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Much of the asset manager’s Sushi trove was deposited at Binance in the last 24 hours.

Political attacks on CBDCs gives a pass to existing government and commercial oversight of financial transactions, says Christopher Giancarlo, cofounder of the Digital Dollar Project.

Decentralized infrastructure protocol The Graph teamed up with web3 fiat-to-crypto gateway Banxa, enabling users to pay with fiat currency rather than just crypto to access its indexing and querying data from blockchains. 

The integration aims to lower the barriers to decentralized protocols, making it easier for developers to access blockchain data in a similar way to traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. Users can now directly engage with The Graph’s user interface without having to deal with centralized crypto exchanges prior to using the service.

The collaboration marks the first use of Banxa’s OpenRamp product, enabling fiat payments to interact with smart contracts. In this case, it fulfills all fiat transactions directly to The Graph’s billing contracts.

The Graph argues the integration provides new possibilities for B2B2C projects in web2 and web3, allowing payments using a wide range of methods familiar to SaaS platforms. By creating a user experience comparable to traditional enterprise models while maintaining the advantages of decentralized technology, The Graph aims to unlock an ecosystem that supports both fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-crypto interactions.

“Integrating Banxa as a fiat on-ramp opens The Graph to an even broader audience, making the decentralized network as easy to use as a traditional SaaS,” Tegan Kline, chief business officer and co-founder of The Graph’s initial developer Edge & Node, said in a statement.

Accelerating blockchain adoption

Banxa’s integration with The Graph should open up web3 to more users, according to the CEO of Banxa, Holger Arians. “We believe the future of crypto lies in interoperability — a prime example of which lies in enabling seamless value movement in fiat and crypto across The Graph Network,” he said.

The partnership marks the latest step in The Graph’s roadmap to improve the billing process for developers and data consumers. The Graph allows developers to efficiently access and extract data from 39 blockchains using GraphQL, an open-source query language developed by Facebook. The Graph enables developers to build and interact with decentralized applications more easily by providing a way to access and organize blockchain data. The protocol serves as an important infrastructure layer in the web3 ecosystem across DeFi, gaming and other sectors.

Last month, Metis also integrated with Banxa to reduce the complexity of onboarding to the Ethereum Layer 2.

© 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.

A person suspected to be Do Kwon, founder of the Terra blockchain that collapsed in spectacular fashion last year, has been arrested in Montenegro, Yonhap reported, citing South Korean police.

Police are awaiting a reply from local authorities in Montenegro after requesting fingerprints for final identification, Yonhap said. The report followed an unverified tweet attributed to Montenegro’s Minister of Interior Filip Adzic that said a person suspected to be Do Kwon had been arrested at the airport in the capital city of Podgorica.

Officials contacted in Montenegro by The Block were not immediately able to confirm the information. 

TerraUSD, the stablecoin created by Terraform Labs and often known by its ticker UST, collapsed in May 2022, wiping out tens of billions of dollars for investors. The incident was the first of a series of crises to hit crypto markets over the course of 2022, including the bankruptcies of crypto lender Celsius and exchange giant FTX. A South Korean court issued an arrest warrant for Kwon, a Korean national, in September, saying he breached capital markets laws. 

Korean prosecutors reportedly traveled to Serbia, which borders Montenegro, in February in an effort to track down Kwon. 

Separately, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission brought civil charges against Kwon last month, accusing him of failing to “provide the public with full, fair and truthful disclosure as required for a host of crypto asset securities.”

© 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.

Short seller Hindenburg Research is short Jack Dorsey’s Block Inc. in its first report since tackling India’s Adani Group. 

Block has “systematically taken advantage of the demographics it claims to be helping,” Hindenburg concluded after its two-year investigation. The payments company’s success has nothing to do with disruptive innovation, rather the firm’s willingness to “facilitate fraud against consumers and the government, avoid regulation, dress up predatory loans and fees as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated metrics,” it claimed. 

Block Inc. stock sunk 18% shortly after the open. The shares were trading at $63.09 by 10:42 a.m. EDT, down 13%. 

The company didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

The short seller said it interviewed “dozens” of former employees, partners and industry experts during its research. It conducted an extensive review of regulatory and litigation records, the Freedom of Information Act and public records requests. 

Sex, drugs and massive downsides

Block’s Cash App has been strongly linked to crime, according to the report. The mobile payment app is cited as the top app used in reported U.S. sex trafficking, Hindenburg said, referencing a November 2021 report from the non-profit organization Polaris. 

It goes on to say that “multiple Department of Justice complaints outline how Cash App has been used to facilitate sex trafficking, including sex trafficking of minors.”

Hindenburg added, “numerous Department of Justice indictments detail how Cash App is used by gangs, including the notorious Sinaloa cartel, to distribute drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine.”

The app was also associated with a Baltimore gang, which shared the name Cash App, in April 2021. Baltimore authorities charged the members of the gang with distributing fentanyl.

The research also claimed Block Inc. overstated its user numbers while understating the cost of customer acquisition. 

“Former employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud or were additional accounts tied to a single individual,” Hindenburg note.

Dorsey’s firm “obfuscates how many individuals are on the Cash App platform by reporting misleading ‘transacting active’ metrics filled with fake and duplicate accounts,” it added. The short seller called on the company to clarify how many unique users are on the app. 

“On a purely fundamental basis, even before factoring in the findings of our investigation, we see a downside of between 65% to 75% in Block shares,” the short seller said.

Adani attack

Block Inc.’s revenue declined by 1% in 2022, while it reported a GAAP loss of just over $540 million.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, its bitcoin gross profit from its Cash App dropped by one-quarter to $35 million. The total sale amount of bitcoin sold to customers, recognized as bitcoin revenue, was $1.83 billion, down 7% year-over-year.

Hindenburg Research recently took aim at India’s Adani Group, wiping over $100 billion from the company’s market cap. Adani Enterprises, the conglomerate’s flagship firm, has plunged around 50% since the report. 

© 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.

Radix, a Layer 1 blockchain network that claims to provide a “radically” better developer and user experience, said Thursday it reached a $400 million valuation in a new $10 million funding round.

The token round was entirely backed by DWF Labs, Radix CEO Piers Ridyard told The Block in an interview. He said DWF had already provided $8 million in funding, and the remaining $2 million will be given in the near future.

DWF has been buying Radix’s XRD tokens since last December on a daily basis from Radix Tokens (Jersey), the token issuing unit of Radix, Ridyard said. He declined to comment on DWF’s token-unlocking schedule.

DWF, a web3 investment firm and market maker, has recently become an active backer of token projects, investing in over 15 projects including Conflux, Orbs, Synthetix and Onomy Protocol. Ridyard said DWF became interested in Radix’s technology stack and mission after the launch of its RadFi platform in December.

What is Radix?

Radix started in 2013 as a blockchain research project. It was established as a company in 2017 and has been under development since then.

Ridyard said it took almost ten years to build the project as Radix did not want to copy existing technologies. “Radix has its own consensus system, its own execution environment and its own programing language,” he said.

Ridyard said that Radix’s programing language, Scrypto, is “massively easier” for new developers to build smart contracts than Ethereum’s Solidity language. “This is how we compete” against all other blockchain networks, he said. “We compete by not trying to onboard a tiny pool of highly competent smart contract developers that are incredibly expensive, but by trying to empower over 25 million developers worldwide to build the future of finance.”

Babylon mainnet launch 

Radix is expected to launch its mainnet dubbed Babylon in the second quarter of this year, which will allow developers to build smart contracts and applications on top of it. More than 50 projects have already committed to build on Radix, said Ridyard, adding that these projects range from DeFi protocols to NFT marketplaces.

The Babylon mainnet will follow its Olympia mainnet that launched in July 2021 as a public network with the XRD token. Olympia only allowed users to create, transfer and stake tokens on the network. Babylon is the final release of Radix’s technology stack.

Radix’s new funding round comes nearly two years after it raised $12.7 million in 2021 in a token round, said Ridyard. Before that, between 2013 and 2017, when Radix was in the research phase, it collected 3,000 bitcoin (worth nearly $82 million at today’s prices) from the community and then issued XRD tokens to the community in 2021, said Ridyard.

© 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 infrastructure provider DRPC launched a decentralized RPC network for Ethereum-based apps to boost security, cost-efficiency, and reliability for decentralized applications in the crypto space.

RPC stands for remote procedure call; a protocol used by crypto apps to communicate with blockchain networks. RPCs form a major part of the infrastructure layer for many blockchains, including Ethereum. But they are mostly offered by centralized providers. As such, they exist as a possible chokepoint for blockchain applications when they go offline, a situation that has happened in the past with providers like Infura.

DRPC says it solves this problem by offering a decentralized RPC stack with a network of globally distributed providers. This group of decentralized providers can spread the RPC load of crypto apps among themselves more efficiently, DRPC stated in its announement.

DRPC Chief Product Officer Constantine Zaitcev stated that decentralized RPCs are necessary for trustless and scalable blockchain networks. DRPC stated that its decentralized RPC is able to scale alongside crypto apps that use its infrastructure.

“The launch of DRPC will enable end-to-end decentralization for Ethereum. In addition to the blockchain and application layer, the infrastructure layer will be decentralized as well. These efforts will help build confidence in Ethereum’s RPC nodes, the infrastructure that fuels the network’s growth.”

DRPC stated that its decentralized RPC currently supports Ethereum-based apps. The team has plans to expand its coverage to other EVM-based networks including Arbitrum, Polygon, and Optimism in the coming months. The project crossed the milestone of processing one billion RPC requests last month.

© 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.

DRPC developers say Ethereum remains dependent on a few major centralized RPC players, which undermines ecosystem sustainability and security.

The funding round was led by market maker and investment firm DWF Labs and gives the firm a valuation of $400 million.