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A number of banks and other big brands are turning to RWA in the form of digital tokens on the blockchain as they look to bring more efficiency to transactions. Industry watchers say the trend will grow.

As part of the launch, creator fees will return to the main OpenSea platform at 2.5%, while Pro users will have zero fees.

Satsuma, a blockchain data indexing platform, announced that it raised $5 million in a seed funding round co-led by Initialized Capital and Archetype.

Other investors included OpenSea, Y Combinator, Homebrew and South Park Commons.

Satsuma was founded in March last year and closed the round in May, co-founder and CEO Jonathan Kau told The Block in an interview. The startup waited to announce the equity round as it was focused on building the platform, Kau said.

Satsuma makes it easier to search and analyze data stored on a blockchain, helping developers gain deeper insights into the data such as the total value locked of a DeFi protocol.

“TVL is a pretty complex calculation to make,” he said. “You can’t just directly call some function on a blockchain and immediately get this answer. You have to do some processing to get this data.”

Revenue growth 

Satsuma uses open-source technology from The Graph, a pioneering decentralized protocol for querying and indexing data from blockchain networks. Satsuma, however, is a business entity with a software-as-a-service model and is not a decentralized protocol.

Satsuma gets specifics from its clients on what blockchain data they need and it then processes the data in the form of custom APIs. Its clients include Decentraland, Aragon, and Syndicate.

Kau said Satsuma’s revenue has grown around 80% month-on-month over the last six months despite the current challenging market conditions because developer interest in the crypto remains strong and there is a demand for better infrastructure.

There are currently five people working for Satsuma, and it plans to stay lean in the near term and build for the long term.

“We want to make our tooling as easy and fast as possible so that web3 developers can move much faster and create web2-like consumer experiences,” Kau said.

© 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 messy governance dispute involving a major Ethereum scaling system shows “communities” of token holders have power. But how should that power be distributed?

Bitcoin’s massive rally has helped get it there, even as the industry faces a regulatory crackdown.

Astria’s aim is to enable anyone to deploy their own censorship resistant rollup without having to rely on a centralized sequencer.

Layer 0 blockchain Polkadot has filed a trademark registration for what appears to be a blockchain-based messaging application, according to a recent filing.

Sales of former President Donald Trump’s NFT collection jumped by 133% on Tuesday, hours before his expected arraignment in Manhattan.

Nearly $37,000 worth of the Trump-emblazoned digital cards changed hands in the last 24 hours, according to CryptoSlam data. 

The price swing comes as Trump is set to be arraigned in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York this afternoon. The former president, who is running to reclaim his old job, was indicted by a grand jury last week likely over alleged hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels. 

Still, the price spike is relatively small compared to the action just months ago. The former president’s 45,000-item NFT collection sold out within hours when it debuted in December, driving $3.53 million in sales. Sales jumped 500% last week — hitting $50,000 — after the news broke that Trump had been indicted. 

For his part, Trump has said there was “no crime by Trump” in posts on his Truth Social social media platform. He derided the indictment as a “witch hunt.” 

The various Trump NFT cards include illustrated portraits of the former president surrounded by gold bars, posing with a “Trumpworld” sign in the style of the “Hollywood” sign, as a superhero with lasers shooting out of his eyes, and as an astronaut. 

© 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 startup will launch its testnet and stablecoin this summer.

Dogecoin’s Elon Musk-fueled rally continued into a second day on Tuesday as the memecoin soared after he replaced Twitter’s blue bird logo with the icon of a Shiba Inu dog on the company’s website.

The coin has jumped by around 30% since the social media platform adopted its logo and its CEO began tweeting about it yesterday.

Dogecoin was trading at $0.0985 by 10:50 a.m. EST, up 3% over the past few hours, according to Binance data via TradingView. Dogecoin’s market cap stood at $13.7 billion at the time of writing.

The run-up in value has drawn attention to a mysterious wallet known as “DH5ya” that once held a staggering $24 billion in dogecoin. In a class action lawsuit filed against Musk in U.S. federal court, investors who have lost money on dogecoin have claimed that DH5ya is Musk’s personal wallet.

Musk, through his lawyer, denied the claims and insisted that the wallet belongs to Robinhood, the equities trading platform offering support for several crypto assets. Robinhood declined to confirm or deny that it controls the wallet.

Dogecoin has a history of moving based on what the billionaire CEO does.

In fact, Musk’s tweets can move multiple markets. Dogecoin is now in the top seven cryptocurrencies by market cap, ahead of Cardano’s ADA, Polygon’s MATIC, and just behind Ripple’s XRP.

Other dog-themed memecoins were also trading higher. Shiba Inu gained 6.7%, dogelon mars gained 10%, and floki was up over 14%. 

The coin jumped over 50% percent in October after Musk finalized his Twitter takeover. It erased these gains days later when reports suggested he might drop the company’s crypto ambitions.

Musk accused of manipulation

Musk’s relationship with dogecoin is currently the subject of a class action lawsuit in a New York federal court. Dogecoin buyers in the case have accused Musk of orchestrating a pyramid scheme by hyping the coin. 

“After the launch and initial coin offerings of the dogecoin investment contract, Musk became the leader of this multi-billion-dollar racketeering enterprise which intentionally manipulated the market to drive the price of dogecoin from $0.002 to $0.73 in two years, an increase of 36,000%,” the complaint alleges.

The complaint says Musk began working with the Dogecoin Foundation Inc. (DCFI) in 2018. In 2019, Musk tweeted that “Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency. It’s pretty cool” and “Dogecoin Rulz.” The coin doubled in value over the next three days, the lawsuit claims, and Musk allegedly learned that his tweets were enough to manipulate the market.

Over the next couple of years, Musk tweeted upbeat jokes about dogecoin. By May 2021, dogecoin’s market cap hit $95 billion. “‘The Musk Effect’ caused the peak daily trading volume to rise 2,000-fold and the peak market cap to rise nearly 400-fold,” the lawsuit claims.

Then Musk made a guest appearance on Saturday Night Live in which he called dogecoin a “hustle.” “Within four days, the Doge market cap dropped to $45 billion (nearly 50% from its peak),” the suit states. Within a year, 90% of Dogecoin’s gains were gone. At its peak, the dogecoin market cap approached $90 billion, according to CoinGecko data. 

DH5ya: Musk’s crypto wallet?

Based on “information and belief,” the plaintiffs allege Musk opened a dogecoin wallet whose address begins with the characters DH5ya in 2019. An on-chain researcher, known simply as “lookonchain,” has previously laid out these claims on Twitter.

Plaintiffs argue the wallet’s transactions indicate that it belongs to Musk. The evidence includes the wallet making a 28.061971 DOGE transaction, which corresponds to Musk’s birthday (June 28, 1971), and a transaction spelling out the phrase “Hi Elon.” There were six transactions with 69 coins and two transactions with 420 coins involving this wallet, the lawsuit claims. One transaction involved 80085 coins — an alternative spelling of “BOOBS.” These actions are typical of Musk’s crude humor, the suit alleges.

The wallet in question currently holds a little over 50,300 DOGE, worth just under $5,000 at current prices, according to DogeChain explorer data.

Yet in May 2021, the wallet held $24 billion worth of dogecoin.

Tesla and Musk have urged the Manhattan federal judge to throw out the case, branding it “fanciful.” A motion to dismiss, filed on Friday, states the wallet does not belong to Musk and instead says it belongs to Robinhood.

While the wallet is linked to the social investing platform, Robinhood holds users’ private keys on their behalf. So it is possible that Musk could have transacted via Robinhood, with those trades being executed by the wallet, without the wallet “belonging” to Musk.

Robinhood’s main wallet for consolidating its dogecoin holdings is now DPDLBAe3RGQ2GiPxDzhgjcmpZCZD8cSBgZ. The wallet currently holds $3.3 billion worth of DOGE, or 24% of the circulating supply, based on Dogecoin Whale Alert data.

Musk’s tweets supporting Dogecoin

Musk was silent for several hours after the logo change before tweeting a post referencing one of his older tweets which joked about changing the logo. The tweet gained widespread attention, garnering over half a million likes and nearly 50 million views.

Musk made no clarifications about the change, nor has Twitter itself. Whether or not the new logo will remain is unclear at present. Most of the firm’s branding remains consistent with the blue bird logo. 

Tesla, Musk’s automaker, has also warmed to dogecoin over the past few years. The electric car manufacturer accepts dogecoin as payment for merchandise, and while it holds the cryptocurrency in its reserves, Tesla has not outlined how much DOGE it holds. 

© 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.