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Quick Take

• The demand for good crypto developers ramped up over the last year but many are locked into current jobs.
• As a result, companies are offering more lucrative token rewards to lure them away.

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Crypto exchange Kraken is working on a platform to support non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

“NFTs are a fast-moving space and we are excited to begin offering services in this field in the very near future,” a Kraken spokesperson told The Block. 

It is not clear which specific NFT services Kraken will offer, but the spokesperson said the exchange will help take some of the NFT activity “off-chain, which would help keep both minting and transaction fees down to a minimum.”

Earlier this week, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell told Bloomberg that the exchange is “working on an NFT platform right now to give investors exposure to the burgeoning NFT market.”

Powell said the NFT sector is going to get bigger in the next year, given the rising activity in the metaverse, including virtual land, digital clothing, and membership in virtual clubs.

Kraken’s planned move follows rival crypto exchanges Coinbase, FTX, and Binance, who have all launched or are set to launch their NFT platforms.

NFT trading volumes of these exchanges aren’t publicly known as they are yet to build APIs for that. But standalone NFT marketplaces saw a sharp increase in trading volumes in August. OpenSea remains the market leader, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard. 

© 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.

Revolut Bank has been granted a full banking license in Europe through its Lithuanian base, simplifying its structure and marking a move to expand services on the continent. 

The decision by the European Central Bank (ECB) will grant Revolut new capabilities such as issuing consumer credit. 

Revolut’s European customers will now be protected under the deposit guarantee scheme.

Before the the change, Revolut had been operating in the European Economic Area (EEA) through a specialized banking license and a payments license and passporting out its services. A specialized banking license allows banks to take deposits but not much else.

The EU’s passporting system lets authorized firms trade freely within the bloc without the need for local licenses in each EU and EEA states. 

Revolut’s recent launch in Portugal prompted regulators to clarify that the guarantee of deposits is associated with the Lithuanian protection mechanism, where it is headquartered, and not with the Portuguese Deposit Guarantee Fund.

Revolut Bank was first granted its specialized bank licence by the ECB in December 2018. The fintech started banking operations in 2020, offering protected deposit accounts and credit services in Lithuania and Poland, and has since then expanded operations to 18 EU markets. 

The move comes amid a global push by the bank to expand into new regions. Revolut also applied for both UK and US banking licenses earlier this year. A spokesperson for the company said it expects the UK license will be granted in 2022. 

© 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.

Quick Take

• This weekly series explores the most interesting insights in NFTs, blockchain gaming, and virtual worlds
• Artificial intelligence has been thrust into the spotlight, as an increasing amount of NFT projects started to integrate it into their products
• With an increasing influx of novel NFT artists, who are operating in niche domains, a lot of new platforms are giving these artists a voice

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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has punted on two more spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) proposals.

Two extension orders hit the docket Friday for NYSE Arca’s proposed rule changes — one for the Bitwise Bitcoin ETP Trust proposal and another for the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust proposal.

The SEC will now take an additional 45 days to review both proposals, kicking their decision deadlines to February 1, 2022, and February 6, 2022, respectively. 

“The Commission finds that it is appropriate to designate a longer period within which to take action on the proposed rule change so that it has sufficient time to consider the proposed rule change and any comments received,” read both orders. 

The SEC has already denied VanEck and WisdomTree’s offerings this year, prompting Grayscale to send a letter to the commission claiming the agency was applying uneven standards to spot bitcoin proposals. That letter alleged that if the SEC failed to approve Grayscale’s offering, it could be in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. 

The SEC has historically punted on bitcoin ETF decisions, capitalizing on the full amount of time for a decision in its procedures. Should the SEC decide to take the full amount of time, it could kick Bitwise and Grayscale’s decisions all the way to June and July of next year.

The next product that it will be required to make a decision on is Kryptoin, with a deadline of Dec. 24.

© 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.

On this episode of The Scoop, The Block’s VP of Research Larry Cermak joined host Frank Chaparro for a discussion in which he broke down his predictions for the top crypto trends to come in 2022.

For the year ahead, Cermak expects that market appetite for established projects will continue, and that exchanges and data businesses in particular stand to benefit most.

“If there is already an established exchange or established data business and it just needs a little bit of cash to raise, they’re never going to have issues,” Cermak remarked.

Layer-2’s in focus

Cermak also outlined why he believes layer-2 networks — protocols that enable faster and cheaper transactions on top of blockchains — will be a central theme of 2022, with a particular focus on zero-knowledge rollups.

“I do think that there’s going to be a big development in layer-2’s next year,” said Cermak, adding:

“You have the first proper decentralized applications launching on these chains not just built for Ethereum, but built already for the layer-2’s. So I think that will be the main theme of next year when it comes to this perspective.” 

The next NFT wave?

Despite recent reductions in attention on NFTs as a whole, Cermak believes there’s going to be a shift in demand for certain kinds of NFTs and gaming tokens.

Indeed, he expects the NFT market to continue to grow and become more sophisticated in its next wave. “I think, you know, maybe some of the profile NFTs are not going to be as hot next year,” Cermak told Chaparro, “But I think some of the more creative ones and in-game assets of proper games… I think we’re going to see some of that next year.”

For an overview of The Block’s 2022 Digital Asset Outlook, you can download the free, public report from The Block Research team here. 

© 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.

Ethereum scaling project Polygon and Seven Seven Six, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm, have jointly launched a $200 million fund to invest in Web3 social media and gaming projects.

The fund is denominated in dollars and not in Polygon’s MATIC tokens, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal told The Block. It will invest in startups building on Polygon’s technology and back their equity as well as token rounds, said Nailwal.

It is not clear by when the fund expects to be fully deployed. Nailwal said it all depends on opportunities.

Polygon and Seven Seven Six look to “contribute to a fair internet where users control their data and privacy” through the fund, said Nailwal. Each party’s contribution to the fund isn’t known. Nailwal declined to comment on that detail.

This is Seven Seven Six’s second such fund for Web3 social media projects. Last month, the firm launched a $100 million fund for such projects building on Solana.

© 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.

Click here to join Upland with a 6,000 UPX bonus to get started on developing your first NFT structure today.

NFT Property Development is live in Upland! That’s right: in Upland, you’re able to develop and construct your own buildings on your NFT properties that you own.

Spark (USPK) is the mechanism by which property development is powered. Spark is a new type of resource in Upland, that is unlike any kind of resource currency you may have encountered in other games. Spark is a crypto token that is implemented on the EOS Mainnet, which means that owners enjoy the benefits of True Ownership. Spark is also introducing nuanced and flexible mechanisms that will allow for near infinite types of economic activity within Upland, blowing traditional resource models out of the water.

Using Spark To Develop Structure NFTs
You can imagine Spark as a unit of output that allows for the building of any inanimate object in Upland (buildings, statues, cars, etc.). This means that you don’t spend Spark: instead, you stake it for the duration required to complete construction or manufacturing. As long as the Spark is staked, construction will progress and when construction is done, you will get your Spark back, ready to be staked against a new project!

Buildings in Upland will be ‘priced’ in a unit we call Spark Hours. So for example — if a building costs 1,000 Spark Hours, it means that if you stake exactly 1 Spark, it will take you 1,000 hours to complete construction. If you stake 2 Spark, the same building will take 500 hours to complete construction, and so on.

The Structure NFT

Spark is what you will need to build a Structure NFT in Upland. This gives the building’s developer True Ownership of the asset as their structures will be implemented as NFTs on the blockchain. Structure NFTs are tethered to the property on which they are built. If the owner of the structure wants to trade their property parcel in the future, their Structure NFT will be included in that sale. This follows real-life logic; if you buy a parcel of land with a building on it, you take ownership of the building as well.

Players in the Upland community have begun developing entire neighborhoods in the metaverse and populating cities with fantastic-looking Structure NFTs.

Click here to join Upland with a 6,000 UPX bonus. Make sure you join our Discord to learn more about how property development works in Upland!

© 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.

Ethereum layer 2 scaling network Optimism announced Thursday that it has removed the whitelist and is now open to everyone.

The move means any project can now deploy their smart contracts on the Optimism network. Until now, the network was only available to whitelisted projects, such as Uniswap and Synthetix. The whitelist allowed Optimism and select projects to communicate directly and resolve bugs.

The public launch of Optimism will let all projects to build on Optimism like Ethereum. Last month, Optimism launched “EVM Equivalence,” saying that its network is completely aligned with Ethereum Virtual Machine and developers can deploy contracts with “one-click.”

Now that Optimism’s whitelist is gone, its total value locked (TVL) could increase. Its current TVL is around $375 million compared to its rival Arbitrum, which has a TVL of about $2.25 billion, according to tracker L2beat.com. Arbitrum opened to developers in May and launched its mainnet in August.

The idea behind Ethereum scaling or L2 networks is to reduce gas costs. These networks allow processing transactions off the Ethereum main chain, which helps reduce the block space used on Ethereum and reduce gas 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.

Former first lady Melania Trump announced her new non-fungible token (NFT) platform and stated that she would be using the Solana blockchain and the payment services of the crypto payment infrastructure startup MoonPay. 

Both companies quickly clarified that they were not, in fact, partners with Trump — nor that they sought out any involvement with the former first lady. 

“I wanted to inform you, to avoid any confusion, that her choice to use the Solana blockchain was completely organic and this project is not part of any Solana-led initiative,” a Solana representative wrote in an emailed statement. Decrypt first reported on the Solana Labs statement.

Solana is a proof-of-stake powered blockchain that’s been gaining in popularity over the past few months as Ethereum – still the most popular blockchain for NFTs – maintains inaccessibly high transaction fees. 

As The Block previously reported, a representative from MoonPay, a UK-based firm that has been helping celebrities get into NFTs, said that “it is not possible to make credit card payments through MoonPay to purchase Melania Trump’s NFT collection.”

Further, “MoonPay has no official role in the effort,” the company tweeted.

Image Credit: MaciejGillert / Shutterstock.com

© 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.