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Bitcoin has been on a tear, but it doesn’t look like retail traders are driving the action, according to data from market making firm B2C2. 

The firm, which has begun circulating a new weekly note to clients with analysis of the market, said overall the market has recently been “moderately biased to the buy-side.” At the time of writing, bitcoin was trading at $57,257, up more than 40% from its lows at the end of September. Ether, meanwhile, is up more than 28% from its lows in September. 

Still, not everyone is buying the ongoing rally in crypto, B2C2 shows. 

“More interesting, however, is the fact that crypto exchanges continue to be the notable outlier, as the only category net selling overall, implying that this move may be driven primarily by institutional money, with retail on the sidelines,” the firm said.

Crypto exchanges, which have millions of retail clients, were skewed 57.4% to the sell side from October 3 to the October 10, while OTC desks were buyers of crypto, skewed 54.8%. 

© 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.

On October 9, an unknown wallet purchased the Ethereum name paradigm.eth for 420 ETH ($1.5 million), the largest such sale by a long way.

At first, observers speculated that it was the crypto-focused VC firm Paradigm, which has investments in a range of projects from centralized companies like Coinbase, BlockFi, Chainalysis, to DeFi projects like Compound, dYdX, Euler. 

Yet the firm told Bradley Millegan, director of operations at the Ethereum Name Service, that it was not behind the purchase — begging questions as to who the mystery buyer is and what was the purpose of the massive sale.

Ethereum names are human-readable names like example.eth that can be associated with blockchain addresses to make it easier to send and receive crypto payments. Rather than sending money to a long and complicated Ethereum address, you just use the .eth name. Ethereum names can also be connected to other information, like email addresses and a Twitter account.

What we know is that the wallet had been bidding on paradigm.eth for months, making smaller offers. It wasn’t until the weekend that the previous owner of the Ethereum name accepted the offer.

But it appears to be some kind of prank or joke purchase. As Millegan pointed out, the Ethereum name’s records were set to some bizarre links. For a start, the buyer set the email to careers@mcdonalds.com — a bit of a long-running joke in the cryptosphere — before setting the associated image to the SushiSwap logo. 

Other strange elements include the Twitter account pointing to VC firm a16z and the GitHub link to YFI founder Andre Cronje’s GitHub. Plus the description shows up as, “Skate on the Paradigm and shift it when I feel like.”

As one Twitter commentator pointed out, “If this is a troll, it has to be the most expensive troll ever, right?”

Millegan acknowledged that the sale could be some kind of wash trading. This is the idea that somebody could be selling the name to themselves in order to make it look like a really expensive trade, while in reality they would be just shuffling money between their own wallets.

But this doesn’t particularly explain the previous bids that weren’t accepted (unless this was part of a strategy) and even if that was the case, they would have had to stump up some heavy fees to the NFT marketplace OpenSea where the sale was made — some $37,500.

If the sale was legitimate — even if for a prank — then it would rank in the upper echelons of highest domain name sales in history. 

© 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

• Dragonfly Capital Partners is a crypto-asset investment firm based out of San Francisco and Beijing.
• Dragonfly Capital is bridging the gap between the crypto economies of the East and West.
• The firm raised $225 million in Dragonfly Fund II, which is focused on allocating capital toward DeFi, NFT projects, applications built on Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, and CeFi.

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Millennium Management, a New York-based hedge fund managing over $57 billion in assets, recently instructed its staff to disclose any personal crypto trading to the firm’s compliance team.

The move is the latest indication of crypto become both a topic — and investment — of interest among Wall Street’s largest titans. A source familiar with the firm’s business told The Block that the disclosure was the most recent of several such notices over the last three years. The Financial News first reported the recent disclosure. 

Millennium was looking to hire someone to lead crypto investments in October of 2020, but pulled back from the market, as The Block reported at the time. Recently, the firm has been more active with certain portfolio managers active across various crypto derivatives.

Meanwhile, other hedge funds have ramped up their interest in the market while Millennium stays on the proverbial sidelines. Steve Cohen — the billionaire owner of the New York’s Mets — has made several investments in the space through his firm Point72 and other vehicles. Elsewhere, Dan Loeb’s Three Point has backed crypto firms including CipherTrace, which was acquired by MasterCard. 

Millennium was founded in 1989 by Israel A. Englander. Outside of crypto, the firm has teams engaged in various strategies across fixed-income, equity arbitrage, and quantitative strategies.

© 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.

Crypto payment startup MoonPay is set to reach a $3.4 billion valuation after its first funding round, The Information reports. 

Tiger Global Management and Coatue Management co-led the $400 million round. The firm’s valuation is unusually large for a three-year-old startup.

MoonPay lets people use credit cards when buying crypto or other digital assets on marketplaces such as OpenSea, Bitcoin.com, Abra, ZenGo, Spot and Trust Wallet. The startup, launched in 2019, has over five million users and supports more than 80 digital assets.

Lately, firms such as Coatue and Tiger Global have been drawn to mid-size crypto companies generating revenue as a way to gain exposure to the industry, according to analysis from The Block Research.

Before investing in MoonPay, Tiger Global backed open banking startup TrueLayer and the neobroker Public.com. Coatue invested $305 million in Dapper Labs — creator of the Flow blockchain — in March of this year, in addition to investing $80 million to the NFT and DeFi development platform Alchemy in April. 

Last month, MoonPay partnered with the crypto wallet provider Blocto to provide a fiat on-ramp to the Flow blockchain and easier access to NFT marketplaces.   

© 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

• Uruguay’s new cryptocurrency Ñeripeso gets its name based on local slang for “close friend.”
• The Binance token has inspired a community of more than 5,000 users, who are using it to pay for goods and services.

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Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic has raised $60 million in a Series C funding round.

The round was led by cybersecurity-focused venture capital firm Evolution Equity Partners, with participation from SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

Existing investors AlbionVC, Digital Currency Group, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, SBI Group, Octopus Ventures, SignalFire, and Paladin Capital Group also backed the round.

As part of the deal, Richard Seewald, founder and managing partner at Evolution Equity Partners, has also joined Elliptic’s board of directors.

With fresh capital at hand, Elliptic plans to expand its team, particularly in the U.S. The firm’s current headcount is around 100, and it plans to increase it to about 150 by the end of the year, an Elliptic spokesperson told The Block.

The Series C round brings Elliptic’s total funding to date to $88 million. The firm has previously raised $28 million in two funding rounds, the spokesperson said. They declined to share valuation.

Elliptic rival Chainalysis recently hit a valuation of $4.2 billion after its $100 million Series E fundraise in June. Chainalysis has raised $366.6 million in total funding to date, according to Crunchbase.

Another blockchain analytics firm, TRM Labs, also recently raised $14 million in a Series A funding round. CipherTrace, on the other hand, was acquired by Mastercard last month for an undisclosed amount.

© 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.

Sorare, a fantasy soccer platform dealing in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), is facing scrutiny from the United Kingdom’s gambling watchdog. 

A consumer information notice from the UK Gambling Commission clarified that the platform is not licensed by the regulator.

“This means that any activity completed on the site by consumers in Great Britain is outside of the gambling regulations that a licensed operator should comply with,” said the notice. 

The regulator also revealed that it is currently “carrying out enquiries” into the firm to determine whether its services fall under the Gambling Commission’s purview. 

“The Gambling Commission is currently carrying out enquiries into the company to establish whether Sorare.com requires an operating licence or whether the services it provides do not constitute gambling,” said the notice.

Sorare has grown at a fast clip with the explosion of the NFT space. By 2021, it said it was already profitable. In 2020, the firm raised $4 million in seed funding before going on to raise a $5o million series A and a $680 million series B round led by SoftBank in 2021. 

The platform enables soccer fans to trade NFT cards of popular players powered by the Ethereum blockchain. It operates much like other fantasy sports websites. More than 120 football clubs have launched player NFTs on the platform.

While the platform does not have any clear gambling functionalities, the price of player NFTs can be driven by a team’s performance. In that way, users can engage in speculation based on game performance.

It is unclear if this amounts to gambling in the eyes of the Gambling Commission. In 2017, the Gambling Commission warned fantasy soccer organizers that they could require a pool betting license from the regulator. In this case, private pools and pools not run in the course of a business were exempt. According to the commission’s website, that notice was updated on Feb. 8, 2021, though it isn’t clear what changes were made to the content. 

Sorare told The Block in a statement that due to the nascent nature of the technology, regulatory questions are expected. It is “very confident” that it does not offer any forms of regulated gambling, said Sorare.

“This has been confirmed by expert legal opinions at every stage since the company was founded, including during a number of fundraising rounds,” a representative for Sorare told The Block in a statement. “We will always engage and have an open dialogue with authorities who reach out to us to learn more about our game.”

© 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.

Futureswap, a decentralized exchange for trading perpetual swaps, has raised $12 million in a new funding round.

Ribbit Capital, Framework Ventures, True Ventures, and Placeholder co-led the round, each investing $2 million, Futureswap co-founder Derek Alia told The Block. The rest of the amount was funded by other backers.

This is Ribbit Capital’s first investment in a decentralized exchange, according to Futureswap. 

The funding round was secured via a token sale and it is Futureswap’s Series A funding, said Alia. The project has previously raised $1.6 million in two rounds, bringing its total funding to date to $13.6 million.

With fresh capital at hand, the exchange plans to expand its current team of eight and grow its platform, said Alia.

V4 launch 

Futureswap has also launched a new test version of its platform (V4) on the Ethereum Layer 2 platform Arbitrum.

Futureswap enables trading in perpetual swaps, a type of derivatives contract. Perpetual swaps allow traders to go long or short on a crypto asset with leverage and no expiry date. Futureswap offers up to 30x leverage. The exchange first launched on Ethereum in April 2020. Its V3 testnet was short-lived, and now the V4 testnet is live to the public. The mainnet should launch later this week, said Alia.

Because perpetual swaps don’t have an expiry date like futures contracts, they follow a funding rates mechanism to balance the short and long positions. When the price of a perpetual swap exceeds the index price, longs pay shorts a fee to incentivize short sellers to enter the market or decrease the incentive to stay long (and vice-versa).

Futureswap says it has facilitated over $4.2 billion in trading volume since its launch.

© 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.

Crypto exchange FTX.US has fully launched its NFT marketplace, which will support trading for a range of Solana-based NFTs.

Up until now, FTX.US’s NFT marketplace had been limited to buying and selling NFTs that have been minted directly on its website. Trading of the majority of Solana-based NFT collections — such as Solana Monkey Business, Degenerate Ape Academy and Aurory — has taken place elsewhere, typically on emerging marketplaces like Solanart and Digital Eyes. But with no one established marketplace, FTX.US is now throwing its hat in the ring.

“With the launch of this platform, we hope to provide both US and global users with a regulated marketplace that is intuitive and responsive to their needs,” said FTX.US president Brett Harrison in a statement.

FTX.US’s expansion will begin with 75 NFT projects, according to Harrison. It intends to add support for all NFTs that are based on Solana’s Metaplex standard, but it does have a few exceptions. Unlike current marketplaces that have few restrictions, FTX.US is not listing projects that regulators might consider securities offerings — such as projects that offer royalties.

To help protect customers from buying fake NFTs, FTX.US will work with NFT creators to ensure that it verifies the authenticity of the NFTs available for sale.

FTX.US’s marketplace will let customers buy and sell NFTs at fixed prices and will also have an auction system — similar to how OpenSea operates. Customers can fund their accounts for buying NFTs with bank transfers, credit card payments or crypto transactions. NFTs can be purchased in US dollars, solana (SOL) or ether (ETH).

The new marketplace will also let customers withdraw NFTs from the platform to external wallets. Currently, it’s limited to Solana-based NFTs (the FTX brand is closely linked with the Solana ecosystem) but it intends to add support for Ethereum-based NFTs. Harrison said this feature will be “coming soon.”

© 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.