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Canada-based listed mortgage brokerage Mogo, which has a market capitalization of nearly CAD 550 million (about USD 435 million), is now rewarding users in cash to let them buy bitcoin.

The development means when a user takes out a new mortgage or refinance one with Mogo, the firm rewards them with up to CAD 3,100 (USD 2,460) as free cashback in their Bitcoin & Rewards accounts.

Mogo is not new in the crypto space. The firm already lets people buy and sell bitcoin via its MogoCrypto service. Last month, Mogo announced that it would acquire a nearly 20% stake in Canadian crypto exchange Coinsquare for around $56.4 million. Mogo also recently announced its plan to buy bitcoin on its balance sheet.

The bitcoin cashback rewards scheme also doesn’t appear to be new. The scheme was previously only available to those who hold the Mogo Visa Platinum Prepaid Card, but it has now been extended to MogoMortgage customers as well.

“Our bitcoin rewards program is all about giving our members more ways to accumulate bitcoin,” said Mogo founder and CEO David Feller. “Given the volatility and speculative nature of bitcoin, there’s an increasing number of Canadians who are looking for ways to participate without risking their own money, and our bitcoin rewards program meets this demand.”

Mogo works with lenders in Canada to provide mortgage deals to its users. Mogo president and CFO Greg Feller said the residential mortgage market in Canada is a “massive market estimated at about $1.7 trillion, and we’re pleased to provide Canadians with a great way to get a mortgage, while also earning bitcoin.”

© 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

• AMM is a logical step in the evolution of decentralized on-chain exchanges.
• Uniswap and SushiSwap each have $4.5B+ of liquidity, which was mainly acquired through incentive programs.
• Curve has a similar amount of liquidity but specializes in stablecoins.
• Liquidity on Curve and SushiSwap is still backed by liquidity mining, which could complicate their existence after the Uniswap v3 launch.

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Visa announced Monday that it now settles payments in the USDC stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain.

The development means Visa has become the first major payments network to use stablecoin as a settlement currency. Until now, Visa settled payments in fiat currencies only.

For its new USDC settlement capability, Visa is initially working with Crypto.com, letting the crypto firm manage its card business fully in cryptocurrencies.

Previously, Visa’s standard settlement process required Crypto.com to settle in a fiat currency, which added cost and complexity for the firm. Now Crypto.com won’t have to go through conversations and settle with Visa directly in USDC.

“The announcement today marks a major milestone in our ability to address the needs of fintechs managing their business in a stablecoin or cryptocurrency,” said Visa’s chief product officer Jack Forestell. “And it’s really an extension of what we do every day, securely facilitating payments in all different currencies all across the world.”

Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek said the firm wants to enable “millions of consumers across the world to access and use digital currencies” and Visa’s capability to “directly accept and interact with digital currencies” helps enable it to maximize the benefits of digital currencies.

Visa’s settlement agent for the USDC capability is crypto bank Anchorage. That means Crypto.com sends USDC to Visa’s Ethereum address at Anchorage.

“Visa came to us in 2019 with an idea—make secure, efficient, and seamless settlement payments possible in digital currency by linking Visa’s treasury with Anchorage’s custody platform,” said Diogo Mónica, co-founder and president of Anchorage. “This would give the next generation of crypto native issuers the option to directly settle with Visa in a digital currency over a public blockchain.”

Visa said this is “one small step forward” for its settlement platform, but “one giant step forward” to integrate digital assets.

After further testing and additional conversations with its clients, partners, and members of the regulatory community, Visa hopes to launch the USDC settlement capability for other partners as well “in the year ahead.”

Eventually, Visa also plans to settle payments in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Earlier this month, Visa CEO Al Kelly said the company aims to cover bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as well, along with stablecoins.

Visa rival Mastercard has also intended to capture business opportunities in the crypto and stablecoins space, as well as in the future CBDCs space.

© 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.

Data collected by The Block Research shows that bitcoin miners have earned more than $1.5 billion in revenue. 

This figure represents the most revenue earned by the mining sector in a given month. Given that several days remain in March, the final figure will exceed the current $1.51 billion number.

The vast majority of the funds earned — $1.36 billion — were in the form of per-block subsidies, or the 6.25 BTC earned with the creation of each transaction block. Per the data, miners earned a collected $148 million in fees, which are paid by transactors in an effort to make their transactions more likely to be included in the next block. 

March’s all-time high figure exceeds February, when miners earned a total of $1.36 billion across the sector. The new performance figures signify that miners have collectively more than $1 billion for three months in a row.

As The Block previously reported, publicly-traded bitcoin mining firms have ridden the recent boom in the price of bitcoin, reflecting the cryptocurrency’s volatile performance. These developments come as institutional investors in North America move to expand their footprint in the mining sector. 

© 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 pair of publicly traded bitcoin mining firms announced plans last week to create what they call the first-ever mining pool powered only by clean energy sources.

The partnership between the UK-based cryptocurrency mining firm Argo Blockchain and Canada-based DMG Blockchain Solutions will result in the launch Terra Pool.

Terra Pool’s hash rate will initially come from Argo’s and DMG’s mining sources. Argo said in a statement that the two firms’ mining power is “mostly generated by hydroelectric resources.”

“Terra Pool represents the first ever opportunity for the creation of ‘green bitcoin’. The initiative aims to expedite the shift from conventional power to clean energy and reduce the impact of Bitcoin mining on the environment. The mining pool will provide a platform for cryptocurrency miners to produce Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in a sustainable way,” the firm said in a statement.

“Addressing climate change is a priority for Argo and partnering with DMG to create the first ‘green’ Bitcoin mining pool is an important step towards protecting our planet now and for generations to come,”  Argo Blockchain CEO Peter Wall was quoted as saying.

The news comes more than a month after Argo purchased 320 acres of land in West Texas to open a 200-megawatt mining facility and nearly three months after the firm sought to increase its mining capacity by 75%. 

© 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 Bank of Japan said Friday that it has created a “liaison and coordination committee” intended to support its planned efforts to test a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the coming weeks.

As previously reported, Japanese central bank officials said this month that its experiments would begin in the spring. The purpose of the committee is to serve as a connecting point between the central bank and the private sector. 

In a March 26 letter, the BOJ laid out its rationale for wanting to create such a committee:

“While the Bank currently has no plan to issue central bank digital currency (CBDC), from the viewpoint of ensuring the stability and efficiency of the overall payment and settlement systems, the Bank will prepare thoroughly, including implementing experiments, to respond to changes in circumstances in an appropriate manner. In the course of CBDC exploration, the Bank considers it important to apply the knowledge of various stakeholders such as the private sector, experts, and relevant public authorities.”

In a way, the language mirrors statements from the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is also making preparations to begin sharing details of its CBDC experimentation with the public. The Fed has said that if it were to ever pursue a CBDC in production, private-sector involvement would be critical to its success.

Private-sector members of the BOJ group include a range of banking, payments and fintech associations, per the document. Meetings will be hosted virtually and “held as necessary depending on the progress of the PoC”, with details set to be published in consultation with members.

© 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.

An animated video that was recently used by Uniswap to promote its V3 platform has been sold in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT).

The video and the NFT were created by the artist named “@pplpleasr1,” and it has fetched the price of 310 ether (ETH), currently worth about $505,000.

The buyer of the NFT is a first-of-its-kind decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called “pleasrdao.” The DAO was specifically formed to buy the NFT.

“Pplpleasr created the most iconic NFT ever to have been minted on any blockchain,” Alex Svanevik, CEO of crypto data platform Nansen and a member of the DAO, told The Block.

“Pplpleasr inspired us to drive forward a community-first approach,” he said. “The charity angle she took as well was great.”

Pplpleasr is donating the whole amount to the Stand With Asians movement to help stop hate crimes and discrimination against Asian Americans and pacific islanders.

Commenting on the sale, Pplpleasr said she is “moved beyond words” and that the funds “will not go to waste, I promise.”

The NFT took Pplpleasr “a little over a month” to produce, she said in a video explaining her artwork. The piece was sold on the NFT marketplace Foundation.App.

Future plans of the DAO?

While the DAO was initially created to buy the Uniswap V3 NFT, it is now looking to buy more art pieces from its treasury, Svanevik told The Block. The treasury is currently worth about $200,000 in ETH, he said.

More than 30 people from the Ethereum community are part of the DAO, including Calvin Liu of Compound, Tarun Chitra of Gauntlet Network, and Andrew Kang of Mechanism Capital, Svanevik told The Block.

“The future is community ownership,” according to Kang. “Not only do we get to ‘win’ with friends, but our collective ownership and appreciation of the NFT (and the incredible story), imposes more value for the NFT than if any individual/central entity owned it themselves,” he said.

Besides possibly buying more NFTs in the future, the DAO could also “commission art from artists” that it wants to support, Svanevik told The Block. “Also, given the DeFi experience present in the DAO, we might experiment with bringing NFTs and DeFi together,” he 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 U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has ordered the operator of bitcoin trading scheme Control-Finance to pay nearly $143 million in restitution and $429 million in penalties.

Benjamin Reynolds allegedly failed to attend multiple court dates in a case from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), resulting in a default judgment against him, according to an announcement from the regulator.

The CFTC first brought the case against Reynolds in June 2019, alleging he utilized a public website, social media and emails to solicit 22,190.542 BTC, or $143 million at the time. He told customers his firm, Control-Finance, employed crypto traders who would trade their deposits for a guaranteed profit.

However, the CFTC alleges Reynolds never made trades on his customers’ behalf. He later said he would return all bitcoin deposits by October 2017, but failed to do so, according to the CFTC, and instead kept the deposits for himself.

After Reynolds repeatedly did not appear in court to address the charges, the CFTC proposed a default judgment in August of last year. The proposal included the $572 million in penalties and restitution Reynolds now faces. With the financial penalties, the court order also prohibits Reynolds from trading in CFTC-regulated markets or registering with the CFTC.

© 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

• EulerBeats is an Ethereum-based non-fungible token (NFT) music and art project built on a unique reproduction model. 
• The project has already released its first collection of 27 original tracks titled “Genesis.” It plans to launch its second collection, “Enigma,” next week. 

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After much anticipation, Uniswap v3 — the latest upgrade to the Ethereum-based decentralized exchange — was announced Tuesday.

On this episode of The Scoop, The Block Research’s Mika Honkasalo walked through the designed upgrade, explaining the significance of Uniswap’s adoption of “concentrated liquidity” which aims to make trading on the platform more capital efficient. 

In Honkasalo’s view, this move will help with the adoption of Uniswap among traders and perhaps serve as a tailwind for the broader DeFi market. 

“I think this is why Uniswap really had nowhere to go in their design except move towards this sort of active liquidity provision because that’s something that works with traditional markets,” he said, adding:

“I think what this unlocks next is the possibility to support just more volumes, especially in combination with the L2 launch, which hopefully comes very quickly after the L1 launch is to really start competing against centralized exchanges.”

Uniswap v3 — set to be implemented in May — will also include Uniswap’s adoption of scaling solution Optimism, which aims to reduce gas fees.

© 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.