Unstoppable Finance, a Berlin-based startup, secured a €12.5 million ($12.8 million) round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to launch a non-custodial crypto wallet.

Other investors in the Series A round include Speedinvest, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, Backed VC, Inflection, Discovery Ventures, Fabric Ventures and Anagram, Unstoppable Finance told The Block. 

Unstoppable Finance was founded by SolarisBank founder Peter Grosskopf, former Soundcloud engineer Omid Aladini and Maximilian von Wallenberg-Pachaly, former CEO of the digital assets arm of Börse Stuttgart, Germany’s second-largest stock exchange.

Unstoppable’s wallet — called Ultimate — aims to draw on the slick user experience seen in fintech apps to attract crypto-curious retail investors. The team behind it thinks a more user-friendly experience, compared with crypto-native offerings such as MetaMask and Phantom, will draw in the masses. 

The company vets not only yield-earning protocols but also the decentralized exchanges it uses to swap tokens. Protocols can be directly accessed in-app, while existing services require users to manually connect with protocols they wish to access, according to Unstoppable’s founders. 

“What we do is integrate DeFi protocols deeply into the mobile front-end experience,” von Wallenberg-Pachaly said in an interview with The Block. “There’s no other wallet that does that.” 

While only allowing the user to access vetted protocols could be construed as adding another intermediary into the DeFi game, Lightspeed’s Banafsheh “B” Fathieh says there are already solutions in place for those who want to explore the DeFi ecosystem without such guidance. While Fathieh is part of the recently announced Faction — Lightspeed Venture’s blockchain fund — this particular deal was done via Lightspeed Ventures. 

“This product is for someone who doesn’t necessarily want to go through and read every crypto whitepaper,” she said in an interview with The Block. “The vast majority of people who want exposure to the space would really appreciate a technical set of eyes that guarantee safety.” 

Stuttering valuations

The deal, which closed in July, comes at a time when valuations are stuttering across fintech and crypto firms in both the private and public markets.

While the company chose not to disclose its valuation, von Wallenberg-Pachaly said it’s a significant step up from when it closed its seed round in October of last year. He also claims that a significant portion of those seed funds are still in the bank and that the startup’s latest raise was motivated by a desire to grow faster, with eyes on the US market. 

Non-custodial crypto wallets give users the ability to hold cryptoassets and access one’s private keys without an intermediary. The company says it has over 300,000 pre-registers on its waiting list. 

While launching initially on the Solana blockchain as an iOS app in European territories, Unstoppable plans to implement Ethereum compatibility later this year with an Android version following. Last week, the Solana blockchain was subject to a hack that exposed nearly 8,000 wallets in its ecosystem. 

© 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.

Curve Finance resolved a hack it suffered earlier today, the company said in a late-afternoon Twitter update.  

The hack was discovered when a Paradigm researcher tweeted that Curve’s front end had been compromised.

The Curve team was able to find and revert the hack, and issued a statement asking people to revoke any contract approvals on its platform.

The hacker used a Domain Name Service (DNS) spoofing hack, cloning the site and redirecting the DNS point to their IP address. Then, they added approval requests to a malicious contract to steal the funds. 

Users who had connected to Curve with their MetaMask wallet were at risk of having their funds stolen. ZachXBT, an anonymous on-chain investigator, reported that the hacker took approximately $570,000. The hacker tried moving funds through FixedFloat, a fully automatic cryptocurrency exchange on the Bitcoin Lightning Network. The exchange froze and secured roughly $200,000 of the stolen funds.

“This did not appear to be a hijack at the registrar level, but rather systems at @iwantmyname compromised themselves,” TCPShield founder Steven Ferguson tweeted. His company is a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection platform.

Curve Finance is one of the largest decentralized exchanges by total value locked (TVL), holding over $6 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.

Most bitcoin stocks declined on Tuesday, as the coin’s value fell closer to the $23,000 mark.

Bitcoin was priced at around $23,100 at market close, according to data from TradingView.

Stronghold’s stock fell by 10.25%, followed by SAI.TECH (-9.78%) and Mawson Infrastructure Group (-8.19%).

CleanSpark posted $29.3 million net losses in its most recent quarter ending in June and announced that it is exiting the energy business. The company also said that it acquired a 36-megawatt mining facility in Georgia. The miner was down by 5.26% at the end of the trading session

Cipher Mining’s stock rose 2.36% after the miner announced in the morning that it completed a 40-megawatt wind-powered site in Texas.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Tuesday, August 9:

© 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 exchange CoinFLEX has filed for restructuring in Seychelles, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. 

CoinFLEX announced the restructuring process in emails to customers on Tuesday. “It will seek approval from depositors and court on a proposal to issue depositors with rvUSD tokens, equity, and locked FLEX Coin,” Bloomberg said.

“We look forward to welcoming a new group of shareholders to CoinFLEX and are glad to be in a jurisdiction where we can quickly resolve this situation and return maximum value to depositors,” CoinFLEX CEO Mark Lamb told Bloomberg. 

The restructuring motion was filed as the company sought to “resolve a shortfall due to a counterparty failing to make a margin call,” according to the Bloomberg report.   

CoinFLEX suspended withdrawals on June 23, citing “extreme market conditions and continued uncertainty involving a counterparty.” Several days later, Lamb accused investor Roger Ver of defaulting on a loan agreement worth $47 million in USDC. But Ver denied the accusation, saying he was the one owed money. 

CoinFLEX has partially resumed withdrawals. The company announced in a July 14 blog post that it would allow users to withdraw up to 10% of their balance.

The company laid off a “significant” number of its team last month in a bid to reduce costs by 50-60%. 

© 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 CleanSpark posted a net loss of $29.3 million in the third quarter of its fiscal year, compared with a net loss $170,000 in the previous quarter.

The company brought in $31 million in revenue in the most recent quarter, down from $41.6 million in the previous quarter, it said in its earnings report on Tuesday.

“We are optimizing uptime and maximizing profits with our wholly owned locations,” CEO Zach Bradford said. “We have also made efficient use of our capital by putting new miner purchases to work quickly. Despite macroeconomic headwinds, our results demonstrate the resiliency of our strategy, and we expect to grow in what is otherwise a bear market.”

CleanSpark announced earlier today that it acquired a 36-megawatt mining facility in Georgia from vertically integrated bitcoin miner Waha Technologies for $16.2 million.

The new site will add 1.1 exahash per second (EH/s) to the company’s hash rate (a 38% increase) is set to grown up to 86 megawatts in 2023.

CleanSpark is formally selling its energy business and is becoming “a pure play bitcoin miner,” the company said. 

“Our decision to divest energy assets will allow us to focus our time, people, and resources on our core business,” said CFO Gary A. Vecchiarelli.

In connection with the reclassification of its energy business as discontinued operations, CleanSpark recorded an impairment charge of $10.6 million.

CleanSpark announced the purchase of 2,861 mining rigs between June and July, leveraging favorable market conditions to secure a better deal. Last month it acquired 1,061 Whatsminer M30S machines, increasing its total hash rate by 93 petahashes per second (PH/s).

As of July 31, CleanSpark had 30,450 miners in its fleet with a total hash rate of 2.9 EH/s. It also had 519 BTC in its reserves by the end of the month.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

© 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.

Online gaming and game creation platform Roblox reported second-quarter revenues of $591.2 million, an increase of 30% year-over-year.

Net cash revenue provided by operating activities totaled $26.5 million, while free cash flow amounted to $57.3 million. Compared with second-quarter 2021, bookings — referring to the platform’s virtual currency, “Robux” — were down 4% to $639.9 million, making the results posted lower than the $644.4 million expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv data.

Overall however, daily active users (DAU) hit 52.2 million, up 21% year-on-year, while hours engaged were 11.3 billion, an increase of 16%, the company said on Tuesday.

“We are now at peak numbers globally for users and hours, and in the US/Canada — the absolute level of users and engagement hours in July exceeded those of any prior month even during the peak lockdown periods of the pandemic. With the exception of December of 2020 and 2021, total global bookings in July were also at monthly high levels,”  the company said in a letter to shareholders.

The results are slightly lower than those of the first quarter of this year, when year-over-year revenue increased 39% to $537.1 million alongside a 28% and 22% growth in DAUs and hours engaged, respectively.

Founded in 2004 by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel, Roblox is headquartered in San Mateo, California. The free-to-play game has been described as a metaverse and has proven particularly popular children and teenagers. However, in a letter to shareholders, the company said that the fastest growing demographic, across both male and female users, was 17- 24 year olds.

It expects male 17-24 year olds to become biggest tracked category in the US and Canada over the coming months.

Personnel costs, excluding stock-based compensation, were also $143.9 million, up 53% year over year, driven by an increase in headcount.

“We believe that our recruiting brand has never been stronger and believe that we are constrained by the number of talented engineers we can hire. As a result, we continued to hire aggressively in [the second quarter] and expect to do so for the balance of this year and likely into 2023,” Roblox stated.

The company will hold a webcast to further discuss its second-quarter results on Wednesday morning at 8:30 a.m. EST.

© 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.

Coinbase cut forecasts and missed estimates as the tumultuous quarter for digital assets took a bite out of the cryptocurrency trading platform.

The company narrowed the range for its annual forecast for MTUs to 7 to 9 million from between 5 million and 15 million. Analysts surveyed by Factset were expecting 8.74 million. Subscription and services revenue will be more than $600 million. 

In the second quarter, trading volume totaled $217 billion versus the average estimate of $216 billion. That was down from $309 billion in the first quarter. Retail trading volume, a metric closely watched by analysts, accounted for $46 billion of the total, down from the $74 billion in the previous period. That was worse than the $58 billion estimate. 

Coinbase reported revenue of $803 million, missing the $874 million estimate. 

© 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.

German fintech firm Nuri, formerly known as Bitwala, filed for insolvency at a Berlin court on Tuesday.  

The company filed for insolvency to “stay ahead of a lasting strain on the liquidity of [the] business,” Nuri wrote in a blog post. While citing macroeconomic issues caused by the pandemic and Russia’s invasion to Ukraine as factors leading to the decision, the firm mentioned the Terra/Luna collapse and crypto lending firm Celsius’ insolvency as reasons behind the filing. 

Celsius suspending withdrawals had affected the company and its bitcoin interest product, Nuri said in June. 

The insolvency proceedings will not affect users’ funds, Nuri assured, thanks to the firm’s partnership with Solarisbank, another Germany-based fintech firm. Users can still access their deposits of euro, bitcoin, ether and Nuri Pot investments through the app. 

“For the time being, nothing will change and Nuri’s app, product and services will continue to run,” the company wrote. 

The insolvency is the latest move made by the German firm amid the recent market downturn. In late May, the company laid off 20% of its employees. 

Nuri has raised €42.3 million ($43.2 million) in funding over eight funding rounds to date, according to Crunchbase. The firm is funded by 13 investors, including Earlybird Venture Capital and Sony Financial Ventures. 

© 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.

Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Magic Eden has submitted a proposal to the ApeCoin DAO to build a marketplace where $APE holders can buy and sell NFTs for a 0.75% transaction fee.

Magic Eden claimed in a proposal posted Tuesday that the DAO was paying “obscene” fees to trade on an unnamed marketplace that “returns no value to its DAO members.”

“We aim to change that,” the firm wrote. “The ApeCoin DAO marketplace will significantly slash fees, provide sustainable utility to ApeCoin, and provide a platform through which the community can launch their own projects and initiatives. There will be no cost to ApeCoinDAO for building this marketplace.” 

Magic Eden proposed a 1.5% fee for each trade with a 0.5% discount for all transactions made in ApeCoin ($APE), and an additional 0.25% discount for transactions made by Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT holders.

The proposal comes a week after Magic Eden announced it would launch on Ethereum. Currently the largest NFT marketplace on Solana, it currently takes a 2% fee on all transactions through its own platform, according to its website.

The ApeCoin DAO, which launched earlier this year, serves as the governance mechanism for the token ApeCoin. The DAO is not controlled by Bored Ape Yacht Club creators Yuga Labs — the two entities even butted heads in June over whether ApeCoin should move to its own blockchain — but its board does include several well known figures in the NFT community. Among them are Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian, FTX’s head of ventures and gaming Amy Wu, and Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu.

Since its inception, the DAO has received several proposals to create a marketplace. None have been successful. If Magic Eden can buck the trend, it said that it could launch its proposed marketplace in September at no cost to the DAO. 

Magic Eden also did not rule out future proposals on fee splitting between itself and the DAO, and has floated the possibility of adding new capabilities that would allow DAO members to launch their own projects.

The proposal will now work its way through ApeCoinDAO’s governance system.

© 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 Fantom community is currently voting on a governance proposal that seeks to reduce the rewards paid to network validators.

Fantom rewards users for staking their FTM — the blockchain’s native asset — on the network. Users with 50,000 staked FTM can also run validator nodes to process transactions on the network and earn rewards as well. Fantom’s staking reward is currently at 13% for staked tokens with a one-year vesting period. These rewards are from transaction fees paid on the network and are scheduled to be distributed up until 2024.

This new Fantom proposal argues for a reduction of the 13% staking reward rate so as to be in line with the market average. According to the proposal authored by Fantom Foundation business development director Sam Harcourt, Fantom’s rate is higher than other major “notable” Layer 1 networks including Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Binance Smart Chain (BNB).

The proposal also argued in favor of reducing the rate given the increase in the volume of Fantom staking rewards for validators. Data from FTMScan shows that there was a 120,000% increase in earnings for validators between January 2021 and January 2022.

By reducing the reward rate for validators, Harcourt’s proposal could extend FTM emissions beyond 2024. The proposal has five voting choices, four of which give the option for reduced rates of 3% up to 6%. These rates will extend FTM emissions by between four to nine years (2026 to 2031). The fifth voting choice is to not change the reward rate which will see Fantom emissions end in 2024.

Voting on the proposal began on Monday and can run until February 4, 2023. The vote may end on August 15 if the polls have reached the 67% quorum mark. Quorum is currently only at 1.8% as of the time of publishing. Data from the voting page shows 99% of voters in favor of a 6% staking reward rate on the network. Fantom emissions will continue for another four years if this reward rate emerges as the winner of the vote.

© 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.