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German exchange operator Deutsche Börse Group said on Thursday it has completed the acquisition of a majority stake in Swiss fintech firm Crypto Finance AG.

The deal, which was first signed in June, will mean Deutsche Börse can provide a direct entry point for investments in digital assets, including post-trade services such as custody.

Crypto Finance AG offers crypto trading, storage and investment tools in over 200 digital assets for institutional and professional clients. The Zug-based business is regulated by The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), the Swiss regulator.

According to a press release, CEO and co-founder Jan Brzezek and the current management team will continue to lead Crypto Finance and retain a significant stake in the company. The business will continue to operate as an independent brand, with a focus on banks, asset managers, fintechs, and other financial intermediaries as its core customers.

The move comes just two months after Deutsche Börse teamed up with Commerzbank to invest in fintech 360X in October. The deal was struck with the aim of building a blockchain-based digital marketplace for digital asset classes in art and real estate. 

© 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.

Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced the board members of his bitcoin development endowment in collaboration with Jay-Z today.

The two previously announced their intention to give 500 BTC to set up ₿trust, an endowment to fund bitcoin development with a starting focus on teams based in Africa and India. When he unveiled the plan for a blind trust in February, Dorsey said he needed three board members.

Today, he named four: Carla Kirk-Cohen, Abubakar Nur Khalil, Obi Nwosu and Ojoma Ochai. All four have worked to promote bitcoin development efforts across Africa. Dorsey said a team selected the four developers from a pool of 7,000 applicants. 

“They’ll now work towards defining the operating principles as they think about how to best distribute the 500 bitcoin towards development efforts,” said Dorsey’s tweet.

Dorsey has been a long-time supporter of Bitcoin, adding the cryptocurrency to the balance sheet of his payments firm, Block. The firm rebranded from Square earlier this month to signal a broader push into crypto. Block additionally has an ongoing grant program to fund the development of bitcoin technology. 

© 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.

Their name is Dr. Seuss Enterprises, and they now speak for the NFTs. 

Specifically, Dr. Seuss Enterprises — a children’s entertainment company that holds the rights to the Dr. Seuss books — has partnered with the NFT developer Dapper Labs and a digital collectibles startup called Tibles to create non-fungible tokens (NFTs) Dr. Seuss’s work. 

These NFTs, called “Seussibles!,” are built on the Flow blockchain developed by Dapper Labs and can be bought on the Apple app store with fiat currency or crypto. 

Users can also swap Seussibles! on the platform, advertising which collectibles they’re looking for and are willing to trade for, as well as showcase their collection on their profile. 

Founded in 2018, Tibles (as in “collectibles”) received $1.14 million in seed funding from Dapper Labs on May 20 of this year. 

Dapper Labs is a billion-dollar industry company that launched successful NFT projects such as CryptoKitties and NBA TopShot. With Seussibles! down, Dapper Labs is gearing up to launch another NFT marketplace centered on American football in January of 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 is a section from The Block Research’s upcoming 2022 Digital Assets Outlook report
• L1 chains have undergone significant upgrades this year, with many non-EVM compatible chains specifically optimizing for performance and growth
• Over time, blockchains are becoming increasingly interconnected as teams focus on enabling value transfer between L1s
• Cross-chain bridges have grown dramatically this year, becoming major sources of capital movement between chains

This research piece is available to
members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.

Katie Haun, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is departing the firm to found a new fund dedicated to crypto and Web3 startups, according to Axios.

Haun joined the venture capital giant in mid-2018 and went on to spearhead some of its most notable crypto investments, including crypto exchange Coinbase. She has also served as co-chair of a16z’s $2 billion-plus crypto fund.

“I’ve been here for four years and am really proud of the value delivered to LPs and the founders we’ve backed,” Haun told Axios. “Marc, Ben and Chris really took a chance on me and on crypto, and I’m ready to go out on my own.”

Per the report, a16z will serve as a limited partner in Haun’s new fund. Axios reported that Haun “plans to be the [fund’s] only general partner and that it will focus on crypto and Web3 startups.”

© 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 December 14, six U.S. senators wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, asking her to keep their original intent in mind as the Treasury Department implements new tax reporting provisions for crypto brokers. 

In the letter, Senators Portman, Warner, Crapo, Sinema, Toomey and Lummis asked Yellen to verify previous statements from the Biden administration that indicated:

“[T]hat the reporting requirements only cover brokers who enable the transfer of digital assets for consideration — and not other parties which are ancillary to the process unless they are serving in an additional capacity as brokers.”

While the Administrative Procedures Act requires a number of steps from the Treasury before any final rules on crypto brokers, the senators “urge the Department of the Treasury to provide information or informal guidance as soon as possible — no later than the end of the current calendar year.”

The new broker language is part of the infrastructure bill that President Biden signed a month ago. At the time of that bill’s passage in the Senate, it was already a subject of major controversy due to the language that in theory might include network participants like node operators and miners.

Several of the senators signatory to the letter were key members of the bipartisan group that drafted the original bill’s language, while others were part of efforts to limit the crypto reporting provision before it could pass. 

© 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 centuries-old art auction house Sotheby’s reported that it earned $100 million from non-fungible token (NFT) sales this year, according to a release shared with The Block.  

The auction house held its first NFT sale from the digital artist Pak between April 12-14, which brought in $16.8 million from 3,000 buyers. Since then, Sotheby’s sold an NFT of the original World Wide Web source code for $5.3 million, a rare CryptoPunk worth $11.8 million, a collection of 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs for $24.4 million, among other notable NFT auctions.

More than three-quarters (78%) of the NFT bidders were new to Sotheby’s and over half were under 40, Sotheby’s notes. 

Suffice it to say, the auction house was one of the first historical art institutions to lean into the blockchain-based digital asset explosion of this year — and it paid off. So much so that Sotheby’s launched its own curated NFT platform called Sotheby’s Metaverse in October. 

Barring the 20 auctions left, Sotheby’s earned a total of $6 billion from its 2021 auctions — up 71% from 2020 — and $7.3 billion in year-to-date consolidated sales.

© 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.

This research piece is available to
members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.

The development team behind Tornado Cash, an Ethereum-based transaction mixing protocol, announced Wednesday the launch of an upgraded pool, dubbed Nova.

Nova, developers wrote in a blog post, is focused on “improving user experience & expanding the protocol functionalities,” per a blog post published that outlines the changes. More broadly, today’s announcement is intended to set the stage for a more significant upgrade, v3, though the timeline for v3 has not yet been made public.

Among the new functionalities is the capability to “deposit & withdraw arbitrary amounts of ETH,” positioned as a privacy-boosting change to Tornado. “Up to now, all Tornado Cash pools had one thing in common: users could only deposit and withdraw a fixed amount of a given token within each pool. With the arrival of the Nova pool, this statement will no longer be true.”

The Nova pool also allows for the use of shielded transfers of token deposits without needing to withdraw from the pool itself, and developers said that Nova will utilize the sidechain xDai Chain as a layer-two protocol for faster transactions. 

In the blog, developers stressed that Nova is currently in beta, with a limit of 1 ETH per transaction. “However, if the community wishes to increase this limit, the 1 ETH cap amount can always be changed through a governance proposal,” they wrote.

Though the timeline for v3 wasn’t disclosed, developers wrote that “[f]uture plans for the protocol include the possibility of making atomic swaps within a shielded pool, as well as a pool that will be able to support ERC20 tokens & NFT.”

© 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.

Scalable Capital has become the latest neo-broker to push into cryptocurrency trading with the launch of its new product “Scalable Crypto,” according to an announcement. 

The product will operate through regulated stock exchanges in Germany, aiming to target “all investors who take their financial investments into their own hands and want to diversify part of their portfolio into digital assets”. 

On the platform, cryptocurrencies are held in the form of securities in the customers’ existing custody accounts. Trading takes place on the Xetra (Deutsche Börse) and gettex (Munich Stock Exchange) exchanges during regular trading hours. 

The exchange-traded products are managed by CoinShares, which is Europe’s largest investment company for digital assets. 

Scalable’s move comes amid a rush by others in the neo-broker market to integrate crypto capabilities in their products. Trade Republic, Plum, Freetrade and Public.com are just a few examples of companies that have laid out plans or launched in recent months. 

Co-founder and managing director Erik Podzuweit said Scalable’s product makes crypto trading as easy as trading stocks or ETFs. 

“Cryptocurrencies have established themselves as an asset class in a balanced portfolio,” he said. “With ‘Scalable Crypto’ we are creating a cheap and intuitive offer to make it easier for even more people to enter the crypto world.”

The announcement of new capabilities comes six months after the company’s Series E funding round led by Tencent, which raised more than $180 million at a $1.4 billion valuation.

Scalable Capital manages more than €6 billion on its platform. 

© 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.