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The team behind the Beanstalk stablecoin has relaunched the project nearly four months after it lost $182 million in an exploit.

The network was due to “unpause” at 12 p.m. ET today, according to a statement from the project. People holding more than 99% of the project’s stalk token backed the resurrection in a vote that closed on Friday.

Beanstalk bills itself as a decentralized stablecoin that uses credit rather than collateral to maintain something close to parity with the US dollar. The project hit the news in mid-April after a hacker exploited its governance mechanism to steal from the project.

Changes to the project’s code have been audited by two firms and governance has been moved to a community-run multisig wallet until a secure on-chain governance mechanism can be implemented, Beanstalk said in the statement.

The Beanstalk team began the process to reboot the stablecoin back in May, when it proposed raising $77 million in an over-the-counter loan from private investors.

The fundraising came just as stablecoins were gaining attention for all the wrong reasons: the same week saw Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin, TerraUSD, implode in a spectacular destruction of more than $40 billion of investor value.

Users invest in Beanstalk debt assets known as “pods” that function like time-vested bonds, paying a high annual interest.

© 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 Huobi said it will list any hard forks of Ethereum following the network’s planned switch to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus — so long as they meet five requirements.

“As long as the forked assets meet our security requirements, we will take the first move to support users to hold the assets and earn rewards,” Huobi wrote in a blog post on Friday. “Trading services for those coins under the spotlight will be available as soon as possible per our rules after we get an overall picture of users’ opinions.”

Ethereum is inching closer to a switch to PoS from energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus, a long-awaited shift known as “the merge” that might come as soon as September. The change could, however, meet resistance from Ethereum miners who have spent billions on equipment that will no longer be needed to run the network.

While miners can’t stop the merge, they can clone Ethereum and create their own version of the network where the transition never takes place.

The possibility of a miner-led fork of Ethereum has gained impetus after Chandler Guo, an influential Chinese crypto miner and investor, last month declared he would fork the network to create a PoW-based chain he called “ETH POW.”

Now Huobi, a crypto exchange founded in China in 2013 but currently based in the Seychelles, says it will list forked tokens if they meet five criteria.

A hard fork project team notifies Huobi Global and receives a clear reply before the hard fork is performed.

Two-way replay protection is implemented by default; that is, the trading on one forked chain is invalid on the other.

The new chain will not be covered or eliminated by the original chain.

The trading on the two forked chains should be differentiated so that the upgrade is required for all wallets (including light-weight nodes) to support the new chain.

Before a hard fork starts, an official client software which has passed the public test and evaluation should be published.

Getting listed on an exchange allows speculators to buy and sell a crypto token and creates more legitimacy in the eyes of some investors.

A prior hard fork of Ethereum created what’s now known as Ethereum Classic, a token that’s still among the top 20 largest crypto assets by value.

© 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 war of words between Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao and WazirX founder Nischal Shetty over who owns the Indian crypto exchange entered a second day on Saturday, with Zhao accusing Shetty of “deception.”

After Indian authorities froze WazirX funds worth 647 million rupees ($8 million) on Friday and accused it of facilitating money laundering, Binance distanced itself from the Indian firm — despite having announced its acquisition as long ago as 2019.

The two sides entered the weekend trading barbs over a deal that onlookers had assumed was wrapped up years ago. In dispute is who owns WazirX’s shares, who controls its day-to-day operations and who has access to WazirX’s web domain and the code stored in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) account.

“People playing deception wording games,” Zhao wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “We can shut down the domain. It just hurts users. We do not have control of the trading system. You just gave the AWS login, no source code, no deployment capability. You also retained access to the AWS account, source code, deploy, etc.”

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, announced the purchase of WazirX in a November 2019 blog post. The company amended that post on Friday to “clarify that the 2019 ‘acquisition’ described in this blog was limited to an agreement to purchase certain assets and intellectual property of WazirX.”

Binance said WazirX continues to be operated and managed by Zanmai Labs, an Indian entity owned by Shetty and others.

Shetty, for his part, said Binance granted Zanmai a license to operate WazirX’s fiat-to-crypto trades, while Binance operated the crypto-to-crypto trading.

Money laundering accusations

Both Shetty and Zhao are distancing themselves from WazirX after India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), a law enforcement agency that investigates financial crimes, froze some of its funds and accused the company of laundering money linked to Chinese loan apps that were involved in digital lending in India.

WazirX said on Twitter that it disputes ED’s allegations and is considering what steps to take next.

“We have been fully cooperating with the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for several days and have responded to all their queries fully and transparently,” the Indian exchange said.

Meanwhile, Zhao warned the Indian exchange’s clients that Binance had the ability to disable WazirX wallets — although he said it won’t because it would hurt users. He advised them to move funds to Binance.

Binance and WazirX didn’t respond to requests for further 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.

The Bank of Thailand (BOT) plans to begin a pilot study of a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) by the end of the year so it can assess risks and benefits for developing policies and designing a digital currency.  

The real-life pilot study, in limited cooperation with the private sector, will extend the scope of the central bank’s previous CBDC developmental programs, it said in a news release on Friday.  

The BOT was “among the first central banks to recognize CBDC as a novel financial infrastructure, with the potential to increase opportunities for business and the general public to have more convenient and greater access to diverse financial services with lower costs,” it said.   

The pilot program will be divided into two parts, a foundation track to assess the system’s design with about 10,000 users paying for goods and services involving three companies, and an innovation track to facilitate the development of new financial services. 

Still, the Thai central bank has no current plans to issue a retail CBDC because it requires “thorough consideration” of the risks and benefits, and it warned the public to beware of frauds and scams claiming to provide retail CBDC investments or services at this point. 

Thailand said last year that a retail CBDC may be fully implemented in the next three to five years.

© 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 Wallet, the Solana wallet platform exploited earlier this week for roughly $5 million, has announced that it will pay a 10% bounty (worth around $450,000) if the attacker returns the stolen funds. 

In a tweet posted Friday afternoon, the Slope team posted a Solana address and appealed to the thief with an added incentive: “Upon receipt of these funds, we will not make additional efforts to investigate this matter, or pursue any legal action.” 

The team gave the attacker a 48-hour window to return the funds and receive the bounty. It added that it has been working with law enforcement and TRM labs, a leading blockchain intelligence firm, to retrieve the stolen funds.  

On Tuesday night, an attacker accessed user seed phrases that had been stored in plaintext on Slope’s centralized server and used them to steal cryptocurrency. The exploit affected thousands of users. 

The Slope Wallet hack came on the heels of another major crypto hack, that one hitting the Nomad Bridge for $190 million initially ($22.4 million has been recovered). 

© 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 mining stocks recovered on Friday, as the coin’s price fell below $23,000 after reaching $24,400 earlier in the day.

Core Scientific saw its stock rise by 10.65% after announcing that it mined 10.4% more bitcoin month-over-month in July, despite having cut power last month due to extreme temperatures in Texas.

Iris Energy’s stock also went up by 7.00%, followed by CleanSpark (+6.15%) and Marathon (+5.59%).

Argo also increased its bitcoin production in July by 22.4%. However, the company’s stock fell by 1.96%  on the London Stock Exchange and 0.4%  on Nasdaq.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Friday, August 5:

© 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 Argo mined 22.4% more bitcoin in July compared with June. It also sold 887 BTC in July, at an average price of $22,670 per coin.

The company used a majority of those revenues to reduce its bitcoin-backed loan with Galaxy Digital down to $6.72 million. Argo had $58.6 million in credit as of March 31, 2022, according to its first quarter results.

In addition to the $45 million it borrowed from Galaxy last year to help finance its Texas facility, the company signed an additional $26.66 million loan from NYDIG in March of this year.

“That is something we’ve been deleveraging from over the last three, four, five months,” said CEO Peter Wall in a video presentation on Friday. “That’s been a strategic decision by the company to make sure that that’s not a future risk if bitcoin was to drop low.”

Argo sold 637 BTC in June. Like it did this month, it had also used the proceeds to pay off debt, bringing its outstanding balance with Galaxy down to $22 million at the end of June. Argo held 1,295 BTC, of which 227 were BTC equivalents, as of 31 July.

Powering down in Texas

Argo’s quarterly results also revealed that the firm mined 22.4% more bitcoin in July (219 BTC), even though like other miners in Texas it curtailed power during periods of extreme heat. 

The company did not disclose exactly how much power it had to curtail. But it claimed that miners in Texas had collectively reduced usage by over 1,000 megawatts at peak demand. Rival Riot said this week that curtailed power by 11,717 megawatt-hours (which earned it $9.5 million in power credits from the state) in July. Core Scientific reported today that it curtailed  8,157 megawatt-hours during the month.

As for Argo, it said that energy costs at Helios — its flagship site in Texas — were higher than anticipated. “That’s because we currently have a PPA (a power purchase agreement) that is connected to the index prices, the spot prices,” Wall said. “Power prices are really high. It’s like signing a mortgage when interest rates are really high. You have to wait for them to come down.”

The CEO hopes the company will be able to negotiate a better PPA at a fixed price after power rates go down closer to the end of the summer, into September.

Argo’s margin was 37% in July. “Not a great margin, not where we wanna be and that should change in the future,” Wall 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.

Quick Take

• The NFT finance vertical has seen an enormous uptick in development activity in recent months
• Collateralized NFT lending generally bifurcates into two technical solutions, that is, liquidity pools and P2P platforms
• The recent introduction of the ERC-4907 standard has spawned novel approaches to design NFT rental protocols

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Voyager will begin processing cash withdrawals next week, according to a new announcement from the lender.

Voyager’s account was frozen as part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, but yesterday a judge approved  the firm’s proposal to restore access. 

Voyager has been advocating to honor cash withdrawals from its Metropolitan Commercial Bank (MCB) account as part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, which began soon after it halted all withdrawals. MCB held $270 million in custody for Voyager customers. 

Voyager announced today it will begin honoring cash withdrawals only on Thursday, August 11. Those with cash in their accounts will be able to withdraw up to $100,000 each 24 hours and should receive the funds within 5-10 days of their request, according to Voyager. Directions will be sent to those with cash balances. 

“Requests will be processed as quickly as possible but will require some manual review, including fraud reviews and account reconciliation, and timing will depend, in part, upon the individual banks to which customers transfer their cash,” said Voyager in a statement.

Voyager last month entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which allows insolvent firms to continue operations as they reorganize to pay creditors. The ability to honor cash withdrawals is a step forward, though more than $1 billion in crypto remains on the platform and in limbo. The federal bankruptcy court has approved a set of bidding procedures, which will lay out how other firms may place bids on the assets for the purpose of reorganization.

© 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.

Binance co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao said the company never completed an announced acquisition of WazirX after news that Indian authorities had frozen about $8 million in funds belonging to the startup.

“Binance does not own any equity in Zanmai Labs, the entity operating WazirX and established by the original founders,” said Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao in a four-part Twitter post today. “On 21 Nov 2019, Binance published a blog post that it had ‘acquired’ WazirX. This transaction was never completed. Binance has never – at any point – owned any shares of Zanmai Labs, the entity operating WazirX.”

Binance only provides wallet services for WazirX, Zhao continued. “There is also integration using off-chain tx, to save on network fees. WazirX is responsible all other aspects of the WazirX exchange, including user sign-up, KYC, trading and initiating withdrawals,” he wrote.

India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), an agency that investigates financial crimes, froze bank balances worth 647 million rupees (around $8 million) belonging to WazirX earlier Friday.

ED conducted searches on WazirX co-founder and CTO Sameer Mhatre as part of its money laundering probe against the exchange, according to a statement on Friday. ED has been investigating WazirX since last year for its alleged money laundering role linked to Chinese loan apps that were involved in digital lending in India.

“Recent allegations about the operation of WazirX and how the platform is managed by Zanmai Labs are of deep concern to Binance,” Zhao wrote on Twitter. “Binance collaborates with law enforcement agencies all around the world. We would be happy to work with ED in any way possible.”

A blog post from 2019 announced Binance’s “acquisition of WazirX, India’s most trusted bitcoin exchange,” offering users a way to start buying and selling crypto with Indian rupees (INR).

Binance said that starting in 2020, WazirX’s unique auto-matching engine would be integrated into the Binance Fiat Gateway platform, meaning Binance users would be able to place orders to purchase Tether (USDT) against INR.

© 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.