FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

ALSO: CoinDesk’s market analyst writes that a decrease in the number of bitcoin addresses with a balance of more than 1,000 bitcoins suggests that large, institutional investors are reluctant to add to their coffers.

TikTok saved once-bankrupt fashion retailer Aeropostale with the popularity of “tiny tops.” Now the brand is turning to the metaverse for its newest attempt at virality. 

The shopping mall stalwart, in partnership with development studio MetaversePlus, today launched AeroPax, an NFT collection with 30,000 one-of-a-kind avatars, which “will build community and give members exclusive perks, including access to limited-edition apparel and VIP promotions.” 

Aeropostale is the latest mainstream fashion label to jump into the metaverse, joining several other fashion brands like Gucci, Forever 21 and Balenciaga. The potential payoff could be big: The global metaverse market accounted for almost $69 billion in 2022 and is estimated to surpass around $1.3 trillion by 2030, according to Precedence Research. Additionally, digital objects offer the ability for infinite reproducibility at little cost and a built-in marketing platform.

That said, as a recent McKinsey report suggested, “direct sales may not be front and center on the metaverse right now.” In other words, it’s a marketing play and, for now, making money is not exactly the point.

Saved by TikTok

Just a few years ago, Aeropostale was a bankrupt fashion retailer with a large and ailing physical store presence. The millennial playbook of skinny jeans and graphic tees, which had been the brand’s bread-and-butter for years, was no longer working.

And then seemingly out of nowhere, the brand’s “tiny tops” went viral on TikTok, and the brand found relevance once more. 

In the metaverse, the company may also be looking for a similar viral impact, though what exactly that could be remains a mystery.

“We think of it as the formation of a community of like-minded individuals … a new generation coming together to build a brighter, more inclusive future,” said Michael DeLellis, Aeropostale’s head of marketing. We “have no preconceived notions about the makeup of this new community. All are welcome!”

The project has gained some momentum thus far, including more than 7,000 Instagram followers and more than 500 newcomers to the company’s Discord channel. 

The impetus for this gathering of digital souls, however, may have more to do with the company’s plan to give away 10 Tesla Model Y’s than with bunny-character NFTs. After all, the chance to win a $50,000-plus car might be more compelling than access to a custom Aeropostale wolf, but in crypto you never know.

© 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.

Recent actions by the Securities and Exchange Commission is putting U.S. financial leadership at risk, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said during a Twitter live chat on Thursday. 

Compared with countries like the UK, Brazil and Singapore, the U.S is the “farthest behind” in areas such as legislation and banking rails, Armstrong said. If action isn’t taken, it could get worse.

The comments came only a day after the SEC issued the crypto exchange a warning notice regarding its staking service, Coinbase Earn and Coinbase Wallet. The recent action by the SEC is part of a slew of regulatory warning shots fired against other crypto firms in the U.S. 

“We should not be subject to regulation by enforcement like this,” Armstrong said, adding that his firm’s focus is to obtain “clear guidelines.”

“In a way we’re happy to go to court,” he said, “if that’s what it takes to finally get some case law developed for this industry.” 

Among agencies in the U.S., the SEC has been a “real outlier” in its opposition to crypto, Armstrong 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 cryptocurrency industry is in an uproar following news that the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a Wells notice to Coinbase, and other companies consider what’s next. 

The SEC’s notice relates to the firm’s staking service, Coinbase Earn and Coinbase Wallet, the company wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. This comes after the SEC has said most cryptocurrencies are securities and commission Chair Gary Gensler has called on firms and token projects to register with the agency. 

An enforcement action against Coinbase appears to have been building for a long time: The markets regulator has signaled an increased attention to issues around staking-as-a-service and custody of crypto assets in recent weeks through a combination of enforcement and proposed rule changes. The SEC and Justice Department also charged a former Coinbase product manager with insider trading activity around nine tokens listed on Coinbase that the SEC claims are unregistered securities.

But unlike other companies and projects targeted by regulators for noncompliance, Coinbase is a public company that received approval from the SEC to sell publicly traded stock in 2021. Though the SEC frequently investigates public companies, some of the offerings apparently under scrutiny now were in place when the SEC approved the IPO. 

“They provided extensive details of their business through that process,” said Brett Quick, head of government affairs at the Crypto Council for Innovation, an industry association that counts Coinbase among its members. “Why are they now coming back and saying that there are all of these problems with the business model?”

What happens next?  

The action may have galvanized crypto community support for the company, though whether that lasts could depend on if Coinbase fights the SEC or chooses to settle and change its business operations. 

“We’ve seen kind of a rallying behind Coinbase over the course of the last 24 hours,” said Jennifer Schulp, director of financial regulation studies at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute.  

The Wells notice that Coinbase received is a letter from SEC staff notifying the subject of an investigation that the agency is ready to recommend formal charges to the commission. But subjects of the investigation can try to persuade staff not to make that recommendation, said Andrew Vollmer, senior affiliate scholar at the Mercatus Center and former deputy general counsel at the SEC. The commission will then vote on whether to bring charges in a closed meeting.  

“So you don’t know how fast the staff will get something to the commission and how fast the commission puts it on its agenda,” Vollmer said. “It can take months. Sometimes cases go quiet for a long time.” 

This is a ripe time for defendants to get together to settle, Vollmer said. That could include a fine and change in operations. 

“Now is an opportune moment for Coinbase and the SEC enforcement staff to talk,” he said.  

To the courts 

Coinbase’s Grewal said the firm still wants rulemaking and legislation over enforcement, but pointedly said “if necessary, we welcome the opportunity for Coinbase and the broader crypto community to get clarity in court.” 

Going to court is not a fast process, noted Quick. “But it will at least help to bring some of the transparency that not just Coinbase, but the entire industry really needs and have been asking for.”   

When asked what Coinbase’s chances would be in court, Cato’s Schulp said it was too early to say.  

Overseas 

The Coinbase case could lead to increased speculation that more of the industry will move abroad, though so far threats from companies to do so without more favorable rules in the U.S. have yet to be acted upon. But companies complain that engagement with U.S. regulators leads to confrontation rather than cooperation. 

People in the industry have said that “if you’re engaging with the SEC, what you get for your trouble is a Wells notice or a settlement. This is just further evidence of that,” Schulp said.  

Gensler repeatedly has said that the “runway is increasingly getting short,” for crypto firms to come in a register. A lack of compliance is hurting investors, Gensler has said publicly, noting the number of frauds or bankruptcies — sometimes bankruptcies involving alleged fraud — in which investors have lost money. 

But Coinbase’s Grewal claimed in a Wednesday blog post there is no current way for a crypto exchange to register with the agency.  

“It’s very difficult to be competitive in that environment and very difficult to want to be a compliant industry player if there is no path to compliance,” Schulp said.  

Aaron Kaplan, co-CEO of Prometheum, a digital asset security market infrastructure company, said the best path forward is for crypto participants to come into compliance under the securities laws in order to protect investors. 

“The paradigm shift is occurring and companies will need to evolve,” Kaplan said. “Those who don’t evolve will either have to really put a significant amount of their effort into fighting legal and enforcement battles and regulatory battles or they will have to potentially operate outside the United States.”  

The SEC did not respond to a request for comment.  

© 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 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s notice to Coinbase (COIN) that it’s likely to be accused of breaking securities laws could foreshadow an agency effort to break the back of the crypto sector as it now operates, but it also may finally force court rulings that define how the industry can move forward.

“We’re bound by the will of the order flow providers,” the pseudonymous CEO Hazard said on a community governance call.

Google says it wants to disrupt itself to serve the needs of the crypto community. Rather than trying to sell what it already offers to the industry, the search giant instead says it is trying to innovate.

“Can we add some new products to that suite that actually addresses the specific needs that the crypto community has [and] that maybe other companies will have in the future?” James Tromans, head of Google Cloud Platform for web3, said on The Scoop podcast with Frank Chaparro this week at Paris Blockchain Week, referring the the company’s thinking on the matter. “But right now it’s sort of the bleeding edge of where people are building.”

“There’s a lot of progress that we can still make, but there’s a lot of opportunity,” Tromans said.

Last year, the company launched Google Cloud’s Blockchain Node Engine to help web3 developers build and deploy new products on blockchain-based platforms, and it announced a cloud partnership with Coinbase.

“Google was interested in exploring what it means to take crypto for payment and continuing to commit ourselves and to really not just building these tools but using them ourselves as well,” Tromans said. “The relationship was very multifaceted and we’re looking forward to working with Coinbase as we go forward to flesh that out.”

For more on Frank Chaparro’s interview with Google’s Tromans and Rich Widmann, head of strategy, web3 and Google Cloud, look for The Scoop podcast, which will be released on Saturday at 5 a.m. EDT.

© 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.

Federal prosecutors charged Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon with fraud after he was arrested in Montenegro.

Arbitrum’s token airdrop started off in a frenzy that broke multiple websites, and yet more than 428 million ARB tokens are left to be claimed.

A bankruptcy judge approved the sale of bankrupt lender BlockFi’s mining machines and other physical assets for $4.7 million.

The assets were sold to a party called U.S. Farms, an attorney with BlockFi told the court on Thursday.

The deal was reached after a “very competitive” auction process that yielded five bids for the complete mining asset package and seven additional partial bids, the attorney told the court. 

BlockFi was one of the biggest lenders in the bitcoin mining space even though that represented a small portion of the firm’s total business. The company was reportedly looking to sell $160 million in mining loans. Because many of them were secured by ASIC machines, which dramatically fell in price over the last year, the loans may now be under-collateralized.

The sector was hit hard last year by the decline in bitcoin prices that occurred just as power costs — their most significant expense — shot up. A reversal in those trends has recently given companies in the space some much-needed breathing room.

Another bankrupt crypto lender, Celsius, also had a significant self-mining business and in January sold $1.3 million in mining machines. It also saw a large portion of its mining fleet get unplugged by bankrupt hosting provider Core Scientific in January.

© 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.