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Binance cuts staff.

Notable depositors into EigenLayer’s pools include one address that deployed the U.S.-sanctioned Tornado Cash money mixing tool and another address associated with Hassan Bassiri, former vice president of portfolio management at crypto hedge fund Arca, per Nansen.

Public beta testing will begin in a few weeks according to parent company Block.

Ripple Labs and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seem to be on the same page about the documents known as the Hinman Emails: The former official’s past remarks shouldn’t govern current policy.

Coinbase has reduced its debt through a recent debt repurchasing. 

The firm bought back $64.5 million worth of their Convertible Senior Notes, a type of debt that can be exchanged into a set amount of the issuer’s shares, at a 29% discount, according to a company release. These notes were originally due in 2026. The firm spent around $45.5 million in cash for the repurchase, which constituted 0.5% of the notes.

Coinbase expects the repurchase to close on or near June 20, 2023, in which the company will have about a $1.37 billion principal amount on outstanding notes. 

“We are always looking for the best opportunities to deploy capital to create shareholder value,” said Alesia Haas, Coinbase’s chief financial officer, in a company statement. “This opportunistic repurchase is a continuation of those efforts and reflects our confidence in our business, strong first quarter financial performance, and improved competitive positioning. 

Coinbase originally announced its $1.25 billion private debt offering on May 17, 2021.

© 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.

Uniswap Foundation’s Bridge Assessment Committee has selected Wormhole and Axelar as two bridges for potential cross-chain deployments.

In January 2023, Uniswap initially selected Wormhole as its preferred bridge but the processed was marred by controversy. In March it set up a committee to research and suggest a path forward, a process that has now been completed.

“The Committee find that the Wormhole and Axelar bridges are currently suitable for use by the DAO for managing governance messaging in future cross-chain deployments, but advise the community to continuously review both them and other bridge providers on an ongoing basis,” the committee concluded in its report.

Uniswap’s committee noted that a multi-bridge architecture would probably be more suitable for Uniswap but that such types of cross-chain swaps are not ready yet.

The committee also examined cross-chain protocols LayerZero, Celer, DeBridge and Multichain. Multichain has been hit by multiple technical issues over the last few weeks and lost contact with its CEO for a period of time. DeBridge today launched a trading platform for native cross-chain swaps.

The committee included co-founders and CTOs of multiple blockchain projects, including the CTO of OtterSec, the CTO of Zellic and the CEO of HashCloak.

© 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.

Stablecoin issuer Tether said Thursday that New York’s Attorney General has provided information about the company’s business that was gathered in the course of a 2021 settlement with the state to crypto media publication CoinDesk.

In February 2021, the NYAG agreed with Tether to cease activity with those living in New York and pay $18.5 million in fines. The investigation found that Tether at times lacked banking access and that its stablecoin was not always backed 1:1 with cash.

Shortly after, CoinDesk filed a Freedom of Information Law request with the NYAG for the documents gathered during the investigation. Initially Tether fought the request but it said today that it dropped its opposition.

Tether says documents are out of date 

The documents include statements from Tether’s banks, which Tether argued are out of date — having changed the core makeup of the stablecoin’s backing over the last two years.

The documents include a lot of names of private individuals who were Tether’s customers at the time, according to a source familiar with the matter.

“The published information, if properly read and interpreted, only demonstrates publicly the legitimacy of Tether’s business and the existence of its reserves,” Tether said in a blog post. 

© 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.

ResearchHub, a startup co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong that rewards scientists with cryptocurrency for publishing content, has raised $5 million in a funding round. 

The seed round was led by Open Source Software Capital, with participation from Boost VC, RedHat’s Bob Young, Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch, Replit’s Amjad Masad, Y Combinator’s Garry Tan and others, ResearchHub announced in a blog post.

By publishing their work on ResearchHub, researchers earn ResearchCoin, a cryptocurrency specifically designed for the platform. The amount of RSC earned is determined by the community’s perceived value of the content, and the crypto can then used to reward other scientists for completing research-related tasks such as peer reviews, answering scientific questions and providing feedback. 

Open-source scientific research

ResearchHub argues that scientific research is too important to be hidden behind paywalls and advocates for an open-source software-style model that fosters collaboration and rewards valuable contributions in an “academic town square.”

“With this new funding, ResearchHub will be able to expand our platform to reach more scientists worldwide,” co-founders Brian Armstrong and Patrick Joyce said in the post. “We will invest in new features and tools that enable our community to work together more efficiently and capture more of the value they help create.”

 

© 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.

Two days after Donald Trump became the first U.S. president to be charged with a federal crime, his NFT project, Trump Digital Collectible Cards, let people know that it was not letting his second arrest stop them from awarding prizes associated with the project.