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Representatives from tech giant Intel will debut what they’ve called an “Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC”, dubbed “Bonanza Mine”, during a technology event next month.

The few available details were included in a presentation guide for the 2022 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, which is set to take place between February 19 and 26. Intel’s presentation, the existence of which was first reported by Tom’s Hardware, will take place on February 23.

Despite the scant information at this time about the upcoming presentation, past events and information releases have long pointed to Intel’s interest in developing bitcoin-related hardware.

Years ago, Intel was highlighted as a technology partner in presentation materials for bitcoin startup 21 Inc., which at the time of the materials’ creation was raising a $75 million funding round. Those materials revealed that Intel had produced mining chips at its foundry for 21 Inc.’s use. However, it has never been clear whether Intel’s in-house chips were used for mining beyond this particular business arrangement.

In 2018, Intel won a patent for an energy-efficient bitcoin mining process. 

© 2021 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.

OHM, the native token of the decentralized finance (DeFi) project OlympusDAO, is down more than 90% from its April 2021 all-time high of $1,415.26, according to Coingecko. As of the time of writing, OHM has lost 12% over the last 24-hours and is at its lowest price level since May 2021.

OlympusDAO is a DeFi protocol with a treasury that backs the OHM currency with the aim of maintaining a certain price floor. The DAO issues OHM tokens at a discount to investors in exchange for their cryptocurrencies, a process designed to grow its treasury over time.

These discounted OHM tokens are called bonds and users often stake their bonds on the DAO itself or use them as collateral on Fuse, an interest rate market powered by yield-generating protocol Rari Capital.

Judging by its price chart, the OHM price action has been in keeping with that of the broader crypto market with a significant rise in April and October 2021 before recent declines. But it has suffered worse than most.

The price of OlympusDAO has fallen. Image: CoinGecko.

Key to the project was an emphasis on staking. The project encouraged users to stake their tokens, locking up more of the supply and reducing selling pressure. Toward the end of last year, 91.5% of the supply was being staked. It’s currently around 85%. But clearly this was not enough to prevent holders from selling eventually.

This New Year price slump, while in keeping with the losses in the broader crypto market, has also been attributed to massive profit-taking from major OHM holders. According to data from Etherscan, one OHM holder swapped over 82,500 OHM tokens worth more than $11 million at the time. The trade happened on SushiSwap with the OHM tokens traded for the stablecoin DAI.

OHM has been on a downtrend since November 2021 and is down more than 60% year-to-date.  This price drop also meant that overleveraged OHM long positions went underwater causing a cascade of liquidations that ultimately led to further downward pressure on the token price.

Worse still, the project’s success led to many offshoot projects mimicking its tokenomics. But many of these offshoots have suffered even worse, with Spartacus down 91%, Invictus down 92%, Klima down 97% and Snowbank also down 97%.

© 2021 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.

Metaplex Foundation, the developer of the Solana-based NFT protocol Metaplex, has raised $46 million in a funding round.

Multicoin Capital and Jump Crypto co-led the round, with Solana Ventures, Alameda Research, and Animoca Brands participating.

The round also saw particularly high interest from former and current professional basketball players, including Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson, Joel Embiid, Kevin Love, and Obadiah Toppin. In all, more than 90 individual investors joined the round, including Italian banker Cozomo de’ Medici.

This was Metaplex Foundation’s first fundraise and realized via a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT) sale, its director Stephen Hess told The Block. The foundation will launch its own native governance token called META in the near future, said Hess.

With fresh capital in hand, Metaplex Foundation plans to support projects that are creating new developer tools based on the Metaplex protocol. The Metaplex protocol helps users build their own NFT marketplaces on the Solana blockchain.

The Metaplex protocol was launched in June 2021 and claims to have helped create over 5 million Solana-based NFTs for 85,000 projects so far. Some of these projects include the Degenerate Ape Academy, Neodyme, Cryptokickers, and Solana Monkey Business.

Compared to Ethereum, Solana helps to mint and buy NFTs at a cheaper cost due to its lower transaction fees.

© 2021 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 exchange Coinbase and payments giant Mastercard have teamed up to simplify the buying experience of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Today people have to use crypto for buying NFTs on platforms like OpenSea. Coinbase and Mastercard are working on letting users buy NFTs via Mastercard cards on Coinbase’s upcoming NFT platform.

Mastercard said buying NFTs should be as simple as buying a t-shirt online. But today users first need to open a crypto wallet, buy crypto, then use it to purchase an NFT in an online marketplace, it said.

“As an important step in this mission, we’re excited to announce today that we’re partnering with Coinbase to let people use their Mastercard cards to make purchases on Coinbase’s upcoming NFT marketplace,” said Mastercard.

Coinbase announced its NFT marketplace in October. It will let people mint and buy NFTs. The company also opened a waitlist at the time for users to join the marketplace and saw a massive response. More than 1 million people signed up for the Coinbase NFT marketplace.

“Coinbase was basically an on-ramp for crypto for many, many users. Millions of people were able to access bitcoin for the first time by using Coinbase. So we want to do the same thing for NFTs with Mastercard by solving the pain points — to make it as easy as possible to buy an NFT and make sure it’s the best consumer experience,” said Prakash Hariramani, senior director of product at Coinbase.

© 2021 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.

Animoca Brands, an Australia-based metaverse startup focused on NFTs and gaming, has raised $358.88 million in new funding round and is now valued at over $5 billion.

Liberty City Ventures led the round, with several other investors participating, including Soros Fund Management, Sequoia China, 10T Holdings, Mirae Asset, Pacific Century Group, ParaFi Capital, and Winklevoss Capital.

With fresh capital in hand, Animoca Brands plans to continue funding acquisitions and investments and further develop its gaming products.

The company’s major blockchain game projects include The Sandbox, the upcoming Phantom Galaxies game, the REVV token ecosystem (including REVV Racing, F1® Delta Time, and Formula E: High Voltage), the Arc8 platform, as well as the TOWER, LMT, BONDLY, and PROSPER token projects, among others.

As for its investments, Animoca Brands has already invested in more than 150 NFT and metaverse-related companies, including OpenSea, Dapper Labs, Yield Guild Games, and Axie Infinity.

“We have set ourselves the ambitious goals of building an open Web3 and facilitating an open metaverse that expands financial inclusion,” said Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands. “We believe we are still at the initial stages of a new Internet revolution, and there are tremendous opportunities ahead of us in 2022 and beyond.”

Animoca Brands issued a total of 111,173,515 new shares at a price of around $3 per share in the latest funding round. The company now has a total of 1,794,128,323 fully paid ordinary shares on issue.

The latest round brings Animoca Brands’ total funding to date to over $500 million. The company has previously raised more than $216 million. Its subsidiary, The Sandbox, separately raised $93 million recently.

© 2021 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 government on Tuesday became the latest authority to tighten its rules around crypto advertising, in a move that will see the regulation of adverts brought into line with other financial promotions.

In a press release, HM Treasury, the UK’s finance ministry, said it is “eager to support innovation in cryptoassets” and recognizes the potential of certain products such as stablecoins to provide a more efficient means of payment. 

The move will bring crypto marketing within the scope of financial promotions legislation. This means the promotion of qualifying cryptoassets will be subject to Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) rules, in line with the same standards that financial promotions for stocks, shares, and insurance products are held to.

“Cryptoassets can provide exciting new opportunities, offering people new ways to transact and invest – but it’s important that consumers are not being sold products with misleading claims,” said Rishi Sunak, chancellor of the exchequer. 

The government taskforce on cryptoassets has been mulling its regulatory response to the sector since 2018. 

The consultation document published on Tuesday took into account a range of concerns from businesses in the space, including the government definition of cryptoasset, the implementation of a transition period and the proposed approach. 

The proposed definition set out several criteria for a qualifying cryptoasset, including that it is fungible, transferable, not electronic money as defined in the Electronic Money Regulations, and not a currency issued by a central bank or public authority. 

The Block asked the Treasury for a list of firms consulted but had not heard back by the time of publication. 

Crypto crackdown

Today’s news follows a slew of bans from the UK’s advertising regulator on crypto-related marketing, and a hold on approvals for crypto adverts by London’s travel authority. 

In December, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) issued a ‘red alert’ warning on the marketing of crypto-assets, banning seven separate ads in one swoop.

Companies whose ads were deemed to have broken the rules at the time included trading platforms eToro and Coinburp; exchanges EXMO, Luno, Kraken and Coinbase; as well as a promotion from pizza chain Papa John’s. 

Since then it has also ruled on Arsenal Football Club’s marketing of fan tokens and two adverts from Crypto.com.

This week, Singapore and Spain also tightened their rules around crypto promotions. 

© 2021 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.

At least 4,830 ETH ($15 million) has been stolen from crypto exchange platform Crypto.com, according to blockchain researchers PeckShield.

Per blockchain records, it appears the alleged hacker has laundered almost all of the proceeds from the incident via TornadoCash, a “coin mixer” that serves to obfuscate the on-chain link between the source and destination of transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.

The attacker began laundering the siphoned funds at 12:53 AM UTC on Tuesday in batches of 100 ETH ($317,000) per transaction. In total, the hacker sent 48 deposits of 100 ETH each and three deposits of 10 ETH each to TornadoCash.

It is not yet known how the hacker was able to steal funds from Crypto.com but the exchange first announced that some users were reporting suspicious activities on their accounts on January 17. At the time, the exchange stated that it was going to pause withdrawals while it investigated the matter.

The following day, the platform tweeted that some users had reported unauthorized activity on their accounts but did not specify the nature of the incident. In response, the exchange reset all two-factor authentication (2FA) protocols, requiring all users to repeat the security verification step before withdrawals would be enabled on the platform.

Tweeting on Tuesday morning, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek maintained that user funds were not lost in the incident  — but did not specify whether the exchange’s own funds were taken. “We will share a full post mortem after the internal investigation is completed,” Marszalek added.

We have reached out to Crypto.com for comment and will update this story should we hear back.

Crypto.com has been on a marketing spree recently, doling out $700 million to rename the Staples Center in Los Angeles to the Crypto.com Arena. The exchange has also inked a multi-year sponsorship deal with the LA Angel City Football Club.

© 2021 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 firm BitMEX Group announced Tuesday its plan to acquire Bankhaus von der Heydt, a 268-year-old private bank based in Germany.

The group’s BXM Operations AG — a company founded by BitMEX CEO Alexander Höptner and its CFO Stephan Lutz — has signed a purchase agreement with Dietrich von Boetticher, the bank’s current owner. The deal is subject to the approval of German financial regulator BaFin.

Bankhaus von der Heydt was founded in 1754. In October, it partnered with Fireblocks to offer crypto services to its clients.

BitMEX Group said it expects the transaction to complete in the middle of this year. But the BaFin approval may not come easy after recent fintech scandals in Germany, including Wirecard and Greensill Bank.

Greensill Bank was deemed insolvent by a local German court last year, and German payments firm Wirecard filed for insolvency after revelations that over $2 billion was “missing” from its balance sheet.

BitMEX Group did not disclose the terms of the deal in the making. But said once BaFin approves it, Bankhaus von der Heydt will continue to operate as a standalone business unit, with Höptner and Lutz joining its supervisory board.

Höptner said BitMEX Group aims to create “a regulated crypto products powerhouse in the heart of Europe” if the deal goes through. The group plans to launch regulated crypto products in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with the planned acquisition.

BitMEX Group has been planning to increase its footprint in Europe. Earlier this year, the group launched BitMEX Link, a crypto brokerage service based in Switzerland. BitMEX Link is owned by BXM Link AG, another company of the group.

Trying to recover market share

Ever since BitMEX and its founders were sued by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in October 2020, it has been trying to recover its lost market share.

At the time, the CFTC filed charges against BitMEX and its founders Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo, and Samuel Reed for operating an unregistered trading platform. Last year, BitMEX settled the case with the CFTC with a $100 million penalty, but the agency’s litigation against the founders continues.

Höptner joined BitMEX in December 2020 from Börse Stuttgart GmbH and Euwax AG and has taken several steps to regain the exchange’s market share.

Last month, BitMEX announced that it will issue its own token BMEX to provide trading incentives to users. Earlier this month, BitMEX also hired several new C-level executives to expand into spot, brokerage, and custody products, beyond its primary derivatives offering.

The company hired Rupertus Rothenhaeuser from Crypto Finance (Brokerage) AG as its chief commercial officer. It also hired Raphael Polansky as its new chief operating officer, from Blocknox, a subsidiary of Boerse Stuttgart Digital Ventures. It also appointed Marcus Hughes as chief risk officer, who was previously managing director of Coinbase’s European business.

© 2021 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.

Cross-chain protocol Multichain (previously known as Anyswap) has been exploited for $1.34 million — according to security researchers PeckShield. This occured through a bug that the platform had recently dislosed.

On January 17, Multichain revealed that it had found a critical vulnerability and had fixed it. It said that the bug affected six tokens, including wrapped ether (WETH).

But the problem is that the protocol couldn’t fix the bug from affecting past users who had interacted with the protocol. Instead, this required users to manually go to their wallets and revoke permissions that they had previously given to the protocol. Multichain said that these users should do this immediately otherwise their assets would remain at risk.

It appears that many users have not done so and the bug is now being exploited.

“Someone is exploiting this literally *right now*. If you haven’t revoked approvals yet you should probably do so before it’s too late,” tweeted a Paradigm researcher known as Samczsun.

PeckShield identified that the funds have been transferred to a single blockchain address.

© 2021 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.

London-based venture capital firm Blossom Capital, founded in 2017 as a generalist investor, is now planning to plough considerably more money into the cryptocurrency market.

Blossom has this morning announced a new $432 million fund, its third to date. The cash will be directed to European startups seeking Series A capital across a range of sectors including consumer, cybersecurity, developer tools, enterprise software-as-a-service, fintech and marketplaces. But a full third of the capital will be invested in crypto-powered firms, according to the company’s announcement.

“We do hold tokens. We will have exposure to the core protocols,” says Ophelia Brown, managing partner of Blossom Capital. “We are going to do a lot more of what we have already done.”

Blossom does not appear to have much of a track record backing crypto businesses — save for its investment in MoonPay, which it backed in November last year when the crypto payments firm raised $555 million at a $3.4 billion valuation.

But Brown says Blossom’s $185 million-sized second fund has quietly been investing in tokens and even NFTs, without showcasing those bets in the way a standard equity investment would be. The company has invested a lot of time and resources in developing the infrastructure needed to invest in web3 organizations, she adds.

“We have some NFTs — we won’t disclose what, but we have NFTs,” says Brown. “We believe in the upside of some of these communities very much.”

Blossom’s efforts in the sector will be steered by a new crypto-focused partner, a role the company is now actively trying to fill.

Betting on fintech

Brown herself is focused on the firm’s fintech bets. Notably, she steered Blossom’s investment in Checkout.com when the payments startup raised $230 million in May 2019. Checkout.com’s value has ballooned from $2 billion to $40 billion since then.

This is not to say that Brown isn’t a crypto enthusiast. She says she tried, unsuccessfully, to get Index Ventures to buy into Ethereum’s presale in 2014 while working as a principal at the investment firm. Her profile picture on Twitter is CryptoPunk #985, which she appears to have purchased in December for 98 ether (or around $320,000 at today’s prices), based on OpenSea records.

Brown says that getting Blossom’s own backers — its limited partners (LPs) — on board for greater crypto exposure wasn’t an issue for the firm. Indeed, while the majority of the second fund’s LPs are again backing Blossom’s third, the company has also brought in some of the world’s biggest endowment funds.

“The best allocators are already positive on crypto,” says Brown.

© 2021 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.