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An employee at one of Celsius’ vendors leaked a list of customer emails to a “third-party bad actor,” according to the company.

The crypto lender said in an email Thursday that it was hit by the same Costumer.io data breach that impacted OpenSea as well. 

Although Celsius doesn’t think that its customers face “any high risks,” it does see the data breach as a “severe violation of vendor-client relations” and has contacted the appropriate authorities, the company said.

Five other Costumer.io customers were affected beyond OpenSea, according to an update from the company.

Costumer.io initially said on June 30 that no Celsius data had been affected, Celsius’ email said. On July 8, however, the company warned that a list of Celsius customer emails had in fact been leaked, even though Celsius had removed all data held with Costumer.io right after finding out about the incident.

Costumer.io also said that “no other Celsius client data was accessed or taken by the employee.”

The employee in question was a senior engineer that has since been fired, Costumer.io’s update noted.

“We do not expect to learn any additional information since this incident resulted from the actions of a single employee, who had legitimate access to these email addresses as part of the employee’s job,” it also 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.

Aurigami, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol based on the Aurora network, has raised $12 million in token rounds.

Sharing the news exclusively with The Block on Thursday, Aurigami said out of the total funding, $9.5 million was raised via a private token sale, and $2.5 million via an initial exchange offering (IEO) on KuCoin, Bybit and Impossible Finance. The private token sale closed in February and the IEO in May.

Crypto venture capital firms Dragonfly Capital and Polychain Capital co-led the private token round. Other investors included Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Jump Crypto, Amber Group and QCP Capital.

Angel investors, including Aurora CEO Alex Shevchenko, Etherscan CEO Matthew Tan, former ParaFi partner Santiago Santos and CoinGecko co-founders Bobby Ong and TM Lee also participated.

Investors purchased Aurigami’s native token PLY. It is currently trading at around $0.001, down 95% from its all-time high of about $0.02, according to CoinGecko.

Aurigami was launched earlier this year. It is a lending and borrowing protocol on Aurora, a subnet of the NEAR blockchain. Aurigami is currently the second largest lending protocol on Aurora behind Bastion, according to data from DeFi Llama. Its current total value locked (TVL) stands at over $20 million, while Bastion’s TVL stands at over $130 million.

When asked how Aurigami plans to increase its TVL, its co-founder EY Tan told The Block that the project has two main plans in that regard. First, enabling NEAR’s native stablecoin USN as a borrowable asset, and second, supporting cross-chain lending and borrowing.

With fresh capital in hand, Aurigami also plans to expand its current team size of 10 and grow its ecosystem, said Tan. The project is currently mainly hiring developers.

© 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.

Trung Nguyen, co-founder and CEO of Sky Mavis: the studio behind the Axie Infinity blockchain game, moved about $3 million in crypto tokens before the company disclosed details of a $540 million, Bloomberg has reported.

According to Bloomberg, Nguyen moved the funds as part of effort to salvage the company’s funds in the wake of the attack. These fund transfers were made before Axie went public with the information about the hack.

Kalie Moore, a Sky Mavis spokesperson said this was necessary to prevent short-sellers from frontrunning the sale of tokens once the hack became public knowledge.

Nguyen’s fund movements are part of a raft of crypto transfers from Axie-linked wallets tracked by a pseudonymous Axie user called Asobs. These wallets all moved funds off the Ronin sidechain to centralized exchanges like Binance after the hack occurred. However, only the one identified to be by the Sky Mavis CEO has been confirmed by the company, according to the Bloomberg report.

The hack occurred in March and saw the attackers compromise five out of the nine validator keys on the project’s Ronin sidechain. The hacker then used these keys to siphon some $540 million worth of crypto from the project.

The Block has since revealed that a fake job advert was used as the attack vector in the exploit.

Sky Mavis later raised funds to compensate for the loss of funds in the lack. The company also previously announced that reimbursement of affected users began on June 28.

© 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

• Stacks is a blockchain that utilizes a novel consensus algorithm, Proof of Transfer (PoX), that maintains the Stacks blockchain by issuing newly minted Stacks tokens to block miners as a fee for producing the next Stacks block
• In exchange, block miners are expected to spend Bitcoin in order to participate in the block production process for the Stacks blockchain
• On top of  the novel consensus, Stacks introduces Clarity, a smart contract programming language that aims to bring greater programmability to Bitcoin
• While Stacks have achieved their technical goals, the adoption has remained lackluster

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Ethereum’s native token was up by around 6.3% on Thursday afternoon, as its price rose above $1,700.

The coin was trading at around $1,720 at the time of publication, according to TradingView.

Just yesterday, the network’s developers announced that the Goerli testnet merger will happen early next month, starting with Bellatrix, the Prater upgrade “readying it for The Merge.”

Ether hit a peak of around $4,800 in November of last year. Although its value has decreased significantly since, it has also risen by about 57% just in the past two weeks.

The Lido DAO token — part of the protocol that lets users earn a yield on staked tokens like ether — was up by roughly 24.5%. 

Cryptocurrencies in general jumped on Thursday by around 4.2%, with the crypto market cap reaching $1.08 trillion at one point.

Bitcoin prices went up by 4.3%, with the coin temporarily rising above $24,000.

© 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.

Early next month will see the Ethereum test network Goerli undergo a beacon chain merger, bringing support for proof-of-stake ahead of a mainnet merger expected this fall. 

The details were included in a July 27 blog post. 

The blog post explained:

“For the last testnet proof-of-stake transition, Goerli will merge with Prater. The combined Goerli/Prater network will retain the Goerli name post-merge. Bellatrix, the Prater upgrade readying it for The Merge will happen at epoch 112260, expected at 12:24PM UTC on August 4, 2022. After Bellatrix is activated, the Goerli/Prater merge will happen when Goerli hits a total difficulty of 10790000, expected between August 6-12, 2022.”

“Post-merge, Goerli’s validator set will remain open for individual stakers to run testnets validators. Stakers who wish to start a Goerli/Prater validator can do so at the Prater Launchpad,” the post went on to explain. 

As previously reported, mergers of this kind serve as dress rehearsals for the eventual mainnet merger. Thus far, the Ropsten and Seploia networks have been merged with their respective beacon chains. 

© 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.

Decentralized blockchain data platform Space and Time raised $10 million in a seed funding round to expand its engineering team and decentralized network to prepare for a product launch later this year. 

Framework Ventures, a crypto-focused venture capital firm, led this round of funding. Other participants include Digital Currency Group (DCG), Stratos, Samsung Next, IOSG Ventures and Alliance. 

The newly raised funds will be used mainly to add more engineers to the team. The company is “quickly ramping up” the engineering team to over 40 employees, Space and Time co-founder and CEO Nate Holiday said in an email to The Block on Thursday.

The team will focus on working on the core database and a new cryptographic protocol called “Proof of SQL,” which refers to the structured query language used to manage and interact with databases. The protocol will allow blockchains to query both on-chain and off-chain data in a single environment and get analysis in a more decentralized, safer and cheaper way compared to centralized data platforms. 

The company’s database will create proofs of the query results off-chain and transmits them to be validated. Once validated, the data is loaded back on-chain to the smart contracts that can be accessed through decentralized applications real time. 

Space and Time have a long roadmap for adding more advanced capabilities to the database, such as query optimization, multi-tenancy and machine learning, Holiday said. “From a decentralization perspective, we plan to add more database clusters and more validators to our network,” he added.

Space and Time is planning to go to the market for a limited alpha offering in December. The Proof of SQL protocol will be launched for initial customer use cases in early 2023 and for more broadly in Q1 2023. The company is targeting to launch the protocol publicly in September 2023.

© 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.

Decentralized exchange Velodrome has crossed the $100 million mark for total value locked (TVL) on the Optimism network (a second-layer on Ethereum).

The total value locked on the exchange hit $106 million on Thursday, signaling a fast-growing demand among DeFi users.

This puts it in the running against dominant rival exchanges like Uniswap on the network. While Uniswap has roughly double the trading volume of Velodrome on Optimism, the newer upstart sees more than twice as many transactions and now has a larger TVL. In fact, it now has the second-largest TVL of all applications on Optimism.

Launched on 1 June, Velodrome is a fork of Solidly, a decentralized exchange built by Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje on the Fantom blockchain. The main reason behind the surge in TVL is that users have locked their tokens to earn weekly rewards.

Velodrome relies on a vote-escrowed (VE) protocol, which incentivizes users to stake the VELO governance token. On Velodrome, one can stake VELO for veVELO, another token that gives holders the right to receive VELO rewards and a share of the protocol fees.

© 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.

Sen. Sherrod Brown laid into crypto scammers during a Senate hearing on Thursday, signaling renewed urgency to regulate digital assets after this summer’s crypto market crash. 

“We’ve witnessed spectacular blowups in the crypto markets, exposing both the alarming interconnectedness and the enormous risks among crypto firms,” Brown said. “One collapse after another revealed how quickly supposedly stable investments could fall apart. We saw that unregulated and unlicensed entities could both borrow and lend hundreds of millions of dollars to engage in risky crypto trading.”

Brown, the chair of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, made the comments during a Thursday hearing on crypto scams. The event was titled “Protecting Investors and Savers: Understanding Scams and Risks in Crypto and Securities Markets.” 

The Ohio Democrat suggested regulators should “do more” to write rules for the industry. The hearing came just days after a stablecoin deal between House Financial Services Committee chair Maxine Waters and ranking Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry fell apart. 

“As this Committee and the American people learn more about crypto-based investments, and understand how frauds and scams are growing, we will push our regulators to do more. Of course, that means the SEC. It also means the banking regulators,” Brown said. “Industry shouldn’t be allowed to write the rules they want to play by.”

Brown also honed in on the risk of crypto-related scams in a letter addressed to executives at computing giants Apple and Google. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission grabbed headlines last week when it launched an investigation into Coinbase and named nine crypto tokens as securities. 

© 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.

New proposals from the Law Commission of England and Wales have suggested making digital assets a distinct class of personal property under the law.

The suggestions are part of proposals published on Thursday in response to a government request that the Commission, which operates as an independent body, review current laws as they relate to digital assets.

Provisionally named “data objects,” the category would include tokens, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other digital assets. The Commission said a separate classification from other assets would allow for a more nuanced consideration of new, emergent and idiosyncratic property rights. This is due to digital assets not slotting neatly into the two existing categories of property that cover “possessions” (physical items) and “actions” (an enforcement right such as contractual obligations).

The Commission also gave its view on the legal value of distributed ledgers and on-chain ownership. It sees distributed ledgers as representing “a factual, as opposed to legal, account of the world,” arguing that on-chain ownership should not necessarily be regarded as a definitive record of legal ownership.

This could have implications for projects that use NFTs as proof of owning a physical item — the report gives the examples of diamonds or bottles of wine tied to NFTs — as, while holding a token would be evidential in the case of a legal dispute, it would not confer additional legal rights to a holder.

Countries around the world are currently struggling to work out where digital assets fit into current regulations, and how they should be catered for.  Despite the lack of regulatory guidance currently available in the UK, the Commission believes that for the most part common law in England and Wales is “sufficiently flexible to accommodate digital assets.”

“But we also think that certain aspects of the law now need reform to ensure that digital assets benefit from consistent legal recognition and protection, in a way that acknowledges the nuanced features of those digital assets,” it said.

This assertion is in keeping with other crypto-related arguments by the Law Commission. Last year, it also said that existing laws in England and Wales can be applied to smart contracts.  

© 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.