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Robinhood’s top crypto executive is departing after nearly five years with the California-based brokerage app company, according to people familiar with the situation.

Christine Brown, who joined the company from Google in 2017, has overseen its crypto business as the chief operating officer for crypto.

According to one source, Brown is starting a crypto startup, though the identity of that startup isn’t immediately known. Robinhood confirmed Brown’s plans to leave the firm. 

“We’re so grateful to Christine for her contributions to Robinhood over the past five years – from leading our self-clearing initiative to scaling the Robinhood Crypto team. We’re excited to follow her entrepreneurial journey going forward,” said Robinhood chief operating officer Gretchen Howard in a statement shared with The Block.

Robinhood began offering crypto services in 2018, and though the crypto product suite helped the company onboard new users, the strength of that activity waned in the last quarter of 2021. As previously reported by The Block, crypto saw a mild decline as a percentage of Robinhood’s overall transaction-based revenue. Crypto made up 18.18% of the firm’s transaction-based revenue, down from 19.1% the previous quarter.

Unlike other companies that offer exchange services, Robinhood has been slow to add more coins to its platform, while rival Coinbase has said that it will accelerate listings on its platform. 

Still, Robinhood is looking to grow its crypto offerings in 2022 and rolled out a beta program for its wallet functionality, which allows users to move coins in and out of Robinhood’s platform. The firm said in its Q4 earnings report that it expected to fully launch wallets by the end of the first quarter. 

Robinhood plans to focus on the international expansion of its crypto offerings.

“Robinhood has set aggressive goals to start opening its crypto platform up to customers internationally in 2022,” the firm said. “The company believes in the immense potential of the crypto economy and sees a big opportunity in serving customers across the globe.”

© 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.

Last week, crypto exchange and wallet service Blockchain.com announced the acquisition of Altonomy’s over-the-counter trading desk.

A source with knowledge of the process told The Block that the deal topped $250 million in a transaction involving both cash and stock.

Such a deal exceeds the value of past acquisition deals in the crypto space, including FTX’s $150 million acquisition of Blockfolio and Coinbase’s reported acquisition of prime brokerage Tagomi, said to have weighed in at around $90 million.

The deal speaks to a broader trend of larger market participants making “product-based” acquisitions with a focus on obtaining “regulatory licenses” and “new products,” including those in decentralized finance and the metaverse, according to Architect Partners, an advisory firm.

FTX.US’s acquisition of LedgerX offers a good example of the latter. The firm acquired the options exchange partially for the licenses it holds from the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to launch a futures platform.

As for Blockchain.com, the acquisition of Altonomy’s OTC business, which traded $16 billion last year, will help the firm expand its trading operation and presence in Asia, according to the source. Blockchain.com traded $10 billion last year across its OTC and other trading businesses. The core systems of Altonomy have been integrated into Blockchain.com’s existing trading platform.

In Architect Partners’ view, the deal will help Blockchain.com meet the needs of institutional clients who are keen to trade a more wide-range of coins.

“Altonomy’s expertise in altcoin and OTC trading will expand Blockchain.com’s presence in this space, while also expanding their product suite,” the firm said in a recent alert, adding:

“As Institutions flood into crypto trading, they require certain products to enhance altcoin trading. Because of this, reputable crypto trading exchanges like Blockchain.com will seek to expand their trading capabilities of low liquidity crypto assets.”

Blockchain.com is not acquiring the entirety of Altonomy’s business. Altonomy was founded by Ricky Li, who previously worked in the hedge fund world.

Looking to the future, Architect expects M&A to continue to ramp up, driven by large exchanges.

“Gobbling small firms—with over 400 active exchanges, there’s plenty of ripe picking to acquire accounts by buying smaller firms,” the firm noted.

© 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 US and allies have levied heavy sanctions against Russia to cut it off from resources to prop up its economy and continue its assault on Ukraine.
• US lawmakers have expressed concern that crypto will be used as a tool to evade sanctions.
• Experts break down why the crypto industry isn’t yet big enough to act as a meaningful evasion tool.

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In the face of geopolitical uncertainty and tightening monetary policy, one crypto whale has hijacked the driver’s seat of the volatile market: Terra Labs’s Do Kwon.

The Forbes 30 under 30 blockchain startup founder revealed his plans to purchase billions of dollars in bitcoin to serve as reserves for its algorithmic stablecoin UST. Shortly after the announcement, Kwon issued a proclamation to crypto bears (“goblins”) in a March 24 post on Twitter:

We have a message for the citizens of goblin town:

Your days are numbered.

Our orange battalions will overwhelm your defenses, and return your cities to the dirt

Your fields will be sown with salt, so that no future bearish thoughts will grow

The 🌕 is coming

— Do Kwon 🌕 (@stablekwon) March 25, 2022

The tweet appears to have been somewhat prescient, given that the price of bitcoin surged to more than $48,000 on Monday. This move triggered over $300 million in short liquidations, according to compiled by The Block.

This market comeback is also reflected in data from LMAX Group, which showed total notational volumes coming in at $777 million for this Monday (16% above the 30-day average), as the exchange group noted in a newsletter.

Indeed, executives at firms across the cryptocurrency market told The Block that Terra’s plans to buy bitcoin in the coming weeks have pushed sellers to the sidelines.

“A lot of people front running and a lot of sellers pausing,” Joshua Lim of Genesis said in a message to The Block. “In the last week, we had several $50mm+ notational call buyers in BTC, across the curve from April to Dec maturities, largely positioning into the anticipated spot buying.”

The Luna Foundation Guard – a non-profit entity that maintains the peg of UST to one dollar – has confirmed it has purchased $1 billion worth of bitcoin since the end of January. That includes about $135 million worth of purchases over the course of Monday.

“We are buying bitcoin now because we’re trying to bootstrap the reserve,” Kwon explained during an upcoming episode of The Scoop. “But the future model of Terra $UST is that a certain percentage of new $UST that is being minted goes to buy bitcoin all the time to build up reserves.”

Genesis’s Lim noted that the buying is contributing “a lot” to the lack of selling pressure because traders don’t want to sell against Terra’s buying spree.

The broader crypto market has risen alongside bitcoin, with Ethereum trading up 19% over the last week and Luna itself up 11.6%.

As for buying pressure, Kyle Davies of Three Arrows Capital said traders have been sitting on cash and have been parked in stablecoins waiting for positive news to reposition themselves in the market.

“There have been so many waves of selling in the face of negative news that funds and other market participants are sitting on big cash positions,” he said. “As bitcoin grinds up, I expect many to chase the market higher…doesn’t really matter how much LFG is doing.”

© 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.

NFT traders will be able to buy and sell Solana NFTs on OpenSea’s website starting next month, the firm hinted in a video promo it posted on Twitter.

However, the venture-backed firm did not speak of a set launch date. Solana will be the fourth blockchain OpenSea will support after Ethereum, Polygon and Klatyn.

As of now, Magic Eden, Solanart and SolSea are among the places where Solana users can trade NFTs. Those users will have a new trading avenue in OpenSea, the largest marketplace for NFTs today. The bulk of OpenSea’s volume happens on Ethereum.

The all-but-confirmed announcement represents the latest attention-grabbing move for the marketplace, which earlier this year raised a $300 million funding round at a $13 billion valuation. Backers include crypto VC Paradigm and the fund launched by Katie Haun, a former general partner at a16z.

In February, OpenSea moved to launch a venture program of its own, with the idea of investing in startups and projects within the NFT ecosystem. Social and gaming-focused projects are also within the venture arm’s remit, as reported at the time by The Block. 

© 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

• Paradigm is a crypto-focused fund founded in 2018 by Fred Ehrsam and Matt Huang. Before creating Paradigm, Ehrsam co-founded the crypto exchange Coinbase, and Matt Huang was a partner at Sequoia
• During the first quarter of 2022, Paradigm participated in at least 13 investment deals
• In total, the firm has publicly deployed capital to at least 61 startups and protocols across 13 verticals. The Block has mapped out these portfolio elements below. This is the third iteration of Paradigm’s portfolio map and an update to our previous coverage

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Ronin, the blockchain network tied to the popular pay-to-earn game Axie Infinity, suffered an exploit last week resulting in the loss of more than $600 million worth of crypto.

In a blog post, developers said that the exploit – which took place on March 23 but was discovered earlier Tuesday – resulted in the loss of 173,600 ETH (worth roughly $590 million) and 25.5 million worth of the stablecoin USDC. Specifically, five out of nine validators on the Ronin network were attacked and controlled during the incident. Validators serve a number of purposes, including the creation of transaction blocks and the updating of data oracles.

As the team explained:

“Five validator private keys were hacked; 4 Sky Mavis validators and 1 Axie DAO. The validator key scheme is set up to be decentralized so that it limits an attack vector such as this, but the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator. This traces back to November 2021 when the Axie DAO validator was allowlisted to distribute free transactions. This was discontinued in December 2021, but the Axie DAO validator IP was still on the allowlist.”

“Once the attacker got access to Sky Mavis systems they were able to get the signature from the Axie DAO validator by using the gas-free RPC,” the post explained. Once those nodes were controlled, the attacker gained the ability to drain funds from the Ronin bridge. Bridges are software mechanisms for moving funds between blockchains.

Ronin was created by Sky Mavis, the developer of Axie Infinity. The blog post said that Sky Mavis “discovered the security breach on March 29th, after a report that a user was unable to withdraw 5k ETH from the bridge.”

Per the post, the majority of the funds are being held in this Ethereum address. Etherscan has flagged the address as “reported to [be] involved in a hack targeting the Ronin bridge.”

“We are working directly with various government agencies to ensure the criminals get brought to justice,” the team said. “We are in the process of discussing with Axie Infinity / Sky Mavis stakeholders about how to best move forward and ensure no users’ funds are lost.”

This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available. 

For more breaking stories like this, make sure to subscribe to The Block on Telegram.

© 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.

 MacroStrategy, a recently formed subsidiary of MicroStrategy that holds most of its bitcoins, has taken a new $205 million loan to buy even more bitcoin.

The loan was provided by crypto-focused Silvergate Bank and is secured by bitcoin worth $820 million held in MacroStrategy’s collateral account with an unnamed custodian mutually authorized by Silvergate and MacroStrategy.

MacroStrategy will use the loan proceeds to buy additional bitcoin, pay interest and expenses related to the loan transaction, or for general corporate purposes.

“Using the capital from the loan, we’ve effectively turned our bitcoin into productive collateral, which allows us to further execute against our business strategy,” said MicroStrategy CEO and chairman Michael Saylor.

MicroStrategy bought its first bitcoin in August 2020 and, to date, has accumulated 125,051 bitcoins worth nearly $6 billion at current prices. MicroStrategy’s subsidiary MacroStrategy was formed last June and it holds over 110,000 of MicroStrategy’s total BTC.

MicroStrategy’s bitcoin bet is paying off so far since its aggregate purchase cost is around $3.8 billion, translating to an on-paper profit of nearly $2 billion at current prices. Still, some market observers recently told The Block that MicroStrategy could struggle to pay its debt back if bitcoin’s price fell sharply since the company’s bitcoin investment is largely backed by debt worth over $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.

Polygon, a popular sidechain on Ethereum, has launched a new user identification service that gives blockchain-based applications the ability to check a person’s credentials without revealing their personal data.

The service, called Polygon ID, will help in verifying users’ information while preserving their on-chain privacy. Using Polygon ID, applications running on the blockchain will be able authenticate user data while keeping sensitive information private. 

To make this work, Polygon will leverage iden3, a decentralized identity protocol that uses zero-knowledge proofs — a cryptographic technology that can verify data that remains encrypted and hidden from the verifying party. 

Polygon ID will find use in blockchain-related Know Your Customer (KYC) checks needed in certain regulated activities as well as custom applications. Even though crypto addresses are anonymous in themselves, the team has outlined the need for its ID. A spokesperson explained that addresses themselves cannot store user data.

“Blockchain addresses tell you nothing about the person behind it. An address does not have KYC attached with it. Polygon ID takes real world credentials and makes details private via zero-knowledge proof. It’s about the user data that we can associate with the identity,” a Polygon spokesperson told The Block.

As such, Polygon hopes its ID offering will aid in on-chain verification and eliminate the need for relying on centralized parties for user verification. The product will work with Polygon’s cryptocurrency wallet offering, the team said in its announcement.

© 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

• It is becoming increasingly important to actively manage and protect our digital identities (e.g., passwords, account numbers, browsing history, social media profiles) given how much value we transact on the web nowadays
• In Web2, we have to trust large companies and their centralized databases to protect and manage our personal data
• But in Web3, we can expect more modular integration of ready-made decentralized digital identity solutions instead of reliance on centralized solutions (or building such tools from the ground up)
• Here, we take a look at the two leading blockchain-based identity platforms providing such personal data tools – Ontology and Civic

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