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Crypto markets traded down Tuesday ahead of tomorrow’s US Federal Reserve interest rate announcement.  

The Fed is widely expected to increase the US federal funds rate by 75 basis points tomorrow – from 1.75% to 2.5% – bringing rates back to an effectively neutral level to combat rising inflation. While some commentators refuse to rule out the possibility of a 100 basis point increase, Pimco’s North American Economist Tiffany Wilding told Bloomberg on Tuesday her firm believes it could be more. 

Cryptocurrencies were trading down in line with equities as traders weigh the potential impact of the rate hike. This comes after a rally last week which saw crypto’s global market cap retake $1 trillion — it has now surrendered these gains

Speaking to The Block on Tuesday, UBS head of FX strategy James Malcolm said the hike itself may not matter as much as the “signal of how much more is to come,” before adding that this will determine the reaction of risk assets like stocks and credit – which crypto is highly correlated with. 

Malcolm also questioned the attractiveness of digital assets now compared to conventional investments. FTX.US president Brett Harrison posed a similar question on Twitter, asking: “How will the expected rate hike tomorrow affect DeFi yields? Does DeFi lending become a less attractive interest vehicle in a higher interest rate environment?”   

Source: tradingeconomics.com

At the time of writing bitcoin was trading at $20,897, down 5.8% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data.

Meanwhile, ether shed 9.9% during the same period, trading at $1,372, as the global crypto market cap hovered around $995.  

© 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 mining companies were down in the stock market on Tuesday afternoon, as bitcoin’s value fell below $21,000.

The coin was trading at around $20,900 at market close.

TeraWulf, Bit Digital and Marathon’s stocks fell by 14.10%, 13.53% and 12.62%, respectively.

Core Scientific was down by 7.65% after announcing earlier in the day that it closed a deal to host 75 megawatts worth of power capacity, which will bring in  $50 million per year in revenue.

Elsewhere in the market, the stock price of crypto exchange Coinbase fell more than 20%. 

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Tuesday, July 26:

© 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 former legal leader from the crypto world is joining the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). 

On July 26, CFTC Commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero announced that she has hired Joseph Cisewski as chief of staff and senior counsel. 

Cisewski most recently served as general counsel for Pantera Capital, a crypto-focused venture capital and hedge fund that reports it has over $5.1 billion in assets under management. In a statement, Goldsmith Romero highlighted these credentials.“His fluency on digital-asset and other issues will be valuable as the Technology Advisory Committee embarks on its agenda later this year,” she said.

A former employee of the CFTC, he worked under then-Commissioner Mark Wetjen, who now heads crypto exchange FTX’s government relations. 

Just yesterday, CFTC Chair Rostin Behnam announced that the commission was expanding its long-standing fintech wing, LabCFTC, into the Office of Technology Innovation. The CFTC has spent much of 2022 arguing for a bigger role in crypto regulation, alongside a corresponding budget and staffing expansion. The crypto industry, especially the major exchanges, have become increasingly supportive.

Pantera, meanwhile, recently lost significant holdings in Luna and Terra, as the stablecoin and associated token collapsed. 

© 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 US Treasury Department has been investigating Kraken since 2019 and is expected to impose a fine on the cryptocurrency exchange, according to a New York Times report.

The firm may have violated U.S. sanctions, according to the Times report, by allowing users in Iran, Cuba and Syria to buy and sell digital assets. The Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control is handling the investigation. Kraken would be the largest American crypto firm to be hit by enforcement action by the office. 

Kraken allegedly allowed users to operate accounts in Iran, as well as Syria and Cuba, which are under US sanctions, according to the Times. Sanctions against Iran have been in place since 1979. A Kraken spreadsheet viewed by the Times showed the firm had more than 1,500 users with residences in Iran.

Kraken CEO Jesse Powell has been vocal about who is allowed to use the exchange. He resisted calls to freeze the accounts of Russian users in February, days after the country invaded Ukraine. While the US has sanctioned some Russian businesses and individuals but has not forced crypto firms to drop the country. 

Powell and the Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment. 

© 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 Wharton School, a high-profile business school out of the University of Pennsylvania, announced the launch of a new course regarding business in the metaverse. 

The online course is titled “Business in the Metaverse Economy” and educates students about metaverse business practices, giving participants first-hand interactive experiences in virtual spaces. 

The intent of the course is to provide business professionals a better understanding of opportunities in the budding metaverse economy and better tools to address issues in it, said the program’s academic director Kevin Werbach in a release. 

Other high-profile universities in the United States have incorporated web3 tech as learning tools, such as classes at Duke University and Stanford University providing course completion certificates as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). However, Wharton’s new program marks one of the first instances that the metaverse as an economic opportunity enters higher education. 

Wharton developed the metaverse business course with the economic consulting firm Prysm Group. The six-week program is asynchronous and contains over 50 lecture videos, with guest speakers from Adobe, Animoca Brands, Second Life, Unity and more.

© 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.

Sango Coin, the national cryptocurrency of the Central African Republic (CAR), is now on sale according to details on the Sango project website.

The public sale began on Monday with the 200 million Sango Coins available for purchase at a price of $0.10. According to the website, the final listing price will be $0.45.

People looking to buy the token need at least $100 in the accepted cryptocurrencies. These coins are bitcoin, ether, binance, tether, usd coin, binance usd, and dai. The sale supports transfers of these tokens on both the Ethereum ERC-20 and Binance Smart Chain networks. The project already stipulated a $500 minimum for participation in this round but was forced to lower the entry requirement amid complaints from prospective buyers.

The Sango project has sold 5.25% of the tokens, as of the time of publishing.  This means the project has raised a little over $1 million in the first 24 hours of the public sale. The project plans to raise more than $1 billion from the token sale that will last for one year.

Sango Coins bought during this public sale phase have a one-year vesting requirement. As such, buyers cannot withdraw or transfer their tokens until the lock-up period is over.

CAR’s President Faustin-Archange Touadéra announced Sango Coin as the country’s national crypto earlier in July. The token will be used as part of the country’s plans to tokenize its mineral resources.

Sango Coin will run on a bitcoin sidechain, as previously reported by The Block. This sidechain is reportedly similar to Blockstream’s Liquid Network with a two-way peg mechanism with BTC and Sango Coin as the tokens in the peg architecture.

CAR became the first African nation, and the second in the world, to adopt bitcoin when it recognized BTC as legal tender in April.

© 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 lender Celsius Network has submitted a motion to bring on former CFO Rod Bolger as an advisor to help with its bankruptcy proceedings. A hearing will take place on August 8 to consider the motion. 

Bolger worked for the company for just five months before resigning in June. He replaced Yaron Shalem, who was arrested in November over alleged fraud related to cryptocurrency, and was later replaced by Chris Ferraro. 

According to the motion filed in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, Bolger gave eight week’s notice on June 30. As a result, he is still an employee of the company for another month. 

The motion stated that Bolger will be paid Canadian $120,000 ($93,188) a month for a minimum of six weeks. It said that this agreement would provide Celsius with his “much-needed accounting and financial expertise during unprecedented times for [Celsius].” 

The advisory salary will be higher pro rata than Bolger’s base salary is at present. He currently earns $750,000 per year and would have gone on to receive performance-based cash bonuses, up to 800,000 CEL tokens ($688,000) and restricted stock, had he not resigned. 

Prior to Celsius, Bolger spent 10 years at RBC, most recently as its CFO. He has had previous stints at Bank of America and Citi.

On July 13, Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The crypto lender said that it had a $1.2 billion hole in its balance sheet, but it also counted $600 million of CEL tokens as assets, despite that being many times greater than CEL’s entire market cap (meaning that it would be hard to realize a fraction of that in the short term — putting the shortfall much higher).

© 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.

Topl, the creator of a purpose-built blockchain that helps companies track sustainability initiatives, closed a $15 million Series A round. 

Founded in 2017, Topl’s blockchain protocol helps corporations track and tokenize their sustainability impact.  

Use cases for the blockchain span companies tracking water usage for their industrial processes, confirming the cold chain for Covid-19 test kits, and monitoring the global journeys of sustainable products, according to a press release issued today.  

“Through this latest fundraise and with the strong network we’ve built, we’re looking to accelerate the growth of our ecosystem and setting a goal of at least 100 applications launched by next year,” said Chris Georgen, founder and managing director of Topl, in a statement. 

Co-leading the round is Mercury, Republic Asia and Cryptology Asset Group. In 2020, Topl raised $3 million in a seed round, from backers including Mercury, Goose Capital and RevTech Ventures.

Key customers of Topl’s blockchain protocol include BCarbon, a non-profit carbon credit registry.

The recent fundraise follows on from Topl’s announcement of a new grant program that aims to fund web3 startups and developers focused on sustainable transformation.

Topl will be making its first 20 grant awards in the lead up to its private token sale early next year, according to the release. 

© 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 Core Scientific closed a deal to host 75 megawatts worth of hardware capacity.

The agreement will bring in a total of $50 million per year in revenue once the miners are fully installed, the company said on Tuesday.

The machines will start being deployed in the third quarter of 2022 and installation is set to wrap up by the end of the year.

The additional 325,000 ASICs will be used for a combination of self-mining and colocation. Core Scientific did not disclose the identity of the hosting client.

The company will receive prepayments that will help fund the additional infrastructure required to host the 75 megawatts.

“This new agreement demonstrates continued customer confidence in Core Scientific’s ability to deliver best-in-class blockchain data center solutions,” Core Scientific CEO Mike Levitt 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.

Quick Take

• The go-to-market strategy of Gala Games is to become a one-stop shop and entry point for Web2 game developers to enter the Web3 gaming space.
• The relationship between GALA and the game-specific tokens is solely linked through Gala Power, which will be implemented across all of its games to increase the utility of GALA.
  
• This research piece will explore Gala Games as a game publisher, including its onboarding strategy, a case study of its flagship game, Town Star, and a brief overview of its metaverse VOXverse.
  
• This piece is the second part of the Gala Games two-part series. Introduction to Gala Games can be found in Part 1.   

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