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Bitpanda, the Vienna-based crypto exchange and neo-broker, has topped up its recent $170 million Series B fundraise with another €10 million (roughly $12 million).

The money comes from leading crypto market makers and investors. Jump Capital and Wintermute Trading have both invested in the company, alongside the venture capital firm LeadBlock Partners. In March, Bitpanda raised $170 million in a Series B raise led by Peter Thiel’s investment firm Valar Ventures.

In a press release, Bitpanda said the extension would strengthen its institutional offering, allowing it to expand into new markets with new products in 2021.

“This is all about getting extensive know-how to strengthen Bitpanda’s institutional offering in Europe ranging from referral solutions all the way to custom build comprehensive tech integrations,” said a spokesperson for Bitpanda.

None of the new investors have joined Bitpanda’s board and the company’s co-founders Eric Demuth, Paul Klanschek and Christian Trummer will maintain a majority shareholding.

Launched in 2014 as a crypto-only investment platform, which later added precious metal investments, Bitpanda recently began offering stock trading for the first time. The company has upwards of two million users.

© 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 May 6, New York Attorney General (NYAG) Letitia James requested a temporary restraining order and other legal action against crypto app company Coinseed.

The Thursday lawsuits build on the initial legal action the NYAG took against Coinseed on February 17. At the time, James claimed the crypto company was defrauding investors and did not have the proper licensure.

Coinseed CEO Delger Davaasambuu told The Block that the allegations were “full of false accusations” and that “Coinseed has left NY in 2019 and we haven’t accepted any users from NY since 2018.” Davaasambuu did not respond in time for comment for the NYAG’s most recent legal action. 

Still, the NYAG claims that Coinseed has been making unauthorized and fraudulent transactions, and that the NYAG office received more than 130 complaints since February from Coinseed investors worried about their assets, according to a release published Friday.

“In the months since we filed our suit, the greed perpetrated by Coinseed and its CEO has not only continued, but grown. This company has continued to operate illegally — holding investors’ funds hostage and conducting unauthorized trades in investors’ portfolios, while depleting accounts and transferring virtual currency to an offshore, unregulated trading platform. We filed this motion to immediately halt Coinseed’s unlawful activity and protect the investments that are left,” James said in the 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.

After years of hype and anticipation, Dfinity, a decentralized network its creators call the “Internet Computer,” is finally going live.

The project, developed by a Switzerland-based not-for-profit called the Dfinity Foundation, was revealed in 2008 and has raised more than $160 million in venture capital. Its developers and promoters claim that the new network can be the basis of a new, decentralized internet.

“At its core, the Internet Computer is the world’s first blockchain that runs at web speed with unlimited capacity — solving the ‘blockchain trilemma’ by producing a blockchain network that is decentralized, secure, and scalable,” reads a press statement from the Dfinity Foundation.

Dfinity features an “algorithmic governance system” that will onboard independent data centers and specially designed “node machines.” As of today, the network is supported by 48 data centers, which are running 1,300 nodes across North America, Europe and Asia, according to the foundation. It adds that by the end of the year there will be 123 data centers running 4,300 nodes.

Dominic Williams, founder and chief scientist for Dfinity, has consistently pitched the network an antidote to what he calls the monopolization of the internet by Big Tech.

“In 10 years, the wider tech community will realize that the Internet Computer is on a trajectory to one day become humanity’s primary compute platform for building software, and the “Open Internet” will predominate over Big Tech’s closed proprietary system,” Williams 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.

Quick Take

• MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative has launched a new academic journal, called Cryptoeconomic Systems.
• It’s a step toward a more robust academic dialogue around blockchain and crypto topics.

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Bitcoin trading and custody services provider NYDIG has hired John Dalby, CFO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, as its CFO.

Dalby is joining NYDIG as the firm is experiencing rapid growth. NYDIG recently raised more than $300 million from a group of strategic partners, including Morgan Stanley, New York Life, and MassMutual. The firm also recently launched a global Insurance Solutions practice to create bitcoin-powered products and services for the global insurance industry.

“The growth of NYDIG has been incredible,” said Dalby. “Every day, more industries come to understand Bitcoin’s potential and more clients seek ways to safely access it. Personally, I share NYDIG’s vision for Bitcoin’s ability to propel economic empowerment for all. I eagerly look forward to doing my part to help NYDIG deliver innovative Bitcoin solutions to institutions and individuals.”

Earlier this week, NYDIG also partnered with fintech firm FIS, a Fortune 500 company, to let banks offer bitcoin capabilities to their customers. NYDIG president Yan Zhao recently told The Block that the firm is well-positioned to make institutional investors comfortable with investing in bitcoin.

As for Bridgewater Associates, the firm is yet to move into the crypto market. Earlier this year, Bridgewater’s director of investment research, Rebecca Patterson,‎ said the firm could invest in bitcoin if its volatility reduces, liquidity increases, and when there is regulatory certainty.

© 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.

Ripple has reported a nearly 100% increase in XRP sales for the first quarter of 2021 despite its ongoing legal battle with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).

Ripple’s XRP sales went up to $150 million in Q1 2021 compared to $76 million in Q4 2020, an increase of 97%. Ripple said its On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service contributed to the jump. ODL helps Ripple clients to settle cross-border payments via XRP without pre-funding.

Ripple said it saw “deeper engagement from key ODL customers” in the first quarter. For over a year, Ripple has not sold XRP programmatically, i.e., to cryptocurrency exchanges.

The surge in XRP sales comes despite Ripple’s ongoing legal fight with the SEC. Last December, the agency sued Ripple and two of its executives — CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Chairman Chris Larsen — alleging that they illegally raised over $1.3 billion selling XRP, an unregistered security.

Ripple is defending itself and says the lawsuit has caused “havoc” for U.S. XRP holders, developers, and small businesses that use and rely on XRP and the XRP Ledger.

© 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

• dYdX is a protocol for decentralized perpetual swaps. Initially launched in October 2018 on the Ethereum mainnet, the new version is live on StarkWare’s zk-Rollups.
• In the first month after its launch, dYdX facilitated $1 billion in trade volume and added markets for DeFi tokens such as UNI, YFI, AAVE and 1INCH.
• The advantage for dYdX is its scalability, but the difficulty will be in bootstrapping liquidity for long-tail markets and a lack of composability.

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Nuvei Corporation, a Canada-listed payment processing company with a market capitalization of nearly $10 billion, has agreed to acquire crypto firm Simplex for $250 million.

Announcing the news on Thursday, Nuvei said the deal is all in cash and is expected to close in the second half of this year, subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions.

Simplex is an Israel-based crypto payment processor, providing on-ramp and off-ramp services to crypto exchanges and firms, including Binance and Huobi. Nuvei said Simplex processed around $500 million of total volume in 2020 and is expected to process more than $2 billion of total volume in 2021.

“Simplex’s infrastructure is a natural fit for Nuvei’s Native Commerce Platform, further strengthening the capabilities and overall value proposition of our single-integration approach to payments,” said Nuvei chairman and CEO Philip Fayer. Nuvei’s commerce platform connects merchants in 200 markets, supporting 470 local and alternative payment methods, including cryptocurrencies.

“We expect Simplex to enhance and expand Nuvei’s steadily growing portfolio of alternative payment methods, adding turnkey simplicity to the process of buying and selling cryptocurrency and converting it back to fiat within a user account,” said Fayer.

The acquisition of Simplex will also provide Nuvei with an electronic money institution (EMI) license to offer international bank account numbers (IBANs) to clients and offer future banking and card issuing capabilities.

Simplex has permission to issue Visa cards. Last December, the firm became a principal member of Visa in Europe.

Founded in 2014, Simplex has raised $18 million to date and employs 160 people, co-founder and CEO Nimrod Lehavi told The Block. The firm would remain a separate entity within Nuvei, said Lehavi.

© 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.

Technology giant Amazon has rolled out a solution dedicated to Chia crypto mining on its AWS cloud computing platform.

According to a campaign page on the Amazon AWS Chinese site, the platform touts that users can deploy a cloud-based storage system in as quickly as five minutes in order to mine XCH, the native cryptocurrency on the Chia network.

The campaign page also provides a quick tutorial on how to use its cloud services to generate Chia wallet addresses, create a plot and then start farming. It appears the service is specifically targeting at Chinese users as the campaign page is in simplified Chinese only.

It’s unclear when exactly Amazon AWS started advertising the solution but it is yet another sign of an increasing level of attention and interest that Chia mining has received from Chinese investors. 

The Block reported last month that as Chinese retail investors flock into Chia mining, the prices of various hard drive models have been surging with some by as much as a 100% premium in China.

Although the market has plenty of hard drive supplies, some dealers and wholesalers appeared to have been hoarding stocks in order to flip on the prices. 

Founded in 2017, Chia is a decentralized storage network that aims to use hard drives as computing power to replace bitcoin’s energy-intensive proof-of-work mechanism. 

The mainnet for mining launched on March 19 and within the last two months, the storage power that is mining on the network has surged to more than one exabytes, which equals to the storage volume of more than 1 million units of 1 TB hard drives.

© 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.

Banking giant Citigroup is considering launching crypto trading, custody, and financing services.

Itay Tuchman, Citi’s global head of foreign exchange, told the Financial Times that the bank had seen a “very rapid” accumulation of interest in bitcoin from large clients since last August.

But Citi is in no rush to launch crypto services. Tuchman said the bank would jump in when it is confident it can build something that benefits clients and that regulators can support.

“I don’t have any FOMO [fear of missing out] because I believe that crypto is here to stay and that we are just at the very beginning of the market,” said Tuchman. “This isn’t a space race. There is room for more than just one flag.”

Citi is the latest Wall Street financial institution to consider moving into the crypto market. In recent weeks, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York Mellon, and others have moved to provide crypto services to their clients.

© 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.