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After launching its mainnet on Monday, Mantle’s utility and governance token has jumped roughly 4%, more than the native tokens of Arbitrum and Optimism over the past day.

Web3 investment firm Polychain Capital has raised $200 million in the “first close” of its fourth investment fund, Fortune reported. 

The firm still plans to raise $400 million for the fund.

The firm also cut three of its research members due to new investing priorities, according to the report. Polychain declined comment to the publication. 

The Block first reported news of the fourth fund in March.

© 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.

U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to refocus its efforts to go after bad actors in the cryptocurrency sector following a judge’s split decision last week in an ongoing dispute Ripple Labs and the regulator. 

In a letter sent Tuesday to SEC Chair Gary Gensler, Torres said he looked forward to how the agency plans to “reassess its regulatory assault on crypto assets” following the ruling. Torres is a member of the House Financial Services Committee, which is tasked with overseeing the SEC. 

“I hope that the SEC will find itself so chastened by the court’s decision that it will concentrate the Commission’s enforcement energies where it belongs: on the bonafide bad actors who perpetrate serious transgressions like fraud, market manipulation, and the misappropriation of customer funds,” Torres said. 

Advocates for the crypto industry were elated last week after a New York judge ruled that XRP was not a security when sold on the secondary market in “blind bid” sales. Judge Analisa Torres did, however, side with the SEC when she said that the token was a security when sold to institutional investors. 

Future cases

Torres, who also sits on the Congressional Blockchain Caucus, said the decision could have future implications. 

“The ability of the SEC to make up the law as it goes along will be, in the meantime, constrained by the persuasive authority that the Torres Doctrine will likely command in future legal cases,” Torres said. 

The SEC declined to comment. Gensler has said he was disappointed over the treatment of retail investors in the judge’s decision. 

“While disappointed on what they said about retail investors, we’re still looking at it and assessing that opinion,” Gensler said on Monday at a National Press Club luncheon where he was discussing artificial intelligence.

Gensler also told Yahoo Finance on Monday that it was “too early” to tell whether the SEC will draft more crypto-specific rules following that decision. 

Torres did not set a deadline on his letter for when he wants a response. 

© 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.

he crypto-focused firm has also cut three members of its research and development staff.

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Entertainment focused blockchain company Theta Labs is partnering with 1990s milk cap game company Pogs as it pursues web3 ambitions.

Rebranded as Pog Digital, the company said that the 165 million millennials and Gen Zers who collected its product “will want to own a modern iteration that integrates digital and physical experiences.”

During more than 30 years of existence, Pogs has worked with top brands like Disney, Barbie and Pokemon, it said in a statement.

“By partnering with Theta Labs, we are able to scale a dedicated ecosystem while connecting our collections across multiple blockchains such as Solana, Ethereum and Bitcoin,” Pog Digital CEO Kyler Frisbee said in the statement.

With a team made up of former employees from Netflix, Samsung, Amazon and Vimeo, Theta hopes to become “the leading blockchain for media and entertainment.” The company has raised more than $100 million, according to Crunchbase.

© 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.

Futureverse, a platform leveraging both artificial intelligence and metaverse technology, raised $54 million in Series A funding, with crypto payment solutions provider Ripple Labs participating.

Growth equity fund 10T Holdings led the round. Futureverse’s founders declined to share the company’s new valuation, according to Bloomberg.

Futureverse’s platform “includes a robust suite of proprietary AI content generation tools designed to enhance the music, objects, characters and animations that make up the metaverse,” the company said in a statement. It also said it had previously forged partnerships with a diverse set of companies and individuals including FIFA, Mastercard, Death Row Records, Snoop Dogg and Keanu Reeves.

The company previously announced a partnership with Ripple that includes an integration that utilizes the XRP token which surged in value last week after a court issued a mixed ruling on whether or not the digital asset is a security.

Futureverse vision

The Futureverse funding news comes at a time when enthusiasm for “metaverse” startups and investments has cooled after soaring last year. The company hopes its technological solutions and tools will foster more development of “interoperable apps, games and experiences.”

“We are excited to continue to support the Futureverse vision,” Ripple President Monica Long said in a statement.  “While we’re at the earliest stages of what a project like this, and really the larger concept of the metaverse, can achieve, we at Ripple are thrilled to contribute to the foundational infrastructure layer and provide real utility to the end users of the open metaverse.”

 

© 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.

U.S. Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand have developed a second draft of their comprehensive crypto regulation bill. Chances are slim that it will, as a single bill, advance to becoming a law, but it may still drive a broader conversation within Congress on what sort of provisions smaller pieces of legislation should include.

Bitcoin mining firm TeraWulf will increase its self-mining hashrate by 58% with the purchase of 18,500 Antminer S19j XP bitcoin mining machines  from crypto mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain for $53.4 million.

The new machines will be deployed at the company’s Lake Mariner facility in New York, the company said in a statement.

“Our planned expansion with S19j XPs will further establish TeraWulf as one of the most efficient mining fleets in the sector with a fleet efficiency of 25.7 J/TH,” said Nazar Khan, co-founder and COO of TeraWulf. “Coupled with a realized average cost of power of 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour and average availability in excess of 98%, we are not only expanding hashing capacity with this order but simultaneously positioning TeraWulf for increased profit margins ahead of the next halving.”

TeraWulf paid a deposit for the new machines and will receive the miners in equal batches split between October, November and December.

© 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 clock for the SEC approval process of spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications will begin Wednesday after all eight applicants, including BlackRock, were listed in the Federal Register.