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PayPal surged nearly 13% after the close after reporting a $2 billion stake by Elliott Investment Management and transaction revenue of $6.27 billion, up 8% from the year earlier.

“As one of PayPal’s largest investors, with an approximately $2 billion investment, Elliott strongly believes in the value proposition of PayPal,” said Jesse Cohn, managing partner Elliott. “Today’s announcement highlights a number of steps that have been underway and are being initiated to help realize the significant value opportunity at the company.”

Transaction revenue, which accounts for 92% of all revenue, includes fees for the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies. The company reported total revenue of $6.8 billion, up 9% on the year, and besting the estimate by $20 million, and Non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.93, beating the estimate by $0.06, according to Seeking Alpha.

Revenue is expected to reach more than $27 billion for the year, compared with about $25 billion in 2021.

© 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.

Stock trading app Robinhood announced a fresh round of layoffs Tuesday.

“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. 

Later in the post, Tenev described the organization reworking as one moving toward “a General Manager (GM) structure, where GMs will assume broad responsibility for our individual businesses.”

Robinhood held a round of layoffs this spring, just ahead of its Q1 earnings release. 

Earlier Tuesday, Robinhood’s crypto arm was hit with a $30 million fine by New York’s financial sector regulators for allegedly failing to comply with anti-money laundering and cybersecurity regulations.

© 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 set to step down as CEO of MicroStrategy and assume a new role as executive chairman, the company’s earnings report revealed Tuesday.

The firm, which holds more than 129,699 BTC, said that revenues came in at $122.1 million for Q2, compared with $125.4 million in the second quarter of 2021.

Michael Saylor’s firm recently purchased an additional 480 bitcoin worth around $10 million at an average price of $20,817.

On the financial state of its bitcoin holdings, MicroStrategy said:

“As of June 30, 2022, the carrying value of MicroStrategy’s digital assets (comprised of approximately 129,699 bitcoins) was $1.988 billion, which reflects cumulative impairment losses of $1.989 billion since acquisition and an average carrying amount per bitcoin of approximately $15,326.”

The firm has consistently refused to alter its outlook on the digital asset, despite the price of bitcoin plunging below $30,000 in May, which meant MicroStrategy was in the red on its average purchase price.  Indeed, CEO Michael Saylor believes the asset’s near-term volatility is largely irrelevant, he told The Block in June. 

In its last earnings report, on May 3, the firm said it may conservatively explore future yield generation opportunities on unencumbered MacroStrategy bitcoins — a reference to its bitcoin-backed loan deal with Silvergate. 

Shares in the computer software company traded down during after-hours trading, losing 2.86% at the time of writing.  

Investment bank Jefferies downgraded MicroStrategy’s stock to underperform from hold last month, setting a price target of $180. The firm also forecasted total revenue growth of 4% – higher than the analyst consensus of 3% – but above/below the resulting report.

© 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.

Synapse, one of the most popular cross-blockchain bridges, revealed last week that it will be the first bridging protocol to develop its own smart contract platform. The firm says the new platform, called “Synapse Chain,” will address limitations to the current infrastructure for cross-chain applications.

Since launching in August 2021, Synapse’s bridge, which connects various Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains, has facilitated more than $11 billion in volume by more than 150,000 users. Now, the goal is to pivot from simply processing swaps across blockchains to enabling the creation of applications that work across multiple blockchains.

“Developers can birth a whole suite of new primitives with multi-chain state that’s deployed on a single blockchain,” the company said in its announcement post. “These primitives can then be used as building blocks for completely new user experiences and applications that are better tailored to our multi-chain reality.” 

Cross-chain applications are growing in popularity because they allow traders to interact with multiple blockchain ecosystems. But according to the Synapse team, one of the main problems many teams building cross-chain applications are facing is the lack of a single execution environment. Instead, they must deploy smart contracts on multiple chains, which increases security risks,  communication barriers and development needs.

Unlike existing systems, Synapse’s platform, and specifically it’s cross-chain messaging protocol, will enable developers to deploy a cross-chain smart contract exclusively on Synapse Chain. “Applications built on Synapse Chain will be able to execute their business logic across any blockchain,” the company said. Transactions will settle on Ethereum. 

Synapse Chain will feature an “Ethereum-based optimistic rollup design” for scalability, security, user experience and compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Optimistic rollups increase speed and lower fees while maintaining security from Ethereum. “Instead of needing to bootstrap independent security systems, optimistic rollups enable dapps to leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum’s base layer, which has the highest security spend out of any generalized smart contract blockchain,” the team said. 

Its compatibility with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) will enable any existing application to be deployed on Synapse Chain and give developers a similar building experience to other EVM chains.  

The launch of Synapse Chain and the associated “Synapse V2” upgrade will also both have implications for Synapse’s native SYN token. SYN will be used for staking and contributing to the security and consensus of the network, adding a new dynamic to the economic incentives underlying the Synapse ecosystem.  

The team plans to release more details on Synapse V2 over the coming months.  

© 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 Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) included a number of crypto firms in a consumer alert that called out companies not registered to deal in the Canadian province.

The OSC’s investor warning encompasses possible harmful or illegal activity. The commission maintains a “warning list” of companies and individuals that may be putting investors at risk. In today’s notice, Kucoin, PhenoFX, Crestswiftrade.com and FX-BTC Trade are listed as unregistered firms in the jurisdiction.

The crypto firms that made the list were among other firms purporting to be foreign exchange brokers or other forms of broker-dealers. Some are facing claims of scams against them.  

In June, the OSC barred Kucoin from operating in Ontario. The move came as part of a wider crackdown on crypto exchanges following a decision from Canada’s securities regulators in 2021 to treat custodial exchanges as securities exchanges regardless of whether the digital assets are securities. The OSC has since gone after unregistered exchanges, most recently settling with Bybit, which has committed to working with the OSC to register.

Earlier this month KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu dispelled rumors suggesting the company might halt withdrawals. 

© 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

• Founded in 2018, TRM Labs is a blockchain intelligence company that provides various compliance and forensics services for public and private sector clients
• TRM Labs noted its key strengths as (1) asset coverage (2) cross-chain analytics and (3) data reliability
• In December 2021, TRM Labs raised $60 million (Series B round) to fuel the company’s global expansion in key markets (Europe, APAC and Latin America) and R&D efforts for maintaining product superiority
• TRM Labs’ plan for 2022 and 2023 is maintaining its aggressive growth (6.0x YoY in recent years) with an eye toward strong unit economics and cash efficiency

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Digital asset manager CoinShares reported losses in the second quarter as the firm suffered over $21 million in losses following the de-pegging and subsequent collapse of TerraUSD (UST).

Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA – a popular measure of a company’s financial performance – was negative £8.2 million (just over $10 million). This is down from a positive EBITDA of £28.6 million a year earlier, according to a statement on Tuesday. 

The firm said that decreased revenue, gains and significant losses relating to the TerraUSD collapse as well as the costs related to its ongoing expansion caused the negative performance.  CoinShares position in TerraUSD was $120 million at one stage, although it reduced its risk during the de-pegging for a loss of just over $21 million.

When asked about its expansion plans during its earnings call CFO Richard Nash said the firm is being “more cautious” with its growth plans, although it wants to be ready to capitalize on the next period of growth in crypto.  

CoinShares CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti shared his views on contagion in the crypto space, saying that we have seen the worst of contagion – before noting there is some potential for contagion risk in Asia.  

Mognetti was particularly critical of centralized lending platforms in response to a question about the firm’s position in Maple Finance and TrueFi. The CEO said there is a lack of transparency when it comes to centralised lending platforms, going on to add that decentralized protocols are the future of finance.  

CoinShares stock price was down 0.48% on Tuesday trading at 30.95 SEK – approximately $3.03. The stock was trading as low as 26.30 SEK just under a week ago on July 27. 

© 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.

Messari, the crypto information and data services firm, has acquired crypto fundraising intelligence database Dove Metrics of Blackrose Capital, the company announced in a statement on Tuesday. 

Further details of the deal were not disclosed. But the acquisition is part of the company’s goal in “creating greater transparency around the industry,” Eric Turner, Messari vice president of market intelligence, said.  

“The acquisition of Dove Metrics will enable us to offer new datasets and tools that further allow our users to stay on top of industry trends and monitor, in real time, the top projects and technologies that investors are backing,” Turner added. 

Following the acquisition, Messari integrated the Dove Metrics dashboard to its platform and made the newly added data available to its subscribers. 

Dove Metrics’ database tracks over 8,000 investors, including venture capital (VC) funds, hedge funds, investment decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), corporate funds and angel investors, the company said in its statement. The database also provides insight into around 3,000 funding rounds and hundreds of merger and acquisition transactions.

Dove Metrics started operations in 2020. The company has been led by Regan Bozman and Pierre Chuzeville, who also run early-stage crypto venture capital fund Lattice Capital. 

© 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.

Paystand, a US blockchain-enabled B2B payments firm, bought Mexican accounts payable startup Yaydoo, Axios reported.

No deal terms were disclosed. The companies did not immediately return requests for comment.

Paystand operates in the US and Canada, while Yaydoo is focused on Spanish-speaking Latin America, including Colombia, Peru and Chile. Combined, the companies serve 500,000 customers, and have processed more than $5 billion in payment volume.

The companies will continue to operate independently, but will cross-sell products. 

In July 2021, Paystand raised $50 million in a Series C round, bringing its total funding to $85 million from NewView Capital, with participation from SoftBank’s SB Opportunity Fund and King River Capital, according to TechCrunch. Yaydoo raised a $20 million Series A round in August 2021 co-led by Base10 Partners and monashees, alongside SoftBank’s Latin America Fund and Leap Global Partners.

© 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.

Solana NFT marketplace Magic Eden will launch support for Ethereum-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the coming weeks, the company announced on Tuesday.

The move has been expected since the company’s Series B fundraise in June, when it hinted it was planning to launch on more blockchains.

Users will be able to choose to mint NFTs using SOL and ETH via its cross-chain Launchpad, starting with NFT project EZU, a sister project to Psychedelics Anonymous by Voltura, aka Lewis Gale.

Launched in September 2021 by founders with pedigrees from Uber, Coinbase and Google, Magic Eden was valued at $1.6 billion in its latest funding round in June. The Series B raised $130 million for the company and was led by Electric Capital and Greenock Partners. It followed just three months after its Paradigm-led $27 million Series A.

Other marketplaces have also rolled out cross-chain services over the past few months. OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, rolled out services to support Solana NFTs in April, having originally launched on Ethereum. In July, OpenSea was responsible for $484.79 million in NFT market volumes.

Magic Eden’s launch comes amid declining in sales volumes for NFT marketplaces. In July, marketplace volumes dropped from $884.68 million down to $626.11 million, according to data from The Block.

Magic Eden is no exception. From an all-time-high trading volume of $380.87 million in January, volumes have dropped to just over $81 million in July.

© 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.