FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Mobile gaming platform MetaverseGo has closed a $4.2 million seed funding round led by Galaxy Digital’s Galaxy Interactive unit.

The over-subscribed round, announced today, also saw participation from Delphi Digital, Dragonfly Capital, Mechanism Capital, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Shima Capital, Com2uS, Akatsuki, Ascensive Assets, BitScale Capital, Yield Guild Games (YGG), BreederDAO, Mentha Partners and Emfarsis.

According to the company, MetaverseGo received an initial valuation of $40 million. The funding will be used for software development, securing partnerships with telecommunication providers and strategic hires.

Gaming dapps accounted for 52% of all blockchain activity in the second quarter of 2022, according to a report from Dapp Radar. But compared to the hundreds of millions of people playing mobile games each day, only around one million are playing blockchain-based games.

Part of the challenge is onboarding. For new players, obtaining a wallet, buying cryptocurrency and purchasing gaming assets remains daunting. But MetaverseGo co-founders Ash Mandhyan, Jake San Diego and JC Velasquez believe their platform offers a solution.

Slated for release within the next month, the British Virgin Islands-based company launched in March 2022, with the bulk of its staff operating out of play-to-earn hotspot The Philippines. It allows users to sign up and start playing games like Axie Infinity and Cyball using just a cell phone number. It then sets up the players’ wallets and grants them access to digital assets owned by gaming guilds such as YGG, albeit with those guilds claiming a percentage of any in-game earnings.

Mandhyan, who has previously held positions at Facebook and TikTok makers Bytedance, likens the importance of getting web3 onboarding right to learning to drive a car, and told The Block it was important not to overcomplicate the process for those new to the blockchain.

“At first, people don’t want to understand how the engine works. They want to first understand how to steer, how to shift gears and how to brake. Then later on, you’ll have a conversation about engine size and combustion and transmission. But if you go and start talking about engine size at the very first conversation, they’ll back out. It’s too much information too soon,” he said.

Any earnings from the games will be accessible to players as MetaverseGo credits that can be redeemed to pay for things like data and utility bills. Mandhyan confirmed players would also be able to transfer earnings to their own 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.

Moonbirds, a popular non-fungible token (NFT) project, has abruptly changed its copyright model. Now, some of its holders are not happy about it — and a copyright lawyer says they have a point. 

Moonbirds co-founder Kevin Rose explained in a Twitter thread on Thursday that Moonbirds and its sister project, Oddities, will adopt the Creative Commons CC0 copyright code. That means the art is now in the public domain and can be freely distributed, augmented and commercialized without the owner’s consent.  

“In this new future, true ownership is dictated by what is recorded on-chain, the way it should be, not by a record housed by a government or corporate entity,” Rose wrote. The project’s terms of services will be updated to reflect this change, and DAOs managing the Moonbirds and Oddities will be formed to prevent scams, hate speech and violence surrounding these projects.  

But some have taken to social media to push back, arguing that why had bought into the project believing they had exclusive rights to their NFT — and now they feel these have been taken away without prior notice.  

“Would have been nice to implement a voting mechanism for holders,” a Twitter user by the name of Cathsimard posted. 

“I disagree with the decision to go with CC0 months after launch, taking rights away from holders,” wrote Twitter’s Head of Consumer Product Marketing Justin Taylor, adding that he doesn’t own a Moonbird. “Artists and creators, I believe, should make the decision upfront, as consumers bought with an expectation.”  

Moonbirds has the legal right to waive the project’s copyright through a creative commons license, according to Sohaib Mohammad, an NFT-focused intellectual property lawyer (who goes by delawyer.eth online). However, Mohammad said the decision to not notify holders before waiving the copyright highlights a lack of protection for NFT buyers. 

“The consumer protection issue for me is that major decisions that affect the value of an NFT are occurring post-mint and following significant secondary market sales. If the CC0 was declared pre-mint, I would have no issue with this decision.” 

Moonbirds are relatively expensive to purchase. The so-called floor price, or the supposed minimum price to buy a piece for the collection, was 16.5 ETH (around $30,000 USD) as of writing. Holders may have invested in their Moonbird to build a commercial brand around their asset, only to find out now that anyone can commercialize their Moonbird, Mohammed said. 

The collection’s floor price fell 3 ETH following the CC0 announcement, according to the crypto data tracker CoinGecko.  

One Moonbirds owner claimed to have lost financial prospects due to the copyright shift. “Shortly after the Moonbirds CC0 announcement, I actually lost a six- figure licensing deal that I’d been working on for a while,” a Twitter user named Lakoz.eth said. “I understand the decision, but the approach by the team could’ve been much better.” Lakoz.eth did not respond to The Block’s request for an interview.   

Murky copyright rules have characterized several high-profile NFT projects, including CyptoPunks. At this point, Bored Ape and CryptoPunk owners generally believe that they have exclusive rights to their assets. Other projects, like Nouns, make it clear that they permit anyone to use the art for personal or commercial use. Moonbirds is the first “blue-chip” project to adopt this standard.  

According to Mohammed, disgruntled Moonbird holders could try to sue the project over the abrupt copyright change. However, their argument “would be much stronger if the Moonbirds team had promised some aspect of exclusivity accompanying the commercial rights to a holder’s NFT,” he said. “But as far as I understand it, they didn’t.” 

© 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.

Greg Dwyer, BitMex’s former head of business development, has changed his plea to guilty in a criminal trial that alleged he violated the Bank Secrecy Act, court documents show. 

“With this plea, this office has now obtained criminal convictions against all three founders, as well as a high-ranking employee at BitMex, for willful violations of anti-money laundering laws,” said Damian Williams, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

In October of 2021, Dwyer pleaded not guilty during his arraignment. In February of this year a spokesman told the media that Dwyer was innocent, the charges were “baseless,” and he planned to mount a “vigorous defense.”

US regulators took the crypto derivatives exchange to task starting in October of 2020, when it charged the exchange and a number of its operators for skirting US regulations. Among those charged were co-founders Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Samuel Reed, in addition to Dwyer.

All the defendants pleaded not guilty at the start of their criminal trials, but Hayes, Delo and Reed entered a change of plea during their proceedings. All avoided jail time.

Now, Dwyer has followed their lead. Like the co-founders, he faces up to five years for allegedly breaching the Bank Secrecy Act. However, his trial had faced a longer time horizon since his legal team argued he lacked adequate time to prepare for the charges as he’s been focused on fighting extradition from Bermuda – a fight he’d ultimately lose. His trial was slated for October of this year. Now that he has pleaded guilty, his sentencing will take place on November 10 at 4:30 p.m. 

At their respective sentencings, Hayes received six months home detention as part of a two-year probationary period. Delo received 30 months probation without home confinement, and Reed received 18 months probation. 

© 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 were up Monday as the coin’s value rose above $24,000.

Bitcoin was trading at $23,900 at the end of the trading session, data from TradingView show.

Iris Energy’s stock was up by 14.56% after the company announced that it doubled its hash rate and expects to reach 3.7 exahash per second (EH/s) by the end of the month.

Other companies that posted double-digit gains include Greenidge Generation (12.32%), Stronghold Digital Mining (+12.30%) and TeraWulf (+10.42%).

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Monday, August 8:

© 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, a zero-knowledge proof-based private transaction protocol has been sanctioned by the US Treasury Department — and the development has industry leaders wondering what’s next. 

The protocol has allegedly been used to launder more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency since its creation in 2019, the Treasury said in announcing the enforcement action. That includes the more than $455 million stolen by the Lazarus Group, a state-sponsored hacker collective with ties to North Korea. 

“The US clearly will not tolerate the excuse that mixers are purely neutral services,” said David Carlisle, who oversees policy and regulatory affairs for cryptoasset compliance firm Elliptic. “If a mixer is facilitating activity on behalf of threat actors, in OFAC’s (Office of Foreign Assets Control) view it is fair game for sanctions itself — simple as that.”  

Carlisle pointed out that many exchanges will likely face significant exposure to activity involving Tornado Cash and will have to be on the lookout to avoid processing prohibited transactions.  

Industry pushback

Blockchain policy advocacy group Coin Center raised constitutional concerns over the sanctioning of Tornado Cash. 

“This particular usage of OFAC raises heightened constitutional concerns because it is, again, not a ban on one non-US person’s ability to use the financial system, it is instead a ban on effectively every American’s ability to use a particular open source software tool,” Coin Center’s executive director Jerry Brito & research director Peter Van Valkenburgh wrote. 

Coin Center also raised concerns about how the US would enforce these types of sanctions. Due to the nature of blockchains, any American could be sent money that is associated with Tornado Cash. With no way to reject transactions, one could be in violation without any association or malintent. 

The sanctions news has many industry leaders scrambling to process the implications.  

“I didn’t know you could sanction a piece of code, so like everyone else I’m playing catch-up,” said Nansen’s Andrew Thurman. 

Others were more pointed in their critiques. 

“The implications to those building privacy solutions on Ethereum may be huge because government and regulatory powers are notorious for being behind on technological innovation and not grasping it,” Hudson Jameson, Communications at Zcash. “Privacy is important so you don’t get tracked for metadata or unfairly grouped into DPRK related activities because a government can’t ascertain Tornado Cash’s code.” 

Others had a more optimistic view.  

“Governments oppressing rights to financial freedom and privacy only further validates what we are building here, It’s natural that there will be resistance along the way. The reality is, they can sanction Tornado Cash but the smart contract will keep living on.” wrote Eric Conner, host of the Into the Ether podcast.   

Meanwhile, on Monday afternoon Circle froze the USDC funds in Tornado Cash’s sanctioned wallets, and the GitHub accounts of the Tornado Cash team appeared to be suspended.  

© 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.

Centre, the consortium behind the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin, has blacklisted wallet addresses controlled by Tornado Cash following the US Treasury sanctions against the crypto mixer.

Ethereum blockchain explorer data shows that Centre has stopped the movement of at least 75,000 USDC by blacklisting Tornado Cash wallets on the sanctions list. Among these addresses is Tornado Cash’s USDC pool, meaning those with USDC deposited on Tornado Cash may be unable to withdraw their funds.

Circle did not detail the extent of the blacklisting in time for publication, but confirmed it had complied with the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s latest measures.

“Circle is a regulated company and conforms to sanctions compliance requirements,” said the firm in an email. “We have addressed the sanctions and blocked the addresses associated with OFAC’s Tornado Cash designation.”

The US Treasury has sanctioned Tornado Cash for allegedly helping to launder proceeds from crypto hacks for the North Korean hacking syndicate called Lazarus Group. This hacking cartel has been linked to several high-profile crypto hacks, including the attacks against the Ronin and Harmony crypto bridges.

By blacklisting the wallet addresses, Tornado Cash will no longer have access to the USDC funds in those wallets. This is because when Centre blacklists an address, the owner becomes unable to receive or transfer USDC funds on-chain from that address. The consortium does this by calling a particular function called “blacklist(address investor).”

This is not the first time that Centre has blacklisted wallet addresses due to law enforcement or regulatory action. The consortium, formed by USD-issuer Circle and exchange platform Coinbase, froze about $100,000 in USDC belonging to a wallet address in July 2020. The company said the action was based on a law enforcement request. Rival stablecoin Tether has frozen 653 addresses on Ethereum over the last few years.

Beyond Circle’s actions, Tornado Cash’s site appears to be down. Its Github page has also disappeared in the hours since the OFAC announcement. 

© 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 Marathon saw a net loss of $191.6 million in the second quarter of 2022, a significant jump from a $13 million net loss in the first quarter.

Revenues in the second quarter of 2022 were $24.9 million, according to the company’s second-quarter results — a 51.8% decrease from the previous quarter.

“Energization delays, maintenance and weather issues in Montana, and an approximately 56% decline in the price of bitcoin during the quarter, severely impacted our bitcoin production and financial results,” Marathon CEO Fred Thiel said in a statement on Monday. “These items reduced our revenues, caused us to record a $127.6 million impairment on our bitcoin holdings, and decreased the fair market value of our investment fund by $79.7 million.”

Marathon produced 707 bitcoin between April and June, representing a 44% decrease from the first quarter of 2022.

The bitcoin mining company was affected by a storm that hit Hardin, Montana in early June and knocked 75% of its mining fleet offline.

As of July 31, Marathon held 10,127 BTC (with a market value of $236.3 million). It recently secured a $100 million bitcoin-backed loan with Silvergate Bank and refinanced a previous $100 million loan with the same firm.

In July, the miner closed a deal with hosting provider Applied Blockchain that will secure the company at least 200 megawatts of energy capacity, with the option to increase it to 270 megawatts.

© 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 miner Bit Digital produced 142.5 BTC in July — a 110.8% increase compared with the previous month.

The company also mined 0.5 ETH in July, according to an operations update released on Monday.

Bit Digital deployed 12,044 bitcoin miners and six ethereum miners last month, representing 1.09 exahash per second (EH/s) and 0.0 terahash per second (TH/s), respectively.

As of July 31, the company’s total hash rate was 2.7 EH/s and 0.3 Terahash TH/s. It owned 38,135 BTC and 731 ETH in its reserves.

The company closed a hosting deal for 5 megawatts in power capacity last month.

© 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 Iris Energy doubled its hash rate to 2.3 exahash per second (EH/s) after completing phase two of its Mackenzie site, in Canada, last Friday.

The company expects to add an additional 1.4 EH/s (or 50 megawatts in energy capacity) by the end of the month at its site in Prince George, Canada, according to a statement on Monday. This will bring its total hash rate up to 3.7 EH/s.

“We are particularly pleased to continue our track record of delivering projects on schedule, despite the current market backdrop and ongoing international supply chain challenges,” co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Roberts said.

Iris Energy announced recently that it was increasing its expected total operating capacity from 4.3 EH/s to 6.0 EH/s by the end of the year.

The second phase of the Mackenzie site was initially expected to be completed by the end of the third quarter of this year. The facility should be operating at full capacity (80 megawatts) by the end of the fourth quarter.

The company has a series of sites under development, two in Canada and one in Texas.

© 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 Binance will no longer support off-chain fund transfers between itself and WazirX as the relationship between the two firms sours.

The move, announced Monday, will take effect on August 11. It will mean WazirX and Binance users won’t be able to use the off-chain fund transfer option to deposit and withdraw crypto on the two platforms. Off-chain transactions occur outside of a blockchain network and are handled using a mechanism similar to that used on payment platforms.

On-chain deposit and withdrawal options between Binance and WazirX, however, will continue to work.

Binance’s move comes as it continues to distance itself from WazirX, an Indian crypto exchange it once announced acquiring. After WazirX had its funds seized by Indian authorities last week, Binance said that it never completed the acquisition.

On Friday, India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), a law enforcement agency that investigates financial crimes, froze bank balances worth 647 million rupees (around $8 million) belonging to WazirX. ED is probing WazirX for its alleged money laundering role linked to Chinese loan apps that were involved in digital lending in India.

After the ED news broke, there was a public debate between Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao and WazirX founder Nischal Shetty over who owns WazirX. Zhao said Binance does not own WazirX and only purchased certain assets and intellectual property of WazirX. Shetty said Binance is the owner of WazirX.

“Fact: we asked for transferring of WazirX system source code, deployment, operations, as recently as Feb this year. This was refused by WazirX. Binance do NOT have control on their systems. WazirX has been uncooperative with us, and looks like uncooperative with ED as well,” Zhao said Saturday on Twitter.

Binance has said that WazirX is still operated and managed by Zanmai Labs, an Indian entity owned by Shetty and his co-founders. Zanmai has license from Binance to operate Indian rupee-crypto pairs in WazirX and Binance operates crypto to crypto pairs, according to Shetty.

“In Feb, Binance team wanted control of Zanmai Naturally, if Binance desires control of Zanmai, they can acquire shares,” Shetty tweeted Saturday, adding: “Zanmai labs has been co-operating with ED from over 7 days and has submitted all the required data. We’ll continue to cooperate.”

© 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.