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The Chicago-based trading venue operator CME Group has no plans to launch a dogecoin futures product, The Block has confirmed.

The confirmation comes hours after a controversial tweet from a breaking-news Twitter account sparked a speculative tizzy within the social media platform’s industry ecosystem known popularly as Crypto Twitter.

“CHICAGO MERCANTILE EXCHANGE SAID TO LAUNCH DOGECOIN FUTURES,” read the tweet from @FirstSquawk, which aggregates breaking news headlines from the business world. An email sent to an address on its operator’s website regarding the source of the information was not returned by press time.

Prior to The Block’s confirmation, sources within the institutional trading world balked at the tweet, noting that CME would have updated them on such a product. 

“No one from CME had asked us about it,” one trading executive said. “Usually they give us a look.”

First Squawk was among a range of Twitter accounts that signal boosted a still-unsubstantiated headline over the weekend that read “U.S. TREASURY TO CHARGE SEVERAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS FOR MONEY LAUNDERING USING CRYPTOCURRENCIES.” Some market observers have drawn a connection between the spread of the headline and this weekend’s market plunge and cascade of futures liquidations.

Dogecoin has been on a tear over the last several trading session, sporting a market cap above $40 billion, and the meme-themed cryptocurrency has been evangelized by billionaires investors such as Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. Robinhood said Friday that dogecoin-related activity on its platform triggered a temporary interruption. 

Dogecoin surged during Sunday’s trading session, but the price has since slipped, trading down 3.12% according to TradingView data. 

© 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.

Bitmain, the Beijing-based mining hardware giant, has hinted that its upcoming Ethereum ASIC miner could outperform all rival products currently on the market.

The firm announced on Friday that it would launch its AntMiner E9 soon but did not provide specific details of the equipment’s tech specification.

In a tweet on Sunday, Bitmain claimed the new Ethereum ASIC miner would be “a game changer” and added the hash rate of one AntMiner E9 is equivalent to 32 Nvidia  3080 GPUs.

According to miner profitability tracked by F2Pool and Poolin, 8 Nvidia’s 3080 cards jointly deliver 760 megahashes per second (MH/s) of computing power. At Ethereum’s current price and network difficulty, they are able to mine 0.04331290 ETH, worth around $90 as of writing, as daily revenue. 

Bitmain’s claim would mean its AntMiner E9 can compute at roughly 3,040 MH/s, which, if tested and proven when it actually hits the market, would outperform rival products by more than 3x.

That said, Bitmain didn’t provide details about the E9’s energy consumption or the product’s expected prices. It also remains to be seen how soon it is able to ship the E9 amid an ongoing global chip shortage. 

Currently, InnoSilicon’s A10 Pro with a 7GB memory is the most advanced Ethereum ASIC miner on the market, capable of producing as much as 740 MH/s. 

The Block reported last year that F2Pool reviewed a sample unit of the Phoenix Ethash ASIC miner made by Shenzhen-based upstart manufacturer Linzhi, which had been in the works for more than two years.

F2Pool’s test showed Linzhi’s hardware delivered 2,733 MH/s, which was already more advanced than the most top-of-the-line equipment available on the market at the time.

© 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.

This weekend’s market turmoil resulted in the triggering of roughly 864,000 crypto futures liquidations, a new single-day record according to data collected by The Block.

As shown in the chart below, about 70 percent of those liquidations — some 613,000 — occurred on crypto exchange Binance.

In total, $8.46 billion in long liquidations occurred on April 17, as shown in the chart below. $4.35 billion and $1.59 billion took place on Binance and Huobi, respectively. Of the total value of liquidations, $4.6 billion were bitcoin futures liquidations.

The price of bitcoin touched a low of $51,300 on Coinbase amid the Saturday market tumult before recovering above the $55,000 level. At press time, the price of bitcoin is trading at roughly $55,200. 

Seven of the top-10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization have posted declines in excess of 10 percent in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. 

© 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.

$7.6 billion worth-of crypto long positions have been liquidated over the past hour as bitcoin’s price plunged to $52,000, data from bybt.com shows.

Bitcoin’s price has started to trend downwards since early Saturday but the sudden plunge began around 3:00 UTC Time on Sunday. 

Bitcoin’s price dropped by more than 10% over the past hour from $5,8000 to below $52,000, during which around $4.3 billion in bitcoin long positions have been liquidated.

As of writing, bitcoin’s price has bounced back to around $55,000.

Overall, $9.2 billion worth-of crypto long positions have been liquidated in the last 24 hours.

© 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.

Aggregated open interest of Ethereum options reached record highs on Thursday, according to data compiled by The Block Research. 

The high sits at $3.57 billion, with Deribit constituting $3.39 billion (95%) of the total and the remainder from OKEx. 

In all, the aggregated open interest of Ethereum options rose 393% this year from $755 million on January 1 to the high on Thursday. 

© 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.

Billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the basketball team Dallas Mavericks has made a strategic investment in NFT data platform CryptoSlam.

Cuban invested in the startup via his venture capital firm Radical Investments. CryptoSlam declined to share the investment sum but said this is its first external round since its inception in 2018.

“Until now, I’d been bootstrapping CryptoSlam since inception,” CryptoSlam founder and CEO Randy Wasinger told The Block.

With fresh capital at hand, CryptoSlam plans to scale its team and add support for more blockchains on the platform. At present, CryptoSlam fetches data from Ethereum, Flow, and WAX blockchains.

Wasinger told The Block that if any blockchain ends up with NFTs that the market cares about, CryptoSlam is committed to adding them. These include Binance Smart Chain, Immutable X, Polygon (formerly Matic Network), and the Ronin sidechain, said Wasinger.

“CryptoSlam has become the industry leader in tracking transactions for NFTs — from watching in real-time what is being listed and sold on NBA Top Shots to being able to trade your NFTs. And that dominance is only growing,” said Cuban. “I’m excited to be part of the amazing company Randy is putting together.”

Cuban has invested in several NFT-related platforms in recent weeks. These include Lazy, Mintable, and NFT42.

Besides Cuban, Troon Technologies, Aloomii, and GeoAds also contributed to CryptoSlam’s “angel” investment round. Aloomii and GeoAds are owned by CryptoSlam’s existing employees Yohann Calpu and Ryan Wasinger, respectively.

With their investment, “Yohann and Ryan are now ‘minority partners’ and integral parts of the CryptoSlam team,” Wasinger told The Block. She further said that the two, along with her and David Mancuso of Troon Technologies, now all have board seats in CryptoSlam.

© 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.

Dapper Labs, the NFT development platform behind NBA Top Shot, is raising money at a $7.5 billion valuation in a round led by Coatue Management, according to the tech news publication The Information. 

The three-year-old Dapper Labs had just completed a $305 million funding round on March 30, which valued Dapper at $2.6 billion. That raise was also led by Coatue Management, an investment firm that has also backed Instacart and Airtable.

Coatue’s interest in the Dapper coincides with the recent NFT boom, during which Dapper’s NBA Top Shot has regularly comprised the majority of weekly users of NFT platforms. 

Dapper Labs’ most recent funding round has not finished, notes The Information, and the final valuation could increase should more investors get involved.

© 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 brokers are making money hand over fist. 

The direct listing of Coinbase put on display just how much money such firms are making, with the exchange reporting nearly $2 billion in revenues during the first quarter of 2021. Much of those revenues were transactional and from trades made on its retail brokerage platform.

Other large brokerages want in on the action, according to Edward Woodford, CEO of crypto firm ZeroHash. The Chicago-based firm works with brokers to jumpstart their own solutions to serve retail clients. On this episode of The Scoop, Woodford joins options brokerage industry trailblazer Tom Sosnoff to discuss why brokers want to create one-stop shops for their clients by incorporating crypto trading as well as the revenue opportunities crypto presents.

Sosnoff founded tastyworks, which began offering crypto through a partnership with ZeroHash announced at the end of last year.

© 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.

A surge in popularity for Dogecoin was behind a temporary shutdown of Robinhood’s crypto trading platform on Thursday night.

The cryptocurrency, a fork of Litecoin that was created as a joke and is named after a popular meme featuring a Shiba Inu, has witnessed significant price increases over the last few days. According to a blog post published Friday, one of Robinhood’s systems failed after the price of Dogecoin went past $0.25  on Thursday evening. That caused the crypto order system to also temporarily shut down.

According to the post, the system was back online in about an hour, though some customers continued to encounter issues trading.  The platform was fully back to normal after two hours, according to the post. 

The price of Dogecoin increased to nearly $0.50 on Friday morning, which again led to problems for some customers who were trying to place crypto orders. 

“These interruptions aren’t acceptable to us,” the Robinhood team wrote in the blog post. “Our teams are working around the clock to provide you with the highest level of service possible, and as interest in crypto continues over the weekend, we may continue to see intermittent service interruptions.”

 At press time, DOGE is trading at $0.35. 

© 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.

Luxury auction house Sotheby’s has auctioned off a non-fungible token (NFT) for nearly $17 million. 

The NFT, titled “The Fungible,” was created by Pak, an anonymous digital artist, and was auctioned in a two-day sale on NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway. In the two days, the sale garnered a total of $16,825,999. 

The collection included NFTs in the form of digital “cubes.” The individual NFTs were: A Cube (1), Five Cubes (5), Ten Cubes (10), Twenty Cubes (20), Fifty Cubes (50), Hundred Cubes (100), Five Hundred Cubes (500), and Thousand Cubes (1,000).

While the total amount made from the sale pales in comparison to the staggering $69.4 million that popular auction house Christie’s made on its Beeple 5000-day collection sale, the collection still fetched numerous bids in the 48 hours it was listed.

The sale encountered some technical difficulties which Sotheby’s says were resolved. Nifty Gateway experienced issues with processing credit card payments on April 13, but the sale was restarted shortly afterward. 

Pak, whose identity remains a mystery, has been active in the world of digital art for over twenty years. In addition to using technology to create artwork, they are also the founder and lead designer of the studio Undream. In addition to this, Pak also created Archillect, an AI that finds and displays visual media. 

“This was an incredible journey with you all. Thank you,” they tweeted. “Now, we keep building.”

© 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.