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BloXroute, a crypto firm that provides tools for DeFi trading, has raised $70 million in a Series B funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

Other investors included Dragonfly Capital, ParaFi Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GSR, Jane Street and Flow Traders. This was an equity funding round and will help BloXroute expand its team and grow its business, the firm’s co-founder and CEO Uri Klarman told The Block.

The current headcount of Chicago-based BloXroute is 30 and the firm plans to scale it to up to 100 in the near future, said Klarman. As part of the deal, Robert Kaplan, investment director at SoftBank Investment Advisors, has joined the BloXroute board.

Founded in 2018, BloXroute bills itself as “Flash Boys for DeFi,” helping traders win trades ahead of slower rivals. BloXroute says its blockchain distribution network allows users to avoid network congestion and receive critical trade information — such as buy and sell orders — quickly.

“DeFi is peer-to-peer. You need to be connected with everyone because critical information — prices, position, arbitrage opportunities — can come from everywhere. This is where BloXroute comes in. We propagate DeFi information almost at the speed of light, allowing our users to make better trades,” said Klarman.

BloXroute is a blockchain agnostic platform and supports several networks, including Ethereum, BNB Chain and Polygon.

The Series B round brings BloXroute’s total funding to date to $95 million, said Klarman. He declined to comment on the firm’s valuation.

BloXroute’s previous funding rounds were raised via a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT) sale. But the firm scrapped its plans for a token launch, said Klarman.

“We had a really cool idea for a security token, back in ’17-’18 when security tokens were all the rage. Once it became clear that the legal framework for token-based securities is a decade away, we decided to focus on our core business and just converted all our investors into ‘regular’ equity holders,” said Klarman.

BloXroute’s funding comes as blockchain infrastructure startups continue to receive record venture capital cash. So far this year, such startups have collectively attracted billions of dollars of funding, The Block reported recently.

© 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.

Private equity firm Silver Lake is leading a $150 million funding round for Genies, according to a report by the New York Times’s DealBook. This latest funding round values the company at $1 billion, minting its status as a unicorn startup. 

“We’re just trying to invest in the very best technology companies,” Silver Lake co-chief executive Egon Durban told DealBook. “Sometimes it’s a small company like this, and other times it’s huge, large companies that need to be transformed.”

Genies allow users to create virtual avatars that can be used in the metaverse, with accessories that can be purchased as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The company has partnered with record labels such as Warner Music Group and Universal to create avatars and NFT-gated digital goods for artists such as Justin Bieber, Migos and Cardi B. 

Most recently, former Disney CEO Bob Iger joined the company’s board alongside investing in the company. This followed a number of traditional media companies taking steps to onboard people to lead metaverse efforts, such as Spotify and YouTube.

This isn’t the first web3 investment for Silver Lake. It previously led an investment round into crypto infrastructure company Alchemy at a valuation of $10.2 billion.

© 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.

As central banks around the world explore central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), the Bank of Canada (BOC) is keen to stress that rollout efforts don’t require coordination between nations — and may not even need blockchain technology at all. 

CBDCs are digital forms of fiat currencies that are controlled by a nation’s monetary authority, with rollout programs currently overseen by supranational working groups. In 2020, it was announced that officials from the Bank of International Settlements and the Bank of England would oversee a six-strong group of central banks, including the BOC, as they pool together research on CBDC use cases. 

Yet Dinesh Shah, the BOC’s director of fintech research, told The Block in an interview last week that reaching consensus on CBDC implementation with other central banks is “not a central focus” — unless the bank chose to explore cross-border payments.  

Ultimately, Shah says that decisions regarding a CBDC are specific to individual countries due to their differing payment systems. He explains that the six-strong group formed in early 2020 primarily exists to pool research. 

“Even if there’s no consensus, that open sharing of ideas is very valuable,” he adds. 

In Canada, research on this topic began around 2010, with Shah joining as the BOC’s first technologist in 2014. While one of his first tasks was explaining the technology behind bitcoin to policymakers and economists, the catalyst for the research was not crypto itself, but the decline of cash. 

“At the Bank of Canada, what [the research] really came out of was not really thinking about cryptocurrencies, but it was more what was happening with cash demand,” he says. “Like in many other countries, there’s been this steady decline in everyday cash use, even though there’s been an increase in the amount of cash out there in the economy.” 

No set decision 

Shah stressed that no formal decision has been made to issue a Canadian CBDC. It’s still quite early days, he says — so much so that the role of blockchain technology, decentralized digital ledgers that underpin the vast majority of cryptocurrencies, in designing any CBDC is not clear. 

Blockchain technology “is not a given but it’s still on our list of potentials,” he says, noting that he has displayed some skepticism in the past about its fit with a retail CBDC. His views echo that of other central bankers, notably Thomas Moser of the Swiss central bank. 

Recently, the BOC announced a 12-month research project with MIT. 

Although it’s currently unclear what form their research findings will take — “depending on what we find, there may be some papers that come out of it” — he confirmed that the bank will collaborate with the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which are also MIT research 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.

Robinhood seems to be adding four major cryptocurrencies to its roster, according to its website. These are the memecoin Shiba Inu, blockchains Solana and Polygon, and DeFi lending protocol Compound.

The exchange has added specific pages for each of the four coins, with a message that prospective traders can sign up to buy or sell each of the coins. It doesn’t appear that the coins are available to trade yet, according to various comments on Twitter.

Robinhood and Coinbase have been engaged in a bit of a competition when it comes to memecoins. Robinhood added Dogecoin early on, as it shot up with the backing of Elon Musk — making up 62% of its quarterly crypto revenue in Q2 2021. Coinbase, which only added Dogecoin in June 2021, was much faster quicker to the draw for Shiba Inu. It added Shiba in September 2021, only a few months after it had started gaining traction. Shortly after, Shiba saw a big price spike from $0.00002 to $0.00008.

Now it seems Robinhood has followed suit on Shiba, albeit seven months behind.

Shiba was launched in August 2020 but didn’t gain any hype until memecoins like Dogecoin started taking off. Shiba was similarly themed around the Shiba Inu breed of dog, but with a much higher total supply of tokens. The project claimed, however, that half of its token supply had been burned, which typically refers to a process where tokens are sent to an address that cannot be accessed. But in this case, the tokens had been sent to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin who decided to sell a chunk of the tokens and donate the proceeds to charity.

Solana is a proof-of-stake blockchain that offers fast transactions at low speeds. It has recently faced degraded performance, according to Solana status, meaning that transactions can be slow to be processed.

Polygon is a blockchain that is often seen as a sidechain to Ethereum and has a similar focus on high performance. But it has struggled with deep transaction reorgs, where long strings of blocks in its blockchain are changed retroactively.

Compound is the sixth-largest DeFi protocol on the Ethereum blockchain, according to DeFi Pulse. It currently looks after $6.3 billion in assets.

Robinhood has not made an announcement for the listings. We have reached out to the brokerage and will update this article should we hear back.

© 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 Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) said on Tuesday that it is set to develop a prototype of how a central bank digital currency (CBDC) might work in the US in practice. 

The corporation, which provides post-trade market infrastructure for the financial services industry, said in a press release that the model will use distributed ledger technology (DLT) and measure the benefits of a CBDC. 

The assignment, dubbed ‘Project Lithium,’ comes as part of the digital dollar project (DDP) effort. It will also explore how a CBDC could enable atomic settlement, a conditional settlement that occurs if delivery and payment are both received at the same time.

Unlike private cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, a CBDC would be issued and backed by the Federal Reserve, just like US paper dollars and coins.

With this prototype, DTCC says it aims to demonstrate the direct, bilateral settlement of cash tokens between participants in real-time delivery-versus-payment (DVP) settlement. The pilot will also identify how it can leverage DTCC’s clearing and settlement capabilities to fully realize the potential benefits of a CBDC.

These benefits could include reduced counterparty risk and trapped liquidity, increased capital efficiency and added transparency for regulators.

The move comes as governments around the world are considering the benefits of developing a digital currency. According to research conducted by PwC, more than 80% of central banks are considering launching a CBDC or have already done so.

Among countries that have already launched, or have projects in pilot are mainland China, Nigeria and the Bahamas. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the central bank of the Philippines, also said in March it intends to move forward with a research project focused on central bank digital currencies. Meanwhile, the Bank of England has said it doesn’t expect a digital currency to launch until the second half of this decade. 

© 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.

Glow Labs, a white label software on the blockchain that lets creators and brands reward their most loyal customers, announced it has raised $4.1 million in seed funding.

The round was led by Harlem Capital, co-founders Annie Reardon and Renee Russo told The Block. Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures, Anu Duggal of Female Founders Fund, Drew Austin of Red Beard Ventures, and Heather Harnett of Human Ventures also participated.  

Co-CEOs Reardon and Russo founded Glow Labs in November 2021. They were former engineers and colleagues at JPMorgan, working on Chase’s web and mobile products, and became friends over their shared interest in web3.

Glow Labs was inspired by an experiment by Russo in August, when she launched an NFT project and discovered a gap in the way she could connect with her community online. Russo wanted to reward customers for supporting her work, but the process of doing so was expensive and time consuming. After nearly four weeks and $10,000 spent on a campaign to give customers NFTs, she wanted to create a cheaper and faster way to provide perks.

The pair designed a way to create a rewards program through a smart contract that requires no coding. Partners of Glow Labs can use the product like a rewards card to thank customers for repeat purchases or shoutouts on social media. Rewards can include things like “gas back,” where creators can discount gas fees on future NFT purchases.

There are two ways the US company makes money. Off-chain rewarding, such as with social tokens, requires a monthly fee. On-chain rewarding happens through a “transaction fee when distributing ETH or WETH back to your community’s wallets.”

Glow Labs has raised a total of $4.4 million so far. With the latest round, the company will focus on growing the team of five, marketing, and focusing on software development.

© 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.

Coinbase launched an open call for all Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT holders hoping theirs will be cast in an upcoming film series.

The exchange announced on Monday the upcoming production, which will be divided into a three-part series called “The Dengen Trilogy.”

Ape owners selected in the casting process will get a licensing fee of $10,000 in apecoin or bitcoin, according to the film’s website. The license will be recorded on-chain and will continue with the ape into the secondary market.

Submissions will be open until April 13 at 11 am PST.

The first episode will be released at the NFT.NYC conference, which takes place between June 20 and 23.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club said on Twitter that Mutant Ape Yacht Club will similarly be able to submit their apes for part two of the series. However, submissions will not be open to the Bored Ape Kennel Club.

The film is set in the 2020s in a “chaotic” Midtown Manhattan, when “for the first time, digital goods and services have outpaced all other indicators as a measure of value in the market,” according to the prologue.

“As the old system crumbles, whole new realms spring forth from the ashes. (…) Enter the Degens. A new class of social adept, versed in the constantly re-invented tools of an ever accelerating economy,” it goes on.

Coninbase said that although it is unlikely they will profit from the film, any net proceeds would be donated to a non-profit organization.

The company also said the point of this series is to “reward and connect with our communities through projects that bring the ethos of Web3 to life: collaboration, transparency, and opportunity.”

© 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 major financial services firm has thrown its hat into the crypto trademark ring, with new filings related to NFTs, virtual worlds and more.

The 15 filings by Mastercard, with an April 7 status date, include NFT backed multimedia, marketplaces for digital goods, and payment transaction processing and e-commerce software business transactions in the metaverse.

The applications are filed on a 1b basis, meaning there’s an intent to use them in the future, though when the company plans to use them and how is unclear. Unlike 1a applications, which are for “actual use,” 1b filings don’t require evidence to the government that the trademark is already being used. Instead, a company must show “bonafide intent” to use the trademark at a future date.

Payments giants like Mastercard and others are no strangers to the crypto industry. Visa, for example, has been moving into the ecosystem for some time, adding crypto staff to the team and purchasing a CryptoPunk last summer.

Last month, American Express filed for similar trademarks as Mastercard for “downloadable computer software for facilitating the transfer of a virtual payment card to an electronic mobile wallet,” among other areas. 

Though there’s no universal definition for the term ‘metaverse’, the term appeared in the American Express application when describing the “transaction authentication services, routing, authorization and settlement services, and fraud detection and control services in the metaverse and other virtual worlds.” 

For the Mastercard application, the term metaverse appears when describing “financial sponsorship of cultural events, charitable events, concerts, sporting events, travel experiences, fine dining events, festivals and awards shows in the metaverse and other virtual worlds.”

This trademark isn’t Mastercard’s first move into the blockchain and crypto space. Earlier this year, Mastercard inked a deal with Coinbase to support its NFT marketplace. 

Last year, the company launched the Start Path Crypto program to support startups that use blockchain technology to solve “real-world problems.” But the move highlights a larger trend among companies. While there were around 13 metaverse trademark applications in February 2021, that number jumped to 257 by February 2022. 

Hat tip Michael Kondoudis

© 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.

Financial advisors surveyed by Nasdaq said that the existence of a spot crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) would encourage them to invest more in crypto.

Nasdaq surveyed 500 financial advisors who are either investing client assets in crypto or considering it and found that 72% of them would be more likely to do so if there was a spot ETF product available.

The study was announced on Monday and also found that a much smaller percentage (38%) of respondents believed regulators were likely to approve an ETF in 2022.

To this date, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has denied every submission for a spot ETF, but last year the regulator approved the first bitcoin futures ETF, which was launched in October by ProShares. 

Grayscale is currently waiting on a decision from the SEC on their proposed bitcoin ETF.

“Over the last decade, financial advisors have been focused on shifting assets into index funds,” said Jake Rapaport, head of digital asset index research at Nasdaq. “As they incorporate digital assets into their investment strategies, they are expressing strong interest in a similar vehicle that can offer broad asset class exposure for their clients.”

According to the survey, 86% of participants already investing in crypto expect to increase their crypto investments over the next 12 months and none of them had plans to reduce them. Half of those respondents said they had already used Bitcoin futures ETFs and 28% were expecting to do so in the next year.

Advisors said that on average they are looking to allocate 6% of their client’s total portfolio to crypto 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.

The blockchain-focused gaming firm Animoca Brands announced Monday that it acquired the French game developer Eden Games, creator of car racing-focused titles such as GEAR.CLUB, F1 Mobile,  Need for Speed: Porsche and V-Rally. 

Formerly known as Eden Studios, the firm was a part of Atari until the early 2010s. Eden Games relaunched as an independent studio in 2013. 

Monday’s acquisition marks the second racing-focused game firm Animoca Brands has acquired since the beginning of the year. The Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands acquired mobile game developer Grease Monkey — behind titles such as Torque Burnout and Torque Drift — in February of this year. 

With this new acquisition, Animoca Brands intends to use Eden Games’ experience to build out its existing play-to-earn game REVV Motorsport as well as other blockchain-based racing video games series.

“With its quarter of a century of expertise in building high-quality motorsport video games, Eden Games will enhance and accelerate the development of the REVV Motorsport ecosystem and add powerful value to the REVV community and the racing metaverse,” Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu said in a statement.

In January of 2022, Animoca Brands hit a $5 billion valuation, 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.