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Israeli defense minister Beni Gantz ordered the seizure of crypto assets on Monday from accounts officials said were meant to fund Hamas.

According to a statement from the National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing of Israel, the accounts were connected to a business alleged to have assisted with the funding of Hamas. 

The assets in the seizure order include “dozens of thousands of shekels” from 12 accounts and about 30 digital wallets that officials say belonged to businesses that helped the Al’matchadun currency exchange company, which in turn belonged to a family known as the Shamlachs. The family also owned part of the seized cryptocurrency directly, the statement said.

The order lists names associated with the 12 accounts, as well as their email addresses.

Gantz said in the same press statement that he was “acting in every conceivable way to cut off the economic oxygen pipe of Terror.”

The Israeli government has been cracking down on the use of crypto to assist Hamas. In July 2021, Gantz ordered the seizure of 84 addresses that had received $7.7 million in cryptocurrency, according to blockchain analytics and forensics firm Elliptic. More recently, in December, assets from 47 users were also seized.

After the Israeli–Palestinian conflict escalated last year, there was an uptick in cryptocurrency donations to Hamas, a senior Hamas official told The Wall Street Journal in June. Hamas is considered a terrorist group by the US, along with the European Union, Israel and other nations.

In August 2020, US agencies announced they were seizing nearly three hundred bitcoin addresses as part of an operation targeting terrorism financing networks including one linked to Hamas.

© 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

• Four Meta (formerly Facebook) employees quit their stable jobs at the big tech company late last year to form their own startup, Mysten Labs.
• Their mission: to improve the user experience of web3 so it can open up to the masses. 

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For crypto venture investors, 2021 was a landmark year. 

The flood of capital that poured more than $28.65 billion into crypto firms last year was propped up by new billion-dollar fund launches, a ramp-up in venture investing among crypto firms, and investor appetite for a general risk-on environment, giving way to a new class of angel investors in the market.

But 2022 has been more risk-off, with the crypto market shedding billions of market cap on news that inflation could lead to a hike in interest rates, plus the addition of geo-political uncertainty, which has caused its own price gyrations across markets. 

This pullback has begun seeping into the private crypto market, according to venture capital investor Darren Lau, who founded crypto educational resource The Daily Ape and runs VC firm Not3Lau Capital. Lau has backed projects including Nansen, Trader Joe, and Mixmob. He was also an early Solana investor.

“I talked to a few projects recently, like just this week, and they were telling me like how even though these VC’s were committing to the round a month ago, two months ago, they’re pulling out of the deals based on how the market looks right now,” Lau said on the most recent episode of The Scoop.

They’re also being much more selective compared to previously. “So back then a lot more VC’s were spraying and praying,” added Lau.

The “spray and pray” approach — which involves an investor making a bunch of bets on the hope that one will deliver a massive upside — appears to be becoming less of a darling strategy in today’s market.

Says Lau: “People are being more careful with their capital.”

On this episode of The Scoop, Lau and Frank Chaparro discuss: 

• Lau’s approach to venture investing and his decision-making process for making a venture bet
• How he uses bots to automate his investment process and scour Discord channels to find hot deals
• How he got involved with Solana early on and what he thinks the future holds for the project
• How DAOs have evolved over the years and why they’ve become a red-hot buzz word

© 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.

UK fintech Wise has today put a halt on its transfers to Russia, according to a Reuters report. The move is a response to Western powers cutting some of the country’s banks from the SWIFT network, says a spokesperson from Wise. 

Wise, known previously as TransferWise, is a public fintech that initially began as a remittance company but has since expanded into payment services, stock investment, and foreign exchange. 

The London-based fintech says it will continue to monitor the situation and update its measures accordingly. The decision to halt operations in Russia follows the company’s previous measure to limit daily transfers to Russia to £200 ($268.34). 

When The Block contacted Wise for further details, the company confirmed the news but did not want to disclose any further details. 

© 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

• Real-world assets (RWAs) are being tokenized and brought on-chain for traditional firms to access liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets
• A handful of third-party custodians have taken the role of bridging on-chain liquidity for traditional firms
• The liquidity loaned to traditional firms via on-chain protocols are typically more transparent and also introduces more accountability
• Regulated firms and entities are also starting to delve into the RWA tokenization domain

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KPMG in Canada, an audit, tax, advisory and other professional services firm, announced Monday that it purchased non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as part of its ‘corporate strategy.’

The firm purchased digital assets from the World of Women (WoW) collection, an NFT project of 10,000 generatively created images of women with a floor price of around $24,000, as of publication.

“This acquisition reflects our belief not only in the continued growth of NFTs, but in the value of WoW and its mission. Having now gone through the process, we are well-positioned to guide our clients around building a corporate NFT strategy, including, acquiring and safeguarding NFTs,” says Benjie Thomas, Managing Partner of Advisory Services at KPMG in Canada in a statement.

KPMG in Canada’s purchase of the World of Women NFTs three weeks after the firm added Bitcoin and Ethereum to its corporate treasury, The Block reported. As Thomas said previously, “institutional adoption of cryptoassets and blockchain technology will continue to grow and become a regular part of the asset mix.”

© 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.

One of Ukraine’s main English-language news outlets has begun soliciting cryptocurrency donations to fund its work.

The Kyiv Independent has started advertising its new cryptocurrency wallets, which are the latest in the newspaper’s means of funding.

The Bitcoin wallet has received just over 0.126 BTC ($5,000), while the ether wallet has taken in donations of 59.4 ETH ($163,000). The two wallets saw their first transactions on February 25. 

Those wallets are in addition to the Kyiv Independent’s older GoFundMe and Patreon accounts. All of these fundraising methods have seen heightened activity amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Kyiv Independent’s crypto wallets are just the latest in a growing list of Ukrainian causes using cryptocurrency to gather funds, including the Ukrainian government itself. 

The Kyiv Independent is an offshoot of the Kyiv Post, the oldest English-language outlet in the country. One of Ukraine’s leading sources of independent news, the Kyiv Post effectively dissolved back in November. 

Owner Adnan Kivan at the time said he intended to restart the publication, which has since resumed. Members of the post’s editorial staff, however, released a joint statement at the time indicating that they had been fired en masse as Kivan was looking to curtail their independence. 

Those fired reporters went on to launch the Kyiv Independent at the end of November. Ominously, the first opinion the outlet published was a November 30 piece called “Is Russia really about to invade Ukraine?”

© 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 UK’s government has brought forward legislation to crack down on “dirty money,” as geopolitical tensions escalate following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week.

Due to be read out in Parliament on Tuesday, the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill will help the National Crime Agency prevent foreign owners from laundering their money in UK property and ensure more corrupt oligarchs can be handed an Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO).

This will form part of a raft of measures to tackle corruption and murky dealings. Through reforms of Companies House, the UK’s registrar of companies, agencies will also be given new powers to seize crypto assets.

This will bring them within the scope of civil forfeiture powers to tackle the growing threat from ransomware and the use of crypto assets for money laundering, the Home Office said. 

Strengthened anti-money laundering powers will give businesses more confidence to share information on suspected money laundering and other economic crime, it added. 

The bill has been in the works for several years and was proposed to tackle the £100 billion in illicit funds the NCA estimates is channeled through the UK each year. 

“There is no place for dirty money in the UK,” said prime minister Boris Johnson in a statement. “We are going faster and harder to tear back the façade that those supporting Putin’s campaign of destruction have been hiding behind for so long.”

It is not yet clear how the new measures will be funded, as agencies are “under-resourced,” “overstretched” and “outgunned” by criminals, according to recent reports.

© 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.

3 ways top crypto companies are leveraging Prove’s technology to onboard new users in 10 seconds while also mitigating SIM swap fraud and other identity fraud.

Cryptocurrency fraud is at an all-time high, with the FBI recently reporting a 5x surge in SIM swap attacks and issuing a warning to crypto investors not to talk about their crypto online. At the same time, crypto forums are rife with complaints about slow onboarding times and confusing identity verification processes. And as fraud – including synthetic identities, SIM swap, and 2FA breaches – continues to increase, crypto exchanges are forced to make their security checks even more stringent, creating a frustrating cycle of increasingly cumbersome experiences for their customers.

But innovative cryptocurrency companies are learning and adapting, solving these two issues using advanced identity verification tools. Here are 3 methods crypto exchanges are employing to fight fraud and onboarding bottlenecks:

• Mitigate SIM swap fraud and synthetic identities using phone-centric signals: One simple way that crypto companies are thwarting SIM swap fraud is by simply checking the reputation of a phone number through a trust indicator such as Prove’s Trust Score before sending an SMS OTP. If the phone number’s reputation is low (indicating that a SIM swap may have occurred), the company can fall back to step-up authentication to prevent SIM swap fraud from occurring. Phone-centric identity signals can also be leveraged during account opening to detect and prevent synthetic identity fraud. In addition to top cryptocurrency exchanges, Prove’s technology is used by 8 of the top 10 banks. 
• Eliminate antiquated utility bill/bank statement verification checks: Because regulations vary widely state-by-state, establishing proof-of-residence is often the first step for many crypto onboarding flows. Many companies still default to the old-school route of asking customers to dig up a utility bill or bank statement to prove their residence, but innovative crypto companies have adopted a faster and more seamless way to establish proof-of-residence and eliminate this step. Keep reading to learn how. 
• Fast-track onboarding by auto-filling verified KYC-compliant data: To create a faster and more secure onboarding experience for new users, many crypto companies are turning to Prove Pre-Fill, which auto-fills forms with verified data to accelerate onboarding by 79%, enabling crypto exchanges to sign up new customers in as little as 10 seconds. Prove Pre-Fill’s checks also eliminate the need for utility bill/bank statement checks, reducing abandonment by 35% while also detecting and preventing synthetic identity fraud. Learn more about Prove Pre-Fill here.

For more information about how top crypto companies are using Prove’s phone-centric identity technology to fight fraud and accelerate onboarding, learn more at prove.com/industries/crypto.

© 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.

Ukraine plans a legal push to force crypto exchanges to freeze Russian accounts following Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.  

After Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation of Ukraine, called on exchanges to block the accounts of both Russian and Belarusian users yesterday, many said they were unable to comply without legal cover. Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, for one, said the exchange “cannot freeze the accounts of our Russian clients without a legal requirement to do so.” Similarly, Binance told Reuters that it was “not going to unilaterally freeze millions of innocent users’ accounts.”

Now, Ukraine is upping the pressure.

“We plan to make legal demands. We are preparing letters,” Yulia Parkhomenko, head of the virtual assets expert group at the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, told The Block. When asked whether it was right to target Russian citizens — particularly with many opposing the war — Parkhomenko said, “This is a necessary measure. There is no way to identify who is financing the war and who is not.”

Targeting all Russian citizens

While Powell said that such a legal requirement was necessary before the exchange could restrict accounts, he appeared to be against the move, arguing that many of Kraken’s customers were likely anti-war. He claimed that crypto goes beyond borders and that crypto users should not “have to worry about being caught in broad, indiscriminate wealth confiscation.”

Powell has previously encouraged his following to consider taking their crypto off exchanges — including Kraken — if they’re worried about legal enforcement. At the time, he said, “If you’re worried about it, don’t keep your funds with any centralized/regulated custodian. We cannot protect you.”

While asking crypto exchanges to block Russian accounts, Ukraine has been adopting crypto for its own benefit. So far, it has received more than $9 million in crypto donations.

© 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.