FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Alchemy has raised $80 million in a Series B funding round at a valuation of more than $505 million.

Founded in 2017, the company offers projects and companies across the cryptocurrency market — ranging from decentralized exchanges to non-fungible token platforms — with developer tools to build blockchain-based products. Those tools range from node management, handling the communication points within a blockchain network, to its so-called Alchemy monitor, which helps developers view the functionality of apps built on their networks. 

“Our business powers tens of millions of end-users across a broad set of verticals,” said Alchemy’s CEO Nikil Viswanathan, a native of Texas. Viswanathan co-founded the firm with Joe Lau, a former engineer at Google and Pinterest.

Marketing materials shared with The Block compares the firm to Amazon Web Services, which comprises the bulk of the online retailer’s business. 

The raise, led by Coatue Management, a hedge fund with more than $37 billion in assets under management across its funds, will help the firm scale its business and support new blockchains. 

“We’re seeing a lot of exciting growth across the industry, and we’ll be using the new financing to expand to new blockchains and grow internationally,” Lau said. “We’re incredibly excited to continue empowering and supporting developers.”

Coatue notably led the $305 million fundraise for Dapper Lab, the NFT firm behind the popular NBA Top Shot. A source familiar with Coatues’ strategy says that they typically bet big when they find an industry on which they’re bullish. The secretive fund, which has been shepherded by billionaire Phillippe Laffont, made headlines in 2019 for the launch of a $700 million venture fund. Former Facebook VP Dan Rose leads the fund, and Kris Frederickson, a managing partner, led the round for Coatue. 

“Alchemy’s developer platform has been transformative in powering the blockchain industry,” Frederickson said in a press statement. “We’re excited about businesses that are fundamental building blocks for industries.”

New additions to the cap table include Lee Fixel, the former Tiger Global executive who has backed firms like Stripe, Warby Parker, and Spotify, and billionaire Charles Schwab, founder of the eponymous financial services firm. Crypto industry firms Pantera and Coinbase, existing Alchemy investors, also took part in the round.

“Alchemy is playing a key role in accelerating the development of the blockchain ecosystem,” Fixel said in a statement shared with The Block. “Their developer platform powers many of the best companies in the space.”

Alchemy operates in a corner of the crypto market that has drawn growing interest from investors. Unsurprisingly, many of the industry’s infrastructure-focused companies seek to compare themselves to AWS. These include Starkware, the scalability firm which recently announced a $75 million raise, and Bison Trails, which was acquired by the publicly traded crypto exchange Coinbase.

Nor is it surprising that crypto firms have set their sights on AWS as a model, given that the business hauled in some $13.5 billion in operating profits last year. 

Still, Alchemy says its differentiator is broader from a product perspective. The company also highlighted how 70% of the world’s most-used Ethereum apps use Alchemy’s technology. 

“Alchemy powers the major players in the blockchain industry,” Viswanathan said.  “We’ve spent years developing technology to provide the only comprehensive platform enabling developers to build products used by millions.”

Indeed, the firm says it has grown 97x in the last eight months, buoyed by the surge in activity in the NFT market.

As noted in a profile by Bloomberg News, the firm powers nearly every major NFT market including OpenSea, Dapper Labs, SuperRare, and Zora. 

© 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.

ConsenSys-owned Ethereum wallet MetaMask has crossed 5 million monthly active users or MAUs.

ConsenSys said MetaMask has grown five times in the past six months, thanks to the increasing use of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) applications. In October 2020, MetaMask had over 1 million cumulative monthly active users.

A growing number of users are utilizing the MetaMask Swaps feature, said ConsenSys. The feature, launched last October, allows users to swap tokens directly from their wallets across decentralized exchanges, aggregators, and market makers.

Behind swaps, accessing NFTs is the second most popular use case for MetaMask, said ConsenSys. 

As for its top markets, India and Indonesia are both in the top 5 countries for MetaMask mobile adoption, said ConsenSys, adding that Vietnam and Nigeria are in the top 10.

“Increasingly, these people use MetaMask to earn a supplemental income or to make long-term investments,” said the firm. “Many are unable to access their local banking system and thus need alternative technology to act as a savings account.”

MetaMask was launched in 2016, and up until 2019, it had only been available as a desktop browser extension. MetaMask began releasing mobile app versions for closed beta testing in 2019, followed by their official public release in September 2020 for both or iOS and Android.

© 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

• Gas in Ethereum is fuel for transactions and protection against spam attacks.
• Berlin hardfork changed the gas costs of some EVM operations, which seriously affected the cost of functions using them.
• Optional access lists added in Berlin hardfork are not a gas costs reduction tool and, if misused, will increase fees.

This research piece is available to
members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.

Uranium Finance, a Binance Smart Chain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) project, says it suffered exploitation early Wednesday and lost $50 million.

Several tokens, including bitcoin and ether, were drained from the Uranium protocol, according to The Block Research’s Igor Igamberdiev.

Specifically, 80 bitcoin ($4.3 million), 1,800 ETH ($4.7 million), 17.9 million BUSD ($17.9 million), 5.7 million USDT ($5.7 million), 638,000 ADA ($0.8 million), 26,500 DOT ($0.8 million), 34,000 wrapped BNB ($18 million), and 112,000 U92 tokens, a native token of Uranium, were drained.

Uranium, which was launched this month, said the exploitation took place during the migration of its protocol to the V2.1 version. Uranium is an automated market maker (AMM) protocol, forked from Uniswap V2, and claims to give daily dividends to its users.

“In our pools and farms, you’re rewarded with our U92 token, like every other DEX [decentralized exchange]. The difference is that we have created a second token, the U92 counterpart : U235. Holding this token on your wallet makes you an investor of our AMM, making you earn dividends in BNB and BUSD every block,” reads Uranium’s website.

It is not clear what exactly went wrong amid migration, but according to Igamberdiev, pair contracts in Uranium V2 had a bug.

Due to this bug, anyone could interact with the pair contracts and withdraw almost all tokens. Pair contracts are smart contracts for special pairs in an AMM, say, for example, WETH-USDC.

Essentially, the bug allowed the exploiter to use a swap function in Uranium to drain the funds.

The exploiter has already started moving and withdrawing funds. About $6.4 million or 2,438 ETH has been withdrawn via Tornado Cash, an Ethereum mixer based on zero-knowledge proofs technology that lets users withdraw funds anonymously.

The exploiter first swapped DOT and ADA tokens to ETH via Binance Smart Chain-based decentralized exchange PancakeSwap. Then they swapped BSC version of ETH to Ethereum version of ETH via AnySwap, a cross-chain swap protocol.

All 80 bitcoin have also been withdrawn using AnySwap.

This could be an insider job or a rug pull, according to Igamberdiev, because Uranium’s V2 version had a bug and its team did not perform a white hat attack before the migration.

The Uranium contracts’ repository has also been removed from Github for some unknown reasons.

The Block has reached out to Uranium for comments and will update this story should we hear back.

© 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 giants JPMorgan and DBS, along with Singapore state investor Temasek, have formed a new blockchain company to improve cross-border payments.

Dubbed Partior, the company aims to resolve pain points or frictions of payments, trade, and foreign exchange settlement through blockchain technology.

Partior would develop a “blockchain-based wholesale payments infrastructure where information and value can change hands around the world in a 24/7, frictionless way,” said JPMorgan’s global head of wholesale payments Takis Georgakopoulos.

When complete, the infrastructure will enable financial institutions and developers to jointly create applications that support use cases such as forex payment versus payment, delivery versus payment, and peer-to-peer escrows.

Partior will initially focus on facilitating payments between Singapore-based banks in both Singapore dollar and U.S. dollar. It then plans to expand offerings to other markets and in various currencies. Central bank digital currency (CBDC) use cases will also be supported in the future, said the three companies.

JPMorgan, DBS, and Temasek have previously worked on Project Ubin, the Singapore central bank’s initiative that explored the application of blockchain technology in multi-currency payments and settlements.

Now through the operation of Partior, which is subject to regulatory approvals, the three companies aim to “transform interbank value movements in a new digital era.”

“The launch of Partior is a global watershed moment for digital currencies, marking a move from pilots and experimentations towards commercialization and live adoption,” said Sopnendu Mohanty, chief fintech officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore. “Partior is a pioneering step towards providing foundational global infrastructure for transacting with digital currencies in a trusted environment, spurring a wide range of use-cases in the blockchain ecosystem.”

© 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.

Tokyo-based video game maker Nexon becomes the latest publicly listed technology firm that is allocating parts of its cash into bitcoin.

The firm said in an announcement on Wednesday that it has purchased 1,1717 bitcoin with a total cost of $100 million at an average price of $58,226 including fees and expenses.

At bitcoin’s current price, the investment right now is worth around $95 million.

Nexon said the allocation represents less than 2% of its total cash and cash equivalents as of December 2020. 

“Our purchase of bitcoin reflects a disciplined strategy for protecting shareholder value and for maintaining the purchasing power of our cash assets,” Nexon’s president and CEO Owen Mahoney said in the statement, adding:

“In the current economic environment, we believe bitcoin offers long-term stability and liquidity while maintaining the value of our cash for future investments.”

Founded in the 1990s in Seoul, Nexon specializes in producing PC and mobile games. The firm later moved its headquarter to Japan and went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2011.

© 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.

Visa CEO Al Kelly discussed the payments giant’s crypto ambitions during an earnings call on Tuesday, describing the firm as “extremely well-positioned” to do so. 

As previously reported, Visa is undertaking a multi-pronged strategy as it relates to its services related to bitcoin, stablecoins and, on a longer time-horizon, central bank digital currencies or CBDCs. It’s an area he has elaborated on in the past, including a podcast appearance this spring during which he positioned such plans in the context of Visa being at the intersection of new payment technologies. 

During the Tuesday earnings call, Kelly again drew a distinction between the different elements of the broader plan, citing the spending and purchase of cryptocurrencies, crypto-related APIs for financial institutions, settlements via stablecoins and CBDCs. 

“So our focus is on five different opportunities that we see in this space and I would say that this is space that we are leaning into in a very big way and I think are extremely well-positioned,” Kelly said during the call.

In the topic of CBDCs, Visa said that the firm is in conversation with central banks about their development, suggesting that the payments firm could play a role in that process. 

“We’re talking to central banks about the criticality of public/private partnership and in particular the criticality of acceptance because for these central bank digital currencies to have value, they’re going to have to both be secure in the minds of consumers and that’s something we have a long track record with and could help and then secondly obviously they have to have some form of utility,” Kelly said. 

© 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 Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received a growing number of business email compromise complaints involving cryptocurrency from 2018 to 2020, according to an April 13 alert.

IC3, the information center through which victims of an internet crime can file complaints to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, notes there are two main types of crypto-related business email compromise (BEC) scams. One involves hackers sending funds from the victim’s account directly to a cryptocurrency exchange, wherein the hacker controls the associated crypto wallet. The second is called a “second hop” transfer, in which the BEC victim’s funds fill a crypto wallet established by a second victim the scammer defrauded. 

IC3 data shows that complaints of BEC increased from less than five in 2018 to 20 in 2020.  “Based on the data received, the IC3 expects this trend to continue into 2021,” according to the report.

More than $10 million in funds were lost due to crypto-based BEC scams in 2020, and crypto BEC scams include a higher average dollar loss compared to other types of fraud reported to IC3. 

© 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

• Brian Brooks — former head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and chief compliance officer of Coinbase — is joining crypto exchange Binance.US as CEO.
• The former regulator spoke with The Block about the major hurdles facing his new firm and how he plans to overcome them.

This feature story is available to
subscribers of The Block Daily.
You can continue reading
this Daily feature on The Block.

Per an April 27 blog post, U.S. Bank is finalizing cryptocurrency custody services.

The actual announcement says that the new services are contingent upon the selection of a sub-custodian to contract under U.S. Bank.

Christine Waldron, Chief Global Strategy Officer for Global Fund Services at U.S. Bank, told The Block “We have made the selection. We’re working through our operational integration and our risk and compliance process.” There is, however, no confirmed timeframe for when these services will go live. 

By assets under management, U.S. Bank is one of the largest in the country. The firm’s blockchain and crypto practice dates back to 2015. Those services have expanded in recent months, thanks in no small part to new guidance from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. 

In the middle of 2020, the OCC under Brian Brooks authorized national banks in the U.S. to custody crypto, following which the OCC began issuing national banking charters to crypto-native firms including custodian Anchorage and Paxos. 

Leadership at the OCC has changed, however, and there is political pressure, especially from Congressional Democrats, to undo the legacy of Brooks and his predecessor Joseph Otting.

Regarding this concern for crypto services, Waldron said: “We are moving forward based off of the most current guidance that we have. That’s the most important piece.”

Alongside the announcement of coming custody, U.S. Bank also highlighted its role in Securrency’s recent fundraising round and said it would be administering NYDIG’s much-anticipated Bitcoin ETF, pending approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission.  

© 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.