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Environmentalists and anti-mining lawmakers debating bitcoin mining facility Greenidge Generation’s impact use rhetorically persuasive arguments that aren’t backed by reality. But so do the bitcoiners supporting the powerplant-turned-mining facility. And the debate does not solve the very real environmental problems on Seneca Lake.

Vega Protocol, a Layer 1 blockchain focused on derivatives trading, has launched its first on-chain markets following the release of its alpha mainnet earlier this month.

The project’s community members approved an on-chain governance vote to kickstart trading and take its markets live. This community vote also greenlit the use of the USDC and USDT stablecoins for deposit and withdrawal operations through an interoperability bridge with Ethereum.

From today, Vega Protocol will offer users the ability to create decentralized and permissionless markets. To start with, the network will only support cash-settled futures markets but it has plans to add spot, perpetual, and other types of markets in future stages.

Beyond its trading capabilities, the core team plans to introduce a browser wallet, allowing users direct in-browser access to the full Vega ecosystem. Additionally, the team plans to incorporate a software feature named Wendy, designed to provide Miner Extractable Value (MEV) protection to on-chain traders.

After an extensive research and development phase spanning nearly five years, Vega launched on mainnet on May 10. The core team published the whitepaper for Vega in 2018 outlining a performance-optimized, application-specific blockchain built on the Tendermint proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.

In 2019, the team raised a $5 million seed round led by Pantera Capital. Then in 2021, the team conducted a community token sale on CoinList, raising $43 million.

© 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.

Decentralized finance protocol Num Finance will offer stablecoins in Brazilian real, Colombian peso, Mexican peso and Bahrain dinar within the next month and develop tokenized money market funds.

“We’ve addressed this on multiple occasions. We keep our user and corporate funds on completely separate ledgers,” Patrick Hillmann, Binance’s chief communications officer tweeted on Tuesday.

The European Commission’s plans could moderate a push from Parliament to discourage crypto holdings as it debates new capital requirements for banks.

Cathie Wood also referenced last year’s dramatic collapse of crypto exchange FTX, saying it “proved the concept” of bitcoin

The Web3 fantasy sports game is working with the French National Gaming Authority to create a framework for France-based players who face a tighter regulatory regime.

Crypto exchange Binance is pushing back against a Reuters report on Tuesday that alleges the company commingled customer funds with revenue in 2020 and 2021, calling the story “weak.”

“They then pinned 1000 words of conspiracy theories (which we explained were false) with zero evidence other than a ‘former insider,” Binance chief strategy officer Patrick Hillmann wrote in a tweet. “We’ve been very public about where the company had regulatory shortcomings in the past.”

Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported that Binance commingled billions of dollars almost daily in accounts the company held at Silvergate Bank, the now-collapsed U.S. lender. In one instance on Feb. 10, 2021, Binance was alleged to have mixed $20 million from a corporate account with $15 million from an account that received customer money, the news outlet reported, citing bank records.

Binance spokesperson Brad Jaffe told Reuters that the Silvergate Bank accounts were not used to accept user deposits and rather used to facilitate user purchases of crypto. “There was no commingling at any time because these are 100% corporate funds,” Jaffe said.

In March, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Binance for allegedly operating an “illegal” exchange and a “sham” compliance program. CFTC, in its complaint at the time, also said that certain Binance entities “have commingled funds.”

A Binance spokesperson referred The Block to Hillmann’s tweets, declining to comment on the Reuters report.

Hillmann said in followup tweets that Binance keeps “user and corporate funds on completely separate ledgers.” He didn’t explicitly say that the company does not commingle customer 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.

Hardware wallet maker Ledger, which has faced a backlash over a recently announced service that would help users recover their private keys, said Tuesday that it would try and assuage concerns by working to increase transparency and accelerate its open source roadmap.

“Ledger never compromises on security,” CEO Pascal Gauthier wrote in a blog post, saying the company hadn’t intended to surprise anyone with the announcement of the service. “Our unintentional communication mistake took everyone by surprise and affected our customer’s ability to accurately understand Ledger Recover, its role for the growing crypto community, and for Ledger’s future offering.”

The company, which unveiled the service earlier this month, had struggled to explain how it would safeguard users’ private keys, especially against the risk of hypothetical government subpoenas.

The service works by splitting a user’s seed phase into 3 pieces, which would then be shared with Ledger and an unnamed entity to be combined in the event of a user losing access to their keys. 

Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet had previously said the perceived security tradeoff of the new product was acceptable. Gauthier tried to ease fears about possible subpoenas earlier this week, when he said that it was not something that typically affects the average user. 

Ledger says seed phrase recovery remains pain point

“We believe wholeheartedly in the need for a service like Ledger Recover,” he wrote Tuesday. “The main pain point for crypto self-custody adoption is precisely the problem of seed phrase recovery.”

Gauthier said the vast majority of Ledger’s codebase was already open source, and the acceleration would include as much of the Ledger operating system as possible, including core components of the operating system.

“We will open source the Ledger Recover protocol, enabling the community to have as much choice as possible over your self-custody, in addition to the service being fully optional,” he said. “We are doing this for more transparency going forward; this does not change the security of your device.”

Users who want increased security, meanwhile, can enable a passphrase feature that is not included in the Ledger Recover and can be “a fully trustless feature,” he 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 Binance-hosted wallets received more than $2 million worth of various cryptocurrencies that were then sent on to North Korean entities, OFAC alleged