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The Adidas Originals x Fewocious collection includes an NFT and a physical Adidas Originals Campus 00’s sneaker designed by the 20-year-old artist.

The Snoop Dogg Passport Series NFT will evolve over time as the rapper embarks on a tour this summer.

Ripple is calling for a fresh investigation into William Hinman, a former director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporation Finance, and a speech he gave in 2018 that has been frequently cited in questions concerning whether or not a digital asset meets the definition of an investment security. 

“An investigation must be conducted to understand what or who influenced Hinman, why conflicts (or, at the very least, appearances of conflicts) were ignored, and why the SEC touted the speech knowing that it would create ‘greater confusion,'” Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty wrote in a thread on Twitter. 

The statement came after documents in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the SEC against Ripple were released earlier in the day that showed behind-the-scenes edits and correspondence about the speech.

Alderoty said the documents demonstrated that Hinman didn’t address internal concerns about the speech before making it public. 

‘Howey factors’

“Hinman ignored multiple warnings that his speech contained made-up analysis with no basis in law, was divorced from the Howey factors, exposed regulatory gaps, and would create not just confusion, but ‘greater confusion’ in the market,” Alderoty wrote. He said the SEC should remove the speech from its website and said it should no longer be invoked in discussion about whether or not a security is a token. 

“Unelected bureaucrats must faithfully apply the law within the constraints of their jurisdiction. They can’t – as Hinman tried – create new law,” Alderoty continued. 

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse echoed the view.

“It’s absolutely unconscionable that a regulator – when presented with so much pushback on what he was about to say / how he compiled this fake ‘test’ in the first place – decided to move forward anyway, and throw an entire industry into chaos,” he wrote on Twitter. 

© 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.

London-based Eden Block, the crypto venture capital firm, today announced the hire of former Goldman Sachs partner Orit Freedman Weissman as a general partner.

Freedman Weissman spent 20 years as a partner for Goldman in Israel from the early nineties until 2014. As well as setting up the bank’s Israeli business and running it as regional CEO, she specialized in M&A, financing and investing in private companies — in particular in the tech sector. She was later involved in bringing the Mandarin Oriental hotel to Tel Aviv.

More recently, Freedman Weissman has performed due diligence on over 50 crypto-focused funds for her family office, she said in an interview with The Block. Of those, she said several made overtures about her coming on board. But it was Lior Messika’s Eden Block that caught her eye.

“Eden Block is a true hidden gem,” she said. “I was impressed with the portfolio. I was impressed with the top performance. I love the strategy of early-stage infrastructure.”

Promising bets

Eden Block remains small relative to rivals in the crypto VC world, such as a16z crypto, Paradigm and Polychain. Its first fund to manage outside capital, raised roughly a year and a half ago, is $30 million in size.

But the business has made some promising bets, including the likes of privacy startup Nym Technologies, Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs and Gensyn, the compute power marketplace that just scored a $43 million Series A round. It even has a few exits in the form of Hal, GK8 and Chainspace, which were acquired by Consensys, Celsius and Facebook, respectively.

“We’ve been dedicated to infrastructure since Chainspace and that’s all we’ve done,” said Messika, who also sits on the advisory board of his family’s jewellery business, André Messika Diamonds. “We’ve been able to attract the best founders in the world working on these problems.”

Scaling up

Freedman Weissman has been brought in to help scale Eden Block, which is currently planning a second fund.

“On a high level, it’s to help institutionalize Eden Block,” she said. Freedman Weissman added that this would mean corralling support from big backers for the next fund, and scaling the company from an operational standpoint.

Freedman Weissman said she sees the advent of web3 as a “seismic shift” that affects all industries. “So being at the core, the infrastructure, is where I want to be,” she 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.

The 14-day average of miner transfers to exchanges has increased sharply to 489.26 BTC, the highest since March 2021, according to Glassnode.

XRP’s uber-passionate supporters believe the SEC unfairly targeted Ripple for securities violations while mysteriously giving Ethereum a free pass. Do they have a point?

House Republicans Patrick McHenry and GT Thompson face a central problem drafting their crypto bill: Removing SEC discretion over whether a crypto token is a security allows issuers of traditional stocks and bonds the opportunity to arbitrage regulation, writes Todd Phillips.

The two are the first companies added by the Financial Conduct Authority to the crypto register in six months.

Newly released documents in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against Ripple Labs show that William Hinman, a former director of regulator’s Division of Corporation Finance, planned to have a conversation with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 2018.

According to a 2018 email sent by Hinman, the discussion aimed to “confirm our understanding of how the Ethereum Foundation operates.”

Hinman, in a notable 2018 speech, opined the native asset of the Ethereum network did not require regulation as a security, and Ripple Labs has since frequently referenced this standpoint in their defense against the SEC’s allegations. The recently surfaced document provides a glimpse into internal discussions at the SEC preceding the Hinman speech in which he suggested that bitcoin and ether were not securities. 

The SEC, in December 2020, filed a lawsuit accusing Ripple Labs of raising over $1.3 billion via an unregistered digital asset securities offering with its own XRP cryptocurrency.

More recently, the SEC initiated lawsuits against crypto exchanges Coinbase and Binance. The legal complaint against Coinbase cited at least 13 crypto assets it argued should be considered as securities including Solana and Cardano.

© 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.

Episode 56 of Season 5 of The Scoop was recorded with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Cinneamhain Ventures Managing Partner Adam Cochran.

Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Please send feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblock.co.

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Adam Cochran has over a decade of experience in the crypto industry and is the Managing Partner of Cinneamhain Ventures.

In this episode, Cochran examines how recent enforcement actions by the US Securities and Exchange Commission is driving crypto innovation outside of the United States.

“This is an absolute fumble for the U.S. government and U.S. industry at large,” he told The Block’s Frank Chaparro

Outline of the discussion:

2:12 – Crypto and Congress

4:30 – SEC Enforcement Actions

7:16 – Coinbase & Binance

9:17 – Impact on DeFi

11:08 – Innovation Outside the U.S.

15:57 – Impact on Venture Landscape

17:10 – Decentralization & DAOs

19:52 – Is Solana a Security?

23:36 – Market Update

27:55 – Hidden Binance Risk?

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This episode is brought to you by our sponsors PayPal and CleanSpark.

About CleanSpark

CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) is America’s Bitcoin Miner™. Visit cleanspark.com/theblock to learn more about the CleanSpark way.

© 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.