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Chinese technology giants have made moves into the non-fungible token (NFT) space but in a localized way where crypto-native features are removed.

Tencent announced Wednesday that it has partnered with the Dunhuang Academy to digitalize the landmark wall paintings of the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO world heritage site in China’s Gansu province.

The project is Tencent’s first move into the NFT market in its bid to use blockchain technology in a charity cause to protect and promote cultural heritage.

Tencent aims to issue 9,999 pieces of NFTs on its permissioned blockchain Zxinchain that each digitalizes a unique painting from the Mogao Caves. Starting from Wednesday, users on Tencent’s WeChat messaging app can win the chance to get one NFT by taking a short quiz about the site and can display the digital card as a social status within the WeChat ecosystem.

For each issuance, Tencent’s charity arm will make a donation to the Dunhuang Academy. The firm told The Block in an exclusive interview that the total donation is about 4 million yuan, or over half a million U.S. dollars. 

Fino Feng, who leads the Dunhuang project at Tencent, said that as of Friday, about 380,000 people have participated in the quiz and all of the NFTs have been issued. 

“We want to use blockchain technology to break through the silos and bring more awareness to the protection of cultural heritage. NFTs can be that digital carrier for our traditional culture and bridge it with the people,” Feng said.

Mogao Caves NFTs

Tencent is not the only tech firm that’s riding on the recent NFT craze.

Alibaba’s payment arm AliPay also tested the waters in June by selling NFTs of original arts created by the Dunhuang Fine Art Academy through its permissioned Antchain on AliPay’s mobile app.

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But different from a usual NFT issuance on public blockchains, Tencent has adapted to the local regulatory environment in China and essentially removed the core crypto features.

Issuing NFTs on public networks like Ethereum involves the usage of ether for whoever mints an NFT and whoever wants to buy and sell. Since the fiat on- and off-ramp for crypto assets in China has been increasingly restricted over the past years, the Dunhuang Academy deemed it not regulatory viable to launch the project on a public network.

Further, Qin Qing, product director at Tencent Blockchain, told The Block that currently the issuance happens only on the primary market level in that users won’t be able to trade the NFT like what they can normally do with digital arts on Opensea. 

However, Qin said they are open to the idea in the future — when there’s a clearer regulation about NFTs in China – of opening up the system to allow third-party partners to create a marketplace where users can change hands of the NFTs.

“Since Tencent issues it in the primary market, we can’t launch a secondary marketplace ourselves,” Qin said. “But even with a secondary marketplace, it will only deal with fiat currency… and we obviously won’t encourage flipping and speculative activities.”

Qin added that another important difference for Tencent’s NFT compared to crypto-native ones is every WeChat user who wins the lucky draw to get the Dunhuang NFT must be real-name verified in order to collect the digital card.

“This is very different from NFTs on public blockchains that can remain anonymous,” Qin said.

Similarly, AliPay forbids the trading of the NFTs sold or auctioned via its Antchain.

AliPay’s user terms and services page currently indicates that NFT owners on Antchain can only give away an NFT after holding it for 180 days to a receiver who is above 14 years old, has completed the real-name verification inside AliPay and is a friend with the donor on AliPay. 

But it appears AliPay didn’t initially enforce the 180-day time constrain strictly and users found ways to flip the NFTs created by the Dunhuang Fine Art Academy in June on Alibaba’s Xianyu app, a marketplace for second-hand goods.

Quotes on Xianyuan for one piece of those NFTs initially went up to as much as 1.5 million yuan, worth over $200,000. But Xianyu swiftly disabled such advertisements and the search for “NFT” on Xianyuan now shows no results.

© 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.

Walmart has not partered with Litecoin, despite a press release that was published today and reported by multiple news organizations. A walmart spokesperson has told CNBC that the press release is not authentic.

The press release claimed that the two had formed a partnership that would see Walmart integrating Litecoin payments in all of its stores by the start of next month. It included quotations supposedly from Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, commenting on the blockchain platform’s faster payments.

The news saw litecoin’s price jump from $175 to as high as $231, before it started retracing. The price of litecoin has dropped back to $190.

For more breaking stories like this, make sure to subscribe to The Block on Telegram.

© 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.

Riding the wave of interest in the market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a startup with support from hedge fund mogul Steve Cohen has closed a $55 million Series A. 

Founded by former DRW trader Zach Bruch and licensing expert Trevor George, RECUR is one of a growing number of startups operating in the NFT market where firms like Dapper Labs and OpenSea have achieved unicorn status. 

RECUR’s raise values the firm at $333 million. Steve Cohen, the founder of hedge fund Point72, is joining RECUR’s board and has invested in the company through DIGITAL, an investment vehicle that invests in the so-called Metaverse. Other backers of the firm include CMT Digital, Delphi Ventures, and Gary Veynerchuk. 

RECUR plans to leverage the funds to scale its platform, hire for more than 100 roles, and go to market with a newly launched collegiate NFT marketplace, dubbed NFTU.com. The firm has teamed up with CLC, a collegiate trademark firm, and Veritone, the licensing partner of the Pacific 12 Conference, to create NFTs of logos, video clips, and “all sorts of college collectibles,” noted Bruch.

The firm is starting with teams in the Pac 12. The firm says it has a number of licensing agreements similar to its deal with Veritone, which justified its hefty valuation, George said. 

“Our goal is to give fans the opportunity to own pieces of the stories and IPs they love, with real value retained across any future chain,” the firm’s founders said in a press release. “Further, we see a future where the standard for a decentralized recurring royalty is embedded, giving the creator due credit as assets are exchanged over and over again.”

The firm declined to comment on whether any such agreement has been reached with Cohen’s baseball team, the Mets. 

A spokeswoman for Point72 confirmed Cohen’s investment through the billionaire’s family office. Point72 made headlines earlier this year for leading data firm Messari’s Series A. 

© 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.

Business intelligence firm MicroStrategy has purchased a further 5,050 bitcoin, taking its total holdings to 114,042 BTC, according to a statement today.

The firm spent $3.16 billion on this entire stash, which has a current value of $5.1 billion — a 42% gain.

Since making several major purchases toward the end of last year and the beginning of this year, the firm has continued to buy smaller amounts over time. This latest bitcoin bump cost the firm $242.9 million at an average price of $48,099. This implies that the firm bought the bitcoin before the price crash on September 7.

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor did not comment on the buy, but ahead of his announcement post about it, tweeted, “Slow and steady wins the race.”

© 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 Coinbase intends to conduct a private offering of $1.5 billion in senior notes due 2028 and 2031, according to a blog post.

“Coinbase intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, which may include continued investments in product development, as well as potential investments in or acquisitions of other companies, products, or technologies that Coinbase may identify in the future,” the blog post said.

In May, the exchange previously said it planned to conduct a similar $1.25 billion offering — which came just a month after the exchange went public via a direct listing.

© 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.

Quite a lot happened over the weekend, spanning Ethereum, Cardano and Avalanche — with a dose of Layer 2 activity thrown in.

Let’s dive straight in.

Total value locked in Arbitrum hits $2 billion

Ethereum’s second-layer scaling solution Arbitrum is getting its first stress test in the real world. Since going live on August 31, at least 76 projects have now integrated it, providing a variety of things to do on the network.

The network is a scaling solution based on optimistic rollups. In short, a lot of transactions can be executed on the network, which are then batched together and settled on the main Ethereum blockchain. Batching them is a technique that uses up less space in total, making each transaction much cheaper. 

With many crypto users bridging their funds over — taking them from the Ethereum main chain to Arbitrum’s layer — the scaling solution is now looking after a growing number of funds. A number that has shot up rapidly, rising from $238 million to $2.2 billion over the weekend.

Funds locked in Arbitrum exhibit hockey stick growth. Source: L2Beat.

And what have people largely been using this for? Well to farm cats, obviously.

Nyancat explodes in popularity — while its price crashes

With all this capital flooding into the platform, it had to go somewhere. And what’s more appealing than a supposed 7,000% yield?

ArbiNYAN is a token that was launched specifically on Arbitrum, branded around the Internet meme Nyan Cat. Its website provided three DeFi pools for farming, a process where you deposit funds and receive a yield in response. You could farm ETH for a low percentage, you could farm Nyan itself for a high four-digit percentage or provide liquidity for the two assets at an even higher percentage.

And it’s taken off like mad. According to DeFi Llama, around $1.45 billion is held in ArbiNYAN’s platform. That makes for 66% of all the value on Arbitrum itself — and over the weekend that percentage went as high as 97.4%.

But like most crazy yields, it was too good to be true. While the number of tokens might be increasing at a rapid rate, this flood of new tokens diluted their value. It fell from $7 to $0.71. Ouch.

Fractionalized dogecoin collapses in price

Talking of pets and price crashes, the value of PleasrDAO’s fractionalized dog meme NFT has plummeted.

PleasrDAO is a collective of individuals who purchased an NFT of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog — which sparked memes and memecurrencies — for $4 million in June. The collective then decided to fractionalize the NFT into millions of tiny pieces, and to sell them individually. The idea was to allow many more people to take part in owning the NFT, and potentially profit from its value.

It worked, at least initially. Within a few days, the value of the tokens spiked to $0.043 — giving the NFT an implied valuation of $730 million (although this is a largely meaningless metric). But that fervor has settled now, and the price has dropped to $0.0074. 

The price of DOG collapsed even further over the weekend, against USD and ETH. Source: DOG/WETH on TradingView.

Although, despite the drop, the artwork still has an implied valuation of $125 million.

Cardano launched smart contracts

Yes, it finally happened. The long-awaited run toward smart contracts on Cardano has finally ended and you can now create decentralized applications on the platform. 

Afterwards, Cardano founder tweeted, “We did it. Everyone is a winner. Even Uncle V :)” — presumably referring to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Questions remain, however, over how Cardano will be able to support decentralized applications, particularly DeFi ones, with its version of a UTXO model (the kind of system that bitcoin has). Answers include batching transactions, which would enable multiple transactions at once.

Avalanche had its first hack

The budding blockchain platform Avalanche has witnessed its first major DeFi hack. According to DeFi Prime, DeFi platform Zabu Finance was exploited for around $3.2 million. 

The coins stolen were wrapped ether (WETH), wrapped avalanche (WAVAX), pangolin (PNG), avaware (AVE), tether (USDT) and trader joe (JOE).

During the exploit, the attacker got hold of a large supply of the ZABU tokens and dumped them for other coins. As a result, the price of the project’s native ZABU token was wiped out. It fell from $0.0037 to $0.00003 in minutes.

The ZABU token’s price collapsed. Source: TradingView via DexGuru.

Zabu Finance acknowledged the hack, claiming only $600,000 was stolen, and has identified the issue. It is planning to take a snapshot of funds before the hack — and after, for those who later bought in — to distribute out tokens and to try to repair the damage.

Lobby Lobsters donate $3.2 million to Coin Center

Some say the lobsters have been controlling Congress for centuries. Okay, jokes aside, but seriously, a different collective this time — known as Universe DAO — has sold 10,000 NFTs of cartoon lobsters and donated the proceeds to the crypto lobbying group Coin Center. 

“Help the Lobby Lobsters get in front of Congress,” says the bio on OpenSea, “Lobby Lobster’s goal is to raise funds, they can help educate the representatives in Washington who make the laws around cryptocurrency. They will wear the suits for us!”

The lobsters sold for 1,000 ETH, which is worth $3.2 million at current prices (although was higher at the time). According to a governance vote, the plan was to give the proceeds to the lobbying firm and vote on what to do with the proceeds from ongoing sales. This vote passed with 100% approval, meaning the donation will soon be on its way to Coin Center.

Solana saw its first million-dollar NFT sale

As The Block reported, the Solana blockchain saw its first sale of an NFT for more than a million dollars. The sale was for Degen Ape #7225, a scarred zombie version of an ape with a halo, a gold tooth and a brain in its mouth. It’s part of the Degenerate Ape Academy, which has the highest market cap of any Solana NFT project, per Solanalysis.

The firm also picked up the 18th rarest SolPunk — a Solana-themed version of CryptoPunks — for 1,388 SOL ($260,000).

Degen Ape #7225. Source: Degenerate Ape Academy.

Solana NFTs have been taking off recently, with the market cap of top NFT projects recently rising to $755 million. TV presenter Steve Harvey changed his Twitter profile photo to a Solana Monkey Business NFT last Thursday. YouTuber KSI has also been buying up a bunch of Solana Monkey Business NFTs, along with Degenerate Apes and Thugbirdz.

Plus in more donations news, Trippy Bunny Tribe, which sold its NFTs for 1.11 SOL on Saturday, gave its $220,000 in proceeds to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

© 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.

Brevan Howard Asset Management has announced the hire of Colleen Sullivan to steer its investments in crypto.

The British hedge fund has also revealed the launch of a new entity named BH Digital, which will manage cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, it said in a press release.

Sullivan joins Brevan Howard from Chicago-based CMT Digital, the crypto-focused division of CMT Group, which she has run as co-founder and CEO since September 2017.

Aron Landy, CEO of Brevan Howard, said in a statement that Sullivan’s track record in crypto “will be of tremendous benefit to Brevan Howard clients and underscores the firm’s commitment to rapidly expanding its platform and offerings in cryptocurrencies and digital assets.”

Bloomberg revealed in April that Brevan Howard was set to begin investing in crypto, initially allocating up to 1.5% to digital assets.  

Founded in 2002, Brevan Howard has become one of the world’s largest macro hedge funds, managing money for a wide range of institutional investors. Alan Howard, the firm’s billionaire founder and former CEO, has made considerable investments in the crypto space himself — backing a wide range of startups in the space and setting up an entity named Elwood Technologies, which is focused on crypto liquidity.

© 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.

Imagine thinking that not collecting sensitive data is inherently a bad thing.

That canard seemed to be the subtext of two memorable lines in last Sunday’s front-page New York Times story about the regulatory crackdown on cryptocurrency lending.

In a passage explaining decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, the authors note, with a faint whiff of disapproval, that “the sites do not even collect users’ personal information.”

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The whiff gets stronger a few paragraphs later, in discussion of the Compound lending protocol, complete with air quotes.

“Each of the nearly 300,000 ‘customers’ is represented by a unique 42-character list of letters and numbers,” the authors write, referring in Gray Lady style to a user’s wallet address. “But Compound does not know their names or even what country they are from.”

Four years after the breach of the credit reporting agency Equifax, which exposed the personal information of 147 million people, would it have killed the Times to at least consider the upside of not storing such records?

“On the normal web, you can’t buy a blender without giving the site owner enough data to learn your whole life history. In DeFi, you can borrow money without anyone even asking for your name,” Brady Dale wrote in CoinDesk last year.

Of course, there is a catch, as he was quick to add: “DeFi applications don’t worry about trusting you because they have the collateral you put up to back your debt (on Compound, for instance, a $10 debt will require around $20 in collateral).”

This purely collateral-based approach to lending taken so far in DeFi has disadvantages for the borrower and lender alike. A challenge for the industry is to move past the current model’s limitations without sacrificing the privacy-preserving innovation that the Times implied was some kind of outrage.

To understand those limitations, we have to take a detour to the musty, stuffy world of traditional finance.

The Cs of credit

There is a reason banks ask mortgage applicants for pay stubs and bank statements, and it’s not some twisted desire to make borrowers reveal their innermost secrets.

“The foundation for determining the credit quality of secured consumer loans such as mortgages … has been well-established over the years by the three Cs of underwriting,” said Clifford Rossi, a business professor at the University of Maryland, in an email to CoinDesk.

In Rossi’s formulation, the Cs stand for “Creditworthiness or willingness-to-pay, Capacity to repay the obligation and Collateral (equity stake).” Other versions of this old banker’s saying also include a fourth C, for Capital (savings), and sometimes a fifth, for Conditions (reasons for taking out the loan).

“Reliance on any one of the Cs might miss other important aspects of the borrower’s risk profile that could ultimately pose greater or lesser collective risk to the owner of that risk,” said Rossi, a former banking executive and regulator.

For example, if Bob puts down 20% on his home and Alice puts down only 10% on hers, on the basis of that factor alone you’d assume that Bob’s is the safer loan. He has more skin in the game and thus a stronger incentive to keep paying.

If times get tough, Bob is the one more likely to eat beans instead of steak so his family can stay in the home, while Alice is the one more likely to just mail the lender the house keys and skip town – all else equal.

But suppose Bob’s credit score (usually calculated with software from a company called FICO) is 640, just above the threshold to be considered subprime and a full 100 points lower than Alice’s. Suppose further that Bob’s debts eat up 40% of his income, while Alice’s debt-to-income (DTI) ratio is only half that.

“While in a deep [housing] market decline (say like 2008) both borrowers might be naturally incented to default looking at their equity stake alone, the second borrower has less likelihood of defaulting given their higher FICO and lower DTI,” Rossi said.

“The point is that secured lending is not one-dimensional and [lenders] should consider tradeoffs among the 3Cs in a multifactor manner,” he said. “They could in some circumstances be under- or over-pricing the risk if they only are using one factor.”

The upshot for DeFi is that if lenders could rely on more than just collateral, they could make more informed credit decisions, and thus charge lower rates to borrowers.

A way forward?

There are numerous efforts afoot to allow multi-dimensional, judgment-based DeFi lending. One of the most promising comes from Aave, the largest DeFi project, with $15.7 billion in total value locked (TVL), meaning tied up in its smart contracts.

Last year, Aave introduced credit delegation, which allows users who deposit collateral into the system to essentially rent their credit lines to someone they trust. The depositor earns extra yield, and the borrower gets an unsecured loan.

In a presentation this summer, Stani Kulechov, Aave’s founder and CEO, described a future where credit delegation would allow people to borrow against their good names – not their government names, necessarily, but their Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain names.

These are designed to be used as cryptocurrency wallet addresses, in lieu of the usual string of letters of numbers so baffling to the Times, and as usernames across different websites and apps. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s ENS name, for example, is Vitalik.eth.

In one scenario envisioned by Kulechov, Aave depositors could delegate their credit lines to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), an entity with no central managers. The DAO’s owners would vote to delegate that borrowing power, in turn, to ENS domains that applied for it.

“This is the future of DeFi,” Kulechov said. “If we make this work [at] scale … we have a lot of ability to empower communities in real life and essentially onboard more DeFi liquidity into traditional finance.”

But how would these contracts be enforced? If the borrower defaulted, the lender wouldn’t need to sue them, since the borrower’s on-chain reputation would be on the line, Kulechov argued.

“I think we should always abandon the idea that if there isn’t collateral or if there isn’t the ability to do legal recourse, you can’t have the relationship and the borrower will escape,” he said.

Rather, the blockchain’s transparency would make it clear to all which ENS names were deadbeats, giving borrowers an incentive to pay their loans, lest they end up blackballed from further borrowing. “I myself will not default on my own ENS name because it will look bad,” Kulechov said. “Because of the nature of the blockchain … you kind of don’t want to have that kind of event stored there.”

In this model, the borrower’s repayment history – information traditionally kept on file at credit bureaus, viewable by banks for a fee – would be out there for all to see. But control of the borrower’s identity, the ENS domain name, would stay with the borrower – at least, as long as they control the keys to their crypto wallet.

That’s a big caveat, given the horror stories about crypto users losing their private keys. Still, compare this setup to the status quo, where the keys to your identity – your Social Security number, home address, date of birth – are entrusted to the provably porous Equifaxes of the world.

Which system would you prefer?

The Solana blockchain has now seen its first million-dollar NFT sale.

Blockchain advisory firm Moonrock Capital purchased one of the Degenerate Ape Academy NFTs for 5,980 SOL on Saturday, worth $1.1 million.

The firm bought Degen Ape #7225, a scarred zombie version of an ape with a halo, a gold tooth and a brain in its mouth. The ape is the 13th rarest in the collection, according to HowRare.is.

There have previously been sales on Solana for amounts that would now be worth more than a million dollars, such as Degen Ape #1674, which was sold for 7,000 SOL. But this appears to be the first sale worth more than a million dollars at the time of purchase.

This marks a shift in the development of NFTs across the blockchain ecosystem. Since their inception, they have typically been created and sold on the Ethereum blockchain, where the majority of value and interest remains today. But with high fees becoming a growing issue, some investors have looked to other platforms — such as Solana, Cardano and Tezos — to experiment at lower costs.

YouTuber-turned-boxer KSI noted this trend, picking up a Solana Monkey Business NFT on Thursday before he was later granted an honorary Degen Ape.

On Friday, he tweeted, “Ethereum fees are too high atm so man is moving onto Solana. GOML,” — meaning Get On My Level.

KSI changed the profile picture for his crypto account to a Solana Monkey Business NFT. Source: Twitter.

Other celebrities have picked up on Solana NFTs too. TV presenter Steve Harvey changed his Twitter profile photo to a Solana Monkey Business NFT last Thursday.

A growing NFT ecosystem

Within the Solana ecosystem, the building blocks for NFTs have been growing in number during the last few weeks.

There have been the launches of several marketplaces, such as Solanart and Digital Eyes, which are attempting to keep up with the rapidly increasing number of NFT mints. Plus, since the Aurory launch, projects have started using Metaplex’s Candy Machine to handle the minting process, which has made for a smoother ride.

On the other hand, the multiplication of the number of NFT projects on Solana has started to dilute the value among the collections — despite high demand for earlier projects like the degenerate apes. Many projects have seen their floor prices slide in recent days, with some mints not selling out and a number of projects selling below minting price.

At the same time, the price of Solana’s native token, SOL, has been rocketing up, rising from $100 to briefly break $200 in little over a week — propelling it into the top 10 coins by market cap. To reflect this rise, NFT projects have started lowering their mint prices, to keep them affordable.

The price of Solana has rallied over the last 30 days. Source: CoinGecko.

Some projects have even been giving them out for next to nothing. Upcoming snake-themed NFT project Sneks revised its prices from 2.25 SOL to 0 SOL, following a failed launch, while Lit Jesus is handing its NFTs (and physical copies) out for free. Plus, some haven’t even kept the profits. Trippy Bunny Tribe, which sold its NFTs for 1.11 SOL on Saturday, donated its $220,000 in proceeds to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

© 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

• “Vincent Van Dough” has spent more than $20 million on NFTs. They recently also set up an NFT fund and aim to raise $100 million.
• The Block sat down with Van Dough to find out why they are so bullish on NFTs, how they value them, and about their plans for the new fund. 

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