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Propy, a real estate blockchain company, sold its first property in the United States on February 8.

The property, based in Florida, was sold for $653,163 or 210 ETH, after receiving 3000 potential bidders. “This is just the first seller in our pipeline and we’re seeing a lot of demand,” said Natalia Karayaneva, CEO of Propy, in a statement.

The sale drew attention for the fact that, as part of the deal, the owner receives a non-fungible token as digital proof-of-ownership. As noted by the Tampa Bay Times, the condo was previously owned by Leslie Alessandra, founder of a crypto company called DeFi Limited. A sale of a condo in Florida under similar conditions is forthcoming. 

Propy has built its own contracts but runs on the Ethereum blockchain. The record of the purchase is documented on-chain and provides access to documents that show ownership of the property. Propy’s plan is to scale this technology globally, said Karayaneva, in an interview with The Block.

In 2021, Propy facilitated the first-ever sale of an apartment via NFT in Ukraine. To date, the company has also raised over $16 million in venture capital and is backed by the likes of Tim Draper and Michael Arrington.

© 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

• A growing number of organizations are using NFTs to raise funds for charitable organizations. 
• Here’s how and why charities and artists have taken to using crypto art for good.

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Bloomberg News reported late Friday that the crypto lending platform BlockFi will pay $100 million to settle investigations into its interest-generating accounts, which last year drew public scrutiny from state-level securities regulators in the US.

Citing sources with knowledge of the process, the news outlet said that $50 million would be paid to the Securities and Exchange Commission and an additional $50 million to state regulators. An announcement is pending and may come “as soon as next week,” per Bloomberg.

As previously reported, regulators in New Jersey, Alabama, Texas, Kentucky and Vermont began investigating whether BlockFi’s offering falls under the definition of securities, a conclusion that BlockFi has pushed back against in past public statements on the issue. 

These moves came amid a broader inquiry in the US into crypto lending companies. SEC chief Gary Gensler has pointed to crypto lending as an area of interest as his agency widens its oversight of the US crypto sector.

In a statement posted to Twitter Friday evening, BlockFi said that “we have been in a productive ongoing dialogue with regulators at the federal and state level.”

“We do not comment on market rumors,” the company continued. “We can confirm that clients’ assets are safeguarded on the BlockFi platform and BlockFi Interest Account clients will continue to earn crypto interest as they always have.” 

© 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

• This weekly series explores the most interesting insights in NFTs, blockchain gaming, and virtual worlds
• In reaction to the preceding euphoria, the overall NFT market has witnessed a subsiding boom as trading activity has slightly waned across the board
• A flurry of events have accentuated the tribal nature of avatar collections, with owners pledging allegiance to their respective communities

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In a February 11 letter seen by The Block, the Treasury reassured six concerned senators that it did not plan to treat crypto miners, stakers and wallet providers as brokers for tax purposes.

“Existing regulations impose broker reporting obligations only on market participants engaged in business activities that provide them with access to information about sales of securities by taxpayers,” the letter reads.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requires brokers to keep information on the entities that they transact for. In crypto, the issue cropped up as a result of a new reporting rule that became law as part of last year’s Infrastructure Bill.

The rule seemingly defined every servicer involved in facilitating transactions for digital assets as brokers. proved to be a major sticking point as the Senate debated the infrastructure bill.

The letter went to six senators, Cynthia Lummis, Mark R. Warner, Rob Portman, Kyrsten Sinema, Pat Toomey and Mike Crapo. The six were involved in efforts to change the crypto reporting language in response to privacy concerns, as well as the technological impossibility of a crypto miner keeping information on every party and transaction they validate. 

The Treasury seems to be on board with the views of the senators, saying that:

“They are consistent with the Treasury Department’s view that ancillary parties who cannot get access to information that is useful to the IRS are not intended to be captured by the reporting requirements for brokers. For example, persons who are just validating transactions through a consensus mechanism are not likely to know whether a transaction is part of a sale. And persons who are only selling storage devices used to hold private keys or persons who merely write software code are not carrying out broker activities.”

However, this letter is several steps removed from formal guidance, which will likely require several rounds of proposals, public comment and revisions to formalize a final tax reporting policy.

Meanwhile, crypto taxes remain a notoriously foggy area, with most legislation that addresses the subject struggling to make it out of committee. 

© 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.

Jamaica is planning to roll out its central bank digital currency (CBDC) this year, according to an announcement from Prime Minister Andrew Holness.

Holness tweeted the news yesterday in a thread reiterating the main points of a speech opening the 2022/2023 parliamentary year for the nation. 

“This will serve as a foundation for Jamaica’s digital payments architecture and will facilitate greater financial inclusion, increase transaction velocity while reducing the cost of banking for the Jamaican people,” said an additional tweet. 

The planned 2022 launch of the digital Jamaican dollar comes after a 2021 pilot, which Holness said was a success.

In December of last year, the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) released the results of the pilot, disclosing it had minted $230 million worth of digital currency on August 9, issued $1 million of the CBDC to wallet providers the following day and two months later issued an additional $5 million in CBDC to a deposit taking institution, the National Commercial Bank. The NCB then onboarded 57 customers that conducted person-to-person transactions, including transactions with small merchants. 

In that 2021 announcement, the BOJ said it planned a national roll-out in Q1 of 2022. 

© 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 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the United Kingdom announced on its website that it wouldn’t continue a project designed to fund conservation work through non-fungible token (NFT) sales. 

“We thank all of those who have generously supported our conservation work by purchasing NFTs,” the WWF UK wrote. “We have now agreed with our partners to bring this trial to a close this evening (Friday 4th February). We recognise that NFTs are a much debated issue and we all have lots to learn about this new market, which is why we will now fully assess the impact of this trial and reflect on how we can best continue to innovate to engage our supporters.”

The launch was originally slated to occur on February 3. The NFTs represented 13 endangered animal species such as the giant panda, Galapagos penguin and cross river gorilla. The collection included about 7,900 NFTs, which corresponded to the actual number of living members of each species in the wild. 

The NFTs cost between 0.05 ETH (about $150) to 0.25 ETH (about $750) to mint, according to the project’s Discord, and were to be minted on Polygon, a scaling chain for the Ethereum blockchain.

However, the UK’s WWF pulled the mint early after experiencing immense user backlash. Some on Discord accused the WWF of “greenwashing this project with half truths about side chains,” citing the energy cost of “dirty ETH for NFTs.” 

Others on Twitter said, “Even if this particular arrangement was eco-friendly (it isn’t), you’re still contributing to the widespread adoption of NFT use which is literally killing the planet and the animals you’re purporting to protect.”

Some did come to the WWF UK’s defense. “Had this been a physical canvas art sale for these animals I don’t think anyone would have had an issue. But because it’s digital art people were attacking it on twitter because they don’t like and understand crypto. I think WWF were a bit ahead of the curve here, and probably poor marketing/hype around it,” a Discord user wrote. 

This is not the first time a branch of the WWF sold NFTs to benefit conservation efforts. As The Block previously reported, WWF Germany sold NFTs corresponding to the actual numbers of endangered animals in October of 2021.

© 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

• Ethereum has developed a vast but fragmented layer 2 environment. Rollup to rollup bridges are being used to connect different L2 platforms.
• Hop Exchange can Celer’s cBridge are two projects which can transfer assets from L2 to L2.
• Traction for these bridges is growing, but it is still small compared to to the rest of the ecosystem.

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Cardiac surgeon, television personality and U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet C. Oz has filed trademarks to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to cover a breadth of digital goods, services and software. 

Dr. Oz’s proposed trademarks for virtual goods and services run the gamut of art, collectible coins, food, beverages, sleepwear, eyewear, jewelry, cologne, beauty products, health products, fitness and exercise equipment, bedding, toys, games, comics phones, posters, and electric kitchen appliances — suggesting that the Turkish-American television host may be interested in capturing broad markets in the virtual world.

Oz’s trademark filing also spans community forums and information streaming regarding health, wellness and lifestyle for use in the virtual worlds, a continuation of an industry Oz covers in The Dr. Oz Show, which he hosts. 

In addition to his health and wellness show, which has encountered criticism from medical professionals for promoting alternative medicines, Oz announced in November 2021 that he’s running for an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania as a Republican. 

Dr. Oz is not the only public figure filing trademarks for their intellectual property in the metaverse. U.S.-based restaurant chains McDonald’s and Panera Bread registered trademarks to build out virtual restaurants — complete with home delivery. 

There have been over 1,200 NFT-related trademarks filed with the USPTO in 2021, up from just three in 2020, according to the intellectual property law firm office of Michael Kondoudis. January 2022 saw 450 such applications.

© 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 chief executive of rideshare company Uber has said the firm “absolutely” will accept crypto in the future, but prefaced those remarks by saying such a move would only happen under particular conditions. 

The remarks came as CEO Dara Khosrowshahi spoke to Bloomberg in an interview Friday. When asked if Uber might accept crypto “someday,” Khosrowshahi remarked:

“It definitely could. We’re having conversations all the time. I think right now, what we see with bitcoin and some of the other cryptos, they are quite valuable as a store of value. The exchange mechanism is expensive, it’s not great for the environment. As the exchange mechanism becomes less expensive, becomes more environmentally friendly, I think you will see us lean into crypto a little bit more. So we’re absolutely watching it. And if you say, is Uber going to accept crypto in the future? Absolutely. At some point. This isn’t the right point, but we will.”

Friday’s interview wasn’t the first time that Khosrowshahi has been asked about crypto payments, and in the past, he has couched Uber’s openness to the idea with qualifications.

Last February, he told CNBC that “if there’s a benefit there, if there’s a need there, we’ll do it. We’re just not going to do it as part of a promotion.”

© 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.