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Miami Mayor Francis Suarez turned heads earlier this year when he said he wanted the Florida city to add bitcoin to its treasury. 

Now, Suarez is pushing a commitment for the city to explore crypto by turning his attention to Ethereum. According to a new episode of The Scoop, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and Suarez announced that they have embarked on a new collaborative project focused on city services.

To be sure, it’s early days for the initiative, but the two have met on two occasions now and talks about the scope of the initiative continue.

“We’re trying to come up with a project that goes through the foundation and directly with Ethereum that we can do with the city,” said Suarez. “We want the city directly involved in a way that demonstrates the applicability of the software so that we can continue to provide better services for our residents.”

There’s a bit of history underpinning the developments: it was in Miami that Buterin, in 2014, first unveiled Ethereum to the world during a presentation at the Bitcoin Miami conference. 

According to Suarez, decentralized information systems are becoming a priority for Miami, especially with looming security concerns like the upcoming hurricane season.

During this week’s episode, Suarez and Buterin, along with Cryptex founders Preston Van Loon and Joe Sticco, also discussed:

• How the Ethereum ecosystem can help create jobs in Miami
• The ways in which decentralized systems would benefit the city, like the transfer of title records for real estate
• Why now is the time to start building a project like this despite Ethereum’s scalability issues
• How Florida is trying to join Wyoming in becoming the next regulatory bastion for crypto.

© 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 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has received a bitcoin donation worth nearly $400,000 from Huobi Charity.

Huobi Charity told The Block that it donated 7 BTC to UNICEF “in the second half of Q1 2021” when 1 BTC was priced at around $50,000. At current prices, the 7 BTC is worth about $405,000.

Huobi Charity said it has committed a total of $1 million to UNICEF in bitcoin and USD. The rest of the funds will be donated over three years, the firm added.

UNICEF’s global innovation director Thomas Davin told The Block that Huobi Charity donated 7 BTC to the UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund, and the rest of the committed funds will be donated to the UNICEF Innovation Fund.

The UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund was launched in October 2019 and since then has received 2,267 ETH and 8 BTC from three donors, including Huobi Charity, Davin told The Block. (The ETH holdings are worth nearly $5 million, and 8 BTC is worth over $460,000 at current prices).

Out of the total donations received, the UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund has made 12 investments, worth 1,225 ETH and 1 BTC, according to its website. Those investments are worth over $2.5 million at current prices.

“The CryptoFund makes crypto-denominated disbursements to companies that are developing software and data-driven solutions, or the research underlying these solutions, to address the most pressing challenges facing children and young people,” Davin told The Block.

“In the coming weeks, UNICEF is launching its next cohort of investments into companies developing blockchain solutions that can be useful for UNICEF in the field,” Davin added.

© 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 accounting platform Cryptio has raised $1.2 million in a seed funding round led by Draper Associates.

Other participants in the round included ConsenSys Ventures, Outlier Ventures, and Aave founder Stani Kulechov, among others.

With fresh capital at hand, the Paris-based Cryptio aims to scale its corporate accounting solution for digital assets. Founded in 2018, Cryptio provides an accounting platform that helps businesses with tax filing and other activities.

“Tax is only a tiny portion of what we are doing,” Cryptio founder and CEO Antoine Scalia told The Block in an exclusive interview. “As a business using crypto for payments, treasury, product development, I need to have a system that identifies all these accounting use cases and pushes the data properly in my accounting system.”

“A marketing expense done in USDC needs to be identified as such and then split into the rights accounts in my accounting system,” he added.

ConsenSys, Aave, and Centrifuge are among Cryptio’s current list of clients. The firm has a total of around 60 clients, Scalia told The Block.

Verady is Cryptio’s closest competitor, said Scalia, adding that the startup is focused on the U.S. market. Cryptio’s solution is global, said Scalia. “We have clients in the U.S., UK, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, and even Costa Rica and Venezuela.” Other indirect competitors of Cryptio include Lukka, Cointracker, and Cointracking, according to Scalia.

There are currently seven people working for Cryptio, and Scalia is looking to hire a product manager, a designer, and an engineer in the next six months.

The seed funding brings Cryptio’s total funding to date to $1.4 million. Last February, the firm raised a pre-seed round of $200,000 from ConsenSys Ventures and Outlier Ventures.

© 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 perpetual contracts offered by decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX have gone live on StarkWare, the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution.

The full launch means there is no more closed alpha of the scaling solution, which was launched in February with limited deposits. 

“With the transition to our Layer 2 protocol, we’ve built an entirely new product and trading system for cross-margined Perpetuals from the ground up,” said dYdX. “The product features a new and improved UI, truly instant trading, and all the advanced features traders expect while trading perpetuals.”

Traders can benefit from “zero gas costs, lower trading fees, and reduced minimum trade sizes,” dYdX explained.

dYdX first partnered with StarkWare last August to bring Ethereum scaling to its offerings; StarkWare utilizes ZK Rollups scaling technology for its solution, which, like Optimism’s Optimistic Rollups, are being developed in a bid to solve some of the scaling challenges facing the Ethereum

Both technologies have their pros and cons. dYdX said it chose ZK-Rollups because StarkWare’s solution was already in production when it first partnered with the startup. Decentralized exchange DeversiFi also uses StarkWare’s solution.

Synthetix, on the other hand, uses Optimism’s solution, and Uniswap is set to utilize Optimism in the coming months.

© 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 Stellar network has not processed transactions for hours, according to publicly available data.

Multiple block explorers show that the most recent transaction took place some five hours ago. According to an incident report on Stellar’s website, “[c]ertain validators dropped off the network.” At 11:45 UTC, the incident page said that developers “continue investigating and testing a potential fix but we’re unable to provide an ETA for a fix at this time.”

“[Stellar Development Foundation] engineers are continuing to investigate this incident. At this moment we are unable to provide ETA for a fix,” the foundation said in its most recent message at 13:26 UTC. 

Crypto exchange Bitstamp said earlier Tuesday that it has temporarily stopped deposits and withdrawals of XLM, Stellar’s native token, in light of the issues.

We’ve temporarily stopped $XLM deposits and withdrawals due to issues on the @StellarOrg network. We are monitoring the situation and will keep you updated,” the exchange said in a Twitter post.

This is a developing story and will be updated with new information.

© 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.

Blockchain project NEAR Protocol has launched its Ethereum bridge, called Rainbow, for cross-chain interoperability.

The bridge allows transferring ERC-20 tokens between the Ethereum and NEAR blockchains. Users can take advantage of faster transaction confirmation times and lower fees with the bridge, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin told The Block.

“A unique sharding model gives the NEAR Protocol the ability to scale linearly while maintaining 1 to 2 second confirmation speeds and transaction fees usually under 1 cent,” Polosukhin told The Block.

NEAR is a proof-of-stake blockchain and uses a dynamic sharding approach — a scalability solution, as The Block Research reported recently. Such scaling solutions can help decrease the load on Ethereum.

“Innovation across the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) spaces has increased demand on the Ethereum network and escalated transaction fees to record-high levels,” Polosukhin told The Block. “The bridge allows to merge economies between NEAR and Ethereum, and allows developers to build novel experiences not possible on Ethereum while still having users from Ethereum to seamlessly interact with them and economic activity from NEAR to flow back into Ethereum’s DeFi.”

NEAR plans to launch more bridges in the future. “We aim to connect with Cosmos and Polkadot ecosystems,” Polosukhin told The Block. “This will make NEAR a ‘hub’ connecting various chains together.”

NEAR is backed by a number of notable investors, including a16z, Coinbase Ventures, and Pantera Capital. The project has raised a total of over $70 million to date, Polosukhin 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.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Balancer, built on Ethereum, is set to expand on Algorand.

Once launched on the Algorand blockchain, Balancer users will be able to create liquidity pools or trading pairs with any Algorand Standard Asset (ASA), Algorand COO W. Sean Ford told The Block.

Balancer’s launch on Algorand is expected in Q3 of 2021 by Reach, Ford told The Block.

Reach is an Algorand Foundation-funded project and helps build blockchain applications. Reach CEO Christopher Swenor told The Block that his team is excited about Balancer’s launch on Algorand because it’s the “first large-scale DeFi project to be announced being built on Reach.”

Balancer is currently the fifth-largest decentralized exchange protocol by trading volumes, according to data compiled by The Block. It saw volumes of over $2 billion in March.

“We are excited to provide support to the Algorand and Reach teams via the Balancer Ecosystem Fund, and to observe how this new implementation will work and how it may grow in the future to be a source of liquidity for the Algorand ecosystem,” said Jeremy Musighi, head of growth at Balancer Labs.

Algorand’s Ford said the project is looking to work with more DeFi protocols in the 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.

Credit Suisse and Nomura-owned broker-dealer Instinet have settled U.S.-listed equity trades on a same-day settlement cycle (T+0) via Paxos’ blockchain-based settlement service.

Paxos announced the news on Tuesday, saying the equity trades occurred at 11 AM ET and 3 PM ET on a day and were settled at 4:30 PM ET on the same day. In the legacy system, settlement can only occur the same day if trades are completed before 11 AM ET, and therefore is “rarely utilized,” said Paxos.

This is not the first time Credit Suisse and Instinet have worked with Paxos on a trade settlement. Last year, the duo settled U.S.-listed securities trades in a live environment for the first time when Paxos Settlement Service was launched.

That settlement was on the standard T+2 settlement timeframe. The same-day settlement demonstrates the future capability of the platform, said Paxos.

“These advancements will ultimately benefit the broader market as more firms join the platform,” said Credit Suisse’s head of distributed ledger strategy Emmanuel Aidoo. “We’re pleased to work with Paxos and Instinet to advance this technology, which will help unlock capital, increase liquidity and reduce risk over time.”

Paxos launched the settlement service, based on its private, permission-based blockchain, last year under no-action relief from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) staff. Paxos today said it will apply for full clearing agency registration with the SEC and hopes to secure registration sometime this year.

If granted the registration, Paxos said it plans to provide the industry with greater flexibility around their settlement cycles, ranging from T+2 to T+0.

© 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 group of major companies, including Fidelity, Coinbase, and Square, have formed a crypto council to lobby policy makers.

The Crypto Council for Innovation has a stated mission of demonstrating the “transformational promise of crypto and communicate its benefits to policymakers, regulators, and people around the globe.” The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.

Crypto venture capital firm Paradigm is also an initial member of the council. Paradigm co-founder Fred Ehrsam told the WSJ that crypto is at a “mainstream inflection point.”

“It’s in its very early stages and, much like the internet (once was), it’s very fragile while it’s in that stage,” he said.

“It’s challenging because policy makers want to balance risk and reward, and even people who spend time in this space would struggle to predict where this will go in the coming decade. It was very hard to say where the internet was going to go.”

The council reportedly plans to appoint a board that would include members from each of the four initial members. The group will also add an executive team, said Ehrsam.

© 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.

Wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) is a token that represents bitcoin on the Ethereum network. WBTC provides a way of using bitcoin in smart contracts and makes the world’s largest cryptocurrency more accessible on decentralized exchanges (DEX). The wrapped bitcoin price tracks that of bitcoin because the two are locked in a 1:1 ratio. In essence, the protocol allows bitcoin holders to exchange their bitcoin for an equivalent number of WBTC tokens, which can be put to work on Ethereum and used to access decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.

Wrapped bitcoin price

Because of the 1:1 mapping with bitcoin, the WBTC price tends to track that of the larger cryptocurrency. It touched an all-time low of $3,139.17 on April 2, 2019, before climbing to a record-high price of $66,109.97 on Oct. 20, 2021, the same day as bitcoin.

How does Wrapped Bitcoin work?

Wrapped bitcoin uses smart contract functionality for bitcoin transfers to provide a way for bitcoin holders to access DeFi. In doing so, it brings the greater liquidity of the world’s largest cryptocurrency to the DeFi arena.

For new WBTC to be produced, or minted, a so-called merchant places a request with another party, the custodian. WBTC’s white paper specifies that the merchant sends bitcoin to the custodian, which mints the WBTC and sends it to the merchant’s wallet on the Ethereum blockchain. The merchant can then swap the wrapped bitcoin with an end user in exchange for the equivalent amount of bitcoin. Merchants are responsible for carrying out know-your-customer and anti-money laundering processes with the end users.

Custodians are the institutions that hold the backing bitcoin and mint the token. For WBTC, BitGo is the sole custodian as of October 2021. The founding merchants were Kyber Network and Ren, though others have now joined. In June 2021, it was reported that more than 1% of bitcoin was held in wrapped bitcoin tokens.

Removing WBTC from circulation – for example when a user wants to convert WBTC back to bitcoin – is accomplished through burning, a process that can be carried out only by a merchant. The merchant calls the “burn” function in the governing contract, and its WBTC balance is reduced. The custodian is then free to release the held bitcoins to the merchant, who can reimburse the end user.

Proof of assets is shown on the protocol’s web page.

Key events and management

Wrapped bitcoin was announced in October 2018 and officially launched in January 2019. It was developed by BitGo, Kyber Network and Ren, who retain their roles in the protocol.

The network is managed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which votes on adding or removing custodians and merchants. Current members of the DAO are listed on the website.

Wrapped bitcoin was released for the Tron blockchain in January 2021.