This research piece is available to
members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.
Go to Source
Author: Lucas Jevtic
eToro is delisting Cardano and TRON for stateside users, according to a new post from the exchange.
Starting Dec. 26, U.S. users won’t be able to open new ADA or TRX positions, and by Dec. 31, staking for the assets will no longer be available. eToro cited “business-related considerations in the evolving regulatory environment” in its decision.
Staking reward payouts for U.S. users will end after Jan. 15, 2022, with the final rewards paid in USD.
Still, U.S. users will be able to hold existing positions of ADA and TRX and those positions can be closed at any time with the assurance that they will pay out in USD. Users won’t be forced to sell their positions at this time, and eToro said it has no plans to force selling.
Any holdings as a result of the exchange’s “Smart Portfolio,” an automated portfolio, will be converted to open positions in the personal portfolio so the user can personally decide whether to hold or sell.
However, eToro will limit the selling of holdings in Q1 of 2022, according to its blog post. It plans to make its eToro Money crypto wallet, rolling out in 2022, compatible with the assets so that users can move their holdings there.
The blog post said the limiting of sales won’t happen for at least 30 days after offering support for redeeming ADA and TRX to the wallet. The wallet will continue to support the assets even after U.S. users can no longer sell their holding for USD.
© 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.
Go to Source
Author: Aislinn Keely
In an interpretive letter publicized on November 23, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency tenuously maintained a series of greenlights that had come out of the previous administration.
Last year, the OCC under then-Acting Comptroller Brian Brooks authorized federal banks to custody crypto, hold fiat reserves for stablecoin operators and operate cryptocurrency network nodes. Tuesday’s announcement said that those activities remain legal — as long as the bank engaging in them gets written authorization from its supervisory office:
“This letter clarifies that the activities addressed in those interpretive letters are legally permissible for a bank to engage in, provided the bank can demonstrate, to the satisfaction of its supervisory office, that it has controls in place to conduct the activity in a safe and sound manner.”
The logistics herein remain uncertain, as these supervisory offices have not had to conduct this sort of oversight in the past.
Owing to a change in the administration and prevailing political winds, the current OCC has had to back away from a number of Brooks-era proposals and positions. The OCC is currently led by Michael Hsu, who has been serving in an acting capacity. During his time in office, Hsu has advocated for stronger oversight of the crypto space and recently convened a multi-regulator “sprint” on the subject of industry regulation.
Earlier this month, the administration of US president Joe Biden formalized its nomination of Saule Omarova, a professor at Cornell’s Law School, to lead the OCC.
© 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.
Go to Source
Author: Kollen Post
Fold, a crypto firm that operates a debit card and an app to provide bitcoin cashbacks for shopping, has launched a Pokémon GO-like game that rewards players in bitcoin.
The game was first announced in August when Fold opened a waitlist for it. Today the game has been officially launched, and Fold said it has partnered with the Pokémon GO creator Niantic for the same.
The game is called Fold AR (augmented reality) and is available within the Fold app. It allows players to explore their surroundings while searching for bitcoin and other rewards “every 10 minutes.”
“Initially, you can earn SATs [satoshis] in the 1-10,000 range, which is a denomination of bitcoin, but you can also earn spins, which allows you to earn even more bitcoin via the Fold app,” Fold CEO Will Reeves told The Block. One satoshi equals 0.00000001 bitcoin ($0.001) at current prices and 10,000 satoshis equals 0.00010000 bitcoin (around $6).
In the future, players will also be able to find “actual collectibles” that will enable them to have “special privileges, increased earning opportunities, and benefits as well, such as a permanent increase in rewards,” said Reeves.
Fold aims to attract more non-crypto users to its platform with the game. It currently has 250,000 users, said Reeves, adding that the firm aims to target “the 100s of millions that don’t have bitcoin today.”
The game is currently available where Fold is operating, including the U.S., said Reeves, adding that more jurisdictions will be supported in the future.
“We hope to harness the natural network effects of bitcoin by creating a novel medium to interact with bitcoin that focuses on fun and community,” said Reeves. “Additionally, this establishes a precedent for embedding bitcoin wallets into the world of mobile games.”
© 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.
Go to Source
Author: Yogita Khatri
A mistake enabled someone to spend $50,000 to receive $1.43 million of olympus (OHM) tokens when they should have received far less, according to an update in the OlympusDAO Discord.
“Earlier today someone bonded an OHM/DAI bond that was presumed to be closed off. This enabled the user to have a substantial discount resulting in the user receiving 1697 ohm instead of 59 ohm. After this occurred, we took immediate action and the bond contract has been shut down in the meantime,” wrote an admin named Wartull.
OlympusDAO is an experimental project in the cryptosphere. The DAO manages a token treasury that’s used to back the OHM currency. The purpose of the treasury is to make sure the token maintains a certain floor price. If the token drops below that price, the assets in the treasury can be sold to buy back OHM tokens — with the goal to bring its price back above that mark.
The DAO uses a process for helping the token to stay above that mark called Bonding. The DAO buys assets from investors (to go into the treasury) and issues OHM tokens to replace them. These bonds usually get a 5-10% discount and the tokens are handing out after a vesting period, which is currently set to five days.
One bond is for liquidity tokens (LP) for the OHM/DAI pool on SushiSwap. Olympus DAO mistakenly believed they had shut down this bond but didn’t actually do so.
Somebody used this bond to sell $50,000 of OHM/DAI LP tokens for 1,697 OHM, worth $1.43 million. Instead, they should have received only around $52,000 to $55,000 of OHM. The OHM tokens they received will be distributed over five days.
According to the update, there was a safety limit in place that stopped the user from being able to withdraw even more tokens. The OlympusDAO community is scheduled to host a community call on Thursday to discuss the incident.
© 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.
Go to Source
Author: Tim Copeland
Federal bank regulators in the United States issued a statement Tuesday summarizing the results of their inter-agency sprint towards clearer crypto regulations.
The regulators, comprised of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, have identified “a number of areas” they feel need to be publicly clarified, according to their joint statement. The stated plan is to issue additional communications on this front throughout 2022.
Today’s statement does not seek to alter any existing rules or regulations. The agency’s work focused on bolstering internal understanding and defining the regulatory parameters for each agency in the context of crypto activities.
Michael Hsu, acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), had called for the so-called policy sprint in May. The effort saw the OCC, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC collaborate on what they intend to be a united approach to crypto. At the start of this month, Hsu announced that all offices involved had concluded their collective review and the industry could expect communications on crypto standards in the coming weeks.
Hsu has frequently called for government agencies to work collaboratively when it comes to crypto, arguing that agencies need to clarify where crypto activities fit into their own regulatory mandate and how they plan to work with other agencies to protect consumers.
To this end, the sprint saw the federal bank regulatory agencies develop a common and consistent set of terms for crypto activities, discern key risks and analyze how existing guidance and regulations can apply to crypto.
The topics that guided the review included: crypto asset custody; facilitation of buying and selling crypto; crypto-collateralized loans; payments, especially those involving stablecoins; and putting crypto on a banking organization’s balance sheet. The review also focused on bank capital and liquidity standards for crypto, consulting with the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. However, this appears to be an ongoing process.
Clarifications will be issued in the coming year, according to the agencies:
“Throughout 2022, the agencies plan to provide greater clarity on whether certain activities related to crypto-assets conducted by banking organizations are legally permissible, and expectations for safety and soundness, consumer protection, and compliance with existing laws and regulations related to:
This story is developing and will be updated with additional information.
© 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.
Go to Source
Author: Aislinn Keely
The government of India is expected to introduce a crypto bill in the winter session of Parliament, according to an official bulletin.
The bulletin, published Tuesday, lists “The Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021” for introduction, consideration and passing.
The bulletin is published by the Lok Sabha — the lower house of India’s bicameral Parliament. It confirms recent reports that said a crypto bill will be presented in the winter session of Parliament, which begins on November 29 and concludes on December 23.
The bill’s description in the bulletin says it seeks “to create a facilitative framework for creation of the official digital currency to be issued by the Reserve Bank of India.”
The bill also “seeks to prohibit all private cryptocurrencies in India, however, it allows for certain exceptions to promote the underlying technology of cryptocurrency and its uses.”
Notably, this is not the first time the Lok Sabha has mentioned this bill in its bulletin. Earlier this year, a Lok Sabha bulletin listed the same bill with the same description. That bill was expected to be introduced in February, but was never tabled in Parliament.
While the latest bill’s description matches with what the 2019 draft bill had said, it can’t be said for sure whether the two bill are the same.
The 2019 bill was drafted by an inter-ministerial committee under the chairmanship of Subhash Chandra Garg, who was then serving as the secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs within the Ministry of Finance.
That bill was named “Banning of Cryptocurrency & Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2019” and had recommended banning crypto in nearly all forms, including trading and holding. It was never introduced in parliament.
It is not clear what the 2021 bill’s contents are. “Need to wait till the session starts,” Jaideep Reddy, leader of technology law practice at Nishith Desai Associates, 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.
Go to Source
Author: Yogita Khatri
What potential could investors realize if they had access to a financial product built on a sound store of value, supported by highly liquid global markets, and with daily transparency reporting to enable the investor’s trust? A bitcoin ETF offers a sweet spot the SEC and legacy investors should be ready for.
Industry proponents have long considered a bitcoin ETF (BTC ETF) an important step in changing the perception of bitcoin from that of a murky financial tool favored by shadowy super coders to an institutional-class asset embraced by mainstream investors. The SEC’s rejection of several spot bitcoin ETFs this fall, Valyrie’s and VanEck’s being the most recent, highlights the challenges facing crypto exchange-traded products in the U.S. The SEC has repeatedly cited its concern over the potential for market manipulation as the reason for spurning applications.
While market manipulation is a legitimate concern, and there is no debate about the need for investor protections, the SEC’s reasoning misses the mark. A financial product built on top of bitcoin’s blockchain is part of a greater transformational shift that is already underway, where the most distributed and secure ledger ever created will drive investors, managers, auditors and regulators to reimagine what is possible. Assurance tools to provide data transparency and financial insight on-demand and in real-time will be commonplace and have already been proven by Armanino’s ability to report on more than $28 billion of crypto-asset-backed instruments in real-time. These tools meet and exceed the SEC’s mission to provide financial transparency as a key component of consumer protection.
One important case in point: CoinShares’ XBT product. Launched in 2015, the XBT Provider Tracker note, traded on NASDAQ in Europe, has parallels to a spot BTC ETF in that the asset manager needs to maintain a hedge of the underlying assets in such a way that the notes are adequately backed, even with volatile daily market price changes. In 2020, CoinShares took the bold step of becoming the only publicly listed asset manager to offer real-time visibility into liabilities and assets through Armanino’s TrustExplorer Real-Time Attest technology. As of today, CoinShares’ total assets under management is approximately $6 billion and TrustExplorer has issued over 7,120 attest reports in the past 15 months. Over the same time period, the largest ETF products have produced only a handful of reports.
Currently, ETFs available for commodities such as gold, rare metals, or income-producing assets like real property are far more opaque to markets, regulators and investors than a spot bitcoin ETF would be. With on-demand attest over the underlying assets and note obligations, there is simply no match. A bitcoin futures ETF is a better-than-nothing start, but the spot ETF, supported by Real-Time Attest, will usher in a new era of financial products built on transparent foundations and auditability to support customer protection, market protection and well-informed capital formation.
For questions or to learn more, contact our Digital Assets & Blockchain team.
Follow us on Twitter at: @ArmaninoCrypto
© 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.
Go to Source
Author: Sponsored
UK crowdfunding platform Crowdcube has raised $13.5 million from payments infrastructure company Circle in a bid to expand into Europe, according to a press release. Existing investors Balderton Capital and Molten Ventures also participated in the round.
The European Commission recently acknowledged that the crowdfunding market in the EU is underdeveloped compared to other major economies such as the US and the UK. On November 10, it enacted new regulation on uniform rules across the European territory. Crowdcube hopes to use the fresh funding to capitalize on this new regulatory environment, accelerating its launch there.
“Combining Circle’s strategic investment with our decade of knowledge and experience of capital raising in Europe, Crowdcube is extremely well-positioned to capitalize on our first-mover advantage into Europe’s high growth investment market,” said Crowdcube CEO Darren Westlake.
This is the Circle’s second investment in the crowdfunding space. In 2019, the company acquired New York-based SeedInvest. However, later in February 2020, The Block reported that the payments infrastructure company was seeking a buyer for its acquisition.
More recently the company has launched a VC fund to support early-stage startups in the blockchain sector.
© 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.
Go to Source
Author: Tom Matsuda
ORIGYN Foundation, a Switzerland-based non-profit organization, has completed a $20 million strategic raise from backers like Bill Ackman’s Table Management, Polychain Capital, and American singer and media personality Paris Hilton.
Other investors include GD10 Ventures, Vectr Ventures, Jason Ma, Div Turakhia, Carter Reum, and Coinko, among others.
According to the Tuesday announcement, the $20 million capital raise puts the foundation at a $300 million valuation.
ORIGYN uses non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as digital certificates to identify and authenticate luxury physical and digital goods. The foundation says it utilizes both blockchain and artificial intelligence to develop its NFT-based authentication system.
“Bridging physical goods with digital certificates is the next evolution of NFTs. ORIGYN is bringing the benefits of a clear record of authenticity and ownerships, to digital objects in a number of different industries. NFTs are more than just digital images and we’re excited to show the world what is truly possible with this technology,” ORIGYN Foundation CEO Daniel Haudenschild told The Block.
The private funding round comes as ORIGYN is gearing up for the launch of its OGY token, which will be available to the public before the end of the first half of 2021. OGY will serve as the project’s native utility token required to interact with services across ORIGYN’s four core verticals — art, collectibles, digital media, and luxury — including the creation of authentication certificates.
© 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.
Go to Source
Author: Osato Avan-Nomayo
20
20
20
20