FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Bitcoin miner Digihost is planning to move some of its fleet from New York to a new site in Alabama.

The company has just broken ground on the new 55-megawatt facility, according to a statement released Tuesday. The machine transfer will allow the miner to benefit from lower direct energy costs negotiated with Alabama Power.

The first 28 megawatts of energy capacity are scheduled to be ready by the end of the third quarter of 2022 and the full 55 by the first quarter of 2023.

The company said that it sold some of its bitcoin to fund energy costs. 

Digihost mined 64.17 BTC in July. It had 220.09 BTC at the end of July, down from 293.30 BTC in June, which indicates that it sold about 137.38 BTC last month.

The company also held 1,000.89 ETH at the end of July. Its total digital asset holdings were valued at about $6.82 million based on current prices. Digihost also held $4.5 million in cash and $500,000 in derivatives.

© 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.

Luxury fashion brand Gucci is now accepting ApeCoin payments through BitPay at select stores in the US, according to a tweet on Tuesday morning. 

ApeCoin is the cryptocurrency affiliated with the Bored Ape Yacht Club, an non-fungible token (NFT) project created by Yuga Labs. 

Gucci will become the first merchant to accept ApeCoin through BitPay, a payment service provider that has been in operation since 2011. This isn’t the first cryptocurrency that Gucci has moved to accept, however. In May, the brand started accepting bitcoin, litecoin, dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies at select US stories. 

The move is the latest in a series of crypto initiatives from Gucci, which has a team dedicated to web3 initiatives and gaming. The firm has also launched games on Roblox, including Gucci Garden, which has had 19 million visitors. Gucci has also created “skins” for avatars in games like Animal Crossing and Pokemon Go. 

In June, Gucci announced joined the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) behind the NFT marketplace SuperRare, acquiring 150,000 $RARE tokens, worth around $31,000 at the time, to join the DAO and earn governance rights within the community. 

© 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.

MarqVision, a startup that detects and removes counterfeit products using AI, announced Tuesday that it raised $20 million in Series A funding.  

Investors in this round include DST Global Partners, Atinum Investments, Softbank Ventures, Bass Investment and Y-Combinator, according to a release sent to The Block.  

MarqVision’s counterfeit detection spots counterfeit items for not only physical items but non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on over 1,500 online marketplaces. Thefts, plagiarism and fakes regarding NFTs are a frequent subject of complaints on crypto Twitter and are often seen on the world’s largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea.  

With this new funding round, MarqVision intends to bolster its product development to further protect intellectual property (IP) for brands and content creators.  

“With this new round of funding, we can accelerate our mission of building the world’s first IP operating system to give brand owners full control of their IP portfolios,” said Mark Lee, co-founder and CEO of MarqVision, in a statement.

Many fashion brands such as Prada have eyed the blockchain spaces as a way to verify products and avoid counterfeits, 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.

Quick Take

• Crypto startups have developed a taste for investing in other projects at an early stage in their own development. 
• Some traditional venture firms are concerned that their portfolio companies are getting distracted from developing their own products. 

This feature story is available to
subscribers of The Block News Plus.
You can continue reading
this News Plus feature on The Block.

Marathon closed a deal for a $100 million loan from Silvergate Bank collateralized by bitcoin, a move that comes as other miners have sold bitcoin in an effort to pay down their debts.

The company also refinanced a previous $100 million bitcoin-backed loan that it had previously secured with the same firm, it announced Monday after the market close.

The new revolving line of credit allows Marathon to draw $50 million initially and an extra $50 million up to 270 days after closing (on July 28). It has a variable interest rate and is currently priced at 7.25%.

“We are pleased to be closing on these debt facilities and believe that the combination of a term loan and revolver provide Marathon with exceptional flexibility as to our funding options,” said Marathon CFO Hugh Gallagher.

Marathon announced Monday that it had no outstanding balance on the original loan, which was set to expire in October 2022. The two credit facilities will now mature in July 2024.

As bitcoin’s value fell by about a third in June, companies like Bitfarms and Argo sold a large portion of their bitcoin holdings (3,000 and 637 BTC, respectively) to reduce the outstanding balance on various loans. Core Scientific sold a total of 7,202 BTC during the same time period.

On Monday, Bitfarms said that it sold an additional 1,623 BTC in July to further reduce its bitcoin-backed loan down to $23 million.

Marathon, however, said last month that it had 10,055 BTC in reserve and hadn’t sold any since October 2020.

© 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.

While most crypto hacks are caused by lone wolves, Monday’s $190 million exploit of the Nomad cross-bridge appears to have been driven by a feeding frenzy of hundreds of bad actors. 

Nomad’s cross-chain bridge was hacked for $190 million in various crypto assets yesterday after a software update exposed a critical vulnerability that allowed anyone to drain funds from the bridge. 

The vulnerability was initially discovered on Monday by an unknown hacker who quickly stole nearly $95 million, blockchain security firm PeckShield told The Block today. As the news of the initial exploit spread in crypto circles, others rushed to join the original hacker to take money for themselves. 

PeckShield told The Block that more than 300 addresses had taken funds from Nomad over the course of an hour. The firm estimated that 41 of them took $152 million, equivalent to 80% of the stolen funds from Nomad’s cross-chain bridge.

However, not all of them were bad actors. PeckShield’s analysis found at least six addresses that were white hackers, a name given to ethical hackers, who grabbed about $8.2 million from the bridge. They are expected to return the funds.

Nomad is a cross-chain bridge, a tool that lets users move ERC-20 tokens among Ethereum, Moonbeam, Evmos and Avalanche. It is one of the several bridge services available in the crypto space.

What went wrong

According to PeckShield, the vulnerability was introduced by Nomad developers during a smart contract update. The bug came from the developers erroneously modifying the bridge’s smart contract and deploying the code without proper audit.

“The Nomad bridge hack is made possible due to an improper initialization leading to the zero address (0x00) being marked as a trusted root, which led to every message being proven valid by default,” PeckShield said. 

Marking 0x00 (also called as the zero address) the verified root accidentally turned off a smart contract check that ensured withdrawals were made to valid addresses only.

After the vulnerability was introduced in Nomad’s code, withdrawal requests from any address were considered as valid by default. This meant that anyone could withdraw funds from the bridge if they wanted.

The exploit didn’t require advanced technical knowledge of smart contracts. All one had to do was simply edit the hacker’s transaction with Etherscan, replace the destination address with their own address and make the withdrawal request on the Nomad bridge. 

© 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 custodian BitGo has announced two top level leadership changes, with both executives reporting directly to the company’s CEO Mike Belshe.

Chen Fang will take on the role of chief operating officer, having previously served as chief product officer, according to a press release on Tuesday. Fang founded an institutional-grade portfolio management suite for digital assets known as Lumina, which was acquired by BitGo in 2020. 

Separately, Victor Tsou will become BitGo’s vice president of engineering. Tsou most recently held the role of senior director of engineering at Affirm, a buy now pay later platform, according to the release. 

“This market environment offers an opportunity to build and it is important to promote and bring top talent to lead our teams, product roadmap and take BitGo to the next level,” said Belshe in the release. “Chen and Victor are invaluable for our future progress and our clients as we expand our suite of institutional grade solutions for the industry.” 

Founded in 2013, California-based BitGo provides a range of services to institutional investors from custody, liquidity and security solutions.  

BitGo claimed in November 2021, to have $64 billion in digital assets under custody. It also processes around 20% of all global bitcoin transactions, according to the release. 

In May 2021, Galaxy Digital announced the acquisition of BitGo for $1.2 billion. However, The Block reported in March that the terms of the deal were now being renegotiated. 

© 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 Waves blockchain community has backed a governance proposal to address the liquidity problems currently facing Waves-based DeFi lending protocol Vires Finance, the project announced on Tuesday.

The vote, which ended on July 29, saw over three-quarters of all votes cast in support of the proposal.

Vires Finance has been dealing with a liquidity crunch since the start of April. The problem began when Neutrino (USDN), a stablecoin on Waves, temporarily lost its peg to the US dollar. This situation triggered a bank run on Vires Finance, the major lender in the Waves ecosystem. The bank run dried up liquidity on the platform preventing other users from being able to withdraw their funds.

Based on comments in the forum discussion, Vires Finance lenders with more than $250,000 in either tether (USDT) or USD coin (USDC) in their accounts were unhappy with a previous plan that would have called for them to be repaid in USDN instead of their USDT or USDC deposits.

With the vote passed, the new “DeFi Revival Plan” for Vires Finance will now go into effect. As part of the plan, these whale users now have two options. The first choice is to liquidate their position to USDN entirely with an added one-year vesting period and a 5% liquidation bonus. Otherwise, they can remain on Vires Finance but will earn no yield on all USDT or USDC funds above the $250,000 threshold.

“Ultimately, the proposal is anticipated to result in more funds being freed up, gradually increasing Vires.Finance’s liquidity and allowing more users to withdraw their assets. Additionally, holders of gVires, the platform’s governance token, will be offered two months’ worth of APY via the revenue system,” the announcement stated.

© 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.

Robinhood’s crypto unit has been fined $30 million by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), which alleges that the company violated anti-money laundering and cybersecurity regulations, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

According to the report, the NYDFS found the alleged failures through a supervisory exam and a subsequent enforcement investigation. This is the regulator’s first crypto enforcement action.

The NYDFS told the Wall Street Journal that Robinhood’s Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering compliance programs weren’t adequately staffed. It added that the firm’s cybersecurity program didn’t properly address the company’s operational risks, nor did its policies comply with the regulator’s cybersecurity and virtual currency regulations.

The investigation also found that by not having a dedicated phone number on its website for consumer complaints, Robinhood had failed to comply with consumer-protection requirements.

Robinhood will now be required to maintain an independent consultant to evaluate its compliance with the state regulator’s rules and its remediation efforts. 

Shares in the retail investment platform were down marginally at the open on Tuesday, losing just over 1% following the news. The firm will post its second quarter earnings on Wednesday.

© 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.

Point72’s Steve Cohen has exited his investment in crypto trading firm Radkl, according to a report by Bloomberg.  

A spokesperson from Radkl told Bloomberg that — despite the news — the firm is “extremely well capitalized with its current investors and continues to grow rapidly.” 

Radkl is led by Ryan Sheftel and was born out of New York Stock Exchange market maker GTS. The firm previously said that it planned to be an electronic market maker across crypto exchanges, while also trading on a bilateral basis with other market participants. 

High-speed trading guru Jim Greco previously worked at the firm, before leaving in January of this year to set up F9 Research. Greco formed digital asset-focused quant investment fund with other former Radkl employees Allan Erskine and Jason Bell.  

Despite the Radkl website listing Beatrice O’Carroll as managing director, her LinkedIn suggests she left the firm in June. She did not immediately respond to request for comment.  

Tuesday’s announcement comes less than a year after it was reported that Cohen invested in the firm. This wasn’t Cohen’s only crypto investment at the time, as he invested in NFT project Recur in September 2021. 

Radkl and Point72 did not responded to requests for comment from The Block by the time of publication.

Corrects headline to show Cohen has exited the investment. 

© 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.