FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

On Thursday, the Nigerian NFT artist Osinachi incorporated social tokens during an event at Christie’s — marking the first time social tokens have been used at the art auction house. 

At the event at Christie’s in London, Osinachi displayed five NFTs in the collection “Different Shades of Water,” also marking the first time an African artist displayed an NFT at Christie’s Europe. 

The display included a unique monetary incentive aimed at viewers. If they shared pictures of the art on social media, they could earn $OSINA tokens via a scannable QR code. These so-called social tokens will then be usable on the Socialstack CommunityOS Shop to purchase Osinachi’s NFTs, merchandise and other physical products. 

Social tokens are cryptocurrencies tied to individuals, communities or brands. Osinachi is the Chief Creative Officer of the DAO platform Socialstack, a social token platform based on Ethereum and Celo that was used to create and disseminate Osinachi’s $OSINA tokens.

Christie’s has been increasing its involvement in the NFT market since its landmark $69.4 million sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 500 Days collection in March. Last month it auctioned off Meebits and Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs.

As for the Osinachi event, Christie’s was “excited to learn more about social tokens and to see how it goes,” Socialstack CEO Andrew Berkowitz 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.

Charting and investing platform TradingView has raised $298 million in a round led by Tiger Global Management, as first reported by Bloomberg.

The raise values TradingView at $3 billion. The London-based company had raised a little over $40 million prior to its latest capital injection, with its last raise coming in May 2018.

Launched around a decade ago, the platform, which is used by more than 30 million people, allows users to chart the performance of a wide range of assets, while also giving them a social network for discussing trades.

Bloomberg reports that TradingView has experienced a 237% increase in visitors to its site over the past 18 months, a period in which retail trading on platforms like Robinhood has skyrocketed.

Multiple fintech firms that offer stock investing — including Trade Republic and Revolut — have capitalized on the growing interest in the sector with massive fundraises. So too have the infrastructure firms that support these retail trading platforms, such as DriveWealth, which raised $450 million in August.

Bloomberg reports that TradingView, which is profitable, is now eyeing global expansion.

© 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

• In this weekly series, we dive into some of the most interesting data and developments across the Layer 1 blockchain landscape, from DeFi and bridges to network activity and funding
• As the crypto market approaches new all-time highs, incentive programs continue to prove effective, both for individual protocols and for ecosystems overall
• This week, we look at Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Terra, and Cosmos

This research piece is available to
members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.

Aurora Labs, a crypto project that has built an Ethereum-compatible development platform on top of NEAR Protocol, has raised $12 million in a new funding round.

This was an equity round and was co-led by Pantera Capital and Electric Capital, Aurora Labs CEO Alex Shevchenko told The Block. Overall, more than 100 investors participated in the round, including Zero Knowledge Validation, Global Coin Ventures, imToken, and Chronicle, said Aurora.

With fresh capital at hand, Aurora plans to increase its headcount, improve its infrastructure, spend on marketing initiatives, and onboard more projects on its platform, said Shevchenko.

Aurora is an Ethereum-compatible developer platform that runs on NEAR Protocol. It allows developers to use smart contracts from Ethereum on NEAR. The Ethereum compatibility could help developers quickly build apps and create an ecosystem for NEAR.

Aurora is built by the NEAR team itself, but it operates as a separate entity having spun off from NEAR in July. Shevchenko said Aurora’s current team size is 25, and he plans to hire around ten more people.

Aurora has also built a bridge to move tokens between Ethereum and Aurora. The project also maintains NEAR’s Rainbow bridge, which allows users to transfer tokens between Ethereum and NEAR.

Aurora plans to transform itself into a decentralized autonomous organization in the future and launch its own token. Earlier this week, AuroraDAO voted on token inception and approved an initial DEX offering (IDO) of the token. In an IDO, a blockchain project makes a token’s first public debut on a DEX or decentralized exchange.

© 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.

Zhejiang, one of several coastal Chinese provinces that have been experiencing power shortages, has launched a probe into operations that are using public resources to mine cryptocurrencies.

The Zhejiang Cyberspace Administration said in a blog post on Thursday that it started an investigation last month targeting those who are mining cryptocurrencies inside government and the Communist Party agencies, state-owned enterprises as well as public high-education and research institutes. 

The probe has screened through nearly 4,700 IP addresses in the province that are believed to be involved in cryptocurrency mining, the Zhejiang government said. It has located a further 77 public entities through 184 IP addresses that are using public-owned utilities and facilities to mine crypto assets including BTC, ETH and others.

Multiple provincial agencies then launched on-site inspections of over 20 of those public entities based on 119 IP addresses and ordered the shutdown of these operations in addition to disciplinary penalties to staff held responsible.

Pictures from the on-site inspections show stacks of graphic processing units (GPUs) installed inside what appeares to be office areas. 

The probe is the latest sign of an ongoing cat and mouse game between GPU miners in China and the authority. 

GPU miners busted on-site

Indeed, the fact that Ethereum’s network hash rate keeps reaching all-time highs indicates that Chinese ether miners are not giving up at all despite an escalated crackdown over the summer. 

When Hangzhou-based Sparkpool, once the largest Ethereum mining pool in China and the world, announced its shutdown on September 27, it had about 160 TH/s of hash rate. Europe-based Ethermine was trailing closely behind and another China-headquartered mining pool F2Pool was at the third with just 75 TH/s.

Over the past two weeks, it appears the hash rate previously connected to Sparkpool has mostly flocked into F2Pool, since its hash rate has doubled to over 165 TH/s. Ethermine’s hash rate has also grown by over 15% to now more than 185 TH/s.

© 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 crypto advocates and firms are forming a new coalition to push the United Kingdom to issue a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The Digital Pound Foundation announced its launch today, aiming to support “the implementation of a well-designed digital Pound and digital money ecosystem.” Member firms include Accenture, Avalanche, Billon Group, CGI Group, Electroneum, Quant and Ripple.

“The Foundation will draw on the expertise & practical experience of its members to conduct research, advocacy, ‘hands on’ exploratory projects and multi-stakeholder collaboration in the design, development, implementation and roll-out of a digital Pound as a means of securing the UK’s place in the emerging global digital landscape,” said the announcement.

The Bank of England has already deployed a pair of third-party working groups to provide input as the central bank looks into the issuance of a CBDC. Members of the so-called Engagement Forum and Technology Forum include PayPal, Monzo, Starling, Checkout.com, ConsenSys, R3, Visa and Mastercard, among others. 

Though the central bank is already conferring with crypto-focused and crypto-adjacent firms, the Digital Pound Foundation said its independence sets it apart from the existing groups.

“Although the Bank of England has recently set up its CBDC Engagement and Technology forums, The Foundation believes that having an independent forum that is external to the Bank, bringing together a wide variety of expertise from technology, policy, financial services and other disciplines, is an important part of the design and implementation process,” said the body, referencing a portion of its frequently-asked-questions section.

© 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.

So many people tried to sign onto the waiting list for Coinbase’s new NFT platform that the traffic broke the site. 

“We are getting a LOT of signups — so grateful for all your interest,” wrote Coinbase’s Vice President of Product Sanchen Saxena on Twitter. “We are seeing insane loads on our servers and our team is working hard to get this resolved. Check back soon!”

At the time of publication, 930,263 are waiting to join Coinbase’s forthcoming NFT marketplace, which is slated to launch in late 2021. Currently, only people older than 18 and who reside in the US can join the waitlist, through the crypto exchange plans to add more countries in the future. 

Coinbase’s NFT platform will allow users to mint, display and discover NFTs. It will also feature self-custody wallets and forgo the know-your-customer (KYC) checks that the platform requires for its brokerage clients. 

Coinbase is the third exchange this week to announce that it will launch an NFT platform. FTX.US launched the Solana-based NFT platform and Binance announced its own platform, Binance NFT, on Monday.

© 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

• Chinese authorities have developed sophisticated methods of cracking down on smaller, more discreet mining operations. 
• These smaller scale miners still have ways of evading detection, including striking deals with existing industrial factories, but the net is closing in. 

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

You’ve got to watch those darn Ethereum fees.

Just weeks after DeversiFi’s slip up that saw it pay $23.7 million in a single transaction fee (which was luckily later returned by the miner), another large transaction fee has been spent by accident. And while the $424,000 is paltry compared with DeversiFi’s fee it’s still another massive mistake.

It appears the person who spent the fee was trying to take part in a token sale of Strips on the MISO  launchpad, which is SushiSwap’s newly launched token sale platform. But the token sale was so competitive that it sold out in six seconds and 14 addresses managed to scoop up all the tokens.

During the rapid sale, the participant attempted to use Flashbots to gain an advantage. Flashbots is a communications protocol between Ethereum users and miners that lets them essentially bribe miners to get priority in newly mined blocks — something that can give a big edge in a highly competitive auction.

But it appears something went wrong. Flashbots transactions are supposed to be kept private until they are included in a block. But in this case, it looks like the transaction somehow found its way into the public mempool. When normal Ethereum transactions are broadcast to the network, they are first stored in the publicly accessible mempool before making their way into blocks. 

As a result of the mishap, the transaction was processed by an Ethereum miner and included in a block. Since the token sale sold out too quickly, the transaction failed and the prospective buyer received zero tokens. They still ended up paying the transaction fees, though, which amounted to 123 ETH ($430,000).

If the transaction had been processed through Flashbots normally (and not broadcast to the mempool), by design it would have not gone through if it wasn’t going to secure any tokens. 

The same Ethereum user also made a second transaction for the same token sale, also using Flashbots. Presumably having seen the eye-watering costs of the first one, however, they decided to cancel it. To do this, they had to submit another transaction to tell the network to cancel the first one and this transaction cost them 30 ETH ($105,000).

All in all, quite an expensive Wednesday.

© 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.

This research piece is available to
members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.