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Mobile gaming veteran Weracle, the company behind Endless Frontier, is partnering with Immutable as it aims to woo gamers with its new blockchain-based title.

Weracle’s crypto game EF Defense will rely on Immutable’s Ethereum Virtual Machine rollup zkEVM, a technology that “offers low-cost, massive scale, enterprise-grade security and Ethereum smart contract compatibility,” the company said in a statement.

“The team at Weracle has years of experience working on web2 titles that millions of gamers already play,” said Andrew Sorokovsky, VP of global business development at Immutable. “Immutable zkEVM will undoubtedly help them make great strides in the world of web3 as well.”

Web3 gaming, where players can not only own, but also trade in-game assets minted on chain, has yet to go mainstream. Some companies are hoping winning over users of iPhones and Android devices is the way forward as web3 game companies try to achieve active-player numbers in the millions rather than thousands.

Proven track records

EF Defense is a tower defense game — a popular genre on mobile devices — already available on Apple and Android devices, the company said. Weracle’s non-blockchain, web2 title Endless Frontier has been downloaded 30 million times whiled generating more than $80 million in revenue, the company also said.

“Immutable has a proven track record servicing various web3 games,” Weracle CEO Myungyong Shin said. “This collaboration will allow us to learn invaluable expertise on promoting web3 games.”

© 2023 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.

It’s all about solving “the duck curve” problem on the grid. This op-ed is part of CoinDesk’s Mining Week.

Since many options are available for digital asset investment and we see more digital asset investment vehicles, now is a great time to start. Understanding the choices available for will help clients of advisors plan how to support them.

MarketVector Indexes is partnering with staking infrastructure firm Figment to introduce what it says are the industry’s first Ethereum staking rewards indexes.

“We’ve been proud to be on the forefront of digital assets indexing and this partnership with Figment reflects our commitment to providing institutions and investors with exposure to leading assets,” MarketVector digital assets product strategist Martin Leinweber said in a statement.

“Now, asset managers and advisors are able to have customizable access to staking rewards as an industry first,” he continued.

The partnership plans to launch two products — the MarketVector Figment Ethereum Staking Reward Reference Rate and the MarketVector Figment Ethereum Total Return Index.

‘Reliable, robust data’

Figment business development lead Josh Deems said the new products would “address one of the most significant challenges faced by institutions in the digital asset space, which is access to reliable, robust data.”

Deems added the indexes would “unlock new opportunities for institutions offering investors exposure to digital assets.” He said that it would allow asset managers to provide products with staking rewards benchmarked against the new indexes.

© 2023 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 Democratic presidential candidate made the comments during a Twitter Spaces conversation with prominent Bitcoiners on Wednesday.

The performance of tech stocks is a common metric widely watched in crypto circles, but CME Group says that movements in the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 tend to impact the price of ether more than the price of bitcoin.

“On days when tech stocks rally, ETHBTC tends to rise as ETH benefits more than BTC,” Erik Norland, a senior economist and executive director at CME Group, said in a report released Thursday, referring to the exchange rate between ether and bitcoin. 

The difference can be explained in how ether and bitcoin are supplied to the market and then used, Norland said, pointing to the “practical applications” of the Ethereum smart contract network. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is mainly being used as a “highly volatile” store of value and hedge against fiat devaluation.

While bitcoin and ether are both known for volatile price swings, the exchange rate between the world’s two largest cryptocurrencies appears somewhat stable in comparison with a daily volatility rate of about 30% over the past year, according to the report. That’s compared to 42% for bitcoin’s price and 59% for ether.

“On days in which BTC rises, ETH tends to rise even more,” Norland wrote. “When BTC falls, ETH tends to fall to a greater degree.”

Still, the correlation between prices of the two cryptocurrencies has hovered at around 0.85 for the past year, suggesting a very close relationship. 

U.S. dollar impact on bitcoin, ether

Ether also appears to be more sensitive to swings in the U.S. dollar, and the ETHBTC rate reacts more strongly to changes in bitcoin supply than it does to ether supply, according to the report.

“A stronger USD appears to be more negative for ETH than it is for BTC,” Norland said. “ETHBTC shows near-zero correlation to movements in interest rate, gold and crude oil futures.”

Furthermore, ether’s supply tends to rise after price increases relative to bitcoin. “In other words, ETH supply responded to price rather than drive it,” Norland said.

“If BTC rallies ahead of its upcoming April 2024 halving as it did ahead of previous halvings, that might also help ETH prices to rise even further on a relative basis,” he added.

© 2023 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.

Layer-2 blockchain Optimism has surpassed Arbitrum in daily transaction volume for the first time in six months, according to Dune Analytics.

Bitcoin whales, or large holders of the cryptocurrency, are on an accumulation spree and are holding on to their coins as prices remain rangebound, according to data and research firm CryptoQuant.

Citing three data points in its latest weekly report — exchange whale ratio, exchange inflow coin days destroyed (CDD) and unspent transaction output (UTXO) value bands — CryptoQuant concluded that bitcoin whales, holding 1,000 to 10,000 bitcoin, have been accumulating more bitcoins this month at price levels of around $30,000.

The first data point — bitcoin exchange whale ratio — is a metric that measures the proportion of large BTC holders’ activity on crypto exchanges. It calculates the percentage of bitcoin held by whales in comparison to the total amount of bitcoin held on all exchanges. CryptoQuant said bitcoin’s exchange whale ratio on all exchanges using a simple moving average over the past 30 days (SMA 30) has hit a 5-year low, indicating that the top 10 inflows to exchanges are noticeably small compared to the total inflows to crypto exchanges.

In other words, whales are holding onto their bitcoin, resulting in reduced movements on exchanges.

The second data point — exchange inflow coin days destroyed (CDD) — is a metric that measures how long bitcoin has been held in an address before it was last moved, giving more weight to coins held for a longer time. Bitcoin’s exchange inflow CDD has reached an 8-year low on SMA 30 basis, CryptoQuant said, adding that it indicates inflows to exchanges from long-term investors are at historically low levels. In other words, whales are not actively moving their coins to exchanges for selling purposes.

The third data point — unspent transaction output (UTXO) value bands — represents the unspent bitcoin amounts in different addresses. “In simple terms, UTXO is quite similar to a public address (wallet),” Mikołaj Zakrzowski, research analyst at CryptoQuant, told The Block. “You can think of UTXO as a box containing some amount of bitcoins. Each UTXO points to only one public address and for instance, the amount of bitcoins that you see in your wallet is in fact multiple UTXOs pointing to your public address and together, when summed up, they make up the number that you see as a ‘balance’ in your wallet.”

Bitcoin’s UTXO value band of 1,000 to 10,000 bitcoins has been rising, CryptoQuant said. It means that whales holding between 1,000 and 10,000 bitcoins have been accumulating more bitcoins, the firm added. Zakrzowski said wallets holding 1,000 to 10,000 bitcoins are actual whales, according to CryptoQuant, because the larger cohort of wallets holding more than 10,000 bitcoins typically belong to exchanges or funds.

© 2023 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.

Negotiations over a comprehensive framework for payment stablecoins in the U.S. have stalled, House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry announced Thursday morning.

After beginning a public debate and amendment process meeting on stablecoin legislation before the committee, the North Carolina Republican said that progress had stalled, at least temporarily, due to White House opposition. He praised his Democratic counterpart on the committee, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., for her work on the bill.

“Unfortunately there was a third party in this negotiation that did not share the same sense of urgency: the White House,” said McHenry, kicking off Thursday’s markup of a different version of the stablecoin legislation that does not yet reflect the latest negotiations.

“A bipartisan deal was within reach,” he said, adding that negotiators “were closer than we’ve ever been” after 15 months of talks, interrupted by midterm elections, a turnover in majority control in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the FTX collapse and subsequent contagion within the digital asset industry.

Finger pointing starts

The stablecoin effort was seen as likely to gain more bipartisan support than Wednesday’s crypto market structure bill, which the committee still approved with six Democrats and all Republicans. But stalled talks may have soured that possibility.

Waters blasted the version of the stablecoin bill up for consideration Thursday, criticizing McHenry as “impatient” and calling the current version of the bill “deeply problematic and bad for America” due to a provision that allows state regulators to approve stablecoin issuances without Federal Reserve input. She also raised concerns that companies like Amazon and Facebook could issue their own digital currencies if the bill, as currently written, became law.

“The Fed does not support the bill, Treasury does not support the bill, and we do not have the support of those who asked us to get involved with stablecoins,” Waters added, referring to a presidential panel that initiated the stablecoin talks last year.

Banks raised similar concerns to those expressed by Waters in correspondence to the committee last week, though McHenry strongly pushed back on those criticisms in a response letter also sent last week.

Waters also pushed to postpone consideration of the bill, a vote that failed on party lines, 25-16.

© 2023 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 move comes a day after the finance-focused lawmakers agreed bills on crypto market structure