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A weekly digest of articles, reports and analyses about tokenized RWAs, the fast-growing financial instruments that merge traditional finance to the blockchain.

The new feature allows collectors to trade NFTs directly with each other as well as add WETH to “sweeten the deal.”

If a financial giant can’t navigate the red tape, who can?

The embattled Harbour Trade credit pool minted $1.5 million of DAI stablecoin secured with loans to a consumer electronics firm, which defaulted on $2.1 million of debt.

Nearly a year in the making, Proof Collective is finally ready to unveil the next development phase expanding upon the once-celebrated Moonbirds NFT brand.

The release of a 20,000-piece collection called Mythics begins today, the company announced. The latest iteration of the Moonbirds brand will kick off with the release of 100 new NFTs and will continue with an additional 100 each day for at least 200 days, Proof said in a statement.

Proof, which is run by co-founder and CEO Kevin Rose and backed by top crypto venture capitalist a16z, first released its Moonbirds PFP non-fungible token collection in April 2022. During its first month the collection generated nearly $485 million in sales with each NFT fetching an average price of over $30,000, according to CryptoSlam!.

Like the rest of the NFT market, interest in Moonbirds has fallen significantly since then with sales volumes just shy of $1.2 million in June, also according to CryptoSlam!. Average sales prices for Moonbirds have declined by nearly ten times from what they once were. Last month a Moonbirds NFT sold for an average of about $3,850, according to CryptoSlam!.

Elite NFT brands keep building

Like other top-shelf collections Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki and Doodles, Proof is hoping to stir community engagement and sales with efforts to enrich the underlying intellectual property with added brand lore. Proof is also aiming to prolong interest in the new collection with a unique release plan, or “slow roll out,” of the new NFTs.

“We’re really trying to give our community a new experience that links together the Proof ecosystem and expands the storytelling that started with Moonbirds,” Rose said in a statement.

Unlike Oddities, another Moonbird iteration released a month after the original collection debuted, Mythics represents a “truer follow-up” to Moonbirds, according to a person familiar with the matter. Proof first mentioned the eventual release of Mythics in August of last year.

“We took a deep dive into the lore of this world we’ve been building,” Justin Mezzell, Proof Collective’s co-founder and chief product officer said. “It was important to us that we create an engaging, entertaining experience.”

© 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.

Terraform Labs is asking a court to allow it to subpoena certain information about accounts, wallets and assets from bankrupt exchange FTX to defend itself in a case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

The SEC charged Terraform and its former CEO Do Kwon in February for allegedly misleading investors over its algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD, which collapsed dramatically last year, wiping out billions in the process. 

Lawyers representing Terraform said a “coordinated short attack” caused the stablecoin to falter and that those sellers likely used FTX to, in part, to conduct that attack, in a motion filed on Wednesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware involving FTX. 

“These records are crucial to TFL’s defense in the SEC Action—for example, for TFL’s experts to perform crucial blockchain analysis of the short-sellers’ trading and market activity to combat the SEC’s allegations, among other things,” the lawyers said.

Trouble at Terra

The SEC said the company and Kwon misled investors about how stable the stablecoin really was. Algorithmic stablecoins, like TerraUSD, use market incentives via algorithms to maintain a stable price. Terra was linked to Luna, a governance token, to keep the prices stable. 

The SEC also said Terraform and Kwon misled investors when the stablecoin depegged previously in May 2021 and they said it was restored by an algorithm. Instead, the firm turned to Jump Trading to prop up the stabecoin, restoring its value. 

In the motion filed this week, Terraform said Jump “was not the cause for the restoration of the peg in 2021.” 

Terraform’s former CEO is also facing legal trouble. Kwon was found guilty last month by a court in Montenegro of using a fake Costa Rican passport in an attempt to leave the country in March and sentenced to four months in jail. 

A hearing on the motion is set for 10 a.m. on Aug 2. 

 

© 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 Financial Conduct Authority will consult on rules once the government gives it the necessary powers, the regulator said in its annual report.

Coinbase’s Base network, which currently relies on optimistic rollups for its connection to the Ethereum mainnet, could expand to include zk-proofs.

Optimistic rollups and zk-proofs are the main two options for creating Ethereum Layer 2 networks at present. The core difference is that optimistic rollups assume transactions are legitimate unless someone proves otherwise, while networks that use zk-proofs submit regular proofs that all transactions are legitimate. The latter is arguably more secure but more expensive.

Coinbase doesn’t want to land on one side of the coin; it wants to take advantage of both approaches.

“Right now people talk about optimistic rollups versus zk-rollups and instead what we’ve said is, no, we’re just going to build a great rollup and we’re going to make it open source, we’re going to make it configurable and we’re going to start building optimistic stuff because that’s the kind of like shortest path,” Coinbase protocols lead Jesse Pollak said in an interview at ETHCC in Paris. “But ultimately we want to have both.”

A collaborative effort

On May 30, the Optimism Foundation put out a request for proposal for a zk-proof designed for the OP Stack. Pollak said that three teams applied, including RISC Zero and O(1) Labs, the company behind the Layer 1 network Mina.

Pollak said that he expects to see multiple implementations of zk-rollups — in the form of zk provers — included in the OP Stack by 2024. He anticipates that these will find adoption among Base, OP Mainnet and other networks using its codebase.

Pollak highlighted that one perk of building in the decentralized space is that it allows for community contributions and corresponding network effects.

 

© 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.

Multiple FTX users have received a “reset password” request from the defunct exchange’s official email address as it appears a hacker is attempting to secure control of user’s bankruptcy claims.

Some argue it would weaken crypto’s payments use case or form a bridge to a digital dollar.