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VanEck’s bitcoin futures-based exchange traded fund (ETF) is slated to list tomorrow, according to an announcement from the firm. 

The VanEck Bitcoin Strategy ETF will launch under the ticker XBTF on Cboe exchange. VanEck’s product is touted as the lowest-cost bitcoin-linked ETF, since its net expense ratio is lower than competitors. It’s also been structured as a C-Corp, which the firm says may provide a “more efficient tax experience” for those holding long term.

XBTF will primarily invest in CME bitcoin futures. The listing of a futures ETF comes just after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) denied the firm’s proposal for a physically-backed bitcoin ETF. The SEC extended its decision deadline as far as possible, soliciting industry feedback and continually punting the date, before finally denying VanEck’s rule change proposal last week.

It was the first in a long line of spot ETF proposals to receive a decision, leaving many observers less optimistic for approval. Indeed, SEC chair Gary Gensler has previously said he’s more interested in reviewing applications for products holding CME bitcoin futures, particularly those that seek to register under the higher investor protection standards of the Investment Companies Act of 1940 as opposed to the disclosure-focused 1933 Act, which most spot offerings — including VanEck’s — proposed to be regulated under.

Despite focusing for now on its futures product launch, VanEck’s director of Digital Assets Product, Kyle DaCruz, said the spot ETF remains the ultimate hope.

“While a ‘physically backed’ bitcoin ETF remains a key goal, we are very pleased to be providing investors with this important tool as they build their digital asset portfolios,” said DeCruz.

© 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.

VC firm Paradigm has announced a new $2.5 billion venture fund for crypto companies and protocols. The fund will continue alongside its existing flagship fund.

“This new fund and its size are reflective of crypto being the most exciting frontier in technology,” said Paradigm co-founders Matt Huang and Fred Ehrsam in a blog post. “Web3 applications have grown to reach tens of millions of users, yet are still a far cry from the billions of Web2 users. The journey is just beginning, and the potential of crypto has never been more clear.”

This story is breaking and will be updated.

© 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 decade ago crypto was unknown and even lesser understood. Fast forward today, and the tables have turned. Over the last 10 years, gold’s return on investment (ROI) in USD is seeing -0.25% and the S&P 500 is showing +277% today. Both these benchmarks pale in comparison to Bitcoin — 437,171% since 2011.

                       (Data Source: Messari.io, bitcoincharts.com)

Bitcoin’s unprecedented performance has driven exponential adoption of cryptocurrencies as a new asset class that merits an allocation in any forward-looking investor’s portfolio. As the next 1 billion crypto curious onboard with a long term investing horizon, the need to manage and earn passive income from one’s digital assets, similar to dividends from equity, coupons from bonds and rental from real estate, will become self-evident. 

There are many yield-generating financial instruments and strategies used in traditional finance, such as options, derivative and arbitrage, that can be adapted for ease-of use and deployed by a trusted and professional crypto financial services platform. In the first three quarters of 2021, Matrixport, Asia’s fastest growing digital assets financial services platform paid out over USD 74 million in interest to its customers. The passive income  generated allows investors to get more from its crypto. 

Simplicity in Sophistication

With USD10 billion AUM and custody, Matrixport recognized early on that investors are looking for ways to grow their wealth in crypto, without the attached complexity.

There are severals ways yield can be generated and these have proven popular with Matrixport’s customers:

• Lowering Barriers to DeFi: The knowledge threshold required to successfully invest in the USD82 billion DeFi market is high. Matrixport’s DeFi Smart Pool enables investors to invest in a basket of liquidity mining projects from the likes of Uniswap, Cure, and Compound, without having to navigate the projects directly. The recently launched ETH2.0 Staking Earn takes a similar approach, delivering up to over 10 percent in annualised yield. 
• Riding on Volatility: Risks arising from crypto’s innate volatility can be turned into opportunities for optimising returns. For instance, our options-based BTC-USDC Dual Currency Product offers floating returns by switching between BTC and USDC. This structured product has proven very popular with Matrixport’s customers, representing 50% of the global dual currency trading volumes.
• Generating Passive Income: Investors are on the search for new ways to earn yield while hodling. Matrixport offers fixed income products with various tenors, across a range of assets from stablecoins to alt coins. The funds are mainly invested in collateralized Loans and credit funding, among others. 

For all our products, users can simply monitor their returns real-time, and gain up to 30% annualized interest rate within a few taps on their mobile phones. 

Our relentless endeavor to make crypto easy enables our clients to trade instantly at competitive prices, secure loans with lowest interest, and enjoy high annualized returns regardless of market volatility. 

© 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.

Marathon Digital, one of the largest Bitcoin mining firms in the U.S., has said it wants to leverage the debt market to buy bitcoin and mining hardware.

The firm said in a statement on Monday that it intends to raise $500 million through an issuance of senior convertible notes that accrue interest payable semi-annually and will mature on December 1, 2026.

Marathon said it aims to use the net proceeds for purposes including “the acquisition of bitcoin or bitcoin mining machines.”

The plan, though currently just a proposal, is the latest debt issuance effort by Bitcoin mining firms in North America that are looking for cash to pay for expenditure and equipment expansion.

It also comes just a month after Marathon said it obtained a $100 million revolving line of credit from Silvergate Bank secured by its BTC and USD.

Publicly listed North American Bitcoin mining companies, such as Marathon, Riot, Bitfarms, Hut8 and Argo, have all adopted the strategy of “hodling” almost all the bitcoins they mined year-to-date instead of liquidating for capital expenditure.

The Block reported previously that as of Q3, just six large Bitcoin mining firms in North America alone were holding over 20,000 BTC, well worth $1 billion at the time. And they kept adding their October monthly production to the balance.

London-listed Argo, which became public on Nasdaq this year, also announced a proposed public debt offering last week hoping to raise $57 million for the build-out of its Texas facility.

Marathon is currently the largest BTC holder among the North American public Bitcoin mining companies. It said that, as of the end of October, it holds about 7,453 BTC ($490 million), including 4,812 BTC ($317 million) it purchased from the market. The remaining amount all came from its mining operations.

© 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.

Decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator provider ParaSwap Foundation is launching its native token, dubbed PSP, on the Ethereum blockchain by doing a retroactive airdrop.

Early users of ParaSwap — some 20,000 accounts — will be rewarded with 150 million tokens, which is 7.5% of the PSP’s total supply of 2 billion. Specifically, “active users on all supported chains” will be rewarded with the retroactive airdrop, ParaSwap Mounir Benchemled told The Block.

The token launch comes a week after The Block Research’s Igor Igamberdiev saw this coming by analyzing ParaSwap’s smart contracts in a tweet thread.

Providing utility and governance

PSP is a ‘utility plus governance token’, Benchemled told The Block. This is because, besides its usage in governance voting, the token will also be used to incentivize market makers similar to maker rebates in centralized exchanges, he said.

That means PSP tokens can be used for staking in ParaSwapPools as well as for voting on governance decisions of the protocol.

“This is the first time that a DeFi protocol will reward off-chain liquidity with on-chain settlement in a similar fashion as centralized exchanges and proof of stake blockchains,” said Benchemled. 

A look at PSP’s tokenomics

Since 7.5% of the total 2 billion PSP tokens are getting airdropped, 150 million PSP will be in the initial circulation supply.

The rest of the tokens are divided among ParaSwap’s core team (17.6%), future team members (5%), pre-seed investors and advisors (2.4%), seed investors (14%), reserves (10%), and ecosystem (51%).

The core team size is 12 members, said Benchemled. ParaSwap has raised $5.7 million in total funding to date, and its investors include CoinGecko, Blockchain Capital, and Aave founder Stani Kulechov.

ParaSwap was launched in September 2019 and has facilitated nearly $12 billion in trading volume to date compared to 1inch’s over $95 billion, according to data from Dune dashboards. 1inch also launched its native token last year, which has more than doubled in price since the launch and is currently trading at around $4.50, according to CoinGecko. Other retroactive airdrops include Uniswap (UNI), dYdX (DYDX) and the Ethereum Name Service (ENS).

© 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 of individuals — seemingly a small team backed by a large community — is raising funds with a unique goal: to purchase one of the earliest prints of the U.S. Constitution.

The print is one of thirteen surviving copies of the Official Edition of the Constitution, out of the 500 that were first issued for submission to the Continental Congress. According to Sotheby’s, where the auction will take place, this was the very first appearance of the Constitution in its final form. According to Sotheby’s senior vice president Selby Kiffer, just two such copies are in private hands.

The group’s plan is to underpin the effort with a decentralized autonomous organization or DAO. Community-led, with ownership usually dictated by owning a token or an NFT, decisions within DAOs are typically made through votes conducted by token holders. In recent times, some DAOs have amassed large treasuries and some have made notable purchases, such as buying a rare Wu-Tang Clan CD for $4 million.

Appropriately dubbed ConstitutionDAO, the idea is to raise enough cryptocurrency in the form of ether or ETH to buy the copy of the U.S. Constitution at auction. Currently, ConstitutionDAO is not technically a DAO since there are no tokens binding everyone together or enabling them to control the future direction of the project, but that’s where it’s headed. In the interim, the group’s efforts are taking place via a dedicated Discord server.

“In the ethos and spirit of Web3, we intend to purchase The Constitution and find a home for it among the world’s finest artifacts to be preserved and enjoyed by all. We the people plan to preserve the document for the people. The ownership, of course, will reside within the DAO. We’ll fractionalize, NFT-ify, and mem-ify in the way that we do,” wrote Graham Novak, one of the architects of the project, on Discord.

On November 12, the Twitter account behind the project said that it was trying to raise $20 million. This is the higher end of Sotheby’s estimate of $15 to $20 million for the auction but it won’t necessarily be enough.

Crypto exchange FTX has said it would exchange the cryptocurrency raised by this project into U.S. dollars to make the purchase, assuming the DAO wins the auction. In its Discord, ConstitutionDAO participant Julian Weisser said the group has been in talks with FTX but hasn’t officially decided to use the exchange for this purpose.

In a recent update, ConstitutionDAO participant Alice Ma said the group has been in talks with Sotheby’s staff. Ma explained how the auction house recommended that the DAO should either have a museum bid on its behalf or use a limited liability company to do so. The project is pursuing both suggestions, with the museum idea top of the list.

According to Ma’s update, Sotheby’s will accept the project’s ether (ETH) balance as proof that it has the funds necessary to bid on the auction. The project hasn’t revealed how much money it has raised so far, or whether it has yet reached the $20 million mark.

If the project is successful, it appears it will do some sort of community ownership. This approach is common in the crypto space, whereby an item (either in the real world or on a blockchain) is fractionalized into millions of tokens, and these are distributed among token holders. 

The idea is that the token holders collectively own the item in question — although this is not necessarily the case. Other pesky issues include whether the item can be unfractionalized and returned to the ownership of a single individual.

© 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.

Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated code upgrade with a focus on enhancing the network’s privacy and security, has been activated.

The Bitcoin blockchain hit the block 709,632 at 5:15 UTC time on Sunday, which was mined and replayed by F2Pool. That has effectively activated the first major upgrade to the network’s code since the introduction of Segregated Witness in 2017.

As The Block explained previously, Taproot introduces the Schnorr signatures that can make more complex transactions on Bitcoin – such as those from multi-signature wallets – to look like just any other transaction, hence improving the privacy and security of the transactions. 

Earlier this year, at least 1,815 blocks were mined by Bitcoin mining pools that were supportive to signal the Taproot upgrade, which effectively locked in the scheduled block height at which the softfork will take place. 

© 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 spat between crypto startup Terraform Labs, its CEO Do Kwon and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) entered a new phase when the U.S. securities regulator went to court seeking an order to enforce an investigative subpoena.

Kwon was served with a subpoena during a crypto industry event in September in New York, and later filed a lawsuit against the SEC, arguing in court that he was improperly served and that the agency had violated his rights to due process. That lawsuit was filed on October 24 and confirmed the subpoena serving at the Mainnet conference, as well as details about the SEC’s investigation into the Mirror protocol.

Now, the SEC wants a court order that would compel Kwon and Terraform Labs to “comply with investigative subpoenas for documents and testimony.”

“[T]he SEC is investigating whether Terraform Labs, Kwon or others violated the federal securities laws by, among other things, not registering the offer or sale of securities, selling security-based- swaps outside of a national security exchange, acting as an unregistered broker or dealer, or engaging in securities transactions by an unregistered investment company,” the agency said in a press statement. 

The SEC described its efforts as a “fact-finding investigation” and said that it “has not concluded that any individual or entity has violated the federal securities laws.”

© 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.

To showcase an insight into the future of Lisk and to celebrate this year’s biggest achievements, AmpliFire was born. This will consist of a hybrid event scheduled to be held on December 2nd, 2021, and will focus on the wider audience of blockchain enthusiasts.

Behind AmpliFire

This is an event designed to suit everyone. It is geared towards both technical and non-technical individuals, blockchain enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, investors, and basically anyone interested in the crypto and blockchain industry. AmpliFire is all about celebrating our competitive advantages within the blockchain world, together with showcasing why blockchain, and why Lisk is the way forward. 

It will also provide us with an incredible opportunity to unveil some of the key announcements and brand new partnerships we have now established, coupled with our extensive vision to amplify and grow Lisk further into the future.

Finally, we could not be happier to host another in-person event in Berlin, to facilitate networking sessions, and other fun activities. 

AmpliFire, an event by Lisk, aims to show the world we are not inactive by any means. On the contrary, we are very much alive and on fire! 

The Venue

Located in a historic and vibrant area of Berlin, Amplifier is a multifunctional and modern venue that offers ample space for a wide variety of diverse event formats. From meetups to conferences, the overall concept represents and portrays much of what we aim to achieve with this event. Hence the inspiration for our event naming.

We cannot wait to see you there on December 2nd, 2021, so make sure to register and secure your ticket while you can!

The Agenda

6:00pm – 7:00pm Open Doors

7:00pm – 7:15pm Welcome to AmpliFire by Monica Tartau, Head of Marketing, and Miguel de Sousa, Community Manager

7:15pm – 8:00pm The Case for Lisk by Max Kordek, CEO & Co-Founder

8:00pm – 8:10pm HackOnLisk2: DeFi & GameFi Prizes by Miguel de Sousa, Community Manager

8:10pm – 8:20pm Lisk in Retrospect by Max Kordek, CEO & Co-Founder

8:20pm – 8:40pm Research & Development – Lisk Platform Launch in 2022 by Jan Hackfeld, Head of Research, Shusetsu Toda, Head of SDK Development, Manu Nelamane Siddalingegowda, Head of Platform Development

8:40pm – 9:00pm Marketing – Let’s Get Loud in 2022 by Monica Tartau, Head of Marketing

9:00pm – 9:15pm The Ultimate Vision for Lisk by Max Kordek, CEO & Co-Founder

9:15pm onwards Networking

The Speakers

To discuss the overall strategy and merits of Lisk, coupled with revealing our ultimate vision, we will welcome on stage Lisk’s CEO and Co-Founder, Max Kordek. 

AmpliFire, as the name suggests, is all about expanding our efforts. To achieve this the event will focus heavily on the newly redesigned and improved marketing strategy to further increase Lisks global exposure into 2022 and beyond, Monica Tartau, Head of Marketing, will also be on stage to highlight this.

Furthermore, AmpliFire will provide an opportunity for those already engaged with the project to get a brief, yet insightful update on the latest technological advancements that the Lisk Development and Research are currently working on, namely, an update on the platform launch, together with numerous other key announcements.

Conclusion

Unlike our other event formats, AmpliFire will heavily focus on our Marketing efforts moving forward and essentially consist of rapid-fire presentations from official contributors of the Lisk project. We are confident this event will be a perfect opportunity to finally reveal multiple exciting announcements that we have been holding on to, together with our brand new partners, and finally to disclose for the first time ever the new vision for Lisk.

We hope you are just as excited as we are. 

Make sure to set a reminder to watch the event live on December 2nd and/or to register if you would like to be present at the Amplifier venue in Berlin, Germany. 

Join us on our journey to make Lisk louder. 

© 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.

Nubank has revealed expected dates for when it will go public in the U.S. and Brazil as part of its upcoming initial public offering (IPO).

In a Portuguese-language blog post, Nubank said it estimates Dec. 9 and 10 as the dates when its parent Nu Holdings will list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the São Paulo-based B3 stock exchange. The company announced in late October that it had submitted filings for a proposed IPO.

In the meantime, the fintech unicorn has been inviting its app users to become partners in the company through a program called NuSócios, which centers around securing “a little piece” of Nubank ahead of the IPO.

Brazil-based Nubank customers can now find instructions in their mobile app about how to claim a piece of the company. Some have likened the strategy to the airdrops popular in the crypto world, although Nubank doesn’t appear to be using the term in its own marketing materials.

Through a new program called NuSócios that launched Nov. 9, the fintech is providing Brazilian Depositary Receipts (BDRs) to “millions” of its customers— free of charge. As explained in educational materials on its website, Nubank estimates that each BDR represents one-sixth of a class A common share of its parent company, Nu Holdings. The final value will be determined after the IPO is finalized. 

According to Nu Holdings’ U.S. IPO filing, which details the project as part of its Brazilian offering, the company will cap the BDRs to a limit of R$180 million (about $33 million). However, management has the option to increase the cap by 25%, “based on the number of BDRs.” 

The campaign appears to be focused on empowering Nubank users with the message that they can invest and learn about how the stock market works, even without being professional traders. The BDRs are subject to a 12-month vesting period, during which time Nubank is inviting its customers to learn about the stock market and make a decision about whether they want to trade their piece on the B3 exchange.

To show off their new “piece” of Nubank, Instagram users have been using a special filter to pose with a sparkly, purple gem floating above the palm of their hand. 

© 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.