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The Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives argued on Tuesday that regulators can’t ignore bitcoin anymore.

In an interview with CNBC, Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said the base behind crypto is only going to continue to grow.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell have been cautious in their approach to crypto. When asked about that approach, McCarthy said regulators previously tried to ignore crypto to make it go away. Now, the ecosystem has grown to a place where they’ll have to take a closer look than they have in the past.

“Those who regulate, those who are in government that make policy better start understanding what it means for the future because other countries are moving forward, especially China,” he said.

McCarthy has previously spoken out on crypto issues, advising the government to research how blockchain could improve governmental work. He also took to CNBC in 2019 to say he liked the decentralized nature of bitcoin, but that it was not yet where it needed to be in terms of combatting illicit finance.  

© 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, the Ethereum-focused software company, has raised $65 million from a group that includes a pair of major banks, a top financial services firm and an array of digital asset industry startups and investors.

Among those backing the formation round, according to a press statement shared with The Block, is JPMorgan, whose involvement was reported by The Block last August. That same month, ConsenSys confirmed that it had secured a strategic investment from JPM as well as acquired Quorum, the Wall Street bank’s blockchain unit. Quorum is a private blockchain network developed within JPMorgan using the Ethereum technology stack as a basis.

UBS and Mastercard also took part in Tuesday’s $65 million funding round, as well as FTX owner Alameda Research, Protocol Labs, Fenbushi, the Maker Foundation, The LAO, Liberty City Ventures, the Greater Bay Area Homeland Development Fund and Quotidian Ventures. The $65 million was raised via a convertible note.

“When we set out to raise a round, it was important to us to patiently construct a diverse cap table, consistent with our belief that similar to how the web developed, the whole economy would join the revolutionaries on a next generation protocol,” ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin said in a statement.

The participation by the Greater Bay Area Homeland Development Fund — a private equity fund backed by both private and state-owned companies in China — is notable, given ConsenSys’s activities in the region. In January, the firm announced that it was partnering with the Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) via integration with Quorum.

More broadly, the funding round is perhaps a sign that investors are as eager to bet on technology-focused firms as they are on those dedicated to digital asset investment services.

“Our investment in ConsenSys adds proven expertise in distributed ledger technology to our UBS Next portfolio,” Mike Dargan, head of group technology for UBS, said in a statement. “This investment underscores our commitment to working with fintechs and the broader tech ecosystem to shape the future of banking for the benefits of our clients.”

At the same time, the new fundraise caps a period of reorganization and reinvention for the Brooklyn-based ConsenSys. In February 2020, ConsenSys moved to divide its business between software development and investment activity. As part of the process, ConsenSys conducted a round of layoffs, which followed a previous staff cut in December 2018.

“The business is focused on two goals: providing developer tools and infrastructure for the developer, decentralized finance, and startup communities; and helping enterprises in the financial services, trade finance, and commerce sectors deploy and operationalize blockchain solutions,” ConsenSys said 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.

A recently formed investment vehicle specializing in non-fungible token (NFT) investments has raised £35 million before expenses through a listing on the Aquis Stock Exchange Growth Market in London.

NFT Investments, which had initially targeted a raise of £10 million, claims the larger sum of money sets a record for the largest amount raised on the Aquis Stock Exchange (AQSE). The raise gives the company a market capitalization of £50 million, double the valuation it had sought at the start of April.  

“It is deeply gratifying to receive strong interest from a wide range of institutional and private investors who share our belief in the vast growth potential for NFTs, just as the cryptocurrency sector has shown so far. We have upsized our offer to broaden and democratize access to this hard-to-reach market,” said Jonathan Bixby, executive chairman of NFT Investments.

The company’s shares will begin trading on the AQSE on April 16.

Incorporated on March 3 this year, NFT Investments was launched by the co-founders of Argo Blockchain, a London-listed crypto mining company valued at more than $1 billion.

Now jumping on the NFT bandwagon, Bixby told The Block in a recent interview that NFT Investments will take a three-pronged approach to investing in the space.

A third of its funds will be spent buying, selling and storing NFTs from the gaming and art sectors; a third will be invested into infrastructure firms, such as Dapper Labs and Rarible; with the final third spent on acquiring the NFT-linked digital rights of celebrities.

© 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

• Founded in 2018 by Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin, NEAR Protocol is an open-source platform for decentralized applications
• Last week, NEAR’s bridge to Ethereum, called Rainbow Bridge, officially launched, allowing any user who owns assets on Ethereum to be able to transfer them on NEAR’s blockchain or vice versa
• In total, The Block has identified 93 projects and companies across 12 different verticals currently expanding on its ecosystem

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Investment banking giant HSBC has confirmed banning customers of HSBC InvestDirect from buying MicroStrategy shares due to bitcoin concerns.

“HSBC has no appetite for direct exposure to virtual currencies [VCs] and limited appetite to facilitate products or securities that derive their value from VCs,” an HSBC spokesperson told The Block.

Last week, a message from HSBC, dated March 29, surfaced on social media. That message directed HSBC InvestDirect users who already own MicroStrategy shares not to buy or transfer in additional stock. The bank, however, allows holding, sale, and outgoing transfers of MicroStrategy shares.

MicroStrategy is a pro-bitcoin company. The company owns 90,531 bitcoin, currently worth around $5.5 billion. On Monday, MicroStrategy also pivoted to bitcoin payouts for non-employee directors.

HSBC remains crypto-cautious at a time when a growing number of banks are dipping their toes into the crypto space. Goldman Sachs said last month it would offer bitcoin and other crypto investment vehicles to private wealth management clients in the second quarter of this year. Morgan Stanley has also started offering clients investments in the crypto space.

It is not clear whether HSBC’s restrictions only apply to MicroStrategy stock or also shares of companies like Tesla and Square as both these companies hold bitcoin on their balance sheets. It is also not clear whether bitcoin mining stocks like Riot Blockchain, HIVE Blockchain, and Hut 8 Mining are part of the restrictions.

The HSBC spokesperson told The Block that the restrictions aren’t new and have been in place since 2018.

It is unclear whether HSBC restricts all its customers worldwide from buying MicroStrategy stock or customers of select countries only. The spokesperson told The Block that the message was sent to customers in Canada.

HSBC InvestDirect is a division of HSBC Securities (Canada) Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of HSBC Bank Canada. HSBC Securities, on the other hand, operates globally.

© 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.

Bitcoin’s price has crossed the $62,000 mark for the first time.

Bitcoin is currently trading at around $62,400 on Coinbase, according to tracker TradingView. 

The price of bitcoin crossed the $60,000 line for the first time in March and the $50,000 mark in February.

This is a breaking 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.

Computing hardware maker Nvidia is projecting as much as $150 million in revenue for its crypto mining-specific product line during the first quarter of the firm’s 2022 fiscal year.

The $150 million revenue estimate was included in an April 12 release, which came months after the firm confirmed that it would produce and sell so-called Cryptocurrency Mining Processor or CMPs. That move in February came as the firm responded to its gamer customer base’s outcry over GPU supplies being snapped up by crypto miners once they hit the market. 

As noted in Monday’s release:

“The company also raised its first-quarter revenue estimate for its new CMP product for industrial-scale cryptocurrency mining to $150 million, up from $50 million previously expected.”

Nvidia’s Q1 FY 2022 ends on April 27, encompassing the prior three months.

Nvidia did not provide any additional information regarding the estimates. However, recent revenue figures from the Ethereum mining space — which uses GPU products like Nvidia’s — suggest that demand for such hardware will continue amid a period of heightened digital asset prices.

The price of ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, hit a new all-time high on Monday. Per Coinbase data, ETH is currently trading at about $2,145.

© 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 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has minted its first collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

The six NFTs, referred to as “First Trades,” commemorate noteworthy listings in the past, with each token representing the exact moment a company became public. 

Traditionally, when a company carries out its initial public offering (IPO), its CEO will strike the NYSE First Trade bell, marking the moment the company joins the public market. Behind the scenes, the NYSE processes billions of order and trade messages. 

“Each message is recorded in our trading platform’s digital ledger. Only one of those messages marks the NYSE First Trade: the exact moment a company became public, creating an opportunity for others to share in their success,” wrote NYSE President Stacey Cunningham in a blog post on Monday. “The NYSE First Trade NFT memorializes that unique moment in a company’s history.”

The NFT collection celebrates the first trades of Spotify, Snowflake, Unity, DoorDash, Roblox and Coupang (the largest U.S. IPO in 2021 so far). 

Cunningham hinted that the exchange may release more NFTs in the near future. 

© 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 crypto industry working group committed to patent sharing is asking the United Kingdom High Court to rule that Craig Wright does not own the Bitcoin white paper.

The civil suit from the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) challenges claims Wright has continuously made in recent years that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin and the author of the white paper. The white paper was published in 2008.

Wright’s claims have been broadly criticized and dismissed, but he has continued to issue copyright infringement notices to multiple venues in an effort to get them to remove copies of the white paper. 

Most recently, his legal representatives sent notices to Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org. This sparked a wave of opposition and new efforts to host the white paper in response, including multiple members of Congress. 

COPA, a patent-sharing consortium founded by payments firm Square, first spoke out against Wright’s tactics after he served the cease and desist notices. At the time, COPA sent a response to the notices, asking Wright to provide evidence as to the claim to copyright under UK law.

Now, the group wants Wright to answer those questions in court. 

COPA filed a lawsuit today asking the Intellectual Property List of the High Court of Justice Business and Property Courts of England and Wales to declare that Wright does not own the Bitcoin white paper. It claims Wright is neither the author nor the owner of the white paper, and any use of the white paper doesn’t infringe on any copyright held by Wright. 

Consequently, the group is seeking an injunction to restrain Wright from claiming he is the owner. COPA is also asking for an order that would require Wright to foot the bill for disseminating information that he is not the owner.

© 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.

Digital artist Pak has launched a non-fungible token (NFT) burning platform called burn.art and a token dubbed ASH.

Sharing the news exclusively with The Block, a spokesperson for Pak and Sotheby’s told The Block that burn.art allows any NFT owner to burn their NFTs and obtain ASH in return. “Burning” refers to the process of permanently removing a crypto token from circulation, or, in this case, the NFT connected to a particular piece of digital art or media. 

In a sense, the Pak-led project seems to be both a performance piece as well as an effort to create an art-specific digital currency. Perhaps reflecting this positioning, NFT owners willing to destroy their NFTs for ASH will be asked by burn.art: “Which do they value more, the artwork or the token?”

When asked why anyone would burn their NFTs, the spokesperson told The Block: “In some future NFT collections by Pak, they will choose to accept only ASH as a medium of exchange. As a permissionless currency, ASH can take on a life of its own.”

Any artist, auction house, or artist collective can also decide in the future if they wish to accept ASH as currency, the spokesperson added.

ASH is an ERC-20 standard token on the Ethereum network, the spokesperson said, adding that at the moment, burning NFTs on burn.art is the only method of earning ASH.

The conversion rate between an NFT and ASH will be determined by a bonding curve that balances price against available supply, though the ratio’s specifics are not clear as of press time. “The more NFTs that are burned, the fewer ASH each one will yield,” said the spokesperson. Owners of Pak’s NFTs, however, will yield “more ASH than non-Pak NFTs,” said the spokesperson.

Pak is currently selling “The Fungible Collection” NFTs in collaboration with auction house Sotheby’s, exclusively on Gemini’s Nifty Gateway. The sale started Monday and ends on April 14.

The launch of burn.art comes just after the first Open Edition sale of The Fungible Collection. The edition saw 14,882 units of “Cubes” sold, each worth $500, making the total nearly $7.5 million. The sale was open for 15 minutes.

Participants in The Fungible Collection sale will be able to burn their NFTs on burn.art after they are minted, i.e. after April 14, the spokesperson told The Block.

© 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.