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Quick Take

• The lending arm of the European Union recently issued a €100 million bond using the Ethereum public blockchain.
• The transactions were settled with the help of a short-lived supply of digital euros issued by France’s central bank.
• Two officials from the EIB spoke with The Block about how they designed the bond — and what it implies for the future.

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On May 10, the Coinbase app topped the U.S. Apple App Store, a position the crypto exchange hadn’t been in since late 2017.

According to data compiled by The Block Research, Coinbase broke top 10 charts in mid-April before reaching the #2 slot on April 14. This was the same day the crypto exchange became a publicly traded company on NASDAQ. 

The app dipped below the top 10 apps for a short period before climbing up on May 4, the same time the art auction house Sotheby’s partnered with Coinbase to accept bitcoin and ether for physical art payments.  

© 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.

While dogecoin got name-dropped on Saturday Night Live last weekend, another dog-themed cryptocurrency is making the waves this week.

Like dogecoin, shiba inu tokens (SHIB) are themed around the shiba Inu breed of dog. They are also designed to be “fun tokens” that come with a “woofpaper” instead of a whitepaper. They have a total supply of one quadrillion tokens — compared with 129 billion total dogecoins — and each token is worth just a fraction of a cent.

Since the start of May, shiba inu tokens have shot up in value. According to CoinGecko, the tokens have gone from $0.0000015 to their current value of $0.00003 — a 1,900% rise. This was helped by recent listings on crypto exchanges OKEx, Huobi, FTX and Poloniex and an upcoming listing on crypto exchange Binance.

This growth has put some early token holders into the money. One account purchased 200 billion tokens for just $17 in October 2020. Those tokens are now worth $6.5 million on paper, if you multiple by the number of tokens by the price. But, with current liquidity, they could actually be cashed out through decentralized exchange Uniswap for $5.9 million.

Another big token holder is Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. According to the shiba inu token website, 50% of the total supply of tokens was locked in Uniswap to provide liquidity (and the keys supposedly thrown away). The other 50% was given to Buterin, with the intention of them being taken out of circulation and not to be sold.

While the shiba inu tokens may seem friendly, they are causing havoc on the Ethereum blockchain. According to The Block Research’s Igor Igamberdiev, transactions involving the shiba inu tokens are now using up 10% of available gas, the token used to pay for Ethereum fees. According to Etherscan, this has helped raise fees to around $20 for a simple transaction and around $180 for a swap on Uniswap.

“SHIB mania, in many ways, repeats the events that took place earlier at [Binance Smart Chain] with meme tokens. However, the characteristic difference here is the potential lack of opportunity for rug pull,” he tweeted.

Other meme coins have been popping in recent weeks too. Doge killer (LEASH), which is part of the shiba inu token ecosystem, shot up from $600 to $8,400 this month. A token called dogelon mars (ELON), which follows shiba inu’s distribution strategy, rose 640% in the last week, reaching a current market cap of $634 million.

It’s worth noting that these types of tokens come with higher levels of risk. With no clear use case, these meme tokens may struggle to maintain traction in the long run. And as we saw with Dogecoin over the weekend, what goes up can quickly fall back down.

© 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.

Block.one, the developer of the EOSIO blockchain, has unveiled a new crypto exchange subsidiary that has raised nearly $10 billion in funding.

The subsidiary, Bullish Global, is developing a crypto exchange named Bullish, which is scheduled to launch sometime this year.

Bullish Global is backed by a number of notable investors, including billionaires Peter Thiel, Alan Howard, Mike Novogratz, Louis Bacon of Moore Capital, Richard Li of Hong Kong-based Pacific Century Group, and Christian Angermayer of Germany-based Apeiron Investment Group. Japanese banking giant Nomura is also an investor.

These backers collectively participated in a $300 million round for Bullish Global. The rest was injected by Block.one in the form of $100 million cash, 164,000 bitcoin (worth over $9 billion at current prices), and 20 million EOS tokens (worth about $227 million at current prices). The EOS token has gone up by about 15% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

Thiel, Howard, Li, and Angermayer have also joined Bullish Global as senior advisors.

Block.one said Bullish would be based on the EOSIO blockchain and will provide benefits of both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

“The Bullish exchange will offer new automated market making, lending, and portfolio management tools to its users to deliver functionality that has previously been monopolized by incumbent players in traditional finance, while driving deeper liquidity to digital assets,” Block.one said in a statement.

© 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.

Peter Thiel’s data analytics company Palantir Technologies now accepts bitcoin as a form of payment from clients.

Palantir revealed the news in a Q1 earnings call on Tuesday, according to a CNBC report. The presentation from the call is not publicly available on Palantir’s website. 

Palantir, which has a market capitalization of nearly $34 billion, is also considering adding bitcoin to its balance sheet, according to CNBC. During the earnings call, the New York Stock Exchange-listed company said the option is “definitely on the table.”

Peter Thiel’s other companies, PayPal and Venmo, have also embraced crypto. Both companies allow users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies through their apps, and PayPal is exploring the launch of a stablecoin, as The Block reported earlier this month. 

© 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

• Celo is a blockchain project that uses a mobile-first approach to empower individuals worldwide through access to financial services and the ability to send money to anyone with their mobile phones
• At the center of Celo’s network includes two native stablecoins, Celo Dollar and Celo Euro, which can be used for payments, savings, and the usage of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications
• In total, The Block has identified 151 projects and companies across 15 different verticals currently expanding on Celo’s ecosystem

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Boxer Floyd Mayweather is releasing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) later this month.

Mayweather has partnered with three NFT firms — IronBend, Reality Gaming Group, and Zytara Labs — for the initiative. The NFTs will drop on May 26, ahead of Mayweather’s fight with YouTuber-turned-boxer Logan Paul on June 6.

NFTs are blockchain tokens tied to unique digital things. They have soared in popularity in recent months. From Paris Hilton to Lindsay Lohan to Jack Dorsey, several celebrities and personalities have issued NFTs.

Mayweather’s NFTs will feature a limited-edition digital collection involving his life and career, including animations, artwork, and memorabilia from his personal keepsakes. “There will be a digital collection of 5 NFT pieces, including a rare 1 of 1,” Al Burgio, founder and CEO of Zytara Labs, told The Block.

“Right now, my career is over, but my name will always live on for the things that I did and for the legacy that I left and the mark that I left in sports,” said Mayweather.

It is not clear on which blockchain network the NFTs will be based on and on which marketplace they will be sold, Burgio told The Block that those details would be disclosed before the May 26 sale.

Mayweather’s NFT effort comes over two years after he settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over initial coin offering (ICO) promotions. Mayweather had to pay a fine of over $600,000 as he hadn’t disclosed that he was getting paid for the ICO promotions.

© 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

• Ethereum transaction fees remain the main issue for crypto gaming.
• Dapper Labs, the team behind CryptoKitties, tried to solve this issue with their Flow blockchain.
• Although the current Flow version is ambitious, it remains highly limited in functionality and centralized.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has just posted a poll on Twitter, asking users whether the electronic car maker should accept Dogecoin (DOGE), the meme-themed cryptocurrency.

Tesla already accepts bitcoin for its vehicles.

This is a developing story and will be updated…

© 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.

Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, plans to tax profits on cryptocurrency trades.

The plan is still at the discussion stage, Neilmaldrin Noor, a spokesman at Indonesia’s tax office, told Reuters on Tuesday. The office is considering levying income tax on crypto profits.

“It is important to know that… if there is a profit or capital gain generated from a transaction, the profit is an object of income tax,” said Neilmaldrin. “So the tax payer who receives capital gain has to pay the tax and report it.”

Indonesia treats crypto as a commodity for trading but has banned its use as a payment instrument in the country.

Indonesia’s crypto taxation plan was first revealed last month when Teguh Kurniawan Harmanda, COO of local crypto exchange Tokocrypto, told CNBC Indonesia that industry players and government agencies, including the Trade Ministry’s Futures Exchange Supervisory Board (Bappebti), are discussing how to impose a tax on crypto transactions.

Harmanda said the proposed income tax on crypto profits is 0.05%, smaller than the income tax imposed on stock trades, which is currently 0.1%.

© 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.