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Two former Uniswap Labs members have submitted a governance proposal to create the Uniswap Foundation, an entity tasked with growing the decentralized crypto exchange’s ecosystem.

The Uniswap Foundation will be a Delaware-based corporation founded by Devin Walsh and Ken Ng, according to the proposal document published on Thursday. Walsh will serve as the executive director while Ng will helm the foundation’s operations.

Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) in the crypto space. The platform accounts for almost two-thirds of the entire DEX market volume, based on figures from The Block’s Data Dashboard. The Uniswap DAO also holds the largest treasury of any decentralized autonomous organization in the crypto space with $3.9 billion in its reserves, according to DeepDAO.

The Uniswap Foundation will be given a $74 million budget to drive growth. It will award grants to development teams and work to support other ecosystem stakeholders, the proposal document said.

This budget will be split into two: $60 million for an expanded grants program and $14 million to cover operational overheads. The proposal requested that the funds be supplied in two instalments, with the first payment being $20 million and the remaining $54 million delivered later. This budget is expected to provide a three-year runway for the foundation.

Apart from the $74 million, the proposal also calls for the Uniswap Foundation to be given 2.5 million UNI tokens — the minimum number of tokens required to call for an on-chain vote. UNI is Uniswap’s native token and this allocation will ensure that the foundation can participate in the platform’s governance process.

This article has been updated to reflect that Devin Walsh and Ken Ng are former Uniswap Labs executives.

© 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.

Two Uniswap executives have submitted a governance proposal to create the Uniswap Foundation, an entity tasked with growing the decentralized crypto exchange’s ecosystem.

The Uniswap Foundation will be a Delaware-based corporation founded by Devin Walsh and Ken Ng, according to the proposal document published on Thursday. Walsh will serve as the executive director while Ng will helm the foundation’s operations.

Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) in the crypto space. The platform accounts for almost two-thirds of the entire DEX market volume, based on figures from The Block’s Data Dashboard. The Uniswap DAO also holds the largest treasury of any decentralized autonomous organization in the crypto space with $3.9 billion in its reserves, according to DeepDAO.

The Uniswap Foundation will be given a $74 million budget to drive growth. It will award grants to development teams and work to support other ecosystem stakeholders, the proposal document said.

This budget will be split into two: $60 million for an expanded grants program and $14 million to cover operational overheads. The proposal requested that the funds be supplied in two instalments, with the first payment being $20 million and the remaining $54 million delivered later. This budget is expected to provide a three-year runway for the foundation.

Apart from the $74 million, the proposal also calls for the Uniswap Foundation to be given 2.5 million UNI tokens — the minimum number of tokens required to call for an on-chain vote. UNI is Uniswap’s native token and this allocation will ensure that the foundation can participate in the platform’s governance process.

© 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.

GSR Capital is now open for your business.

The digital asset trading company established last year by crypto market maker GSR received approval from the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to build investment products for institutions, family offices and others and officially launched yesterday.

GSR, founded by former Goldman Sachs executives nine years ago, traditionally partners with cryptocurrency projects and provides liquidity in crypto markets, including for Binance, Coinbase and FTX. It started building out GSR Capital last year, hiring research and operations staff and is now offering two funds, one focused on bitcoin exposure and the other on the broader market.

They’ve already seen “remarkably high interest” from family offices and institutional investors who want exposure to digital assets, according to GSR CEO Jakob Palmstierna.

“One of the best ways of getting exposure to a new asset class is via allocating to an investment manager, so we looked around us, saying, ‘Are there any really credible investment alternatives in crypto?’ And we find that the answer was pretty weak,” Palmstierna said. “What we want to create is something that looks and feels like any other line item on an allocated portfolio except that the underlying exposure is to this new asset class.”

GSR Capital is aiming to provide familiarity and credibility to traditional investors interested but cautious about moving into a new asset class. And that asset class has taken a beating this year, with prices plunging, coins like luna collapsing and high-profile bankruptcies like Three Arrows Capital dominating the headlines.

Still, Palmstierna remains confident. Even if you know nothing about crypto, he said, the potential is more than evident. He cited the opportunities inherent in blockchain technology, the deep talent pool in the industry and more than $36 billion in venture capital invested last year.

“You have promising technology with the greatest talent density with a huge amount of capital behind it,” Palmstierna said. “Do you want to invest one or two percent into that promising technology? It’s almost a no-brainer.”

While the digital assets can be esoteric and mysterious, GSR is counting on its long-term involvement in the crypto space and the creation of an experience that feels familiar to more traditional investors. The aim is to “make the experience as comfortable as possible, especially for institutions moving into what’s a new space for them and obviously that brings a lot of challenges for them both from an investment analysis perspective, but also from a governance, due diligence perspective,” Chief Operating Officer Andrew Moss said.

The funds have a lot in common with traditional investment vehicles, but there are crypto-specific facets to take into account, such as the 24/7 nature of trading and implementing research framework on day one that can account for that, Moss said.

Palmstierna said two more funds are likely to be launched this year as the company ramps up.

“Investors are desperately looking for new sources of potential returns,” Palmstierna said. “We think we’re creating something that doesn’t exist today which will help investors actually coming into the space.”

© 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 has partnered with Mastercard to debut its Binance Card in Argentina, the cryptocurrency exchange announced on Thursday.

The Binance Card converts cryptocurrencies to fiat currency “in real-time at the point of purchase,” a statement from Binance said. Cardholders in Argentina also can earn up to 8% cash back in crypto on certain purchases. 

“Payments is one of the first and most obvious use cases for crypto, yet adoption has a lot of room to grow,” Binance Latin America General Director Maximiliano Hinz said in a statement. “By using the Binance Card, merchants continue to receive fiat and the users pay in cryptocurrency they choose. We believe the Binance Card is a significant step in encouraging wider crypto use and global adoption and now it is available for users from Argentina.”

Argentina will be the first country in Latin America to access the Binance Card, a statement from Binance said. The card currently is in a “beta phase” and will roll out to a wider audience in the coming weeks, according to the statement. Binance mentions Bitcoin and Binance Coin (BNB) as two of the cryptocurrencies the cards will support. 

“The Binance Card issued by Credencial Payments will allow all new and existing Binance users in Argentina with a valid national ID to make purchases and pay bills with cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and BNB, at over 90 million Mastercard merchants worldwide, both in-store and online,” the exchange said in its press statement. 

Binance appears to be planning a further expansion of its card product. When Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao teased the Argentina card launch in a July 24 tweet, he added, “More regions soon.”

Argentina’s historically high inflation rate and currency controls have prompted locals to seek financial alternatives, such as cryptocurrencies. 

Binance’s prepaid card will join several others in Argentina that focus on crypto in some manner. Like the Binance Card, Lemon Cash’s Visa card also converts cryptocurrencies to fiat as needed based on purchases. Others cards focus on crypto cash back rewards. Argentine exchange Buenbit, for example, announced last August it was launching a prepaid BKR Mastercard for local residents. The card currently offers 2% cash back in crypto for every purchase. 

Along with Mastercard, Visa also has been focusing on its crypto-focused card partnerships in Latin America. In addition to Lemon Cash, Visa has card partnerships in the region with Crypto.com, Alterbank, Zro Bank, Agrotoken and Satoshi Tango, the company said in June. It also has an agreement with Tribal Credit to expand card offerings for small- and medium-sized businesses in the region, it said. 

Binance launched a version of the Binance Card for European residents in 2020. The card is issued by Visa and converts various cryptocurrencies to euros. That product functions as a debit card rather than a prepaid card. 

© 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

• In this bi-weekly series, we look into some of the most interesting data and developments across the Layer 2 blockchain landscape, from DeFi and bridges to network activity and funding
• This issue looks at the development of StarkEx Validiums, such as ImmutableX, DeversiFi and Sorare
• ImmutableX and DeversiFi have both seen substantial growth after the launch of their native governance token
• Sorare has launched a series of NFT-based games though it has yet to see significant traction
• StarkNet is seeing a steady increase in activity, both in terms of assets bridged and the development of applications

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The Lido DAO voted to support a sale of treasury tokens to the venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital after the deal’s terms were tweaked following last month’s rejection of the plan. 

A poll on Lido’s proposal to sell 10 million treasury tokens (worth about $25 million at the current market price) to Dragonfly ended today at 12 p.m. ET with more than 99% approval, according to the voting page on Snapshot.

The vote is half of a treasury diversification plan for liquid staking giant Lido Finance. The entire plan involves liquidating 20 million LDO tokens for dai stablecoin. Lido plans to sell half of this sum to Dragonfly Capital.

A previous vote last month was blocked by the community, with DAO members objecting to the terms of the token sale. These objections revolved around the quoted price for the token sale and the absence of any vesting requirement on the part of Dragonfly.

Lido Finance subsequently filed a revamped proposal that addressed these concerns, including two price ranges for the LDO token sale. The first price is based on the combination of a previous average spot price and a 50% premium that amounts to about $1.45 per coin while the second is based on a seven-day backward-looking average at the end of the vote. Dragonfly will buy the coins at the higher of the two prices. The venture capital firm can exit the deal if the higher of the two price benchmarks exceeds $2.25. Lido’s revamped proposal also includes a one-year lock-up period for the tokens sold to Dragonfly.

Hasu, a pseudonymous advisor to Lido Finance and strategy lead at Flashbots, told The Block that the previous deal’s structure was unpopular — and highlighted some of the unique problems associated with negotiating business deals with decentralized organizations like DAOs.

“The first proposal didn’t have a contingency for the case that the LDO price increased after posting and that’s why the vote predictably failed. The second proposal does have a contingency — the purchase price now moves up together with the spot price — and it also addresses another concern the community had around lockups,” Hasu 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.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has jumped by 1.74% after falling for three consecutive time periods.

The change is reflected in data published Thursday by BTC.com, which tracks network mining difficulty and posts an update as adjustments take place roughly every two weeks.

Zack Voell, an analyst at mining firm Braiins, said that it isn’t unusual to see a slight uptick like this after more significant drops. “Difficulty is still significantly lower than a few months ago, and lots of hash rate has been pushed offline from declining profitability, summer temperatures, and some lingering site construction delays,” he told The Block in a message.

Just this week, bitcoin miner Riot said that the amount of time it powered down its operations due to extreme heat in Texas in July led to an estimated 21% cut in bitcoin mined.

“We could see more small positive adjustments through the rest of the summer as some miners around the world deploy more machines. But large increases in hash rate and difficulty are unlikely until the market significantly recovers,” Voell said.

The network’s hash rate has also gone up by almost 5% since July 21, the date of the last update, according to data compiled by The Block Research.

Mining difficulty refers to the complexity of the mathematical process behind mining, during which miners are repeatedly trying to find a hash below a set level. Miners that “discover” this hash win the reward for the next transaction block. 

Mining difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks (roughly every two weeks) in sync with the network’s hash rate.

© 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

• Vlad Tenev, Robinhood Co-founder & CEO, affirms no desire to sell the business
• Announced ~23% headcount reduction amidst declining share price and fundamental operations 
• SEC investigation into Robinhood’s short-selling and compliance with regulations 
• Closed Wednesday, August 3, 2022, at $10.31 / share, a +11.7% 1-day movement, but traded down (2.61%) to $10.06 in after-hours trading 
• Reported $318mm Q2’22 Net Revenue, ($295mm) Net Loss, ($271mm) EBITDA and ($0.34) EPs
• Disclaimer: This is a market commentary research piece and includes opinionated views from our research team. Nothing contained in this piece constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer by The Block Research.

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Meta, parent company to the social media platform Facebook, announced on Thursday that it is expanding its Instagram digital asset integration over 100 countries. 

Meta’s expansion of digital asset integration brings non-fungible tokens (NFT) into the mainstream, as Instagram has over two billion worldwide active users, according to CNBC.

The regions supporting the expansion include the Americas, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, according to an updated post from Meta. Users must connect a digital wallet to the social media platform Instagram to start posting their digital collectibles. 

“As of today, we support connections with third-party wallets including Rainbow, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet and Dapper Wallet coming soon,” Meta wrote in a post. 

Meta is also leveraging the Flow blockchain, developed by CryptoPunks creator Dapper Labs, to allow individuals to post their assets minted on the Flow blockchain on Instagram. Meta’s currently supported blockchains include Ethereum, Polygon and Flow. 

Meta’s move comes three months after the firm first began testing digital asset integration on Instagram. Users can post non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as their profile picture like on Twitter, 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.

Coinbase shares briefly hurtled past $100 on Thursday morning following an announcement that the firm will partner with BlackRock to offer institutional clients access to crypto. 

Shares in the company were trading around $99 at the time of writing, after closing at $80.81 on Wednesday. Trading in COIN was halted shortly after the open having jumped as high as 35% minutes after the open. 

The price of COIN shares dropped back below $100 after trading resumed, trading up about 20% at $99

Matt Weller, global head of market research at forex.com, told The Block that investors are enthused by Coinbase’s partnership with BlackRock and its integration into the widely-used Aladdin platform.

Coinbase is set to work with BlackRock — the world’s largest asset manager — to offer its institutional clients access to crypto. Clients using the asset manager’s portfolio management software will soon be able to get direct access to crypto through the partnership. Clients of both companies will initially be able to trade bitcoin. 

“After years of hype, today’s announcement offers a ray of hope that institutional money actually *is* coming to crypto, and after today’s announcement, Coinbase is poised to be a beneficiary of that trend,” he said. 

Coinbase will announce its second quarter earnings next week on 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.