FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

SOL, the native token of the Solana blockchain, was declared an unregistered security in this week’s SEC lawsuits against crypto exchanges Binance.US and Coinbase.

Coinbase shares rose 3.1% on Thursday to close at $54.90 amid a tumultuous week for the crypto exchange that was marked by a lawsuit against it filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The stock had dipped to $52.14 in the morning around 10 a.m. ET but rose steadily throughout the rest of the day, according to TradingView. 

Mark Palmer, an equity research analyst for digital assets at Berenberg Capital, said shares will most likely decline due to the SEC lawsuit and reduced his price target to $39 from $55. 

However, some remain bullish on the stock. Cathy Wood’s Ark Invest purchased $21 million in Coinbase stock on June 7, just a day after the SEC alleged that the company had broken securities regulations.

© 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.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal have pledged fresh support for pandemic relief research. 

“Last year @CryptoRelief_ led by @sandeepnailwal allocated $100m to Covid research projects I wanted to fund Sandeep and I discussed and jointly concluded these and other projects are high-impact and need follow through grants,” Buterin wrote on Twitter. “Hence we decided to put $100m more to these projects.”

“Covid and future pandemics are a global problem that requires a global solution combining frontier scientific innovation and on-the-ground implementation all over the world,” Buterin continued. “We need to find public health solutions that respect people’s rights and freedoms, are widely accessible, and ensure that we not only stay alive and healthy but have enjoyable lives that are worth living.”

Buterin said $10 million of the new funds would come from him personally. 

Nailwal founded the emergency relief fund Covid Relief in April of 2021. Aided by Buterin, it has disbursed over $58 million in pandemic relief grants and holds over $20 million in its bank account, according to the organization’s website. 

© 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.

BitGo has reached a preliminary deal to buy crypto custodian Prime Trust, CoinDesk reported, citing a source.

The deal would still require regulatory approval, CoinDesk said, adding that financial terms were not disclosed and that both companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Founded in 2016, Las Vegas, Nevada-based Prime Trust offers various developer tools and APIs to crypto companies, including for custody, payment rails, compliance, liquidity and settlement. Last year, Prime Trust raised $107 million in Series B funding from investors that included Kraken Ventures, FIS Impact Ventures and Fin Capital.

Prime Trust started offering services to crypto companies in 2018. The firm has said it served nearly 700 fintech and crypto clients last year but lost several clients recently, including the Binance.US. exchange that was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this week for allegedly violating the country’s securities laws, among other charges.

Prime Trust provided services to Binance.US, FTX

The SEC lawsuit mentions a “Trust Company B,” which has drawn speculation on social media that it could be Prime Trust. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Block earlier Thursday. 

“Trust Company B is a Nevada-based trust company. In or around July 2019, BAM Trading [d/b/a Binance.US] entered into an agreement with Trust Company B to provide certain services to customers purchasing crypto assets on the Binance.US Platform with U.S. dollars,” the SEC complaint notes.

Prime Trust also provided services to the FTX exchange, which collapsed last November.

Shortly after FTX’s bankruptcy, Prime Trust abruptly replaced its then-CEO Tom Pageler with interim CEO Jor Law. Earlier this year, Prime Trust cut jobs and suspended its business operations in Texas after withdrawing its applications to receive a money transmitter license in the state.

© 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.

Cryptocurrency custody firm BitGo is seeking to buy Prime Trust, another crypto custody specialist regulated in the state of Nevada, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Animoca Brands, a web3 investment firm, released its long awaited 2020 financial report after months of delay. 

The company was originally supposed to release its 2020 report by the end of 2022 but was granted an extension into sometime this year, The Block previously reported. Animoca Brands had pinned the delay on crypto market turbulence in 2021 and 2022, as well as putting blame on the 2020 global pandemic.

“We want to thank all of our shareholders for their patience,” co-founder and Chairman Yat Siu said in a letter with the report. “This report has suffered significant delays owing to many factors including in particular the COVID-19 pandemic, which severely impacted our capacity to integrate acquisitions into our blockchain/NFT strategy and locked down many of our employees across several countries around the world,” Siu said. 

Siu said that deferred revenue for 2020 increased from $6.9 million to $27.9 million.

He dedicated a large part of the letter to more recent strides the company has taken to embrace artificial intelligence. 

“Some parts of our organization are already seeing improvements of up to 80% in efficiency on product development that utilizes AI, and we are very excited by the ways in which AI can accelerate different Web3 efforts in areas such as education and learning, gaming, fashion, sports, and all the other forms of digital identity and culture addressed by Animoca Brands,” he wrote. 

© 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.

Representatives of the layer-2 network atop Ethereum confirmed the change in the treatment of ETH after CoinDesk observed a $550 million transfer in blockchain data. The change occurred in conjunction with Optimism’s “Bedrock” upgrade this week.

Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao warned employees in an internal memo to mind their words — lest they end up in court for the world to see.

“Binance collaborates with investigators. The first thing they usually ask for is our chat logs. Anything you say can/will show up in a courtroom (or on the internet) one day,” Zhao wrote in a memo first obtained by Wu Blockchain. A Binance spokesperson confirmed the authenticity of the memo to The Block. 

Zhao referenced one tweet that quoted now infamous chat logs cited by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a lawsuit it brought against crypto exchange earlier this week. 

Binance reputation

“While this is just two guys ranting ‘privately’ 5 years ago, this is extremely damaging to our reputation,” Zhao said. The comment referenced came from an employee who allegedly had said that “we are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.”

SEC Chair Gary Gensler said the agency has internal communications that allegedly show Binance executives knowingly broke the law. He quoted some of it in a Thursday speech. Zhao said it was “outrageous” that the SEC had been using some of the comments.

“But we will let the lawyers handle that,” he said in the memo. 

© 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.

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has officially launched its NFT marketplace out of beta testing, supporting over 250 NFTs across the Ethereum, Solana and Polygon blockchains.