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Crypto mining firm Argo Blockchain has raised £5.75 million (around $7.5 million) from a concurrent institutional and retail share sale, oversubscribed by both new and existing shareholders.

Argo placed 51,340,000 new ordinary shares with institutional investors at 10 pence per share, raising approximately £5.13 million ($6.64 million). The crypto miner also raised £616,000 ($797,000) through retail investors who subscribed for 6,160,000 new ordinary shares at the same price, according to a London Stock Exchange announcement.

Argo had targeted a minimum of 47,750,000 new ordinary shares to raise £4.78 million ($6.18 million), according to a previous announcement.

The shares were issued at a discount of around 14% to the 30 trading day volume-weighted average price and approximately 26% to the closing mid-price on July 18. The new shares represent roughly 12% of its existing issued ordinary share capital. The crypto miner plans to use the funds to pay down outstanding debt and pursue growth projects, according to the announcement.

Argo has submitted applications to the Financial Conduct Authority and the London Stock Exchange for the admission of the new shares, expected to become effective by July 24.

Argo stock is down over 20% following the news.

Avoiding bankruptcy

In December, Argo said it accidentally published drafts implying it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection but was actually trying to avoid that fate by selling assets. Later that month, Argo confirmed it had agreed to sell its Helios mining facility to Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital for $65 million. Argo also received a $35 million loan from the company.

© 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.

RFK Jr. said his administration would use bitcoin and other assets to stabilize the U.S. dollar and exempt bitcoin profits from capital gains tax.

Speaking on Tuesday at the Heal-the-Divide PAC event, the U.S. presidential candidate said his administration would “begin to back the U.S. dollar with real finite assets, such as gold, silver, plantinum and bitcoin, which would be done to strengthen the U.S. dollar and continue to guarantee its success as a world reserve currency.”

Kennedy explained the process would be gradual and, depending on the plan’s success, he would adjust the amount of backing for the dollar. “My plan would be to start very, very small, perhaps 1% of issued T-bills would be backed by hard currency, by gold, silver platinum or bitcoin,” he added.

Kennedy said backing dollars and U.S. debt obligations with hard assets could help restore strength back to the dollar and rein in inflation. “Ironically we will be able to use bitcoin to save the U.S. dollar,” he added.

He said the Kennedy administration would encourage the proliferation and propagation of bitcoin and protect self custody. Reiterating on a promise he made at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami, he said, “Your wallet should be your own, and we will ensure the capacity of American people to run bitcoin nodes inside their own homes.”

Bitcoin to dollar conversion exempt from CGT

In addition, Kennedy announced he would exempt the conversion of bitcoin to the U.S. dollar from capital gains taxes.

He said such an exemption would spur investment and incentivize ventures to grow their business in the U.S. instead of other crypto-friendly jurisdictions such as Singapore or Switzerland.

He suggested that making bitcoin conversion a non-taxable events would promote innovation, protect privacy, and make it harder for governments to use currency against free speech. He noted, “Non-taxable events are unreportable and that means it will be more difficult for governments to weaponize currency against free speech, which as many of you know, is one of my principal objectives.”

© 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.

Cryptocurrency exchange OKX announced its wallet will provide a staking-like function for tokens on Bitcoin and native bitcoin.

Anyone who locks up their bitcoin or BRC-20 tokens using this process will receive BRC20-S tokens as rewards. The BRC20-S standard is OKX’s extension to the current standard for building tokens on Bitcoin.

“We have heard from OKX Wallet users that they want more opportunities to participate in the ecosystem,” the company’s Chief Innovation Officer Jason Lau said in a statement.

DeFi developers and projects will be able to use the BRC20-S protocol “to create staking pools” and then “distribute BRC20-S tokens” to holders of bitcoin and BRC-20 tokens, OKX added.

The company also announced it will soon unveil a marketplace for selling BRC20-S tokens.

© 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.

Next week, the Ethereum Layer 2 project, Optimism, will release an “open neutrality framework” as its decentralization guidelines, and Coinbase’s Base will follow it, said Jesse Pollak, the lead for Coinbase protocols.

The neutrality framework, currently in draft, sets out principles for networks that want to remain decentralized, Pollak said in a talk at the ongoing EthCC event in Paris.

Pollak stated that Coinbase is committed to three principles of decentralization. First, state transitions must be consistent. This refers to the fundamental method of recording transactions and wallet balances on the network. Second, the network’s security uptime liveness must always be maintained. If this is not the case, Pollak noted, there will be consequences. Third, upgrades should be approved through a governance process.

Pollak added that Coinbase has been working with Optimism to ensure that Base adheres to the framework, including the way that keys used for making network upgrades are handled.

The Layer 2 network, Base, which is backed by the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, is built on Optimism’s software stack known as the OP Stack. It functions as a rollup network—a secondary layer that performs off-chain computations with the aim of facilitating faster and cheaper transactions, while maintaining the security advantages of the Ethereum mainnet. Last week, the Base team released a mainnet for developers ahead of a public launch, slated for early August.

Base supporting the Optimism vision

Pollak reiterated that a portion of the fees Coinbase receives from running a sequencer on the network will be given to fund public goods. “Value share in a full public way from a public company to a decentralized autonomous organization to fund public goods,” he said.
Coinbase has spent time designing a security council model for the Superchain, which is Optimism’s umbrella term for an ecosystem of Layer 2 networks built using its OP Stack, including OP Chain and Base.

The exchange also spent the last six months building Pessimism, an open-source toolkit that lets anyone monitor any OP Stack chain and look for unexpected behavior. This is important because chains built on the OP Stack use optimistic rollups, which assume transactions are legitimate unless proven otherwise.

Pollak noted that Base will conduct its first round of grants in August, around the time when the main network will be released to the wider public. Coinbase is also helping to run a virtual hackathon called Superhack in August.

© 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.