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The bill would potentially kick off the development of a digital rupee while banning “private cryptocurrencies.”

The Chicago exchange has now traded 77 ETH contracts after going live on Sunday.

Crypto exchange FTX announced Monday that it will donate 1% of net fee revenue to charities via the newly created The FTX Foundation.

Last year, FTX made $85 million in fee revenue, CEO Sam Bankman-Fried told The Block, adding that for 2021, the exchange expects to make $400 million. The projections are made based on FTX’s December fee revenue of $200 million, said Bankman-Fried.

Within hours of the announcement, the total amount earmarked for charity has reached over $2,500. FTX said its users will have a say in directing the foundation’s funds.

“For the time being, our plan is to use the same voting system that we use for letting users choose which tokenized stocks to list next,” said FTX. “We’ll start by offering a few options that we think are great, and we’ll be listening for feedback on what’s missing and what users would like to see.”

FTX and the team are known to make large donations. To date, they have given away more than $10 million. Last year, FTX and its sister company Alameda Research donated around $11.50 million to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, according to data from OpenSecrets.org.

Bankman-Fried’s personal net worth is estimated to be around $10 billion, according to a recent report from New York Magazine’s Intelligencer.

© 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 “Billy Bitcoin” hero is part of the charity’s efforts to drum up more crypto donations.

PoolIn, one of the world’s largest bitcoin mining pools, has announced that several notable crypto VCs have invested $10 million in its proprietary bitcoin hashrate token.

The firm said on Monday that it has issued another 100,000 units of its pBTC35A token with a lock-up period of 30 days to institutional backers including Three Arrow Capital, Hashkey, Fenbushi, FBG Capital, IOSG, Mindfulness Capital and Ledger Prime.

Each pBTC35A is backed by one terahashes second (TH/s) of computing power racing on the bitcoin network with a power efficiency of 35 watt per TH/s.

The sales comes weeks after PoolIn sold a first batch of 100,000 units of pBTC35A to retail investors and raised $10 million at the time.

PoolIn said the newly raised capital is used to reimburse the cost of bitcoin mining equipment that the firm has placed in advance to power up the tokenized hashrate.

As The Block reported last month, PoolIn rolled out a protocol called Mars as an experiment to connect proof-of-work mining with decentralized finance (DeFi).

Investors who stake pBTC35A or the trading pair of pBTC35A against USDT in one of the two liquidity pools on the Mars Protocol can receive rewards in the form of the Mars governance token as well as Wrapped BTC (wBTC).

The calculation is based on the amount of bitcoin that the underlying hash rate can mine at the network’s current difficulty after deducting a set electricity cost of $0.058 per kWH and Poolin’s 2.5% 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.

A stream of crypto payments services coming to market give new life to the debate around whether bitcoin can be both a store of value and a payments token.

The Central Bank of Nigeria said its warning to banks on Friday was not a new position, but a reiteration of its 2017 stance on cryptocurrencies.

CME Group is on the cusp of launching its long-awaited ether (ETH) futures product.

The derivatives exchange said in a Sunday morning tweet that ETH futures will go at 6 p.m. ET on Sunday “for a first trade date of Feb. 8.” 

CME’s ETH futures were announced in mid-December to much fanfare. Per contract details published on the CME website, the futures are cash-settled and based on the CME CF Ether-Dollar Reference Rate. Each monthly contract represents 50 ETH — an amount worth roughly $78,000 at press time — with a minimum block trade size of five contracts.

The CME Group website lists a range of liquidity providers for its ETH futures, some of whom also provide liquidity for the exchange’s bitcoin futures and options products. The firms providing liquidity for ETH futures include BlockFi, Galaxy, Genesis, CoinShares and NYDIG. 

The launch itself represents a significant step toward the creation of financial products built around cryptocurrencies and is the first product of its kind in the United States. 

Heath Tarbert, former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, predicted in 2019 that derivatives focused on Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency would eventually hit the market. As reported at the time, Tarbert said he believed ETH falls under the definition of a commodity.

© 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 number of visitors to crypto exchange websites surged in January, according to data collected by The Block.

Some 344 million visitors flocked to crypto exchanges, per SimilarWeb data, surpassing December’s total of 196 million.

The data signifies the highest point since January 2018, when exchange sites drew in roughly 531 million.

Additional data shows that Binance continued its streak, having drawn in approximately 28.8% of the total number of visitors. Binance was followed by Coinbase (25.11%) and Kraken (6.19%).

That January was such a big month for website visits is unsurprising, given the movements in the digital asset market. January saw the price of bitcoin eclipse $40,000 for the first time. 

The price of bitcoin is currently about $38,190, according to Coinbase.

© 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 Twitter-based DOGE show culminated in a Lion King-inspired meme photo of Musk holding up Simmons who is shown holding up Snoop Dogg, who in turn is holding up a Shiba Ina.