FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the winner of last night’s chaotic auction for a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution, which spawned a week-long effort among a group of crypto enthusiasts to raise the millions of dollar needed to bid on it, was Citadel founder and CEO Kenneth Griffin.

Griffin’s winning bid of $43.2 million was declared “record breaking” by Sotheby’s on Thursday evening, beating out the representative for ConstitutionDAO, which raised more than $40 million for its own effort. The group is now in the process of moving to refund its donors.

Thursday night’s auction and aftermath were notably chaotic, with the winner of the auction not immediately apparent at the time of its conclusion. 

The publication reported that Griffin intends to lend his newly-won copy of the U.S. Constitution to an art museum based in Arkansas.

© 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

• Blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem can make cross-chain swaps once they have adopted the IBC standard.
• While takeup of IBC is reaching an inflection point, it’s starting to result in some growing pains.

This feature story is available to
subscribers of The Block Daily.
You can continue reading
this Daily feature on The Block.

Storied U.S. department store Macy’s announced on Friday that it has launched a series of NFTs based on the theme of its iconic Thanksgiving Day parade balloons, with the proceeds going to the Make-a-Wish Foundation charity. 

Macy’s will launch NFTs in two phases. First, it is holding an auction for a set of 10, unique collectibles based on parade balloons throughout the decades. The auction for these began at midnight Eastern time on Nov. 19, and will run through Nov. 30. And then, around 10:00 EST on Nov. 25 — during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade — people will be able to claim one of 9,500 free NFTs and also enter a sweepstakes to win $10,000.

At the time of writing, the NFT with the highest bid ($1,700) was Tiptoe, a new reindeer character Macy’s launched this year that has to face her fear of flying. Other popular NFTs include a spaceman from the 1950s, a dragon from the 1960s and a 1990s-era wiggle worm.

Macy’s says the NFTs, which are ERC721 tokens, are “carbon-neutral.” It is working with the NFT platform Sweet, which is built on the Polygon blockchain. The works were designed by REOMETRY, an agency led by NFT artists REO and Seth Brown.

Interestingly, Macy’s says it “has structured the smart contracts” of each NFT so that they create additional donations whenever they’re sold later on through “compatible marketplaces.” 

“This means that any time one of these unique 1 of 1 NFTs are sold, a 10 percent residual fee from the sale price will automatically be donated to Make-A-Wish,” Macy’s said in a press release. “By employing NFT technology in this way, Macy’s is forging a path of charitable contributions that goes far beyond what traditional methods can achieve.”

© 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.

Snapshot Labs, a decentralized organization (DAO) governance solution provider, has completed a $4 million seed investment round led by crypto-focused early-stage venture capital fund 1kx.

Coinbase Ventures, StarkWare, MetaCartel, Gnosis, and Scalar were also among the investors involved in the capital raise.

According to Friday’s announcement of seed funding investment, Snapshot plans to use the capital to build more robust solutions for decentralized governance.

The funding news marks the first capital raise by the project that has so far been reportedly financed by Gitcoin donations, as well as funds provided by the likes of MetaCartel DAO, ENS, Curve DAO, and Balancer.

As part of the funding announcement, Snapshot stated plans to introduce improvements to its voting framework. The project stated that these changes will help to make DAOs become more mainstream.

Snapshot’s website shows over 2,200 DAO communities and the project says one million votes have been cast on the 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.

Crypto exchange Binance announced Friday that it has completed the integration of Arbitrum One, an Ethereum Layer 2 network developed by Offchain Labs.

The integration currently works for ether (ETH) deposits, meaning Binance users can now directly deposit their funds on the exchange through Arbitrum One without using the Arbitrum bridge.

Until now, users had to first move funds from Arbitrum to Ethereum through the Arbitrum bridge. With the direction integration, Binance users will have faster access to funds for trading.

Binance said it has assigned users ETH deposit addresses on the Arbitrum One network. Arbitrum One is live on mainnet but is still in a beta phase.

Binance will also enable withdrawals on Arbitrum at a later date, said the exchange, without specifying a timeline. Once that option is enabled, Binance users will be able to withdraw their funds on Arbitrum faster and at a much cheaper cost.

Arbitrum, being a Layer 2 network, helps reduce transaction costs using Optimistic rollups technology. Rollups allow executing Ethereum transactions off-chain, thereby reducing the network congestion, increasing its speed, and reducing gas fees.

Binance is one of a few major centralized exchanges that have completed integrating a Layer 2 network. OKEx has also integrated Arbitrum’s network. Coinbase recently announced its plans to integrate Polygon’s Layer 2 network but is yet to support it. Coinbase has also said that it will explore Arbitrum, Optimism, and Starkware’s Layer 2 networks over time.

Decentralized protocols, on the other hand, such as Uniswap, 1inch, and Aave, have integrated Arbitrum’s and other Layer 2 technologies into their platforms.

Binance’s Arbitrum integration comes at a time when Binance Smart Chain (BSC) validators are complaining that the network is poorly run.

“BSC is a lost cause,” one GitHub user posted earlier this week, for instance. “There is zero responding to bug reports. Hundreds of people report non syncing nodes or nodes falling out of sync. Response from the ‘developers’ – zero.”

© 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.

In September, the Solana network went offline after it was overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. 

It remained down for 17 hours.

The Block spoke to Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs and co-founder of Solana, in an interview at Solana Breakpoint, in Lisbon. When asked what are the chances the network goes down again, Yakovenko replied, “I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, though.”

His argument went as follows: as long as there’s at least one copy of the ledger, the funds are still safe and the transactions will eventually get processed. If you don’t care how long a transaction takes to go through, “then how much do you care that there’s a 72 hour block?” 

Yakovenko likened the downtime to a particularly long wait between blocks. He claimed that Solana didn’t really go offline, there just wasn’t a confirmed block for that time period. “So that technically does look like a 17-hour block if you look at the history.”

He pointed out that it is possible that bitcoin could have a two-hour period with no blocks. He said: “If the validators got really, really good and recovered within two hours, is it the same?”

He also claimed that other blockchain platforms, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum offer soft guarantees at transactions going through — particularly for those who don’t have the funds to pay the transaction fees.

But the downtime is a problem for people who need their transactions to be processed at high speeds, Yakovenko acknowledged. “It matters for people that care about delivery of messages within 40 milliseconds.”

“So in terms of safety to funds in the state, it doesn’t matter. In terms of real-world application, it does,” he added.

Yakovenko said that he couldn’t assert that Solana would never go down again because it’s hard to make such a guarantee under all circumstances and prove it.

“So you kind of saw the worst case of it, right? Shit hit the fan. They figured out how to continue,” he told The Block. “But to say that it never happens, I don’t even know if that’s possible in any realistic way, in any network.”

© 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.

Bitpanda, the Austrian fintech unicorn, is setting up a new crypto derivatives trading desk.

The crypto firm is currently trying to hire a head of trading for its “Bitpanda Pro” product, which caters to experienced traders and institutions. The role entails setting up a new trading function, first focusing on a spot OTC desk but later expanding into derivative products.

Derivatives, such as futures and options, allow traders to make bets on and hedge the performance of underlying assets, in this case cryptocurrencies.

Former JPMorgan executive Joshua Barraclough, who was hired to lead Bitpanda Pro in late October, told The Block that the company is hiring a team of experienced institutional salespeople to bulk up the outfit’s presence in Europe.

“We have a lot of exciting new features and products lined up,” he said. “As a specialized and professional exchange, Bitpanda Pro’s goal is to offer highly complex financial instruments.”

Bitpanda has never offered derivative products before, according to a spokesperson. The plan is to offer derivatives exclusively to Bitpanda Pro customers. 

Prior to joining Bitpanda, Barraclough was co-head of digital innovation at JPMorgan, responsible for creating new businesses and products. Before that, he served as the bank’s global head of fintech.

“Bitpanda Pro has not had the same exposure as Bitpanda has, and my job is to change this and really transform our exchange and institutional offering into the number one exchange in Europe,” he said. “Some of my first initiatives are to shore-up our liquidity and pricing and we have launched a market maker equity incentive program that will make our traded pairs the most attractive in the EU.”

Bitpanda raised $263 million at a valuation of $4.1 billion in a Series C round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures in August.

© 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.

ZKSwap is a layer 2 AMM DEX employing ZK-rollups technology. With the V2 upgrade, ZKSwap launched a new-look app interface, unlimited token listing, optimized circuit efficiency, smoother withdrawal processing, and multi-chain support services. Amid its massive rebranding and technical changes, ZKSwap looks to introduce NFT features, cross-chain interoperability, and more exciting layer2 products.

A Brief History of DEXs
Now considered an integral part of the DeFi revolution and building of Web3.0; decentralized exchanges have long been sources of poor user experience and frustration. DEXs allow for true P2P exchange of wealth and are representative of the core values of bitcoin.

First emerging on Ethereum following standard CLOB (central limit order book) design prevalent on most CEXs, DEXs such as Etherdelta and later, Forkdelta, were used as platforms for exchange after users had already agreed to trade terms somewhere else (Github, Reddit, telegram, etc.). After they began to grow in popularity, however, many users bypassed forums and went directly to the application itself, attempting to match single resting orders by out-bidding others on gas fees and competing against bots. The result left many frustrated and resulted in days where up to 30% of trades failed due to on-chain collisions.

Following on from Forkdelta, IDEX provided a better but more centralized solution of hosting order books offline in order to reduce gas wastage due to collisions. This worked well until Uniswap was launched in 2018 and took the crypto world by storm. As an AMM, Uniswap removed order books completely and instead popularized trading against a supply/demand curve.

Since the popularization of AMMs, many innovative DeFi protocols have taken different approaches to providing better services to attract more users. For example, Curve uses a formula that is better for single-sided staking assets against stable coins, and now Uniswap V3 has emerged for professional asset management, allowing users to concentrate their liquidity in different price ranges in order to enhance capital efficiency.

The ZKSwap Solution
Pioneering the DeFi industry in the utilization of ZK-rollups for a Layer 2 AMM DEX, ZKSwap offers users real-time 0 gas-fee private transactions. Transactions made on ZKSwap utilize the strong consensus security of the underlying Layer 1 blockchain whilst maintaining the privacy of zero-knowledge proof and requiring no gas fees. This solution is ideal for users or institutions looking to perform high-volume trades across a wide range of assets.

New to ZKSwap
With further details to be outlined in the incoming whitepaper, NFT support is one of the biggest changes coming to the protocol in the upgraded version of ZKSwap with the intention of becoming a benchmark for supporting Opensea on Layer 2. In addition to standard transactions, the new version of ZKSwap will support NFT transaction mining and liquidity mining in which users will share in a percentage of the transaction fees from the whole network. Similar to how users can generate and list their own Layer 2 ERC20 compliant tokens using ZKSwap v2.0, the upgraded version of ZKSwap will support NFT issuance, minting, and airdrops.

Also new, flexibility upgrades to the AMM formula will change how users use and interact with the DEX. These changes increase the variety of trading methods available, and for trading with stable coin pairings, the upgraded version of ZKSwap will closely resemble the Curve V1.0 model. Trading between non-stable coin assets will more closely resemble an improved version of Uniswap 3.0, which allows for determining limited price ranges to reduce loss via slippage if a trade were to drain the liquidity at one price range and therefore move into another. The upgraded version of ZKSwap achieves this innovation by using non-fungible ERC721 LP tokens and an internal oracle re-pegging mechanism.

Visually, the interface will see a number of upgrades, including a new-look block explorer, which will include deposit, withdrawal, transaction, and transfer information for tokens and the newly-supported NFTs on the new version of ZKSwap.

Stay Tuned
With many of the details still yet to be unveiled, the upgraded version of ZKSwap is set to be an innovative alternative to some of the existing DeFi platforms. 

Moving forward, the team has plans to further expand NFT-related functionality and include batch mining, verification, mystery box auctions, bidding, and much more. The team is also looking to implement better cross-chain interoperability between different Layer 2’s, providing even faster and cheaper cross-chain services. Finally, ZKSwap will be working on more features and solutions for improved capital utilization and release a version of ZK-Rollups that is fully compatible with EVM in order to allow Dapp developers to join the ecosystem and build the future of ZKSwap together. Check out: https://zks.org 

© 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.

Copper’s CEO Dmitry Tokarev will become a fintech billionaire when his startup raises $500 million in the coming weeks.

The Block recently revealed that Copper, a London-based crypto infrastructure firm, is working on a major fundraise that will propel its valuation into the billions of dollars.  

On November 18, Bloomberg reported that the raise would value the crypto firm at around $3 billion.

At that price, Tokarev’s shares in the startup would be worth at least $1.2 billion on paper. One person with knowledge of the situation told The Block that Tokarev owns a little over 40% of the business. This chimes with an analysis of corporate filings, which suggest he owns 76,487,000 ordinary shares out of a total 189,129,188 total shares in the company, equating to a stake of 40.4%.

There is likely to be some dilution in the upcoming raise, but not enough to keep Tokarev from acceding to billionaire status, according to the same source.

Another person with direct knowledge of the matter said the fundraise will also make paper millionaires of 30 Copper employees. The startup currently employs around 150 people. 

Tokarev’s billion-dollar fortune would only be paper-based, in that he would need to sell shares through a public offering, by selling the business, or through secondary sales in order to realise it. But it nevertheless places him among a select few tech billionaires in Britain.

Another from the fintech sector is Revolut CEO Nikolay Storonsky, who recently set up a family office to manage a fortune that is estimated to be worth $7 billion. Like Tokarev, Storonsky was born in Russia.

The particulars of Copper’s upcoming $500 million raise — including the investors and the exact valuation — are yet to be finalized, but Bloomberg reports that SoftBank, Tiger Global and Accel are participating. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment.

Copper’s big year

Founded in 2018, Copper helps investors to protect their crypto holdings against cybercrime. Its signature product ClearLoop connects cryptocurrency exchanges together to power instant, offline trade settlements. The startup also offers payment settlement and prime brokerage services.

Copper raised $75 million through an extended Series B round earlier this year. The first $50 million tranche of that transaction came in May and was led by Dawn Capital and Target Global, while the second came courtesy of hedge fund heavyweight Alan Howard, who invested $25 million in the business in June.

Copper also recently announced the appointment of former Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond as a senior advisor to the business. The Conservative Party politician — who served as Chancellor from 2016 to 2019 — will provide strategic advice to the startup as it expands internationally, as well as promoting the United Kingdom as a digital assets hub.

© 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.

“It makes a lot of sense for us to be a crypto first firm”

That’s Jess Turner, Executive Vice President of New Digital Infrastructure and Fintech at Mastercard. On this episode of the Scoop, Turner joined host Frank Chaparro to discuss how Mastercard is continuing to lean into crypto.

More than ever, Mastercard and other traditional financial institutions are finding themselves involved with crypto, Turner said. “Whether traditional banks issue crypto in the way it’s defined today or not, they’re heavily involved today because many of their cards are being used to buy this cryptocurrency.”

Mastercard’s business includes providing companies with credit card infrastructure. But crypto has quickly become a strategic focus for the payments network giant. Take for instance its partnerships with Bakkt, Gemini and Voyager Digital.

Mastercard is also testing how it can add stablecoins to its payment rails as evident in the news that it would serve as a bridge between consumers spending with USDC and merchants.

CBDC and Stablecoins

Turner thinks that stablecoins will serve as one financial rail among others.

Said Turner: “If you think about what you’re getting back for, whatever payment mechanism or money movement mechanism you’re using, you want to use the one that’s giving you the best value for what you’re trying to do. And that’s why you need kind of this multi-rail choice… Do I believe stablecoin will be part of those choices and continue to grow? I do.”

Mastercard is also exploring how it can work with governments and central banks on launching central bank digital currencies. Turned explained how the firm recently worked with the government in the Bahamas to establish the Bahamas’ own digital currency.

NFTs

“It’s a big market.”

Mastercard is currently working adding partnerships with NFT companies, including with marketplaces such as Mintable.  The company is eyeing an opportunity in expanding consumer access to NFTs as they go mainstream.  

Turner went on to say that Mastercard is also exploring ways to work directly with the technology, focusing on how NFTs can better create provenance and validity as well as how they can be programmed for value exchange, such as for payment and receipt. However, at this time, Turner is uncertain if Mastercard will continue to mint NFTs as a service beyond promotions.

© 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.