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Quick Take

• Algorand is a public blockchain network that intends to provide a highly scalable platform for decentralized applications and financial solutions
• The Banking & Payments category is one of the largest verticals that currently makes up Algorand’s ecosystem, including popular stablecoins like USDC and CBDC initiatives such as the Marshal lslands’ plans to launch its national digital currency on Algorand
• In total, The Block has identified 97 projects and companies across 17 different verticals currently expanding on its ecosystem

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Crypto exchange OKEx Korea is shutting down on April 7.

In a notice published Tuesday, the exchange said customers must withdraw their fiat and crypto holdings by the date.

“After the end of the service, OKEx Korea will not be held liable for any losses arising from failure to withdrawal by customers,” said the exchange.

OKEx Korea did not mention a reason for the closure, but it is likely because of a new law that is coming into effect on Thursday in South Korea. Per the law, Korean crypto exchanges will no longer be able to share their order books with other exchanges.

This is apparently why Binance Korea shut down earlier this year, after launching in April 2020. OKEx Korea was launched in August 2019 and had meager volumes of around $3.5 million in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

Rival Huobi Korea could likely follow suit. The exchange hasn’t responded to The Block’s queries. It had higher volumes of around $125 million in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

Still, these volumes are tiny compared to the main exchanges Huobi and OKEx, which have done $7 billion and $6 billion worth of trading volumes, respectively, 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.

Google keyword search volume for the “Uniswap” — a useful indicator of interest in DeFi more broadly — has reached its highest point since September of 2020.

Google doesn’t release raw numbers for search volume. Instead, it publishes scores between zero and 100, where zero is no interest in the term and 100 is maximum interest. The current score for “Uniswap” is 87. Last September, it got as high as 100.

The search term “Uniswap” is up 10.1% compared with last week and has been trending upward since hitting 32 at the beginning of the year. 

Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange by volume, boasting more than $36 billion in trading volume for February and regularly contributing more than half the total volume for decentralized exchanges.

© 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 Beeple sold his collection of 5000 daily works for a whopping $69 million in a Christie’s auction last week. That’s the third-highest auction price on record for a living artist, but the sale was record breaking for another reason — it was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT).

In recent weeks, NFTs have soared in popularity, and that’s created opportunities for big and small artists alike to generate value for their work. The Block’s Saniya More sat down with Cory Van Lew, an artist who’s been tokenizing his work on SuperRare, with some pieces going for tens of thousands of dollars. 

He’s taken a lot of that profit and reinvested it in the NFT market by supporting other artists, but he has even bigger aspirations — he’s just started the process of creating his own NFT gallery in the physical world. On this week’s episode of The Scoop, he talked about what a merged digital and reality gallery would look like, as well as:

• How Van Lew began his career as an artist and how that led him to tokenizing his work.
• The nuts and bolts of turning a creation into an NFT.
• Why holding NFTs creates different value than say holding a print of an artwork.
• His take on the energy use conversations surrounding NFTs.
• Why the NFT community is a supportive space for creators and collectors.

© 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.

Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will unveil prototype central bank digital currency systems as early as July, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The researchers, whose collaboration was announced in August 2020, have been “developing prototypes for a digital dollar platform,” according to Bloomberg. 

James Cunha, who leads the project for the Boston Fed, said that the team will unveil at least two platforms capable of moving, storing, and settling digital dollar transactions. He declined to say whether any of them use blockchain technology.

Last month, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell told the House Financial Services Committee that 2021 would be “an important year” for the digital dollar in that the central bank would be engaging a lot more on the issue with the public.

Cunha said the research at the Boston Fed is meant to demonstrate what’s possible. The bank is not advocating for a specific policy. “We think it’s important that we not wait for the policy debate because then we’ll be a year or so behind,” Cunha told Bloomberg.

© 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

• Last month the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust began trading at a discount for the first time ever.
• New competition and selling pressure are major factors behind the trend.
• What happened to the GBTC premium — and will it ever come back?

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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has sold a non-fungible token (NFT) of the first-ever published tweet for $2.9 million to an investor who goes by the name @sinaEstavi. 

Earlier this month, Dorsey minted the tweet using Cent, an Ethereum-based service that allows users to mint, sell and bid on NFTs of tweets. Dorsey’s message, which he sent March 21, 2006, reads “just setting up my twttr.”

Dorsey has said he will donate all the proceeds of the auction to GiveDirectly, a non-profit organization that sends cash directly to families living in extreme poverty. It appears after Dorsey received the funds, he transferred them to crypto exchange Kraken. 

© 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.

TIME is hiring a new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to oversee the brand’s money matters — and it would prefer someone familiar with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, according to a job description posted on LinkedIn on Monday. 

The listing did not explain what the CFO would be doing with crypto. But included among the qualifications that TIME would like to see in job candidates is “comfort with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.”

The new job posting comes on the same day that the brand announced it will auction three magazine covers in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The NFTs are available for purchase individually or as a collection on NFT marketplace SuperRare. The auction is now open and will run until March 24. At press time, the highest bid was at 20 ETH (about $35,000). 

The Block has reached out to TIME and we will update this story if we receive additional comments.

© 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.

Ethereum-based interoperability project Connext has raised $2.2 million in seed funding, according to a statement shared with The Block on Monday.

The round was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from 1kx and Huobi Capital. With fresh capital at hand, Connext looks to seed the early network liquidity and expand its team to launch the full network, founder Arjun Bhuptani told The Block.

Connext is building a cross-chain liquidity network to enable fast and noncustodial swaps within the Ethereum ecosystem, including Layer-2 scaling solutions. For example, if a user has funds on Arbitrum and wants to use an application on Optimism, with Connext, they will be able to directly call the contract on Optimism using funds they have on Arbitrum, bypassing the 1-week waiting period on Arbitrum and its Layer1 fees, Bhuptani told The Block.

“There are several other approaches to interoperability out there. None of them really focus on Ethereum and the Ethereum scalability ecosystem like we do,” said Bhuptani, adding that other approaches are either slow and expensive or difficult to use.

There are currently seven people working for Connext. The project is looking to hire five more people in the next three months — 3 developers, one product marketer, and one community/communications person — said Bhuptani.

Connext, currently available in a limited version, expects to launch the whole network within the next 3-6 months, Bhuptani told The Block.

The seed round brings Connext total funding to date to over $3.7 million. The project, which was into payment channels infrastructure until last year, raised a little over $1 million in 2017 and subsequently raised a $500,000 bridge round in 2019 from Consensys Ventures.

Connext looks to raise more funds “relatively soon,” said Bhuptani, because that there is a “clear market need” for its network.

“For fast, frequent cross-chain interactions that are baked natively into the user’s experience, Connext is the only option out there at the moment, and we think it’s a winner-take-all market,” said Bhuptani.

© 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

• Leveraged ETFs from traditional finance have inspired leveraged tokens.
• Alameda Research is a pioneer in the leveraged token market, but their tokens have limited popularity due to complexity.
• Binance offers a black-box version of tokens, where the exchange’s proprietary algorithms control all parameters.

This research piece is available to
members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.