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Polygon (formerly Matic Network) has made yet another acquisition in the ZK-rollups space, buying Mir Protocol for $400 million.

Mir is an Ethereum scaling startup that utilizes zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proof) technology. A ZK-proof is a cryptographic tool that can be used to create ZK-rollups. ZK-rollups enable transactions to be processed but don’t require all transaction data to be posted on Ethereum. This helps to reduce the block space used on Ethereum — enabling it to scale — and reduces gas fees.

The deal follows Polygon’s acquiring of Hermez Network for $250 million in August.

Polygon says Mir Protocol possesses the fastest ZK-proof technology, meaning it can generate proofs faster and verify more transactions in a single proof. The Mir team has invested a lot of time designing and optimizing their ZK-proof technology called Plonky2, Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic told The Block.

“It is a great piece of engineering,” he said. “Plonky2 can generate recursive proofs in an incredible 170 milliseconds on a laptop. Most importantly, plonky2 is practical to use on Ethereum, with 45kb proofs in size-optimized mode.”

Mir was founded by Brendan Farmer and Daniel Lubarov two years ago. Along with eight other colleagues, they are both joining the Polygon team as part of the deal, said Bjelic.

Polygon and Mir reached the deal on November 26. It involves 190 million MATIC tokens and $100 million worth of USDC stablecoins, totaling around $400 million as of MATIC’s price on November 26, said Bjelic.

The deal carries a vesting period of three years, meaning the Mir team will be able to withdraw the funds over a period of three years based on deliverables, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal told The Block.

Mir rebranding to Polygon Zero

As part of the deal, Mir is rebranding to Polygon Zero, and the project will build a ZK-rollup based on its ZK-proof technology.

Bjelic said the Polygon Zero ZK-rollup should be ready sometime next year. As for the zkEVM launch by the Polygon Hermez team, Bjelic said that should happen by mid-next year.

There are currently several ZK-rollup-based Ethereum scaling technologies live in the market with limited functionalities, including StarkWare‘s StarkEx, Loopring, and Matter Labs‘ zkSync. StarkWare also recently launched StarkNet Alpha, which allows whitelisted developers to write and deploy their smart contracts permissionlessly on the Layer 2 network like on Ethereum.

StarkEx currently has the highest total value locked (TVL) at nearly $1.3 billion, followed by Loopring (about $630 million) and zkSync (about $60 million), according to The Block Research.

When asked whether all Polygon-based projects will move to its ZK-rollup technologies when launched, Nailwal said once these technologies are “battle-tested, we’ll press throttle on them in terms of growing adoption.”

Polygon committed to investing $1 billion in ZK-rollup-related efforts in August and since then has announced two acquisitions worth $650 million: Hermez and Mir. It also recently announced Polygon Miden, a STARK-based Ethereum-compatible rollup, and Polygon Nightfall, a privacy-focused rollup built in collaboration with EY.

Nailwal said Polygon aims to become “a Layer-2 aggregator,” providing a suite of Ethereum scaling solutions in the long run.

© 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.

A group called FreeRossDAO has won the auction for Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s first non-fungible token (NFT) collection with a winning bid of 1,446 ETH (about $6.2 million).

Tweeting on Thursday, FreeRossDAO stated that it raised over 2,800 ETH ($12 million) from more than 1,300 supporters, spearheaded by the PleasrDAO community.

The NFT collection in question, dubbed “Genesis Collection,” is a collection of digital items including journals and art pieces created by imprisoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and showcased on the SuperRare platform.

Following its auction win, FreeRossDAO says it will fractionalize the NFT collection and distribute same on a pro-rata basis to all DAO participants. The distribution will be in the form of ROSS tokens. Meanwhile, the remaining funds held by the DAO will be held in a community-managed treasury.

FreeRossDAO aims to undertake prison reform advocacy while fighting to free Ulbricht, who is serving a double life sentence plus forty years for operating the defunct darknet market Silk Road.

The news is another indication of seemingly effective fundraising by DAOs, especially under significantly short notice. In November, Constitution DAO raised $40 million to bid for a rare copy of the United States constitution.

Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin eventually beat Constitution DAO with a winning bid of $43.2 million.

© 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.

San Francisco-based startup Tribal Credit is working with Latin American exchange Bitso and the Stellar Development Foundation to launch a new cross-border payment system for businesses in Mexico and the U.S.

The tool is aimed at making it cheaper and faster for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMBs) in Latin America to send payments to other countries including the U.S. Bitso is facilitating the conversion of Mexican pesos to the dollar-pegged USDC stablecoin. 

“If a customer is holding onto 100,000 USDC in a certain entity in Mexico, then we will allow them to spend up to $100,000 in the Tribal platform to pay whoever they want to pay,” Arvind Nimbalker, Global Head of Product of Tribal Credit told The Block in an interview. “So, it’s enabling them to make payments in the real world by having access to these kinds of crypto assets.” 

Tribal announced it had completed a $34.3 million raise in April largely focused on Mexico, which is its largest market. It also provides services like corporate credit cards to smaller businesses and a platform for managing expenses.

The company has also expanded in Colombia, Peru and Chile, and looking at growing into Argentina and Brazil, Mohamed Elkasstawi told The Block. 

© 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.

As 2021 is coming to a close, one of the largest players in the cryptocurrency lobby has seen a surge in membership and funding. 

The Blockchain Association, a 501(c)6 trade association for the crypto industry, has been a player in Washington, DC since its founding in 2018. But 2021 has seen record growth. 

Membership has risen from 28 firms to 65 since January 1. Meanwhile, the 2020 budget that was just shy of $2 million has gone up to nearly $8 million, according to executive director Kristin Smith and the association’s most recently filed 990 forms. 

Among the most recent members are Solana Labs, Republic, Dapper Labs, Tacen and Messari. 

While the beginning of the year saw a bull market for tokens, a flurry of action on Capitol Hill and around financial regulators this year heightened interest in politics across the board. 

Perhaps the highest-profile moment was a fight in the Senate over IRS reporting language that seemingly implicated node operators and miners. That fight corresponded to an industry-wide expansion of lobbying spending, which especially impacted the more prominent crypto trade associations. 

“We’ve nearly doubled since August with the infrastructure fight. I think that was an eye-opening moment for a lot of people in the industry,” said Smith. “It’s obviously awesome for the Blockchain Association, but also because it shows that the crypto industry is serious about engaging in Washington.”

The new roster of members also reflects a rise in market interest in NFTs and gaming. Smith notes that these newly prominent use cases have been helpful for conversations with regulators, because “it’s a lot easier for a policymaker to see an NFT and visualize what a digital collectible is than to visualize what a bitcoin is.”

The rise in members brings along with it challenges in coordination. Similarly, there have been a number of new trade associations, PACs, and other political organizations to emerge in D.C. in recent months. 

At the time, Smith told The Block’s Frank Chaparro: “We went from zero to 60 overnight, and we have caught the attention of the entire policy-making class in Washington.” 

As for funding, the Blockchain Association saw a major boost not necessarily from membership dues, but rather from a high-profile raise in November, which saw the Filecoin Foundation matching contributions. The new budget has enabled an expansion of the Blockchain Association’s roster.

“But really to be a mature trade association we need to be at about $20 to $30 million,” Smith said.

© 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.

MicroStrategy has spent $82 million to acquire 1,434 bitcoin, the company announced on Thursday.

According to a Form 8-K filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the latest MicroStrategy bitcoin purchase occurred between November 29 and December 8.

The purchase came at an average cost of $57,477 per bitcoin and follows the $414 million purchase announced last month.

The business intelligence outfit now owns 122,478 bitcoin, as of December 8. MicroStrategy has spent $3.66 billion on its bitcoin treasury holdings at an average cost of $29,861.

The company remains the largest corporate holder of bitcoin with a stash worth north of $6 billion at current prices. The company first announced its decision to begin holding bitcoin on its balance sheet in August 2020.

Since that August 2020 announcement, MicroStrategy has routinely added to its bitcoin position with CEO Michael Saylor becoming a prominent advocate for the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

© 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.

Novi, the crypto wallet owned by social media giant Meta, has launched the ability to send and receive money via WhatsApp, according to a tweet from the company’s VP of product Stephane Kasriel. 

This integration with WhatsApp comes six weeks after the company launched a pilot for the crypto wallet and will not interfere with the messaging app’s privacy features, according to Kasriel. The service is initially only available to a limited number of users in the United States. 

“We’re still very early in the Novi pilot journey, so we made the decision to test this new entry point in one country to start and will look to extend it once we’ve heard from people what they think of this new experience,” said Kasriel. 

The launch comes after plans for Novi’s proposed currency Diem hit regulatory hurdles, forcing Meta’s crypto subsidiary to pursue an alternative direction. It ultimately partnered with stablecoin provider Paxos in October. 

The company has previously launched a similar non-crypto-based service on WhatsApp in India named WhatsApp Pay, which floundered after competition from Google and local player Phone-Pe. 

© 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.

Paradigm — a player in the crypto derivatives market — is the latest digital asset trading firm to tap into the wave of capital pouring into the market.

On Thursday, the firm announced the close of a funding round that values it at $400 million.

Launched in 2019, Paradigm provides a platform for dealers and market makers to execute large trades in options and futures to settle across a wide-range of venues. As per Thursday’s announcement, the firm has raised $35 million in a funding round led by crypto trading giants Jump Capital and Alameda Research.

In total, 25 investors participated in the Series A, including clients such as GSR Markets, Genesis Trading and QCP Capital. A number of Wall Street firms also joined Paradigm’s cap table, including Fidelity Digital Assets, IMC, and Optiver. 

Paradigm isn’t alone. Financial services firms and exchanges like FalconX and Gemini have nabbed hefty valuations in recent fundraises. NFT firm RECUR clinched a $333 million valuation in its Series A.

The company, which facilitates $10 billion in volume traded per month, captures 30% of the crypto options market, according to chief executive officer Anand Gomes. Paradigm isn’t an exchange like a Deribit where buyers and sellers are centrally matched. Rather, trading firms leverage Paradigm to structure complex derivatives trades and then execute them bilaterally with other traders in the network. Their RFQ product has evolved to be more of an order book.

The former gas and oil credit strategist Gomes told The Block that the company’s growth has been buoyed by broader growth in crypto derivatives. 

Aggregate open interest in bitcoin options has surged from just over $1 billion in July 2020 — when Paradigm announced its last round — to $10.88 billion as of December 6. 

“Fundamentally we have undergone a massive transformation over the last 12 months,” Gomes said. “Our primary role is to serve as a liquidity access point for crypto derivatives. We solved this problem for options first but our ambition has always been to scale this solution to other assets and venues.”

Indeed, Paradigm now has its sights set on the decentralized finance world. Traders who want to make a complex derivatives trade will soon be able to have such a trade settle across centralized venues like CME Group and decentralized venues. Paradigm is still in the process of integrating DeFi options protocols. The could open up its institutional users to the fast-growing yet nascent market. 

“We want to say traders, tell us what you want to trade, how you want to trade it, who you want to trade it with and where you want to settle,” Gomes added.

As for the fresh capital injection, it will allow the firm to keep the lights on while Paradigm allows users to use the platform for free. 

“We are focused on establishing a robust network before monetizing,” Gomes said. “This funding round allows us to continue building out our network of institutional traders, CeFi exchanges, and DeFi protocols, while also enhancing our 24/7 customer support, and expanding upon our current product offerings to better accommodate the needs of our clients.”

Other investors in the round include Goldentree Asset Management, Amber Group, and Akuna Capital. 

© 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.

Braintrust, a Web3 talent network, has raised $100 million in a private token sale led by Coatue, according to an announcement on Thursday.

Tiger Global and True Ventures as well as previous Braintrust backers like Blockchain Ventures and HashKey also took part in the private token sale.

Braintrust aims to connect companies with skilled workers in the Web3 space. The company claims to have over 700,000 community members.

According to Thursday’s announcement, Braintrust will use the proceeds of the private token sale to grow its network and provide funding for community projects via grants. The company said that all 700,000-plus members are eligible to apply for grants on projects geared towards improving the network.

Launched in June 2020, Braintrust’s gross service volume has grown by 2,250% to reach $28.2 million in the last 18 months, according to data from the company’s website dashboard.

Other figures from the dashboard also show significant growth for the company as the number of its enterprise clients has increased eight-fold from 63 to 474 during the same period, with over 36,000 job-seekers on the platform.

In October 2020, Braintrust secured $18 million in a funding round led by ACME and Blockchange.

© 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.

Hardware wallet maker Ledger made a slew of announcements at its inaugural — and now bi-annual — conference Ledger Op3n in Paris today.

Key among them was the reveal of its new crypto debit card, released on the basis that, as Ledger VP of payments Iqbal Gandham put it, “we need to start focusing on spending.” According to the presentation, it’s a Visa card that’s issued by Baanx, an affiliate of Contis Financial Services. 

Called the Crypto Life card, it supports a range of cryptocurrencies and can be tracked through Ledger Live, the software companion to Ledger’s range of hardware wallets. Ledger has started a waitlist ahead of its launch.

Gandham said the card will convert to crypto at the point of sale, or card owners can request an interest-free credit line for 30 days, based on the crypto they hold. He added that early next year, a card holder will be able to have their salary sent to their account and have it automatically converted into crypto.

Securely sending NFTs

Ledger wants to make it safer to send NFTs between wallets. 

Charles Hamel, VP of product at Ledger, said onstage that when users make an NFT transaction, they will either blind sign it (meaning they don’t see what data they’re agreeing to share) or they’ll see a large “blob of data,” which is meaningless to most people. This is unlike a normal crypto transaction where users can typically see where they’re sending funds to when they approve the transaction. 

Ledger’s alternative is to break down the transaction and present what’s going on in its mobile app at the point of signing. Hamel showed a demo where the app provided transaction details, including the destination address and the token being sent. 

On top of this, Ledger has integrated Rarible into Ledger Live, so that Ledger owners can access the NFT marketplace to buy and sell NFTs while using the hardware wallet to execute transactions.

Coinbase Wallet adds support for Ledger

Coinbase’s non-custodial wallet, which is called Coinbase Wallet and is distinct from the main exchange’s wallet offering, now provides support for Ledger as its first hardware wallet. 

This will provide an alternative to Ledger Live — a closed environment where only certain applications are available — that will enable users to interact with blockchain applications via their web browser and still use their hardware wallet. 

Via a pre-recorded video, Max Branzburg, VP of product at Coinbase, said that the exchange is building out support for hardware wallets directly within its non-custodial wallet. He said this will begin with the browser version of its wallet, as opposed to its mobile app.

Integrating FTX into Ledger Live

Ledger Live has also expanded its in-house trading options by introducing FTX into the line up. This means that Ledger owners can transfer assets to the exchange through Ledger Live from their hardware wallet and continue to make trades within the application.

There is a slight catch. Trades will be more expensive through this service, since Ledger adds a small fee on trades made this way.

This isn’t the only way to exchange crypto on the platform. In June, the app integrated its first decentralized finance (DeFi) platform ParaSwap, enabling users to swap tokens across multiple decentralized exchanges including Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, and Sushiswap, among others.

Bringing out the Nano S Plus

Ledger’s fifth announcement was an upgrade to its popular Ledger Nano S model, namely the S Plus. One key difference is that it is developer friendly, designed so that developers can test on the actual device itself rather than through an emulator. The other difference is that it has a larger memory capacity. 

“Memory is important because, as we bring all these new use-cases to Ledger Live, you need more space,” said Ledger’s chief experience officer Ian Rogers. 

He added that the company is working on another hardware project, implying that it might come out in 2022 or 2023.

© 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.

Cloud banking platform Mambu has raised a $266 million Series E round, valuing the company at $5.5 billion, according to an announcement.

The company is part of a group of banking-as-a-service platforms that aim to bring cloud computing to the financial world. Mambu’s latest raise was led by EQT Growth and the company claims it as the largest round to date for a banking software service. 

Although already established across multiple continents, Mambu will use the funding to deepen its global presence, build new partnerships and invest in new product lines. 

“This latest round of funding will allow us to accelerate our plans in expanding our mission-critical banking platform to further enable composable business models which are agile and continuously evolving,” said Eugene Danilkis,  Mambu’s co-founder and CEO. 

The investment is the latest in a flurry of deals for banking technology providers, which is seen as a key growth area with banks and even fintechs migrating onto modern, cloud-based infrastructure. Last month, the UK’s Thought Machine raised $200 million in a round led by Nyca Partners. 

© 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.