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Crypto investment firm CoinFund has onboarded a former leader in the U.S. regulation space to its advisory board.

Per a January 13 announcement shared with The Block, former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair J. Christopher Giancarlo will join CoinFund as a strategic advisor. 

“It’s pretty high-level strategy,” Giancarlo tells The Block, explaining that he hopes he “can help them peer into the future a bit.”

In particular, Giancarlo emphasized his work with brokerage firm GFI Group, and especially its 2005 initial public offering, as critical to his understanding of how to shepherd firms through investment rounds. Of the current market for investment in crypto, Giancarlo acknowledged a single overarching trend: “There’s a lot of capital chasing a lot of deals.”

One beneficiary of this is CoinFund. The firm saw significant expansion over the course of 2021, launching a new fund focused on decentralized finance and helping to launch Metaversal, a holding company that invests in non-fungible tokens. 

Giancarlo himself is no stranger to the world of crypto, earning the moniker of “Crypto Dad” owing to his favor towards the industry during his time at the CFTC. He would subsequently launch the Digital Dollar Project, which advocates for a U.S. central bank digital currency. Later, the CryptoDad nickname would appear as the title of a book he released near the end of 2021. 

As CoinFund’s president, Christopher Perkins, said in a statement: “Chris was a driving force in supporting innovation at the CFTC, and continues to serve as a trailblazer and advocate for thoughtful crypto policy in the United States.”

A representative for CoinFund told The Block that Giancarlo is the first strategic advisor the firm has onboarded. 

Crypto-native venture capital has radically expanded its investment into policy and regulation in recent months. Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, has basically rebuilt its regulation team since August. New recently broke that Katie Haun, an outgoing partner at a16z and former Department of Justice official, was leaving the VC firm to start her own fund. 

© 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.

Congress is officially looking into the environmental impact of blockchain, especially proof-of-work networks like Bitcoin. 

On January 13, the House Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee publicized a hearing entitled “Cleaning up cryptocurrency: The energy impact of blockchains” for January 20, confirming The Block’s reporting from last week. 

No witness list is yet available, and staffers for the subcommittee did not respond to The Block’s request for further details.

The hearing follows on growing concern over the rise of the crypto mining in the U.S., which has become the largest source of Bitcoin’s hash rate over the past year. 

The Oversight Committee is, broadly speaking, not a place that an industry wants to end up, as its mandate focuses on reining in problematic activity. However, the state of gridlock in both chambers of Congress — coupled by an approaching election season — complicates the idea of passing legislation between now and the next congressional term. 

© 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.

Digital collectible company Candy Digital is launching its Secondary Marketplace that will allow users to buy and sell previously released officially licensed Major League Baseball NFTs starting January 15.

Fans can log onto the company’s website to purchase collectibles like Play of the Day series, MLB 2021 ICONs, and the 2021 World Series Collection and the Team Candy Digital Jersey.

With the launch, the company hopes to bring more people into the digital space. “We’re obviously very excited about utilizing all the opportunities that exist in the NFT space, in terms of being able to mint and own a digital asset,” said Scott Lawin, CEO of Candy Digital, in an interview with The Block. “But we realize that the existing on ramps or setting up a digital wallet, funding a crypto purchase, and then buying an NFT for the first time can be confusing and daunting for a lot of folks.”

Candy Digital was formed by three executive partners, including Michael Rubin, CEO of Fanatics, Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, and Gary Vaynerchuk, serial entrepreneur and investor. In October 2021, the company announced that it completed a $100 million Series A financing round, which values the company at $1.5 billion.

To help with the process, Candy is set up with a fiat-first approach, meaning purchasing an NFT can be done by simply going to their website, putting in an email address and paying with a credit card.

Products previously sold on Bitski and OpenSea will not be featured in the marketplace for this launch, but Candy plans to roll-out additional crypto-native features and provides owners the opportunity to bridge those NFTs to the Candy platform.

“Over the course of the next few months on our roadmap, all the crypto functionality around being able to connect to wallet, pay with crypto, ultimately bridge your asset onto Ethereum and other chains are all things that we will continue to roll out,” said Lawin.

© 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.

Canadian startup Conduit has raised $17 million in a funding round led by Portage Ventures, according to a statement. FinVC, Gemini Frontier Fund, and ex-a16z partner Rex Salisbury also participated in the round. 

Conduit creates APIs — a software tool that enables easy access to new services — that it says will allow fintechs, neobanks, and traditional financial institutions to easily integrate high-yield DeFi accounts into their existing product offerings. They say that this will increase access to DeFi and facilitate mainstream adoption. 

“We’re excited to back Conduit, as we believe bridging the DeFi and fintech worlds is a massive opportunity,” says Stephanie Choo, partner at Portage Ventures. “The Conduit API will allow a whole new set of consumers to participate directly from platforms they already use.” 

APIs have previously been utilized by fintechs and legacy banks to provide new features to their customers that range from cryptocurrency investment services to new payments methods to savings accounts. In this space last year, open banking API startup TrueLayer raised a $130 million round led by Tiger Global. 

Conduit plans to use the extra funding to further build out its APIs and expand to Latin America and the US. 

© 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 NEAR Foundation has closed a $150 million funding round less as it looks to become the hub of an open web3.

Three-Arrows Capital led the token sale with participation from Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Jump, Alameda and Circle Ventures, among others. 

The NEAR Foundation launched in 2020 after a $21 million token sale and help from backers including a16z and Pantera Capital. The non-profit platform oversees the development and governance of the proof-of-stake NEAR blockchain. 

On Jan. 1 of this year, the platform installed Marieke Flament, who was previously leading a fintech bank in London, as its new CEO. In a recent interview with The Block, Flament said NEAR wants to create a world where it’s automatically associated with web3. 

To that end, it’s already created an $800 million grant fund for projects, with $450 million apportioned to ecosystem grants and startups and $350 million allocated to decentralized finance (DeFi) through its DeFi DAO, which executes spending for protocols applying for liquidity mining programs. 

Flament told The Block at the time of her installation that her hope is to decentralize the platform to a point where her job is no longer necessary. In the meantime, she’s hoping to create more accessibility to web3. The underlying principle of NEAR is to be a hub of development and an easy-to-use platform for developers, according to Flament. 

© 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.

Seashell, a startup building an investment app to offer high yields, has raised $6 million in a seed funding round.

Khosla Ventures and Kindred Ventures co-led the round, with Coinbase Ventures, Solana Ventures, and the Avalanche Foundation (through its Blizzard Fund) also participating.

Individual investors, including billionaire Mark Cuban, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, former CFTC chairman Christopher Giancarlo, entrepreneur Elad Gil, Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon, and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal also backed the round.

Seashell has emerged from stealth with its seed funding announcement. With fresh capital in hand, the firm plans to launch its investment app in the first half of this year, its founder and CEO, Daryl Hok, told The Block. Hok was a chief operating officer at blockchain audit firm CertiK until last August and now remains its advisor.

Hok said he founded Seashell to provide the easiest on-ramp for users to generate high yields, especially when inflation is rising and bank interest rates are below 1%. The US consumer price inflation hit 7% last month, the highest since 1982.

Seashell promises to offer up to 10% yields. All users have to do is connect their bank accounts and transfer money to the Seashell app, said Hok.

How will Seashell generate high yields?

Hok said users’ fiat money will be converted into stablecoins via “a licensed custodian,” and those stablecoins will then be deposited into decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to generate high yields.

“We’re building a multichain solution to be able to deposit stablecoins into the high yielding yet trustworthy protocols,” said Hok. “The intention is to diversify among various high yielding protocols across major blockchains.”

Seashell will also explore off-chain lending to generate high yields, said Hok, meaning it will lend money to market makers in the crypto space.

While Seashell aims to offer higher yields than bank deposits, any money parked with the firm will not be protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Hok declined to share which custodian Seashell will partner with to convert users’ fiat money into stablecoins because business terms are still being negotiated. But he said the partner would have appropriate licenses to conduct business across all 50 US states.

Seashell will initially operate in the US, but it is also exploring international options, said Hok.

There are currently more than 15 people working for Seashell, and Hok expects the team size to double or triple this year. To that end, Hok said more funds could be raised as soon as during the first half of this year.

© 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.

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Payment tech company Global Processing Services (GPS) said on Thursday that it had increased its latest fundraise by $100 million, taking the total raised in its latest round to $400 million. 

New investors included Singapore-based Temasek and US growth equity firm MissionOG. They joined Advent International — through Advent Tech and affiliate Sunley House Capital – and Viking Global Investors. 

GPS’s technology and partnership approach has helped scale some of the largest fintech firms, including Revolut, Curve, Starling Bank, Zilch, WeLab Bank, and Paidy, among others. The company has issued over 190 million physical and virtual cards, and last year processed more than 1.3 billion transactions, generating record revenues.

The news comes alongside a raft of other funding news announced this week. On Wednesday, Checkout.com revealed it had secured $1 billion in funding at a $40 billion valuation, making it one of Europe’s largest start ups. 

GPS said in a release that the money would be used to “further accelerate [its] growth trajectory,” expanding across Europe, APAC and MENA. 

Alongside the funding news, the company also announced that Gene Lockhart, former CEO and president of Mastercard International and founder of MissionOG, has been appointed its new chair.

© 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.

Visa has teamed up with blockchain tech provider ConsenSys in order to develop new infrastructure that will support the rollout of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

Catharine Gu, head of CBDC at Visa, told The Block that the pair has been consulting with central banks around the world about its development and potential. 

The new Visa and ConsenSys tech will be able to plug into existing payments modules, meaning companies will be able to integrate infrastructure to issue things like CBDC-linked payment cards or wallet credentials. It is designed to provide an on-ramp for existing networks. 

The pair are in the process of integrating the Visa payment module with the ConsenSys infrastructure, so that the platform can be ready to tap into enterprise blockchain technology. 

Gu said they are now looking into pilot cases to test usability in the spring. 

“The next two to three years will be critical” in understanding the role CBDC will play in payments systems in the future, she said. “The key challenge is understanding how new forms of money can coexist with existing means of payments and existing systems.”

Shailee Adinolfi, director of strategic sales at ConsenSys added that interoperability is also a challenge. “We’re looking at addressing problems in a hands-on fashion,” she added. 

CBDCs are a hot topic among both businesses and policymakers. Payment-watchers have questioned their use cases as well as the potential impact on the banking system. 

ConsenSys is already helping Australia, France, Hong Kong and Thailand develop CBDCs. Adinolfi said that it had seen ethereum most commonly requested by governments in development due to its credentials for scalability and privacy. 

© 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.

Latin America exchange Bitso has become the first crypto sponsor for the Mexican National Team (Selección Mexicana de Fútbol). 

The soccer team, which counts 98,700 followers on its English-language Twitter account, will work with Bitso to offer crypto education opportunities in Mexico and also develop a series of NFTs that the exchange will distribute. Bitso is not disclosing the sponsorship value, a spokesperson said. 

“Our soccer team constantly encourages us to dream about reaching new heights, so we could not ask for a better ally to promote access to technology and innovation throughout the region,” Bitso CEO and co-founder Daniel Vogel said in a press release. 

This marks Bitso’s latest professional sports partnership after a wave of deals in the past few months. Just last week, the exchange landed a three-year sponsorship deal with Brazil’s São Paulo Futebol Clube. And in November, it announced a sponsorship deal with Mexico’s Tigres soccer club.

Bitso has more than 3.7 million users in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia. The crypto unicorn is valued at more than $2.2 billion, according to the company. 

© 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.