FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

A majority of bitcoin mining stocks tracked by The Block went up on Thursday, while others saw their value decrease.

After dipping below $23,000 earlier in the day, bitcoin’s price went back up to around $23,200 by the end of the trading session, according to TradingView.

Riot’s stock rose by 8.55%, followed by Marathon (+8.18%), Hut 8 (+5.61% on Nasdaq) and Bit Digital (+3.13%).

Core Scientific announced Thursday that it closed a deal with financial services firm B. Riley for the sale of $100 million in common stock.

“Securing access to additional capital during adverse market conditions enhances our liquidity and expands our strategic optionality,” said Mike Levitt, Core Scientific CEO.

The company’s stock fell by 0.99% on Thursday.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Thursday, June 21:

© 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.

Minecraft-based project NFT Worlds aims to reveal a plan of action in response to Minecraft banning non-fungible token (NFT) integrations by this weekend, the project’s pseudonymous co-founder ArkDev said via Twitter on Thursday. 

The company uses Minecraft’s source code as a basis for its NFT-powered metaverse. It said it had been “blindsided” by the announcement from Minecraft makers Mojang Studios — which Microsoft acquired in 2014.

In a blog published on Wednesday, Mojang Studios said NFT integrations were “generally not something we will support or allow.” The post raised concerns that NFTs create a culture of unequal access.

In a Discord update on Wednesday night, the team at NFT Worlds said it was looking at several options for how to continue the project, including trying to get in touch with “the right decision makers within the Minecraft policy enforcement team” to understand the change and see if there are any possibilities for continuing operations using Minecraft.

It also laid out several options should this fail, including transitioning into their own Minecraft-like game engine and games platform, and collaborating with other projects.

The effects of the announcement are already hitting NFT Worlds, however. OpenSea data for July 21 shows the sale of 555 NFTs from the NFT Worlds collection compared with 16 the day before. The average price has dropped too, from 3.33ETH to 1.06ETH.

Mojang Studios is not alone in its dislike for blockchain technology among the gaming community. While some studios are dipping their toes into web3 — Epic Games Store is planning to host its first blockchain-based game later this year, for instance — others have little interest in the technology or have even banned it outright. Steam prohibited crypto, NFT and blockchain games in mid-October last year.

Mojang’s move has drawn some harsh criticism. In a Twitter thread on Thursday, Yat Siu, executive chairman of Animoca Brands — the company behind metaverse project The Sandbox and which has no stake in NFT Worlds — likened Microsoft and Minecraft to a “digital dictatorship.” 

Siu colorfully accused the two of causing “pain and suffering to an innocent [and] blameless minority who was purged and cleansed without regard to their circumstances and without advance notice,” and said the companies had provided no proof that NFTs are harmful to their community.

“Blockchain and NFTs are not a threat to Minecraft or the gaming community, it is a threat to closed platforms/monopolies who control every aspect of our digital lives and wish to continue extracting every ounce of value from our time and attention,” he 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.

Hashflow, the decentralized finance trading platform, raised $25 million in a Series A round to fund its expansion and launch into structured products later this year.

The capital infusion brings the company’s valuation to $400 million. 

In an blog post on Thursday, the company said investors in this round included Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital Partners, LedgerPrime, Balaji Srinivasan, Jump Crypto, Wintermute Trading, GSR, Kronos Research, Altonomy, Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Fabric Ventures, Evernew Capital, Spacewhale Capital, Meltem Demirors, Anthony Sassano and Jason Choi. 

The newly raised capital will be used “to continue to build and scale — regardless of market conditions,” the firm said in the post on its website. According to Hashflow’s roadmap, the firm aims to deploy the trading platform on Solana by the third quarter of this year to enable native and cross-chain swaps.  

It also is planning to offer structured products in allowed jurisdictions by the fourth quarter of this year, launching decentralized request-for-quote (RFQ) platform “to seamlessly trade structured products,” including options and exchange-traded funds. 

Founded in 2021, Hashflow offers a decentralized exchange (DEX) that uses an RFQ model. According to the company’s website, this approach allows professional market makers to manage liquidity pools – rather than relying on automated market makers that are more “capital inefficient, routinely prone to risks […] and cannot price non-spot assets.”

© 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 market maker Cumberland said institutional investors have been increasing long positions on ether during the cryptocurrency’s rally this week.

The Chicago-based firm tweeted that despite a slight pullback on Thursday morning the up-trend was intact and technicals aren’t being driven by macro-related issues.

“This move has been crypto-fundamental: the Sepolia testnet successfully merged to proof-of-stake on July 6th, setting the stage for an early-autumn mainnet merge,” the firm tweeted. 

The mainnet merge refers to the Ethereum blockchain’s move from a proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. During a developers’ call last week it was projected that the merge will take place in September. It’s worth noting that similar projections have been subject to change in the past. 

The firm said portfolio allocation was by no means oversubscribed at present, so it wouldn’t take significant flows to “move the needle.” It also noted that it was seeing increased flows through its OTC desk. It went on to say that buy and sell ratios had tilted long over the past week, with the buyers being institutional. 

Cumberland’s Twitter thread was attributed to its head of trading, Johan Van Bourg, who said this action reflects the incentive structure of every volatile asset. “It’s always easier to buy a bounce than to catch the falling knife.”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin appeared at ETH CC in Paris on Thursday to speak about the merge, echoing the roadmap and previously mooted benefits of the upgrade.

Ether was trading at $1,551.84 at the time of writing, up about 0.3% over the past 24 hours, according to data via CoinGecko. Although the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap is still up 34.5% over the past seven days, compared with bitcoin’s 11.4% gains.

© 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

• In this new bi-weekly series, we look into some of the most interesting data and developments across the Layer 2 blockchain landscape, from DeFi and bridges to network activity and funding
• Optimism has seen a significant spike in activity since the launch of its native governance token on June 1 but that is trending down together with the bearish sentiment of the markets 
• Arbitrum paused its 8-week Odyssey in its second week as a result of surging gas prices, reported exceeding that of Ethereum’s
• dYdX has announced their planned migration to a native chain on Cosmos instead of remaining as a zk-rollup on Ethereum

This research piece is available exclusively to
members of The Block Research.
You can continue reading
this Research content on The Block Research.

Animoca Brands, the Hong Kong-based blockchain software company, has appointed a handful of senior-level executives to the company, as it continues to expand its footprint in the web3 world.

Alan Lau will join as chief business officer to oversee Animoca Brands’ 340 portfolio companies and lead M&A and business development. Before joining, Lau was CEO of WeSure, Tencent’s insurance arm that offered affordable internet insurance to WeChat users in China. Lau also worked at McKinsey Digital and Citibank. 

Animoca Brands has also added Minh Do as co-COO, who will be in charge of major scaling initiatives at the company. Before joining the team, Minh worked at global information services and consulting company at Gerson Lehrman Group, where he was general manager of the Greater China businesses. Minh is also a dual qualified attorney in Hong Kong and New York. 

The new team will lead major strategic, organizational and operational decisions at the company alongside co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu, group president Evan Auyang, CEO of North America Robby Yung and COO Arnold Concepción.

Additional hires

Animoca Brands has also added Joanne Chan as deputy CFO, who will be in charge upgrading the financial systems at the company. Before joining the company, Chan was senior vice president of finance at Gerson Lehrman Group. 

Benny Ho will be joining as head of business development for new ventures, where he will work on developing web3 opportunities of “high strategic importance to the company,” said a statement from Animoca Brands. Ho spent almost a decade at Tencent, leading global expansion across social media, streaming, music, games and fintech. 

Brian Chan will join from McKinsey as vice president of operations and projects, responsible for strategic planning, leading capability development and operational projects, and “driving continuous improvements in the company’s governance and organization process,” the statement said. 

Kenneth Shek will join from Accenture as director of project management and work closely with the business development team to executive web3 projects.

The moves come as Animoca continues to put its stamp on web3 and gaming through investments and acquisitions. Among other deals, in early June, the company announced the purchase of Notre Game, a gaming firm that incorporates physical and digital items into its titles.  

Animoca Brands also acquired racing-focused blockchain gaming startups Grease Monkey Games and Eden Games in February and April, respectively.

© 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.

Will Ruben is joining Uniswap, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, as vice president of product, the company said on Thursday.  

Most recently, Ruben was at Coinbase as vice president of product where he oversaw the teams responsible for web3 and social discovery experiences across Coinbase and Coinbase wallet apps.

“My time at Coinbase strengthened my belief in the transformative potential of crypto, and, despite the current market, I remain extremely excited about the future of web3,” said Ruben in a post on his LinkedIn last week.

“I joined both Facebook and Coinbase the year they went public and enjoyed focusing on building new product experiences for millions (and billions) of people at both places through all the highs and lows. After a decade in Product Manager and PM leadership roles at public tech companies, I’m drawn to the challenge and opportunity of leading Product somewhere smaller with tremendous potential.”

Ruben was also previously director of product management at Instagram from September 2018 to 2021, leading the feed and relevance pillar in New York City. Back in 2013, Ruben started the growth team at Instagram after the company was bought by Meta (then Facebook). Ruben had left Instagram in 2014, to spend a few years at as product lead at Meta leading the company’s local discovery team in New York.

“We’re just at the beginning of the tokenization of everything. I believe Uniswap is perfectly positioned to make everything digital tradable and to build consumer products that bring the promise of fair, accessible markets to everyone on the internet. I’m thrilled to be joining this team as the VP of Product,” Ruben told The Block. 

Uniswap was launched in 2018 by founder Hayden Adams. The company has previously received investments from VC firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Paradigm Venture Capital. As of June 2022, the company as 85 employees. 

“We can’t unlock universal ownership or make the global financial system more inclusive if we don’t have simple, high-craft user experiences built on top of web3 protocols,” said Ruben. “Uniswap Labs is at the center of this effort, and I’m excited to bring my experience building consumer products at scale – especially on mobile – to this exceptional team.”

© 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.

Curve Finance may be the latest DeFi project joining the race to ship a decentralized stablecoin, according to details emerging from a cryptocurrency event.

SCB 10X — a Thailand-based investment firm and the organizers of an event called Redefine Tomorrow 2022 — tweeted today that Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov discussed the possibility of an upcoming stablecoin at the event. 

When questioned in a fireside chat whether Curve had plans of a stablecoin Egorov replied, “Over-collat. That’s all I can say for now,” according to the event organizers.

Here, “over-collat” is short for over-collateralized, a type of stablecoin that is backed by excess collateral, usually in the form of other cryptocurrency held in a reserve. This is the same design used by Dai, the most popular decentralized stablecoin in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Redefine Tomorrow 2022 is an ongoing virtual event organized by SCB 10X. There is no recording yet available of the event and Egorov has not replied to a message asking for confirmation of his comment.

Curve is currently the fourth-largest decentralized protocol, with more than $5.9 billion locked to its platform across its markets on ten blockchains.

The news comes at a time when the crypto market has been struggling to recover from a price crash triggered by the collapse of the algorithmic stablecoin UST.

DeFi projects have since been floating the idea of launching their own stablecoins. On July 7, Aave, a popular lending protocol, came out with plans of launching its own stablecoin called GHO. 

Plus, stablecoins like USDD and USN, which were launched with similar mechanisms to UST, have since pivoted toward collateralized models, while remaining decentralized.

© 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 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has listed nine cryptocurrencies on Coinbase that it says are securities. This was contained within a complaint arresting and charging a former Coinbase employee with wire fraud.

The assets were: AMP, RLY, DDX, XYO, RGT, LCX, POWR, DFX, KROM. They were each mentioned in connection with alleged insider trading.

“Our message with these charges is clear: fraud is fraud is fraud, whether it occurs on the blockchain or on Wall Street,” wrote the SEC in its complaint.

This is one of few examples from the SEC where it has named specific cryptocurrencies as securities; it has provided little clarity over the years.

Initially, former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said that bitcoin was not a security. Then former SEC director of corporation finance William Hinman said that ether did not exhibit properties of a security. Current SEC Chairman Gary Gensler more recently undermined that latter view, saying bitcoin was the only token that he felt comfortable calling a commodity. The SEC has also sued Ripple for allegedly selling unregistered securities, referring to the token XRP.

The complaint today implies that the SEC is largely keeping with the view that the majority of cryptocurrencies are securities.

Coinbase responded to the SEC filing with a blog post of its own. It said today that laws in the US are not keeping up with the digital world and need fixing.

“Crypto assets that are securities need an updated rulebook to help guide safe and efficient practices. Crypto assets that are not securities need the certainty of being outside those rules. Anything short of that will have the effect of entrenching incumbent technologies at the expense of innovation and ultimately, consumers,” said Coinbase.

It has submitted a petition to the SEC that it should develope rules for what it describes as “digital asset securities.”

“Coming up with such comprehensive rules will require a genuine examination of how crypto works differently from traditional financial securities and what provisions would actually protect investors who trade in crypto securities,” said Coinbase.

Coinbase further said that if the SEC encouraged crypto adoption while providing sensible regulation, the US would reap the rewards. Yet it added, “If they don’t, others will — and the U.S. may not be able to catch up.”

For more breaking stories like this, make sure to follow The Block on Twitter.

© 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 product manager at Coinbase, Ishan Wahi, was arrested Thursday on charges of wire fraud in connection to an inside trading scheme, according to a statement from the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Wahi, who worked within the assets listing team, repeatedly tipped his brother Nikhil Wahi and friend Sameer Ramani — who also both face the same charges — about new coins that were slated to be listed on Coinbase, the statement said.

The two profited at least $1.5 million in illegal trades from 25 different crypto assets and at least 14 separate Coinbase public listings, law enforcement officials said.

The two brothers were both arrested in Seattle, but Ramani remains at large.

© 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.