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Coinbase has joined the Defi Alliance, an organization that supports decentralized finance (DeFi) startups, the crypto exchange company announced Thursday. 

The association was founded almost exactly a year ago by a group of Chicago-based crypto organizations: Volt Capital, Jump Capital, CMT Trading and DRW Trading. According to an earlier blog post, the alliance aims to “provide entrepreneurs and start-ups in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space with meaningful support and guidance with respect to trading and applicable regulations.”

According to its website, the DeFi Alliance provides mentorship and support to emerging projects in the DeFi space. It also hosts Accelerate DeFi, an eight-week program that is meant to provide startups with the resources they need to build, develop and grow their platforms. 

“DeFi expands the concept of digital currency based on Bitcoin’s basic premise of digital currency,” the Coinbase team wrote in a blog post. “DeFi has the potential to create a more open, free and fair financial market for anyone with Internet access.”

According to data collected by The Block, DeFi protocols generated more than $200 million in revenue last 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.

London-based neo-bank Revolut announced Thursday that it has added the option for users to buy and sell 11 more crypto-tokens, bringing the total number of digital coins it lists to 21. 

“2021 is the year of crypto at Revolut,” the firm said in an email sent to customers Thursday, adding that the 11 additions are “some of the hottest coins in crypto right now.”

The new list includes Cardano, Uniswap, Synthetix, Yearn Finance, Uma, Bancor, Filecoin, Numeraire, Loopring, Orchid, and The Graph. The coins the platform had already supported are Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple (XRP), Stellar (XLM), EOS, OMG Network (OMG), Tezos (XTZ), and 0x (ZRX). 

As of 2019, Revolut customers — which now include people in more than 35 countries — held more than $120 million in cryptocurrency. Revolut’s U.S. customers, who can trade crypto thanks to the neo-bank’s partnership with Paxos launched last year, can only access Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin.

The large addition of new tokens — a mixture of currencies native to trendy blockchain projects and coins associated with more obscure projects that have been around for years — reflects the recent trend of popular fintech platforms adding crypto features. 

© 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.

Major auction house Christie’s will sell a collection of nine CryptoPunks – widely considered to be the first non-fungible token (NFT) projects released on the Ethereum blockchain – in a sale next month.

According to an announcement published Thursday, the auction house will auction off a sample of the popular NFT project at its 21st Century Evening Sale on May 13 in New York. Specifically, CryptoPunk founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson are selling the nine CryptoPunks from their own collections.

“Taken together, the set represents both the rarest possible CryptoPunks and highlights from the variety of attributes that are the signature of the project,” Hall and Watkinson said in a statement published by the auction house.

Like the recent Beeple NFT sale, Christie’s will accept bids and payments in the form of ether, Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency. 

Released in June 2017 by software company Larva Labs, CryptoPunks features a collection of 24×24 8-bit-style pixel images. In total, there are 10,000 unique collectible characters. Proof of ownership for each character is recorded in a contract on the Ethereum blockchain. Each of the unique characters sports different characteristics, accessories, and traits, and some CryptoPunks are considered rarer than others. 

Image taken from Christie’s via CryptoPunks.

© 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 fraud case that began in 2019 has come to a $32 million conclusion.

On Thursday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission saw a default judgment in the commission’s favor in its case against Circle Society and its operator, David Gilbert Saffron. 

The Circle Society, which is unrelated to USDC issuer Circle, was a vehicle for Saffron to allegedly lie to investors about his forex and crypto investing expertise and persuade them to send funds to his personal crypto wallet, where they languished rather than going into any innovative trading strategy.

Prosecutors argued that Circle Society’s new investments were being paid out to existing stakeholders until Saffron eventually stopped making payments — in effect, the collapse of the scheme. 

The CFTC says that, since 2017, Saffron defrauded investors out of nearly $16 million in Bitcoin and U.S. dollars. Per today’s judgment, Saffron owes $14,841,280 to defrauded pool participants, $15,815,967 in disgorgement, and $1,484,128 in penalties to the CFTC. 

The case began in September 2019, with the court ultimately frustrated at Saffron’s inability to produce private keys for the crypto wallets 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.

Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, isn’t convinced by the bitcoin narrative yet, but it’s listening.

On this week’s episode of The Scoop, Bridgewater’s director of portfolio strategy Jim Haskel said he’s not surprised by the growing institutional interest.

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio previously said he didn’t see bitcoin’s merits as a currency, but he amended his statements in a newsletter published earlier this year. 

“I believe Bitcoin is one hell of an invention,” Dalio wrote at the time.

Haskel said Bridgewater remains skeptical but also recognizes bitcoin’s “fantastic” attributes. Though the cryptocurrency’s price remains volatile and lacks some of the characteristics of traditional wealth from Bridgewater’s point of view, Haskel says he sees potential.

“What I would say is that we certainly have not rejected it as a potential store hold of wealth,” Haskel remarked. “We just wouldn’t use it in big size yet.”

On this week’s episode, Haskell talked about Bridgewater’s unfolding bitcoin strategy as well as:

• If it’s still possible for funds to have access to unsustainable levels of leverage
• Whether the inflation alarmists are justified
• What the impact of continued monetary and fiscal actions will be on asset prices and how that affects allocations to alternatives
• How Bridgewater started considering bitcoin as an inflation hedge.

© 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 size of Coinbase’s public listing alone will reset the industry’s total annual aggregate financing as seen to date, which has equated to roughly $15.8 billion from 2015 to 2020. In what will be a landmark year in digital asset/blockchain financing, our presentation covers early trends in the private markets and M&A activity that has occurred during the first quarter.

This session will provide investors and enthusiasts with intelligence on which verticals are garnering the most interest and capital, and which funds have been the most active to start the year.

View the associated slides here, and the full video below.

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In a virtual press conference Thursday, senior leaders from Russia’s central bank provided key details about plans to release a central bank digital currency (CBDC). 

Deputy governor Alexei Zabotkin and first deputy governor Olga Skorobogatova disclosed how, based on the current timeline, a full launch could take place in 2023. 

The announcement today builds on what was previously known for the Russian central bank’s plan to roll out the digital ruble. As The Block previously reported, the bank intended to implement digital ruble infrastructure by the end of 2021 and test digital ruble prototypes by 2022. Now, it seems Russia’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) will become a reality in two years. 

Some of the operational specifics of how a digital ruble would work were also discussed during the event.

For example, the central bank will endeavor to curb non-cash transactions in order to create a smoother transition to the digital ruble. Narrowing non-cash transactions will hopefully offset liquidity shortages when the digital ruble rolls out, Zabotkin said. 

The CBDC will also have a two-tiered system, akin to China’s digital yuan, wherein the central bank distributes the CBDC to third-party firms like commercial banks that then distribute the CBDC to users.

Olga Skorobogatova, a Bank of Russia board member, said in the conference today that 73% of transactions in Russia have gone digital — a shift from Russia’s cash-only world from several years prior.

“A digital ruble functions as a third form of money. Why a third form? We have cash, we have non-cash, and a digital ruble will look like a token of the ruble, which incorporates the properties of cash and non-cash,” Skorobogatova 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.

Major business magazine Forbes has sold a non-fungible token of its latest issue cover for $333,333 to a bidder who goes by “mondoir.” 

The magazine’s first-ever NFT, titled “Merchants of the Metaverse,” features Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The 24-hour auction took place on NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway, ending on Thursday at 1:30 PM EST. 

Forbes has stated it will donate all proceeds of the sale to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). 

“We like to say our covers of the world’s billionaires and next-generation entrepreneurs are the most-valuable real-estate in media for their ability to capture the people who are shaping our world in real time,” said Forbes COO Randall Lane in a statement. “As we watch the rapid rise of cryptocurrency and its mainstreaming across the world, we’re capturing a unique moment in time and also playing a role ourselves.”

Nifty Gateway was purchased by the Winklevoss brothers in November 2019. The issue’s cover story features the two brothers and traces their history within the technology industry. 

Forbes is the latest in a line of major publications that have created NFTs. The New York Times sold an NFT tied to a column for nearly $560,000. TIME Magazine sold three of its issue covers for 81 ETH (about $131,000). Quartz sold its first NFT news article for 1 ETH (about $1,800). 

© 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.

Hong Kong-based app-maker Meitu’s originally outlined goal to invest $100 million in cryptocurrency has been achieved.

In a disclosure filing Thursday, the publicly-traded company said it purchased another 175 BTC to reach the $100 million mark it set for itself in its Cryptocurrency Investment Plan. The plan called for Meitu to add $100 million in BTC and ETH to its treasury, both as an investment and preparation for future initiatives. Meitu intends to use some of the ETH to launch decentralized apps in the future.

The publicly-traded firm first acquired $40 million in BTC and ETH in early March of this year, when it unveiled its intention to make further purchases. A week later, it purchased another $49 million. Today’s announcement is the final $10 million of the acquisition.

In total, Meitu holds 31,000 ETH (valued at $50.5 million) and 940 BTC (valued at $49.5 million).

Coinbase disclosed in late March that its institutional business facilitated the past purchases, a service it has provided for other public companies such as Tesla. It’s unclear if the latest purchases were also handled by Coinbase. 

Meitu is one of the first China-based publicly listed companies to add crypto to their treasury. Other tech firms like Square, Tesla and MicroStrategy made headlines in the past year for making similar acquisitions.

© 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.

Equilibrium, a Polkadot-based interoperable decentralized finance (DeFi) project, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding.

The funds were raised via a token sale, Equilibrium CEO Alex Melikhov told The Block.

Investors, including CMS Holdings, KR1, Signum Capital, AU21 Capital, and Genesis Block Ventures, purchased Equilibrium’s EQ tokens, said Melikhov.

With the investors on board, Equilibrium looks to participate in an upcoming Parachain Lease Offering of Polkadot and win a parachain slot. The offering is starting April 12 and will last for 14 days, said Melikhov.

Parachains are shards or part of the Polkadot network. Winning a parachain slot would help Equilibrium connect with the Polkadot ecosystem and interact with other parachains, i.e., other projects and bridges, Melikhov told The Block.

Polkadot has a set limit of 100 parachain slots to be offered. “The market cap of each project with the slot will be a cap of Polkadot, divided by the number of slots,” Melikhov told The Block. “Rough expectation of market caps for parachain projects is $420-430 million each.”

The current market cap of Equilibrium is around $320 million, said Melikhov. So if the project wins a parachain slot and its market cap increases, the investors would gain.

“After a parachain leasing slot is secured, the path is free for the value of our token to grow,” he said.

Equilibrium has estimated that it would require 1 million Polkadot’s DOT tokens (currently worth nearly $40 million) to win a parachain slot. Some of the Equilibrium’s investors are expected to stake DOT tokens so that the project could win a slot, Melikhov told The Block.

“They can participate either in a swap (swap DOT for EQ) or to stake in a crowdloan,” said Melikhov.

The Series A round brings Equilibrium’s total funding to date to $8 million. Last October, the project raised $5.5 million. 

© 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.