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Pseudonymous NFT researcher and artist Elena admitted to tracing other pixel art to pad out her upcoming collection Atomic Ordinals.

Empowerment, the second NFT in the football club’s ten-piece Masterpiece collection, is a one-of-one created in collaboration with World of Women that pays tribute to Spanish player Alexia Putellas.

The exchange’s share in ETH staking dropped to 9.7%, the lowest since May 2021, as the SEC sued Coinbase for offering unregistered securities this month.

Joseph O’Conner, a British man who made roughly $900,000 in an elaborate Twitter hack and a separate crypto-related SIM-swapping scheme, received a 5 year sentence from a federal judge on Friday, Inner City Press reported.

The approved consortium includes Mastercard, broker Genial, registrar Cerc and financial software fintech Sinqia as partners.

Optimism, the Layer 2 network focused on scaling Ethereum applications through the use of Optimistic Rollups, has changed the project’s name to OP Mainnet in a move meant to reflect the objective to create a “superchain” network of many Layer 2 blockchains.

“It’s official: the chain formerly known as Optimism is now OP Mainnet,” the Optimism Foundation tweeted. “This distinction clarifies the delineation between the OP Mainnet blockchain and the collective vibe and ethos that ‘Optimism’ encompasses.”

The name OP Mainnet will denote the foundational layer of the envisioned superchain network, which currently hosts over $1.3 billion in total value locked.

OP Mainnet relies on Optimistic Rollups for its operation — a technology that aggregates Ethereum transactions on a secondary layer. The adoption of the technology allows for faster and cheaper transaction processing, addressing increasing scalability concerns within the Ethereum network.

OP Labs, the developer of OP Mainnet, operates a development software stack referred to as the OP Stack, which enables developers to launch their own Layer 2 blockchains. Crypto exchange giant Coinbase is developing its own blockchain, called Base, using the OP Stack.

 

© 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 gaming, entertainment and loyalty industries are poised for big changes, thanks to Web3 tech such as NFTs and DAOs. We talk to the experts on how. Plus, Nike and Puma announced new digital partnerships that show Web3 is still kicking.

The first leveraged bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund became effective on Friday after not being rejected by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 

The Volatility Shares 2x Bitcoin Strategy ETF, or BITX, is due to start trading on Tuesday, Stuart Barton, chief investment officer at Volatility Shares, said in an email. CoinDesk first reported the news. 

BITX will look to provide two times the return of a bitcoin futures index on a daily basis.

Bitcoin futures contracts

The fund will not directly invest in bitcoin and instead “seeks to benefit from increases in the price of Bitcoin Futures Contracts,” according to the prospectus. 

The SEC has approved a bitcoin futures ETF before, but it hasn’t yet approved a spot fund. This past week firms including WisdomTree, Invesco and BlackRock all filed for spot bitcoin 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.

Belgium’s Financial Services and Markets Authority ordered Binance to cease all offers of virtual currency services in the country — immediately. 

“The FSMA has noted that Binance is offering and providing exchange services in Belgium between virtual currencies and legal currencies, as well as custody wallet services, from countries that are not members of the European Economic Area,” the regulator said in a statement on Friday.

“The FSMA has therefore ordered Binance to cease, with immediate effect, offering or providing any and all such services in Belgium,” the regulator added.

People and firms governed in Belgium and not a member of the European Economic Area cannot offer exchange services between virtual currencies and legal currencies or custody wallet services, the regulator added. Failing to comply could mean criminal sanctions, FSMA said. 

Binance did not dispute regulators findings

FSMA said Binance did not dispute that it offered those services in Belgium. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Block. 

“There are apparently 27 such companies involved in the operational and/or technical aspects of the provision of these services, of which 19 appear to be based outside the European Economic Area,” FSMA said. 

Binance is also facing heat from regulators in the U.S. Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao for allegedly operating an unregistered exchange and misleading customers. 

© 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.

A trader has opened an on-chain short position on the stablecoin TUSD after the issuer had to pause mints and redemptions through one of its banking partners, Prime Trust.

An Ethereum user deposited 7.5 million USDC, another stablecoin, as collateral on Aave’s V2 lending platform. They used this to borrow 4 million TUSD and immediately sold them for USDC, per on-chain data. Borrowing and immediately selling is a common tactic to take a short position on a specific asset.

TrueUSD announced earlier this month that it had halted the minting of new TUSD coins via Prime Trust, a Las Vegas-based trust company. More recently, the Nevada Department of Business and Industry’s Financial Institutions Division (FID) recently issued a cease-and-desist order against Prime Trust.

“We have no exposure to Prime Trust and maintain multiple USD rails for minting and redemption,” said TrueUSD.

The TUSD stablecoin itself saw a surge in use after cryptocurrency exchange giant Binance adopted it, following regulatory complications with the exchange’s associated BUSD stablecoin.

© 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.