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On Wednesday, Rostin Behnam, Biden’s nominee to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, appeared before the Senate Agriculture Committee in a hearing for his confirmation.

Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow clearly focused her questions on Behnam’s plans for the cryptocurrency market.

Behnam pointed to a number of recent enforcement actions that the CFTC had undertaken, including the recent fines against Tether and Bitmex. “We’ve been one of the few cops on the beat because of limited statutory authority,” Benham said, explaining:

“This is the tip of the iceberg. As of yesterday the total size of the digital asset market was $2.7 trillion. Of those $2.7 trillion, nearly 60% were commodities.”

Behnam notably went on to ask for greater statutory authority to become the “primary cop on the beat.”

Behnam and Stabenow had a particularly friendly exchange; Behnam formerly served as Stabenow’s senior counsel. 

Sherrod Brown, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, joined in today’s hearing to reinforce the point, asking: “Are there additional tools that would be helpful for the CFTC on [digital assets]?”

“Absolutely,” Behnam responded. “The market transactions that are taking place right now are a huge part of the risk that digital assets pose.”

He further requested “a regulatory structure for both securities and commodities.”

Nobody named specific policies, but the coordination between the two committees is clearly key. The original commodities were primarily agricultural products, which is why the CFTC reports to the Agriculture Committee. The Banking Committee, however, oversees the U.S. securities regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The cross-committee interaction on crypto is critical, as lawmakers in the leadership are setting the stage for greater authorities for regulators like the CFTC in digital assets markets, in addition to a standing campaign to secure more funding for those agencies. 

© 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.

Robinhood was hit by a slowdown in its crypto business during the third quarter, but the business unit’s chief operating officer, Christine Brown, is optimistic. 

On this episode of The Scoop, Brown told host Frank Chaparro that “business is good” at the brokerage company. 

“More than 60 percent of Robinhood funded accounts traded crypto in Q2, and now everyone, everyone listening should know that retail is very cyclical,” she said, foreshadowing the firm’s earnings drop on Tuesday. “There’s ebbs and flows.”

Robinhood reported a decline in crypto activity from its levels in the previous quarter, “leading to considerably fewer new funded accounts.”

Yet Robinhood hasn’t moved as fast on launching new products and listing new coins, allowing rivals like Coinbase to take advantage of hype cycles around cryptocurrencies like Solana and Shiba Inu. And Robinhood’s long-asked-for crypto wallet, announced in September, may not launch until next year. 

“We are actively rolling out the alpha and we have a small group of customers, about five to 10 people, who are going to be actively working with us through the last pieces of the customer experience,” Brown said.

As for new listings, Brown said the firm is taking a “safety-first approach,” indicating the firm won’t add new coins anytime soon. 

“We only have seven coins on our platform. That’s an incredibly curated set of assets, especially if you think of other exchanges out there where there might be hundreds,” she said. “We want to make sure that what we list makes sense, that we are working with our regulators in the proper way.”

Robinhood’s slow and steady approach to listing new coins was further emphasized by the firm’s CEO Vlad Tenev, who said during Tuesday’s earnings call that “[t]he regulatory environment, in terms of new coins and lending products in crypto, is uncertain and evolving.” 

He added: “We’re having to carefully evaluate whether we can add new coins in a way that’s safe for customers and in line with regulatory requirements.”

As for NFTs, Brown said that the firm would “be remiss to not consider” launching a product akin to Coinbase’s upcoming marketplace. 

“This second NFT wave that we’re looking at is really focused on on digital art,” she said. “But I think there are so many other uses for it as well.”

© 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 finance (DeFi) money market and lending service CREAM Finance appears to have been the target of a devastating exploit Wednesday that drained over $1 billion in funds, likely the largest exploit to date.

According to CREAM’s native frontend, most Ethereum-based pools are now empty.

The funds appear to have been taken using a flash loan in a notably complex transaction that involved 68 different assets and cost over 9 ETH in gas.

At the time of writing the attacker’s contract holds $92 million in various crypto assets, and the contract creator’s address holds $22 million.

The attacker is now using various privacy-preserving mixing services, such as Curve’s 3pool, to ‘wash’ the funds.

A CREAM representative did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is ready to be the main federal regulator for crypto, its acting head said Wednesday.

Rostin Behnam, the acting chair of the CFTC, told the Senate Agriculture Committee that the commodities regulator is ready to become the primary federal regulator for digital assets, should Congress expand the agency’s remit.

Behnam was testifying as part of his confirmation hearing to serve a full term as chair of the agency.

“The CFTC has responsibly and aggressively been pursuing enforcement cases in the digital asset marketplace for a number of years now,” Behnam said, pointing to the agency’s recent settlements with Kraken and Tether.

The regulator pointed to the size of the crypto market, noting the overall market capitalization hovers around $2.7 trillion right now, and “nearly 60% were commodities.”

“I think it’s important for this committee to reconsider and consider expanding authority for the CFTC,” Behnam said.

He acknowledged that regulating crypto would be “a departure” from the agency’s historic role as a commodities regulator, but said the sector is important enough that the shift would be warranted.

“Given the size, the scope and the scale of this emerging market, how its interfacing and affecting customers, retail customers, and then with the scale of the growth being so rapid, potential financial stability risks in the future, I think it’s critically important to have a primary cop on the beat and certainly the CFTC is prepared to do that if this committee so wishes,” Behnam said.

Behnam later pointed to digital asset market transactions as posing a risk, including banking and prudential finance risks and clearing and settlement risks.

“We really also need to have a conversation about market regulation and sort of the exchange, the purchase and sale of these coins in a regulatory structure for both securities and commodities,” he said.

Shiba inu, the self-proclaimed dogecoin killer, briefly surpassed DOGE in market value on Wednesday, according to data from CoinGecko.

Both coins now have a market cap of over $31 billion and are toggling between 10th and 11th on CoinGecko’s rankings page.

Blockchain data shows that while SHIB continues to attract retail investors around the globe, more-sophisticated crypto traders are fueling the latest rally.

Since the beginning of this week, addresses labeled as “smart money” by blockchain data firm Nansen, started buying up SHIB, according to Daniel Khoo, a research analyst at Nansen. The buying was mostly concentrated in the past seven days, worth about $160 million.

Addresses labeled as “smart money” include traders who made more than $100,000 in profit by providing liquidity and mining liquidity in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and public entities that invest in crypto.

“It was shocking to me,” Khoo said, adding that he didn’t expect SHIB to become accumulated by “smart money.”

Read more: Shiba Inu Coin (SHIB): A Beginner’s Guide 2021

Data from another blockchain data firm Santiment also supports the perspective.

SHIB transactions worth at least $1 million started increasing since the beginning of October, Santiment data shows. The whale activities spiked on multiple days in the past weeks, as SHIB’s price rallied.

Notably, while there have been a lot of SHIB spot activities on centralized exchanges, at press time, roughly 66% of SHIB are on DeFi versus 13% on centralized exchanges, according to Nansen.

Over on centralized exchanges, SHIB’s trading volumes mostly come from Binance, Coinbase and BKEX, according to CoinGecko. Compared with Binance and Coinbase, BKEX is a little-known exchange started in China.

SHIB hits China

Google trends also revealed another interesting fact about shiba inu: Despite China doubling down on its crypto trading ban, traders in the East Asian country have shown an unquenchable appetite for SHIB that’s nearly as high as their counterparts in the United States.

At press time, Google Trends, a widely used tool to gauge retail interest in trending topics, shows a value of 98 for the search query “SHIB” in China versus 100 in the U.S. over the past week.

A score of 100 represents peak popularity – the maximum number of searches observed for a term during a given time frame. It means more and more people are scanning the web for information on SHIB.

The finding is extraordinary considering the fact that the market has been talking down China’s influence on crypto for weeks. Chinese crypto traders may be lying low, but they have not quit crypto, as suggested by SHIB’s latest rally.

Read more: Why Shiba Inu Has Been More Resilient Than Some SHIB Haters Would Like to Admit

DeFi protocol Cream Finance has been hacked for $115 million. The exploit was highlighted by PeckShield, who identified a large flash loan that was used to carry it out.

According to blockchain records, $92 million was stolen into one address and $23 million into another — although the funds are now being moved around to different wallets. This is the third largest DeFi hack in history, according to Rekt’s leaderboard (although both of the two bigger hacks had funds returned).

The funds stolen were mostly in Cream LP tokens and other ERC-20 tokens. Cream LP tokens are tokens you receive when you deposit funds into the Cream pools.

Cream Finance is a decentralized lending protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain. The protocol has notably suffered multiple flash loan attacks in its history, losing $37.5 million in February and then another $6 million in August.

This will bring the total amount of funds stolen in DeFi attacks to $500 million (graph not yet updated).

This story is breaking and will be updated.

For more breaking stories like this, make sure to follow The Block on Twitter.

© 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.

Tulip Protocol (formerly SolFarm), a crypto yield aggregation platform built on the Solana blockchain, has raised $5 million in strategic funding.

Jump Capital and Alameda Research co-led the funding, with Amber Group, Cadenza Ventures, CMS Holdings, FinTech Collective, and others also participating.

Angel investors, including Darren Lau, Noah Dummett, eGirl Capital’s “Fjvdb7,” and Drift Protocol’s Cindy Leow, also backed the round.

The funding was secured via a private token sale round, Tulip Protocol’s anonymous co-founder, who goes by “Momo,” told The Block. Momo and the three other co-founders “senx,” “therealssj,” and “post” also remain anonymous for “privacy reasons,” they said.

Tulip was one of the winners of the Solana Season Hackathon earlier this year. The protocol currently allows users to stake tokens from the Solana ecosystem and earn yields with auto-compounding strategies.

Over $800 million worth of funds are currently locked in Tulip Protocol. Right now, it’s the seventh-largest protocol in the Solana ecosystem, according to DeFi Llama.

Momo said the funding will help further develop the protocol and expand the team. There are currently six people working for Tulip, and it plans to hire some developers.

The TULIP token is listed on crypto exchanges, including FTX, and is currently trading at around $17, according to CoinGecko.

© 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.

Vincenzo Lee, CEO of Kollect

Overview

If there is a new acronym or concept that you’ve picked up in the last year, it is most likely ‘NFTs’, short for Non-fungible tokens. An NFT is a unique digital asset representing ownership of a digital item and is then stored on a digital ledger we call the blockchain to verify and authenticate. Reports from Reuters show that in the third quarter of 2021 alone, NFT sales volumes reached an insurmountable amount of $10.7 billion; Roughly eight times more than that of the previous quarter, and thus, has been making the news constantly.

It is now common to see NFT project launches from all sorts of brands and celebrities; We all know what it feels like when there’s a new project hitting the wire and making headlines globally. Some notable celebrities and brands that we have seen starting their NFT projects in recent days include Snoop Dogg, Lindsay Lohan, Coca-Cola, Paris Hilton, Ellen DeGeneres, Dolce & Gabbana, Mark Cuban, and much more. However, some of them are only digital collectibles with minimal actual usage.

Lack of Utility Results Unsustainable Growth

Although the broader NFT market has been booming, and we have seen owning some specific NFTs could bring the owner a certain social status, most projects lack true utility, meaning buyers can not further leverage their NFTs after purchasing them. 

Gary Vaynerchuk, a world-recognized entrepreneur, speaker, internet influencer, and now NFT specialist, spoke about the recent digital boom, stating that 90% of NFTs will have little to no value in 3-5 years. Coinbase founder and CEO supported Gary’s beliefs. He compared it to the early internet companies in the late ’90s, where he sees that due to the lack of utility, sustainability, and “value”. As a result, 90% of these projects are doomed to fail. 

The market is eager to see a paradigm shift in the current NFT market, where it’s still primarily driven by hype, pure speculation, and a group of niche collectors and short-term profit-taking investors. Instead, we need a more utility-driven environment to allow NFT projects to transform into a long-term sustainable model so that they can be quickly adopted and appreciated by the masses.

Initiating the Paradigm Shift

There are some projects that are making an effort to help initiate that paradigm shift and turn the NFT market into a more utility-friendly place. Kollect could be one of them.

Kollect is set to become the hub of NFT collectibles and play-to-earn games for recognized brands and IPs. It contains two major parts: Kollect.book and Kollect.game. Kollect.book is a collection book for the NFTs that is available on the Kollect platform. It has a unique built-in play-to-earn feature, allowing users to strategically stake their cards in different collection books to earn rewards. This feature enables flexible gamification and earns functions for all the collecting activities. 

Meanwhile, Kollect.game is an in-house game launchpad. Games launched on Kollect can leverage the collection book system to enjoy a broader player base, while players can use the NFT cards they collected in the collection books to participate in the games.

Projects like Kollect, where users can put their NFTs into real action and have real utility, rather than purely a collectible item, could drive the new wave of growth in the NFT/GameFi market.

Figure 1: An illustration of a card game in Kollect features original IP <Dumpling Empire vs Slime Kingdom>

Source: Kollect.cards

NFT Value Drivers

From a broader perspective, the utility of NFTs remained an under-discussed area in the space. While many are still focused on the headline value of NFTs, bringing in actual usage for NFTs could open up a whole new market. Here’s the utility that all the Kollect NFTs will have and what we believe will be able to drive the value of those NFTs:

1. Digital ownership of the NFT is derived from a particular IP.
2. Built-in rarity (exclusivity of the NFT and rarity derived from the designed system)
3. Financial yield (viewing the NFT purely as an investment) and;
4. Metaverse implication and utility of the NFT (in-game/universe utility, redemption for real-world assets)

It’s essential for collectors and players to understand the above value drivers for NFTs. That’s because when consumers recognize where the value is, demand will be generated. We have seen that NFTs have transformed the traditional collection market with new ecosystems built based on peoples’ desire to collect digital assets. 

With the addition of interactive gamification and crypto-economic incentives to generate financial yield, projects such as Kollect could potentially unlock the value in the digital collectible and GameFi space at the intersection of psychology, technology, and finance.

What Makes Kollect Unique?

Although bringing utility into the NFT scene could trigger the paradigm shift in the scene, that’s not enough to take a project to thrive. 

What makes Kollect unique is that it leverages its connections and partnerships with globally recognizable intellectual property in gaming, animation, and entertainment. In addition, the team behind Kollect also has extensive experience as a creative gaming studio. As a result, it can address apparent issues that were holding back the potential of the NFT space.

Combining high-quality games, decent financial yield systems, and household anime names such as Power Rangers, Kollect will directly address all the aspects of the market. 

Conclusion

The current NFT Market is booming with projects launched daily and world-recognized brands and celebrities stepping their feet into the market. However, the growth that we are experiencing is not sustainable due to a lack of utility and ecosystem for long-term survivability. Projects such as Kollect aims to change that. There will be hurdles and challenges for sure. Still, with over 20+ years of experience in game development, Kollect will trigger the paradigm shift by bringing true utility into NFT. 

© 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.

Miami-Dade County in Florida has approved a resolution to create a task force to study the feasibility of accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment for taxes.

• The Cryptocurrency Task Force will offer recommendations around other potential policies related to crypto that could prove advantageous, according to an announcement Wednesday.
• First and foremost, the task force will explore how Miami-Dade could accept crypto as a method of payment for taxes, fees and services.
• The task force also intends to meet with Cheyenne, Wyoming-based American CryptoFed DAO, the first legally recognized decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in the U.S., and other legislators and regulators in Wyoming to discuss crypto and blockchain initiatives.
• Wyoming has attempted to attract investment in recent years through establishing itself as a crypto and blockchain-friendly state, passing legislation in April to legally recognize DAOs, companies whose governance is built on smart contracts and where decision making is shared around the organization.
• The City of Miami is another jurisdiction to have adopted such a stance, thanks to some degree to its pro-crypto Mayor Francis Suarez.

Read more: Is Crypto Miami for Real?

The European Central Bank (ECB) has appointed 30 members to its new “Digital Euro Market Advisory Group.”

The members will advise the Eurosystem on designing and distributing a potential digital euro, a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The Eurosystem is the monetary authority of the euro area and comprises the ECB and the national central banks of the member states that use the euro.

The ECB launched the digital euro project in July in an investigation phase. At the time, it said a market advisory group will consider prospective users’ and distributors’ views on a digital euro.

Now that the group has been put in place, quarterly meetings will be held starting next month, and written consultations will be organized between sessions. The group includes senior business professionals from organizations such as BBVA, Deutsche Bank AG, Société Générale, European Payments Council, Stripe, and IKEA.

BBVA’s head of payments discipline Antonio Macías Vecino, Deutsche Bank’s managing director and global head of asset platforms Jochen Siegert, Société Générale’s open banking director Yves Blavet, and Stripe’s head of payment engineering of EMEA payments Sean Mullaney are representing the group, among other professionals.

The investigation phase will last 24 months, and it aims to address key issues regarding the design and distribution of a digital euro.

The ECB has yet to decide whether it will issue a digital euro. The central bank has said if it does, then the digital euro would complement cash and not replace it.

© 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.