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© 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.

Iran has temporarily banned the mining of cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, until September of this year.

At a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Iran President Hassan Rouhani said the ban is effective immediately until September 22, as reported by Reuters. The ban comes as Iran faces significant power blackouts in many cities, including the capital Tehran.

Iranian officials have reportedly regularly blamed “illegal” crypto miners for surging electricity demand in the country. Rouhani today said around 85% of the current mining in Iran is unlicensed.

Iran is home to around 4.5% of all bitcoin mining, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. The country’s cheap electricity supply has attracted miners in recent years. Iran also allows cryptocurrencies mined in the country to be used to pay for imports of authorized goods.

While Iran’s ban is temporary, China’s Inner Mongolia region plans to completely shut down crypto mining activities to meet the country’s carbon neutrality goal. Mainland China also recently raised the subject of a bitcoin trading and mining crackdown during a recent meeting.

© 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 Gemini has added the GUSD stablecoin to its interest-earning product called Earn, offering a flat 7.4% annual percentage yield or APY.

The development means Gemini users in all 50 U.S. states, including New York, can deposit GUSD to their Earn accounts and earn interest.

Gemini Earn was initially launched in February of this year. The program supports various cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, ether, and DeFi tokens, allowing users to earn interest up to 7.4%.

GUSD is the first dollar-pegged stablecoin to be added to Earn. The product already supports DAI, but it is an algorithmic stablecoin, meaning it is not backed by fiat currency but by crypto assets.

Institutional demand 

Gemini said the 7.4% APY on GUSD is more than 100 times the national average interest rate on savings accounts in the U.S., which is currently less than 0.05% APY.

Gemini and other crypto lenders such as BlockFi are able to offer a high interest rate on crypto and stablecoins because there is a demand by institutional borrowers.

“There is high demand for GUSD among institutional borrowers who use it to fund their operations and investment strategies,” Gemini COO Noah Perlman told The Block. “They are willing to pay competitive market rates to borrow GUSD. Our vetted institutional lending partners such as Genesis Global Capital find these borrowers and lend your funds in exchange for an interest payment.”

While crypto lending offers higher yields than bank deposits, it comes with a higher level of risk. Loans made through Gemini’s Earn program, for instance, are unsecured. That means users are exposed to borrower credit risk.

In other news, Gemini has also launched the recurring Buy+Earn functionality. It allows users to automatically purchase a set amount of GUSD or any other crypto available on Gemini on a regular basis and have it immediately transferred into Earn.

Gemini Earn is currently available in the U.S. and Singapore, while GUSD into Earn is only supported in the U.S. Perlman said Gemini is “actively exploring” the possibility of expanding access to Earn in other international jurisdictions.

© 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

• NYDIG has evolved out of an in-house stealth project to become the leading full-service, vertically integrated Bitcoin financial services firm which helps institutions, funds, and corporates of all shapes and sizes acquire and secure bitcoin. 
• The company has managed to secure one of the largest cumulative funding amounts in the entire crypto ecosystem (~$400 million), and counts New York Life, Morgan Stanley, Mass Mutual, among others as strategic investors.
• Looking ahead, the firm remains on a shortlist of US-listed bitcoin ETF applicants and is a trust custodian for a separate proposal. Other opportunities such as banking and credit-based solutions, bitcoin exposure insurance products, and other Crypto-as-a-Service capabilities remain strong growth opportunities for the firm over the next 12-18 months.

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The total supply of dollar-pegged stablecoins has risen past the $100 billion mark, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard.

At the time of writing, the total supply of stablecoins stands at $100.33 billion. Most of that growth has been driven by the two largest stablecoins: Tether’s USDT and the Centre consortium’s USD Coin (USDC).

Tether has a 62% market share, while USDC has a 21% share, although USDC’s market share has been increasing at a faster clip in recent weeks. Late last year, USDC’s market share was less than 10%.

Most of the stablecoin growth has happened in recent months as can be seen from the charts above. At the beginning of this year, for instance, the total supply of stablecoins was only around $30 billion.

The sharp growth in stablecoins suggests that crypto market participants are increasingly deploying funds, including in areas such as derivatives and decentralized finance (DeFi). Derivatives traders often use stablecoins for collateral, whereas DeFi users utilize stablecoins to trade and lend funds to earn yields.

Stablecoins allows crypto market participants to move faster between trades without having to wait days compared to fiat money transfers. Also, not all crypto exchanges support fiat on-ramps, leaving stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies the only solution to trade crypto.

The growing use of stablecoins has caught the attention of global regulators, including the U.S. Last December for instance, members of the U.S. Congress proposed the Stablecoin Tethering and Bank Licensing Enforcement (STABLE) Act. If the act proposal were to become law in its current form, it would require all stablecoin issuers to have bank licenses. The proposal effectively declares that stablecoins are a kind of deposit under federal law.

© 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.

Regulators in the U.K. have forced Luno, a crypto exchange based in London, to amend its bitcoin-focused advertising campaign.

The ads started appearing across the London Underground and on the side of buses in February. They featured a cartoon image of a bitcoin with the message, “If you’re seeing bitcoin on the Underground, it’s time to buy.”

On May 26, the Advertising Standards Authority, the U.K.’s advertising watchdog, published a ruling on Luno’s ads. It found that the placement of the ads meant they were untargeted and “likely to have been seen by consumers who did not have extensive financial knowledge and experience of bitcoin.”

The regulator also stated that bitcoin is a complex investment that is unregulated in the U.K. and prone to high levels of volatility.

“We concluded that the ad irresponsibly suggested that engaging in bitcoin investment through Luno was straightforward and easy, particularly given that the audience it addressed, the general public, were likely to be inexperienced in their understanding of cryptocurrencies, and was therefore in breach of the Code,” the ASA stated.

In consequence, the watchdog ruled that the ads must not appear again in their current form. Further, Luno must ensure that its next set of ads clarify that the value of bitcoin is variable, that neither Luno nor bitcoin is regulated, and that it does not seek to exploit consumers’ lack of experience by oversimplifying the process of investing in cryptocurrency.

“While we welcomed Luno’s assurance that their future ads would feature risk warnings to consumers, at the time the ad appeared it had not featured any risk warning making sufficiently clear to consumers that the value of bitcoin could go down as well as up, or that the bitcoin market was unregulated in the U.K. We therefore concluded that the ad was misleading,” said the ASA in its statement.

Luno was acquired by Digital Currency Group (DCG) in September, 2020, for an undisclosed sum. At the time DCG said it would make a “significant financial commitment” to the 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.

GameStop has quietly unveiled a new web portal for a non-fungible token (NFT) platform.

“We are building a team” the page declares, stating:

“We welcome exceptional engineers (solidity, react, python), designers, gamers, marketers, and community leaders. If you want to join our team, send your profile or something you’ve built to: nfteam@gamestop.com.”

The exact scope of the project is unclear, though prominently featured on the page is a link to an Ethereum address, indicating that GameStop’s team will use Ethereum as a technology base.

The smart contract code declares “Game On Anon” and links to GameStop’s NFT page and indicates that potential GameStop-released NFTs will utilize Ethereum’s ERC721 standard. The code also points to a dedicated token, GME.

As for the intended audience for whatever NFT offering emerges from GameStop’s team, an animated image on the page states: “Power to the players. Power to the creators. Power to the collectors.”

Image Credit: rblfmr / Shutterstock.com

© 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.

Elon Musk’s trigger-happy Twitter fingers have left the bitcoin world in a tizzy in recent days.

As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent piece, Musk has become bitcoin’s “biggest influencer” — much to the dismay of many evangelists. Since he first tweeted that Tesla would stop accepting bitcoin as payment because of environmental concerns, bitcoin has fallen about 40% from its all-time highs. 

More recent tweets about Musk working with North American miners on addressing environmental concerns have pushed the crypto from lows near $30,000. 

On this most recent episode of The Scoop, Martin Green, who leads quant investment firm Cambrian Asset Management, explained why Musk’s tweets are having such an outsized impact on the crypto market. In Green’s view, it’s not so much Musk’s tweets that matter but the environment into which he is tweeting. 

“Often the news itself, like Elon’s tweet, would have a different consequence in a different situation,” he said. “You can light a match in the middle of my driveway… you can take that match and drop it on the floor in an open space. Monstrous difference in the consequences. Still the same match.”

Green said that the crypto market has been primed to overreact to market news thanks to the amount of leverage in the system, which creates “a cascading of selling pressure.”

The lack of institutional spot buying recently has added fuel to the fire.

Still, Green said there are a number of tailwinds for the industry. He said that there are macro forces that indicate that institutions are under-allocated to the crypto market, noting specifically that Ethereum is “quite under-owned.”

© 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 Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) announced today that its venture arm, the SDF Enterprise Fund, invested $15 million in Airtm, a Mexico-based digital wallet and crypto exchange startup. 

That $15 million investment in Airtm is the SDF’s largest investment on record. Looking at the 2021 fiscal year, Airtm is Stellar’s third investment focused on Latin America and the fifth one overall. 

Stellar had previously invested $3 million in the Argentina-based Settle Network in December of 2020 and $3 million in US-based Tribal Credit on April 21, both with the intent of expanding cross-border payments in Latin America. This new Airtm investment seeks to do the same, in addition to streamlining payment systems and helping to digitize Latin America’s largely cash-based financial system. 

“With this investment, and our integration with the Stellar network, we will continue to advance on our mission of helping consumers and businesses throughout the developing world access stable money that holds its value, is instant to transfer with no fees, compatible with the global economy, and can be withdrawn as local currency whenever, and wherever it’s needed,” said Airtm CEO Ruben Galindo Steckel in a statement. 

Other Stellar investments in the 2021 fiscal year include putting $5 million toward the blockchain payment firm Wyre and $750,000 toward Cowrie, a Nigeria-centered firm aiming to bolster payment systems throughout Africa.

© 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 crypto market’s M&A streak continued Monday with Galaxy Digital’s announcement that it has acquired investment and asset management firm Vision Hill Group. 

According to Galaxy, the acquisition will expand the firm’s asset management business, Galaxy Fund Management. Vision Hill offers hedge fund indices and market data tools for professional investors. It also offers portfolio management and advisory services to large investor clients. Vision Hill also operates a crypto fund of funds. 

Galaxy offers similar tools such as the Galaxy Bloomberg Crypto Index, which measures the performance of the market’s largest cryptocurrencies. Galaxy Digital also offers a number of passive crypto funds, including its Galaxy Bitcoin Funds and Galaxy Ethereum Funds. 

“As the institutionalization of digital assets accelerates, so does the need for comprehensive institutional-grade platforms to support it and that’s precisely what we’re building at Galaxy,” commented Damien Vanderwilt, the firm’s co-president and head of global markets.

The former Goldman Sachs partner added: “The powerful data capabilities that  Scott, Dan, and the Vision Hill team have developed are the perfect addition to our full suite of  technology-driven financial services and investment management solutions, fostering the broader  mainstream adoption of digital assets.”

The financials of the deal were not disclosed. Galaxy Digital’s internal investment banking business worked on the transaction with legal support from David Polk & Wardwell and other firms. Kluk Farber Law served as a legal adviser to Vision Hill. 

The deal comes as the broader asset management sector in crypto grows. As noted by Bloomberg’s Katie Greifeld, $BTCC — the largest Canadian Bitcoin ETF — has fared well despite the slump in crypto prices, seeing inflows every day last week. Galaxy has filed for its own bitcoin ETF in the U.S. 

The transaction comes amid a deal-making flurry in crypto. Galaxy announced a few weeks ago it would acquire custody and financial services firm BitGo in a $1 billion-plus deal.

Earlier this year, Coinbase acquired Bison Trails and Skew, and is said to have held discussions with asset management firm Osprey about an acquisition deal, according to CoinDesk. A spokeswoman for Coinbase declined to comment on the deal, adding the firm does not “comment on rumors and speculation.”

© 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.