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Tightening ties between traditional finance and cryptocurrency markets mean that regulators around the world can’t stop talking crypto.

On October 13, Jon Cunliffe, deputy governor of financial stability at the Bank of England, spoke on the risks crypto poses to the financial system, particularly in  stablecoins, decentralized finance and derivatives trading on unbacked digital assets. 

While Cunliffe repeatedly noted that cryptocurrency markets remain quite small, he highlighted that the risks they pose hinge upon “the degree of interconnectedness between crypto and the conventional financial sector.” That degree of interconnectedness has been growing.

Cunliffe found regulation’s pace to be lacking, especially relative to the rate of the industry’s developments. Speeding up regulation, he said, “needs to be pursued as a matter of urgency.”

He explained:

“Financial stability risks currently are relatively limited but they could grow very rapidly if, as I expect, this area continues to develop and expand at pace. How large those risks could grow will depend in no small part on the nature and on the speed of the response by regulatory and supervisory authorities.”

The Bank of England has been engaged with crypto regulation for some time, especially in its capacity as a monetary authority and ongoing work on a digital pound. Alongside HM Treasury’s Katharine Braddick, Cunliffe leads a recently established joint task force of the two UK regulators, focusing on digital currency. 

© 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.

Abstract

The video gaming industry is evolving across several dimensions.

User experiences are transforming. In-person split-screen play has given way to massively distributed online games with global reach. Virtual and augmented reality primitives are immersing gamers in increasingly realistic alternative and borderless digital worlds.

Business models are evolving. Monetization through sales of physical games in-store has given way to free-to-play games monetized through in-game purchases and advertising. eSports tournaments and streaming services such as Twitch are giving gamers a “slice” of gaming industry revenues for the first time.

But a new trend is emerging.

Over ten years after the advent of Bitcoin, blockchain technology is being leveraged to redefine gaming experiences for developers and players alike. With innovations such as non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) and smart contracts, developers have new toolsets for crafting gaming experiences and their related economics.

With the introduction of blockchain technology come new existential questions. What are the incentive structures that align the interests of game developers, players, and spectators? Does the introduction of digital assets merely provide developers a new avenue for extracting rents from gamers? Or does it deliver gamers more enjoyable and more valuable gaming experiences?

All signs point to the most popular blockchain-based games today being proof of concepts that precede much higher levels and potentially widespread adoption of blockchain technology within the video gaming industry. Understanding how the technology is embedded into and impacting gaming experiences today can provide insights into how this nascent industry’s future could evolve.

How this report is structured:

Chapter 1 defines “blockchain-based games” and explains the technology underpinning them.

Chapter 2 outlines how blockchain technology is redefining in-game economics and impacting players and developer experiences, alike. It includes a case study on Axie Infinity, the largest blockchain-based game seen to date, that showcases many of these technological and economic concepts in action. The section concludes with a series of data that capture the current state of the industry and related fundraising data.

Chapter 3 introduces the concept of “the metaverse” and where blockchain-based gaming resides within it. It also identifies several catalysts for adoption of blockchain-based games.

© 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.

Makor Group, a brokerage and investment banking firm with a growing crypto business, has closed a Series A fundraise. The round values Makor at $200 million, according to a press release.

The press release did not specify how much money had been raised, but a person close to the firm said it had secured $17 million in equity capital. 

Makor’s new strategic partners include Algorand, a blockchain organization, and British billionaire Alan Howard, who both invested in the round. The company said it has also formed strategic partnerships with unnamed asset managers in the United States. In addition, Algorand’s CEO Steven Kokinos has joined Makor’s board.

Some of the cash will be used to expand Enigma Securities, Makor’s crypto brokerage subsidiary, which has recorded monthly trading volumes of more than $2 billion over the course of 2021. The funds will also be used to help Makor expand internationally and for acquisitions.

Makor said in its press release that it plans to take advantage of Algorand’s blockchain expertise to build and distribute digital assets, with a view to helping institutions access crypto products.

“We are witnessing an unprecedented shift in our industry powered by technology and innovation. Over the past year, the exceptional growth in our digital asset division has clearly demonstrated that we are at the forefront of this trend,” said Michael Halimi, co-founder and CEO of Makor, in a statement. 

Building a crypto empire

Former Brevan Howard boss Howard has been pouring vast sums of capital into the crypto sector in 2021. He has invested in a bevy of crypto startups, including Copper, Bullish Global, Bottlepay and Ledn, as well as in Dan Tapiero’s 10T fund and One River Digital Asset Management. 

Howard also owns a software business named Elwood Technologies, which helps banks and fintech firms to access crypto liquidity through an API.

© 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.

RECUR — the NFT company backed by billionaire hedge funder Steve Cohen — announced Wednesday plans with media giant ViacomCBS to create a platform for trading NFTs tied to the firm’s brands and franchises. 

Founded by Zach Brunch and Trevor George, RECUR gatecrashed the crypto scene after it reached a $333 million valuation from a funding round led by an investment firm backed by Steve Cohen. RECUR is trying to stand out in a crowded space by striking licensing deals with corporates to create NFT marketplaces tied to specific brands. 

RECUR plans to launch the ViacomCBS platform in the spring of 2022, according to a press release. Recur plans to take a “chain-agnostic approach” and accept payments via debit and credit card.

ViacomCBS has a wide-ranging portfolio, including MTV Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central — opening the door to NFTs tied to brands like SpongeBob and South Park. A spokeswoman declined to comment on how RECUR will prioritize brands as well as details around the economics of the deal. 

“Fueled by beloved characters and iconic properties with multi-generational appeal, we are thrilled to accelerate our consumer products presence even further into the growing metaverse,” commented Pam Kaufman, president of ViacomCBS consumer products. “In teaming up with RECUR to create an NFT platform dedicated to ViacomCBS IP, voracious collectors and first-time NFT buyers alike will find unique opportunities to own a piece of their favorite franchises.”

© 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 Story of a Smart Contract

On May 19th, after a productive day of yield farming, Damien transferred his funds, totaling 98,000 in USDC, from his Metamask wallet to his Binance wallet. 

During this transfer, Damien made a common mistake. While trying to swap his USDC to USDT, Damien inadvertently sent his transaction to the wrong address. Within a few seconds of making the transaction on Metamask, he realised his inadvertent mistake: the last address he copied and pasted for the transfer was not the address of his Binance.com wallet, but that of the USDC smart contract.

A Common Mistake With Irreversible Consequences   

We can all empathize with Damien’s distress when he saw his funds disappear from the result of one simple mistake. In the world of blockchain, there are varying chances of recovering lost funds depending on the type of wrong network transfer. Make sure you’re prepared for all scenarios and read our guide for recovering lost funds from wrong network transfers.

Finally, after much research, Damien ended up sharing his story on Binance’s French-speaking Telegram community, which is composed of over 23,000 people and moderated by Binance Angels. 

Creating a Safe And Responsible Crypto Ecosystem

After explaining the story to community moderators, comprised of the Binance Angels, Damien was informed that his funds could be recovered if it met the criteria of the BNB Pioneer Burn Program, a new initiative which aims to help restore funds incurred due to accepted cases of user error on  Binance Smart Chain. Under the BNB Pioneer Burn Program, Binance will cover the losses of eligible users and count the lost tokens against Binance’s quarterly burns. 

The Angels helped pull a successful recovery effort and fortunately for the user, his case met all the criteria for the Pioneer Burn Program. In just 24 hours after his mishap, Damien received the entire lost sum back from Binance. 

At Binance, protecting our users is one of our top priorities and we understand that user error can affect anyone, even long-time crypto enthusiasts. The Pioneer Burn Program is just one of many initiatives as part of our efforts to develop a safe and responsible crypto ecosystem and community. Read below to see the cases where Binance’s BNB Pioneer Burn can help you recover lost funds on the Binance Smart Chain.

The BNB Pioneer Burn recovers lost funds from users in the following cases:

• The lost tokens are either BNB, “wrapped” tokens (e.g. WBNB), or “pegged” tokens (e.g. BTCB) supported via the Binance “Token Canal” Project;

• The lost tokens are transferred to BEP20 contract addresses that are verified on bscscan.com, so the loss can be publicly justified or recognized as moving the asset out of circulation and cannot be brought back forever.

• The loss is incurred from an honest mistake and totals more than 1,000 USD, but is less than the projected BNB burn amount in the upcoming quarter.

Read the full announcement for more details about the BNB Pioneer Burn.

A Happy Ending Thanks to Our Passionate Community

We are fortunate to have a fast-growing and passionate community of French-speaking users and Binance Angels mobilising to help first-time and experienced blockchain users alike. Our Binance Angels are community volunteers who wish to share their knowledge of the world of cryptocurrencies, especially within the Binance ecosystem. In addition to helping new users, managing online and offline communities and translating content, Binance Angels will also help users, like Damien, in emergency cases. 

Learn More About The Angel Program

Whether you’re a crypto enthusiast, a first-time or long-time supporter, you can all contribute something to the ecosystem! All you have to do is sign up for the Binance Angel volunteer program. 

As an Angel, you’ll get exclusive invites to Binance events, either as a VIP guest or organiser, and meet and work alongside the Binance team, attending behind-the-scenes meetings and providing feedback and suggestions on new features. Most importantly, we’ll reward your hard work with limited-edition swag, gifts and prizes exclusive to Binance Angels. Beyond the perks and the cool people you meet, our Angel program is also a good way to learn and improve in many different areas through the many roles you can take on.

What Do Binance Angels Do? 

The volunteers who participate in this program are essential to helping us run our different social channels. Since every individual is unique, we’ll help place you into a team that suits your skills best. At the moment we need passionate Angels to help new and old Binance users with their questions and concerns, provide our team with feedback and suggestions to help us grow, help foster our online and offline communities and translate and proofread content. Although each role has a different set of responsibilities, every Angel in our program has learned how to understand the needs of the community and make an impact in the blockchain industry. Become a Binance Angel today!

Follow Binance on Twitter or Facebook for more information.

© 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.

There’s now $200 billion tied up in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, according to tracking site DefiLlama. That number has doubled since late June.

This metric is known as the total value locked (TVL) in these protocols. It refers to the dollar value of the tokens held in smart contracts within DeFi protocols, such as lending or trading platforms.

The TVL across multiple blockchains has reached $200 billion. Source: DefiLlama.

DefiLlama looks at these protocols across multiple blockchains, so this is quite a wide ranging figure, encompassing big blockchains like Ethereum as well as those newer to DeFi, like Avalanche and Solana.

The majority of the value is held in projects on Ethereum. DefiLlama puts this figure at $140 billion (notably this is 55% higher than the estimate on DeFi Pulse). Up next comes Binance Smart Chain with $18.5 billion and Solana with $11.7 billion. The next biggest chains are Terra, Avalanche and Fantom.

DefiLlama also includes a few scaling networks built on Ethereum, such as Polygon (although more of a sidechain), Arbitrum and Optimism. The latter two have only recently launched and have relatively small amounts of value locked in protocols on their networks.

Despite Ethereum’s strong market share and growing TVL, it has lost significant dominance due to the emergence of DeFi protocols on other chains. It has declined from 98% dominance in January to 68.5% today. During that timeframe, however, its TVL increased by four times.

© 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.

© 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 latest data compiled by the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF) suggests that the U.S. has replaced China as the country with the biggest market share of Bitcoin’s hash rate.

The CCAF estimates that the U.S. is responsible for 35.4% of the mining activity, based on an analysis of 44% of the market’s hash rate.

The CCAF’s mining map as of August shows that Bitcoin mining firms in the U.S had a total of 42.7 exahashes per second (EH/s) of hash rate, followed by Kazakhstan, Russia and Canada. This has been due to mining firms buying large swathes of new equipment and expanding their operations — in light of both the opportunity presented by China’s crackdown on mining and bitcoin’s recent price rally.

Meanwhile, the joint market share of U.S. mining firms surged to 35% during the third quarter from just above 17% in May thanks to waning competition from rival Bitcoin mining operations in China after the country’s crackdown.

This has posed well for the bigger firms. Over the third quarter this year, just seven publicly listed bitcoin mining firms in the U.S. alone mined about 7.5% of the Bitcoin block rewards up for grab. Those firms were holding over 20,000 BTC as of last month.

But the U.S. is not the only winner following China’s mining crackdown.

Growing hash rate in other countries

The hash rate powered by mining firms in Kazahkstan has also doubled since Q2 to nearly 22 EH/s in August with a market share of 18.1%. As The Block reported previously, after China’s crackdown in May, Kazahkstan has become one of the top destinations for Chinese miners who have considered relocating their operations.

Bitcoin mining operations in Russia and Canada are also competing closely for the third place, with 11.2% and 9.6%, respectively.  Russia-headquartered mining colocation provider BitRiver has said that over the summer it signed hosting deals with Chinese customers for over 100 megawatts of capacity.

The CCAF’s data source came from miner information provided by four bitcoin mining pools: BTC.com, Poolin, ViaBTC and Foundry USA. The real-time hash rate connected to these four pools total to about 62 EH/s as of press time, which is around 44% of Bitcoin’s network total hashing power.

The CCAF first released its mining map data in April 2020. It updated the map in July for the first time and has started releasing monthly data as of April 2021, data that suggested China’s dominance over Bitcoin’s hash rate was already declining but didn’t capture the market changes after China’s mining crackdown in Q3. 

But there is room for error. As the center disclosed in its methodology, the usage of virtual private networks by individual miner customers could obscure their real locations. “Such behavior may distort the sample and result in an overestimation (or underestimation) of hash rate in some provinces or countries,” it noted. 

© 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.

Binance has said it will halt the marketplace for the Chinese yuan over-the-counter (OTC) trading on its platform following China’s latest crypto trading crackdown.

Binance, one of the major crypto exchanges that have a significant number of China-based customers, said in a Chinese statement on Wednesday that it will delist the Chinese yuan OTC marketplace after December 31.

Further, the exchange said it will restrict the access for mainland China customers but does not indicate if it will retire all China-based accounts.

“If the platform finds out mainland China users, Binance will restrict such accounts to the withdrawal-only mode. Users will only be able to withdraw assets, cancel orders, redeem or close positions,” Binance said in the statement.

The move follows Binance’s largest rival in China Huobi, which said it will not only suspend the Chinese yuan OTC marketplace but also retire all the customers who are verified with mainland China IDs. 

Binance’s move also adds to a long list of responses from crypto companies that suggest China’s escalated crackdown measures last month has been taken seriously.

BNB, the exchange token of Binance, dropped by about five percent shortly after the firm announced the news and is changing hands at $440 as of press time.

© 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

• The Block Research analyzed a total of 423 blockchain-related investment deals that occurred during Q3′ 21 to identify which crypto funds were the most active
• Compared to last quarter, the frequency of deal flow activity by the most active investors dropped considerably, from an average of 40 investments in Q2 to 22 in Q3
• Although DeFi funding and the number of deals declined in Q3, the vertical still made up roughly 42% of the most active investor’s investments

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