FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Obadia cited personal reasons for his departure but warned of “serious challenges” for Flashbots in a letter posted to Twitter.

Alex Obadia, a co-founder of the Ethereum infrastructure service Flashbots formed to battle negative consequences of MEV extraction techniques on Ethereum, is departing the Paradigm-backed company. He’s also warning of serious challenges ahead.

“The system we committed to protect is still vulnerable to centralization from phenomena such as cross-domain MEV and exclusive orderflow,” he wrote in a letter posted to Twitter. “To top it off, as we’ve grown into an incumbent, we now also need to protect the system against ourselves, to avoid becoming the very Moloch we’re fighting against.”

Obadia said he was leaving the company for multiple reasons, “some more personal than others.” 

Flashbots North Star

“What it boils down to is that I feel my vision and values will be better served somewhere else,” he added. “This is normal, and happens in every growing organization.” 

Flashbots’ service proposes blocks for validators running the Ethereum blockchain, and the company earlier this year was looking to raise funds at a billion-dollar valuation. Its website says it was born out of the “the existential crisis of MEV.”

Maximal Extractable Value, which MEV refers to, is a technique that involves manipulating transaction sequencing to capitalize on certain types of trades.

“We founded Flashbots to confront a looming crisis we saw on the horizon, standing up for a technology we believe in, and protecting values dear to us,” Obadia said. “In an industry often caught in the short term, the decision to invest in fundamental research may seem counterintuitive, but this is precisely our edge.”

© 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.

BlackRock’s entrance into the market for crypto-tied exchange traded products might be a welcomed development by industry bulls, but it could prove to be a headache for one of the largest market participants.

The company, which last week submitted a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a new trust tied to the largest cryptocurrency, is among a number of asset management firms keen to introduce a spot-based product to the market. Grayscale, which has long offered a wide-range of trust products, is another. 

Unlike an ETF, which trades on a national securities exchange, Grayscale’s products trade over-the-counter and don’t always track the price of the underlying asset. Still, it has been able to charge a hefty fee to traders. 

Grayscale, the largest crypto native asset manager, is suing the SEC to upgrade its trust to an ETF.

BlackRock rival product

Data from The Block Research indicates that the firm brought in more than $230 million from its flagship GBTC and ETHE products since the beginning of the year. Still, the 2.0% and 2.5% annual fees it charges to manage those assets may soon collapse if BlackRock can successfully bring a rival product to market, says James Seyffart of Bloomberg Intelligence. 

Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust manages over $16 billion. 

Seyffart, who joined an episode of The Scoop this week, noted that a BlackRock fund would hit Grayscale’s valuation.

“If BlackRock wins approval for their ETF, which isn’t guaranteed, it may decrease Grayscale’s valuation because Grayscale would be forced to lower fees sooner than might have been assumed,” Seyffart noted.

“On top of that, if GBTC converts to an ETF then the fund will be subject to potential outflows,” he added.

DCG — the parent company of Grayscale — has actively been looking to offload assets, including media company CoinDesk, in the wake of the crypto credit crash. The firm’s lending unit Genesis Capital owes more than $3 billion to its creditors and was at risk of default earlier this year.

© 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 wallet potentially connected to a different one named in the forfeiture of funds stolen from the now shuttered darknet marketplace Silk Road has made a small bitcoin transaction.

The wallet in question — beginning with bc1qzd8c — moved 10 BTC to another wallet while sending 1,490 BTC to a change wallet.

A wallet associated with James Zhong, who was convicted for stealing bitcoin from the Silk Road, sent 0.00000547 bitcoin to the bc1qzd8c wallet on April 22, 2022, around the time that control over his funds were handed over to the U.S. government. Other wallets also sent bitcoin to it as part of the same transaction.

Some crypto analytics platforms, including Glassnode, figured that this meant the bc1qzd8c wallet was also under the control of the U.S. government and labelled the funds as such, while Arkham previously connected the walled to the government in a tweet. This led to alerts going out today that the Silk Road funds were being moved, leading to a brief dip in the price of bitcoin.

It’s unclear whether the funds are in the possession of the U.S. government.

Strange movement of bitcoin

After the funds were transferred today, they were then sent to further wallets that contain transactions linked to crypto exchange Coinbase and Gemini, according to Arkham.

There are some strange signs about the way the bitcoin was moved around. The original transaction initially sent just 0.01 bitcoin but then used the replace by fee function to not only increase the fee, but also increase the amount being sent. It’s an unusual practice. 

The U.S. government is among the largest bitcoin whales following the seizure of more than 50,000 bitcoin tied to the now-defunct marketplace in 2021. The holdings have become the subject of intense scrutiny among chain-watchers, and transfers have in the past triggered price action.

Coinbase handles the U.S. government’s bitcoin, The Block has previously reported. The exchange was sued on June 6 by the SEC for allegedly operating as an unlicensed securities exchange.

 

© 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 next cryptocurrency bull market will need regularity clarity in the U.S. and proof that core inflation is moving lower, according to the crypto analytics firm Nansen

“Shallow BTC sell-offs and ongoing decrease in crypto implied volatility tell us that a lot of regulatory and macro bad news are already priced in,” it wrote on Twitter, referencing a report by Nansen research analyst Aurelie Barthere. 

“The scenario of a recession is being pushed back and inflation is surprising by its ‘stubbornness,” it continued. “This creates non-linear effects, whereby monetary policy (outside of Asia) remains more restrictive for longer, and in turn, becomes an increasing headwind for risk assets.”

Despite talk of U.S. regulatory uncertainty in the wake of lawsuits filed against crypto exchanges Coinbase and Binance by the Securities and Exchange Commission last month, bitcoin has been a solid performer. The price of the largest crypto by market capitalization is up 66.5% over the past six months and is currently trading at $28,023, according to TradingView. 

 

 

© 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.

EDX Markets (EDX), which is backed by Fidelity Digital Assets, Charles Schwab and Citadel Securities has launched in the U.S. after building out its technology for the past nine months, the company announced Tuesday.

Bitcoin surged past $28,000 for the first time since May 29 on Tuesday.

As of 4:05pm in New York, the world’s largest crypto by market capitalization was up 4.7% over the past 24 hours to $28,016, according to CoinMarketCap. 

The surge comes amid optimism after asset manager BlackRock filed for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund last week, according to The Block Research’s Kevin Peng. The move subsequently had impacts on other bitcoin offerings, such as a 400% spike in trading volume of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Investment Trust. 

The gains come as bitcoin is seeing its highest dominance in nearly two years, according to data from The Block. As the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said a slew of other cryptocurrencies were securities in recent lawsuits, bitcoin’s percentage of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization now sits around 46.6%.

© 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 price surge liquidated some $34 million of short positions in the past 24 hours, the most this month, CoinGlass data shows.

All Fortnite players who play this island for 10 minutes or more will receive the Air Max 1 ’86 Back Bling digital sneaker.