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Alchemy, a blockchain node infrastructure provider, announced a deal to provide its node infrastructure to Astar, a blockchain on the Polkadot network.

Astar offers a smart contract service that supports dApps based on blockchain software stacks like Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly. It offers interoperability with other Polkadot’s parachains. It hosts dApps like ArthSwap, Starlay Finance, AstridDAO, Algem, Sirius Finance and Zenlink.

The partnership, announced on Wednesday, allows Astar developers to use Alchemy’s flagship offering called SuperNode to meet infrastructure requirements. Essentially, it functions as a middleware platform for Astar’s dApps to stay connected and prevent downtime.

“Alchemy infrastructure makes it easier for developers to build any dApp with infinite scalability, accuracy and reliability,” Rob Boyle, head of product at Alchemy, said on the partnership. “We’re thrilled to combine forces with Astar to foster an era of better web3 building that will power the decentralized applications of tomorrow.”

Alchemy offers its node application programming interface (API) service on three other blockchains including Ethereum, Polygon and Solana. It’s used by popular apps on Ethereum like 0x, Aave, dYdX, OpenSea and Nifty Gateway for scaling needs. In February, Alchemy raised $200 million at a $10.2 billion valuation.

© 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.

“White hat” actors who safeguarded funds on behalf of Nomad during Monday’s $190 million hack have returned the funds to a wallet address belonging to Nomad, according to a report by PeckShield.

Nomad on Wednesday published a wallet address for the recovery of stolen funds. Data from Etherscan shows almost $9 million in crypto tokens taken during the hack have been returned. The crypto tokens returned so far include $3.75 million in usd coin (USDC), $2 million in tether (USDT), $1.4 million in covalent query token (CQT), and $1.2 million in frax (FRAX), among others.

Most of these funds have come from known Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain wallet addresses. These individuals are among the 300 wallets that participated in the incident. Unlike the hackers, these white hat actors took action to try to secure Nomad funds during the free-for-all heist that ensued. Some of them promised to return the funds once Nomad provided a recovery wallet. White hat or ethical hackers, often put their hacking skills to use in identifying security vulnerabilities in the digital space.

Nomad has stated that is working with law enforcement and blockchain forensics firms to trace the hackers responsible for the heist. The crypto bridge infrastructure has also said that it is working to patch the vulnerability that led to the theft in the first place. Nomad support cross-chain token transfers among supported networks like Ethereum, Evmos, Moonbeam, and Avalanche.

© 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-native banking software company Galoy this morning announced a $4 million fundraise led by Hivemind Ventures. 

Co-founded in 2019 by Nicolas Burtey and Chris Hunter, Galoy provides a suite of tools that enable merchants and consumers to use the Lightning network for payments and create tools for bitcoin-native banking services. 

The Lightning network is a payment layer that sits on top of the bitcoin network, promising cheaper and faster transactions for bitcoin payments. 

Galoy’s technology powers the Bitcoin beach wallet in El Salvador and the Bitcoin jungle app in Costa Rica. 

The new funds will help further the development of GaloyMoney, which is an open-source bitcoin banking platform that helps organizations access and integrate bitcoin payments into their services using the Lightning network. 

“Galoy dramatically lowers the barrier for any community or organization to become their own bank and plug into the world’s first open monetary and payments standard,” said Max Webster, the founder of Hivemind Ventures, in a press release. 

Other investors in the round include Valor, Timechain, El Zonte Capital, Kingsway Capital, Trammell Venture Partners and AlphaPoint. 

At the end of last year, Galoy closed a $3 million seed round led by Craft Ventures. 

New synthetic dollar launch

Alongside the new fundraise, Galoy is also launching a feature on its platform called Stablesats, which is a derivatives contract that creates a bitcoin-backed synthetic dollar pegged to the US dollar. 

The feature will give users access to a US dollar account within their lightning wallet, and aims to power everyday payments by removing the exposure to the short-term volatility of exchange rates between the dollar and bitcoin, per the release. 

A user can transfer their bitcoin to US dollars in the app to lock in a certain exchange rate. Behind the scenes, Stablesats is using bitcoin derivatives markets and an inverse perpetual futures contract, also known as inverse perpetual swap, to make this possible.

This means Galoy will short the current amount of US dollars at a predetermined bitcoin price to lock in the exchange rate, according to the website. As the contract is perpetual, it avoids expiry. When the contract is settled it is done so in bitcoin avoiding the need to touch US dollars.

“While the dollar value of their BTC account fluctuates, $1 in their USD account remains $1 regardless of the bitcoin exchange rate,” said Burtey in the release. 

Derivatives are a complex trading product and the Stablesats website lists several risks inherent in using a product built on a derivative instrument, including counterparty risk and the potential for auto deleveraging.

© 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 venture capital firm Hashed lost more than $3 billion from its investment in the Terra ecosystem’s luna token following its crash in early May, CEO and managing partner Simon Seojoon Kim has confirmed.

In an interview with Bloomberg published on Wednesday, Kim said Hashed had bought 30 million luna tokens in the blockchain project’s early days, which were worth as much as $3.6 billion when luna’s price peaked in early April.

This is the first time Hashed has officially confirmed the extent of its loss in the luna crash. In May, CoinDesk, citing on-chain data, reported that Hashed had staked a total of nearly 50 million luna tokens and that its losses appeared to have been over $3.5 billion.

The Terra ecosystem began to collapse on May 7 when the price of its algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) lost its peg to the US dollar. UST’s sister token, luna, crashed in tandem — dropping from around $80 to just a few cents. Terra’s implosion wiped out more than $40 billion in investor wealth in a matter of days.

But despite facing heavy losses in luna, Hashed hasn’t lost faith in crypto. The firm, in fact, plans to raise a third fund in the first half of next year, Kim told Bloomberg.

It isn’t clear how much money Hashed would hope to raise for its new fund and Kim didn’t respond to The Block’s request for comment.

Hashed has previously raised at least $320 million in two venture funds. If and when the firm is able to raise a new fund, it will focus on investing in blockchain-based gaming startups, according to Kim.

© 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 generated roughly $8.8 million from the sale of 426 BTC  in July, based on an average bitcoin price of $20,768. The company expects to use the proceeds to fund its own growth and operations, it said in its most recent monthly update.

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).

“We are seeing unprecedented opportunities in this market,” said Zach Bradford, CEO of CleanSpark. “We believe that our operational strategy focused on efficiency, up-time and execution will allow these metrics to continually improve.”

As of July 31, CleanSpark had 30,450 miners in its fleet with a total hash rate of 2.9 EH/s.

The company mined 384 BTC in July and held 519 in its reserves by the end of the 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.

A hack on the Solana blockchain entered a second day on Wednesday, with no firm consensus on the source of the exploit or how it might be stopped. 

As of 5 a.m. UTC on Wednesday, the Layer 1 network said 7,767 wallets had been affected. A report from security firm Anchain estimated that more than $5 million in assets had been taken. 

While it’s not yet confirmed what may be responsible for the exploit, Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said on Twitter the incident is likely a “supply chain attack” on wallets using Apple’s iOS operating system.

Supply chain attacks happen when a hacker enters and modifies software by injecting their malicious code in a system. The code inserts can be employed to deliver a malicious payload or backdoor malware. In Solana’s case, it’s possible that a hacker attacked its iOS wallet libraries to extract private keys, based on the team’s analysis.

Yakovenko came to his conclusion based the fact that exploited wallets didn’t have prior interactions with dApps and had remained inactive for some time. This indicates that hackers may have extracted private keys from Solana’s hot wallets not with the usual phishing attacks carried out with malicious links.

Gaining access to private keys means the hackers had the ability to transfer out funds from hot wallets, including Phantom and Slope wallet services.

Hot wallets are considered less secure than cold wallets as they stay connected to the internet. Cold wallets, meanwhile, store private keys within an offline hardware layer.

While more than 7,000 Solana wallets have been hit in this hack, that’s a tiny fraction of the total. There were about 25 million active addresses on the network in July, according to data compiled by The Block. 

The Solana team previously stated that it had been working with engineers and several security firms to put its fingers on a definite vulnerability responsible for the incident. It also opened a survey to collect details on the 7,767 exploited wallets as it continues to look for further clues.

The latest wallet exploit is one among a series of issues plaguing the Solana blockchain. Despite being a widely-used Layer 1, Solana has suffered regular outages due to block congestion.

© 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.

An attacker appears to be draining SOL and SPL tokens in an apparent exploit on the Solana network. 

Solana auditor OtterSec tweeted this evening that more than 5000 Solana wallets have been drained in the past few hours, corroborating numerous reports from people on Twitter claiming their balances have disappeared. OtterSec’s analysis showed the transactions were signed by the owners, which the auditor said suggested a private key compromise. The exploit may also affect ETH users. 

Wallets that have been inactive for more than six months appear to be those hardest hit, according to reports on Twitter. Users of Phantom and Slope wallets say they have lost funds. 

“We are working closely with other teams to get to the bottom of a reported vulnerability in the Solana ecosystem,” tweeted Phantom. “At this time, the team does not believe this is a Phantom-specific issue.”

At time of publication, it is unclear where the exploit originated. Non-fungible token marketplace Magic Eden recommended users to revoke permissions for any suspicious links within Phantom wallets in a tweet to users. Gaming firm Star Atlas issued a community warning to users, saying a large scale exploit of Solana is in progress and advising users to revoke permissions for all apps in their wallets and move funds to cold storage. 

This story is developing and will be updated as details emerge. 

© 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 bad news from Robinhood kept coming today. First, the New York Department of Financial Services hit the company with a $30 million fine, followed by the company’s CEO announcing layoffs for about one-quarter of its staff.

After the layoff announcement, Robinhood released its second-quarter earnings, reporting net revenues were up 6% to $318 million. Still, it’s a far cry from Q2 2021, when the firm raked in over $233 million in crypto transaction revenue and $565 million in net revenues. 

Crypto transaction revenue saw a slight increase from Q1, from $54 million to $58 million. Despite the uptick, overall transaction revenues were down 7%. Today’s figure marks the most the firm has made on crypto since the mania of 2021. 

The firm touted its introduction of a number of new coins and wallet offering, saying in a statement that it plans to continue building momentum in crypto. 

Like last quarter, the earnings figures came hot off the announcement of layoffs. In Q1, Robinhood laid off approximately 9% of its global staff before announcing its earnings figures. At the time, it cited a period of significant growth that led to duplicate roles and needless layers of complexity. Today, the firm made similar moves, announcing a fresh round of layoffs. 

“As part of a broader company reorganization into a General Manager (GM) structure, I just announced that we are reducing our headcount by approximately 23%. While employees from all functions will be impacted, the changes are particularly concentrated in our operations, marketing, and program management functions,” Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, said in a blog post. 

Separately, and before the layoff news, the crypto business hit a speed bump today when the New York Department of Financial Services fined Robinhood for allegedly failing to comply with anti-money laundering and cybersecurity regulations. It will now be required to retain an independent consultant to evaluate its crypto business’s compliance. 

Robinhood will host its second-quarter 2022 earnings call tomorrow at 5 p.m. EDT. 

© 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.

Michael Saylor is stepping down as CEO of MicroStrategy on August 8, but the firm says its outlook on bitcoin will not change — despite huge losses related to digital assets in the second quarter.

The software company revealed impairment charges relating to bitcoin of $918 million for the second quarter of 2022, following losses of $425 million in the first quarter. The firm’s revenue decreased 2.6% compared with the second quarter of 2022.

MicroStrategy

Incoming CEO Phong Le said the firm’s plans to hold bitcoin long term will not change.

Saylor will continue to chair the firm’s investment committee, he said on Tuesday’s earnings call, while also increasing his advocacy efforts for bitcoin. Saylor told analysts the reshuffling of roles was a win for everyone involved.

In an attempt to preempt questions on bitcoin’s price dropping, Chief Financial Officer Andrew Kang said the firm has sufficient collateral to pledge in case of any further volatility in crypto markets. 

The decision on Phong Le’s succession was seven years in the making — since Le joined the firm and worked closely with Saylor on various projects.

Saylor told listeners in his opening remarks that the current wave of scrutiny facing cryptocurrency was good for the asset class in the medium to long term. The demise of Celsius, Voyager and 3AC has removed dangerous business practices from the market, he said, and has kickstarted regulatory preparations – which he said should be good for bitcoin in the long run.

© 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 companies were up in the stock market on Tuesday.

The coin was trading at around $23,000 by market close, according to TradingView.

Cipher Mining, Core Scientific and Hive Blockchain’s stocks were among the most well-performing, going up by 13.50%, 12.86% and 7.79% (on the Toronto Stock Exchange).

Marathon announced after market close on Monday that it secured an additional $100 million in credit from Silvergate Bank and refinanced an existing $100 million bitcoin-backed loan. The company’s stock was up by 5.62% on Tuesday.

Digihost’s stock fell by 1.56% after announcing plans to transfer part of its mining fleet from New York to a new Alabama site.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Tuesday, August 2:

© 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.