard that Slope set out to establish and maintain, and we are deeply regretful of these occurrences. Security is paramount to us, and our user base is everything. We should never have let this happen,” today’s announcement stated.

Following the hack, Slope offered a 10% bounty to the attackers if they returned the stolen funds.

© 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.