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Stride’s native token STRD trades 0.7% higher as the transition is expected to beef up the liquid staking protocol’s security by several thousand percent.

Former FTX executive Constance Wang has resurfaced at crypto venture firm Sino Global Capital.

Wang, who spent nearly four years at FTX in a number of key roles including as COO, has now joined Sino Global after keeping a low profile since the collapse of the exchange group, according to a Bloomberg report published today that cited anonymous sources.

Wang could not be reached for comment. Sino Global did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Considered a key lieutenant of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, Wang was also co-chief executive of FTX Digital Markets, the company’s Bahamas affiliate. She was responsible for driving the company’s global user growth, as well as for partnerships, PR and marketing, institutional clients and geographical expansion, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously worked at Huobi Global and Credit Suisse.

While certain top FTX executives have been embroiled legal proceedings — and in some cases plead guilty — others have sought a fresh start. Amy Wu, who ran FTX Ventures, recently joined Menlo Ventures.

Bankman-Fried himself has plead not guilty to an array of charges. He is currently under house arrest, awaiting trial. 

Disclaimer: The former CEO and majority shareholder of The Block has disclosed a series of loans from former FTX and Alameda founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

© 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.

PLUS: Last week’s partial court victory for Ripple last week buoyed Coinbase’s share price by clarifying a nettlesome regulatory issue. The company still needs to recapture trading volume but seems headed for better times, an analyst says.

Crypto index funds potentially adding XRP to their holdings could mean additional buying pressure for the token, a FalconX analyst said.

Crypto custodian Prime Trust has been ordered by the Eighth Judicial District Court of Nevada, where the company has its headquarters, to be put into receivership after the state ordered the custodian to cease all activities amid a shortfall of customer funds.

To scale, DeFi platforms need to attract institutions keen to trade tokenized bonds, equities, and debt, and physical assets such as gold, real estate and art, says Enrico Rubboli of Mintlayer.

A Nevada district court judge approved a petition to place embattled crypto custodian Prime Trust into a state regulator’s receivership, according to a statement on Tuesday from the regulator. 

The Nevada Financial Institutions Division asked for an appointment of receivership last month, alleging that the company didn’t have funds to cover customer deposits and had lost access to some wallets. 

“The Court, having reviewed the points and authorities along with relevant exhibits filed in support of the Petition, including the consent of Respondent, finds good cause to grant the Petition,” the judge said in the Eighth Judicial District Court of Nevada, according to a filing dated July 14.

The judge then ordered Prime to appear before the court on August 22 to show why the state regulator’s petition shouldn’t be permanently granted, according to the filing. 

The original petition sought to take over the day-to-day operations of the company and “thoroughly examine all its finances to determine the best option to protect Prime’s clients, either by rehabilitating and returning the company to private management or by liquidating the company.”

Prime has trouble with withdrawals

The regulator said in the petition that Prime had fallen short and owed millions to its customers. 

Prime Trust owes over $85 million in fiat currency to its clients, but has just under $3 million in cash, according to the filing in June. The company also owes over $69 million in digital currency to its clients but currently has about $68 million in digital assets.

© 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.

Ether.Fi said Tuesday that OpenSea, the most popular digital marketplace by number of traders, has stopped the trading of its staked-ether NFTs. 

“We launched ether.fan, which is an NFT collection backed by staked ETH,” CEO Mike Silagadze said in an open letter published on Medium. “By all measures it was wildly successful. We minted out all 3,000 NFTs within a day, with over 6200 ETH staked.”

Silagadze went on to say that listings “immediately” began appearing on OpenSea, with Ether.Fi then directing to those listings so that they could trade.

“Then we got hit with a gut punch. All listings on OpenSea disappeared,” Silagadze said in the letter. “New listings were seemingly disabled (with a cryptic error message.) We didn’t get any notice or warning. None of the many people we’d been speaking with at OpenSea had reached out. The collection was just inexplicably disabled.”

Silagadze said OpenSea eventually replied with a “form letter” explanation, with the marketplace stating that it “doesn’t allow NFT collections that ‘carry out any financial activities subject to registration or licensing.'”

When asked for comment, OpenSea told The Block it would not address “enforcement actions” regarding specific collections.

“Our terms of service govern the type of content and behavior that’s permissible on OpenSea,” an OpenSea’s spokesperson said by email. “When we find collections or content to be in violation of our Terms of Service, we enforce our policy in various ways, including delisting collections and in some instances, banning accounts.”

Silagadze said “ether.fan NFTs are just wrapped staked ETH with a PFP.”

OpenSea an ‘unlicensed casino’

Silagadze also took a decidedly contentious tone in the letter. 

“OpenSea has been running a de facto unlicensed casino where people engage in ruinous gambling and spend millions on pictures of monkeys and such,” he said. “This is all great and ok apparently, but listing a collection that actually has utility is disallowed because it has utility.”

Ethereum stakers that use Ether.Fi are given NFT representations of every validator generated. The NFTs allow for the storage of metadata, which the company hopes developers will use to build out further staking infrastructure. The company raised a $5.3 million in February.

Silagadze appeared on CNBC last week to better explain Ether.Fi while describing what he believes sets his company apart from its competitors.

“Lido of course is the dominant player. They are by far the largest staking player in the world … there’s certainly a huge first-mover advantage,” he said, reiterating that his company only launched its staking mechanism last week.

“Ether.Fi is the only staking protocol that I would describe as truly non-custodial. So in other words we are the only protocol where the stakers get to control their own keys,” 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.

Bitcoin’s price dipped below $30,000 on Tuesday, with a confluence of factors affecting the performance of the digital asset. 

The price of the world’s largest crypto currency fell 0.6% over the past day to $29,852 as of 2:13 p.m. in New York, according to CoinGecko.

While bulls are focusing on three key prospects for long-term holding and accumulation including the Bitcoin halving event, potential approval of spot bitcoin ETFs and speculation about a rate cut next year, one analyst believes downside pressure is being catalyzed by the possible sell-off of the U.S. government’s seized bitcoin stash.

Will more Silk Road bitcoin be sold?

On July 12, the U.S. department of justice stirred speculation by appearing to transfer $300 million in BTC to new addresses in two transactions.

“I think that this price reduction is mostly driven by futures prices showing bearish signals, mostly driven by news the U.S. government is allegedly preparing to sell close to $300 million worth of bitcoin,” independent digital asset analyst Konstantin Anissimov told The Block. “I believe the market is expecting this to happen very soon.”

“The total daily volume traded in bitcoin is less than $2 billion right now,” he added. “My assumption is some of this is wash trading. So, a sell-off of $300 million worth of bitcoin should and will result in a negative price movement.”

However, the analyst expects any dip to be short-lived and followed by a price correction.

While bitcoin historically presents an inverse correlation with the U.S. Dollar Index, it has failed to appreciate in the wake of DXY’s recent decline of around 2.3%. 

“The BTC-DXY relationship will be hard to shake for long, though,” said Noelle Acheson, author of Crypto is Macro Now newsletter. “It’s not just that the U.S. dollar is the denominator in the most-quoted pair for the crypto asset, and when the denominator goes down in value, the ratio goes up, all else being equal, it’s also that a weaker dollar boosts global liquidity by giving U.S. dollar debt holders around the world more room to breathe.”

© 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.