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The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School will accept cryptocurrency payment for a new online program, the Philadelphia-based Ivy League institution said on Thursday. 

Dubbed the Economics of Blockchain and Digital Assets, the new program is aimed at professionals with finance and tech backgrounds and will cover use cases of blockchain, smart contracts, and the structure of decentralized autonomous organizations, according to a spokesman. 

The program spans six weekly modules that cover seven case studies. It is currently open for enrollment, with the program starting on January 3. Students can pay for the program with Ether, USDC, or Bitcoin via Coinbase Commerce. 

“We designed this program for business professionals and executives from a range of backgrounds, including traditional finance, management, and tech,” said Professor Kevin Werbach, who is the program’s academic director. 

Wharton launched the program to help equip professionals with blockchain knowledge in the wake of the industry’s business expansion. Hiring across the space has picked up, putting companies under pressure to find talent with crypto expertise. As The Block previously reported in August, more than 19 firms added thousands of employees to their headcount. 

“Blockchain and digital assets are not going away,” Werbach added. “We hope to equip business leaders, consultants, and entrepreneurs to identify the value drivers of these innovative technologies and to give them the practical understanding to build solutions.”

© 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 Indian government is likely to regulate cryptocurrencies in its upcoming budget in February, moving away from its earlier approach of seeking to impose an outright ban, according to a Business Today report. 

• A law covering cryptocurrencies will most likely be discussed in the country’s next general budget, the report said, citing Indian Finance Ministry officials.
• The government is likely to opt for regulating cryptocurrencies as an asset class, similar to commodities, with appropriate taxation of transactions and gains.
• India’s Finance Ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) officials are currently engaged in “fine-tuning the conceptual framework and the necessary regulations,” according to Business Today.
• In June, The New Indian Express reported that the government was leaning towards classifying bitcoin as an asset class, citing industry sources, and that the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) would regulate the cryptocurrency sector.

Read more: India May Have Quietly Shown Its Hand on Crypto Regulation

Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, devoted a keynote presentation Thursday to unveiling an ambitious framework for creating a 3-D virtual world known as the Metaverse.

Part of that vision appears to include a role for non-fungible tokens or NFTs, which are representations of digital objects, artworks and more backed by a unique piece of data on a blockchain. 

Source: Facebook Reality Labs presentation screenshot

Facebook unveiled a series of new projects on Thursday to support its vision for the Metaverse, including a $150 million fund to spur use among its customer base. As noted by Axios, Facebook has made clear that it plans to spend billions of dollars in an effort to make its 3-D worlds plan a reality.

Precisely how NFTs will fit into this vision is unclear, based on the presentation, though Zuckerberg referred to “digital goods” as part of the user experience. 

Past comments from Facebook Financial head David Marcus suggest that NFTs could a part of the offering from Novi, which grew out of Facebook’s crypto and stablecoin efforts. “It’s too early to talk about our plans, but we’re definitely looking at a number of plans to get involved in the space, because we’re in a good position to do so,” Marcus told Bloomberg in late 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.

Facebook said Thursday the company’s metaverse will support non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in a possible boost to Ethereum, where the digital collectibles format has thrived.

“This will make it easier for people to sell Limited Edition digital objects like NFTs, display them in their digital spaces and even resell them to the next person securely,” Facebook Head of Metaverse Products Vishal Shah said.

The news comes as Facebook delves further into the virtual world. The social media behemoth already owns virtual reality headset maker Oculus and recently signaled a major hiring push for its metaverse unit.

“Our goal is to provide a way for as many players as possible to build a business in the metaverse,” Shah said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Elementus, a blockchain data analytics firm with ties to Palantir (NYSE: PLTR), has raised $12 million in a Series A round, the startup has told CoinDesk. The funds will help advance the company’s institutional-grade intelligence platform.

The round was led by Velvet Sea Ventures with participation from Alameda Research, BlockFi, Pomp Investments, Lightspeed, Gemini Frontier Fund, Blockchain.com and Avon Ventures.

Elementus offers blockchain compliance and data analytics solutions aimed at government agencies, financial institutions, researchers and investors. The crypto forensic solution can be used for market intelligence, security vulnerability detection and the identification of bad actors.

“What we have accomplished and plan to do with the funds announced today is provide an institutional grade platform that offers the search speed and scope of Google and the data insight of the Palantir platform. Trust me. This is no easy task. But we are doing it,” Elementus CEO Max Galka wrote in an email to investors that was shown to CoinDesk.

The startup has deep ties to Palantir, the publicly-traded software company that specializes in data analytics. Elementus President Greg Barbaccia worked at Palantir for a decade, most recently as head of investigations. And Chief Strategy Officer Chitra Ragavan was once a senior advisor to Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp.

Earlier this month, Palantir added Elementus to its Foundry for Builders Program, which provides startups with access to the flagship Foundry data intelligence software. In his email to investors, Galka wrote that access to Foundry will “turbocharge our analytic products.”

Rally’s push to decentralize its social token infrastructure has yielded a spinoff venture studio run by the project’s co-founders and backed by the RLY token’s early venture capital believers.

Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, both general partners at Silicon Valley VC giant and longtime Rally backer Andreessen Horowitz, are among the investors in SuperLayer Labs, the new startup accelerator seeding projects that utilize Rally’s RLY token.

Essentially, SuperLayer aims to be for the Rally network what ConsenSys has been for Ethereum.

Rally is a blockchain network that allows internet creators such as streamers and artists to monetize their relationships with their fanbases. In August its community members voted to split the ecosystem five-fold – into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a venture studio, a nonprofit, an affiliate and a corporation – in a bid to increase the project’s decentralization.

Read more: RLY Holders Approve Social Token Platform’s Decentralization Plan

SuperLayer’s formal launch comes as some in the Rally community debate how decentralized the broader ecosystem really is. On Oct. 26, community member “Masongos,” who is active on the project forums, said Rally’s early investors and team members control over three-quarters of the RLY token’s circulating supply.

That’s “more than double their intended share of the final economy,” the user wrote. “The decision to sell off such a large portion of the economy left the Rally platform in a state where it operates somewhere between a decentralized ecosystem and a centralized start-up.”

Masongos said RLY’s tokenomics could have consequences for project governance, profits and incentive programs. The user called for changes to RLY’s distribution scheme.

On Thursday morning Kevin Chou, a Rally co-founder, said in a reply that he was “100% supportive” of the proposed changes and would “personally commit” to fixes.

He was unavailable for an interview prior to press time.

New investors, old leadership

Paris Hilton, Quantstamp CEO Richard Ma, investor Packy McCormick, former football great Joe Montana, entrepreneur Brit Morin, rapper (and early Coinbase investor) Nas, talent agency veteran Michael Ovitz and newsletter writer Lenny Rachitsky are new backers of SuperLayer, the press release said.

SuperLayer Chief Product Officer Saad Rizvi is also new to the ecosystem. He is the only newcomer among the venture studio’s leadership.

Chou and co-founder Mahesh Vellanki will run SuperLayer, according to a press release. Rally’s former general counsel, Ira Lam, is its top lawyer. Gary Coover, the chief operating officer, has been helping shape the formation of Rally’s DAO since August, according to project forums.

Major token holders approved the appointments in the August vote. The vote also granted SuperLayer millions of dollars in RLY tokens to invest in Web3 projects that utilize the token.

It will soon start deploying $25 million – a combination of money authorized in the August vote and checks from the new investors – in an attempt to fund projects building on RLY.

Quick Take

• Yellow Card, which launched in 2019, recently raised $15 million, the largest ever for a crypto exchange based in Africa.
• With the new funds in hand, it aims to make crypto easy to access across the continent.

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Multi-chain transaction network Biconomy has raised $11.5 million through the public sale of its native token BICO on CoinList.

• Biconomy, which raised $9 million in July from investors including Coinbase Ventures and Huobi Innovation Labs, follows projects such as Solana, Mina, Algorand and Flow in turning to CoinList to help sell their native tokens.
• The sale added 12,000 new token holders, having attracted more than 860,000 registrations, Biconomy announced Thursday.
• Biconomy aims to make developing decentralized apps (dapps) relatively easy by offering plug and play application programming interfaces (APIs) that help relay transactions between layer 1 blockchain networks, the main network on which a cryptocurrency runs, and layer 2, a companion system that helps a crypto system handle more data. It currently has more than 70 Web 3.0, decentralized finance (DeFi) and non fungible token (NFT) dapps using the protocol to offer end users gasless transactions and instant cross-chain transfers.
• To date, Biconomy has processed more than 8.2 million transactions across Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche and Moonriver.

Read more: CoinList Valued at $1.5B as Lending, Staking Join Business Mandate

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Cryptocurrency broker Voyager Digital has received a $75 million investment from trading firm Alameda Research.

• The investment will be used for growth, Voyager Digital (TSX: VOYG) said Thursday. Shares of the company soared 17% as of 10:20 a.m. ET in Toronto.
• Voyager Digital and Alameda plan to tap into opportunities in non-fungible tokens (NFT) and crypto derivatives as well as work together with lawmakers on shaping regulation.
• “Through our strategic partnership, we believe there are endless mutually beneficial opportunities to grow both our businesses,” said Caroline Ellison, the co-CEO of Alameda.
• Alameda Research was launched by crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried who announced Oct. 12 he was taking a step back to make room for co-CEOs Ellison and Sam Trabucco.
• Currently, Alameda Research trades over $5 billion a day across thousands of products including cryptocurrencies, altcoins and their derivatives.

Read more: Voyager Digital a Step Closer to Operating in EU After French Regulatory Approval