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Tensor, which brands itself as “the Blur of Solana,” raised $3 million in a seed funding round.

Placeholder VC led the round, with Solana Ventures, Alliance DAO, Big Brain Holdings, Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, and others participating, Tensor said Tuesday.

Tensor was founded last year and started raising for the seed round in November when FTX collapsed and crypto prices plunged. “Needless to say, our initial investor calls were tough, to say the least,” Tensor co-founder Ilja Moisejevs told The Block. But the startup closed the round within a few months, which is an equity-plus-token-warrants round, according to Moisejevs. He declined to comment on the valuation.

By calling itself “the Blur of Solana,” Tensor references its NFT marketplace for pro traders on Solana — like how Blur is on Ethereum. Blur launched six months ago and has had a total trading volume of over $2 billion to date, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard.

As for Tensor, it has had a total trading volume of $7 million since its launch late last year. Moisejevs and his other co-founder, Richard Wu, see NFTs as an “extremely high potential” market. “Everything that’s digital and unique will be an NFT,” according to Moisejevs.

Wu said today’s marketplaces for NFTs are slow and that “the pros aren’t going to wait 30 seconds for a transaction to confirm and pay $1000s in fees eroding their trading profits — they want it Ferrari-fast and dirt-cheap, and Solana’s 400ms consensus is the only way to deliver it.”

While Solana may be faster and cheaper than Ethereum, the trading volume of Solana-based NFTs is much lower than that of Ethereum-based NFTs, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard. Solana has also suffered multiple network outages since its launch in 2020.

But Tensor plans to follow a similarly aggressive user acquisition on Solana as Blur did on Ethereum. It recently launched a new incentives program that will reward any Solana-based NFT traders. It is also planning a second program to reward only those who traded on TensorSwap.

Tensor was bootstrapped entirely off prize money from winning two Solana hackathons. Its team is lean, with the two co-founders and its recently made first hire — KRTrades_ or “Stringray” — a pseudonymous crypto trader. Stringray will help Tensor bring new liquidity to NFTs and Solana in particular, Tensor said. The startup plans to stay lean in the near future and is currently looking to add two founding engineers, said Moisejevs.

© 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.

Relai, a bitcoin investment platform focused on serving Europeans, raised $4.5 million in a new funding round.

Jeff Booth’s Ego Death Capital led the round, with Lightning Ventures, Redalpine, Fulgur Ventures and others participating, Relai said Tuesday.

This was a seed extension round and brought Relai’s post-money valuation to $20 million, co-founder and CEO Julian Liniger told The Block. Relai previously raised $3 million in pre-seed and seed rounds. The new round brings its total funding to date to $7.5 million.

Relai was founded in 2020 by Liniger and Adem Bilican in Switzerland and offers a bitcoin-only investment app. Despite the recent bear market, Liniger said Relai has been growing over 10% month-over-month and is looking to clock a “record” quarter in terms of volume and revenue in the first quarter of 2023.

Product roadmap

Relai currently has around 60,000 active users across Europe and has seen over $100 million invested to date into bitcoin via its app, according to Liniger. The platform plans to launch several new features this year, including zero-fee trading (in Q2), a white-label product that will let other fintechs offer fiat-to-bitcoin trading (in Q3) and Lightning Network support (in Q4), according to Liniger.

To that end, Relai also plans to expand its current team of 20 people to around 25 this year, said Liniger.

Earlier this year, Relai also launched a new business operation that allows small and medium-sized businesses to add bitcoin to their balance sheet. “A handful of first pilot customers” have bought bitcoin on their balance sheets via Relai Business, Liniger said, without disclosing names. There are “dozens” of more enterprises interested in adding bitcoin to their balance sheet, Liniger added.

Relai plans to stay a bitcoin-only platform. Liniger said the world’s first and largest cryptocurrency “is the only and best savings technology in the crypto market and the rest of the coins/tokens are mainly for startup and speculative trading.”

© 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.

Thailand’s cabinet has approved tax waivers for crypto companies that offer investment tokens in the country, according to a statement by Finance Minister Arkhom Termpittayapaisith on Tuesday.

This tax waiver will be applicable for both primary and secondary offerings on these investment tokens. Arkhom stated that such companies will have to register their token offerings to benefit from the tax waiver. Investment tokens are legal in Thailand despite the government banning the use of cryptocurrencies for payments in March 2022.

Thailand’s new crypto tax policy also extends to investors. Those who invest in these token sales will also be exempted from paying value-added tax. This is the crypto-related value-added tax exemption. Last year, Thailand’s government waived VAT for crypto transfers until 2024.

Arkhom stated that that tax waiver could see the government forgo revenue of up to 35 billion baht ($1 billion) in the next two years. This is based on an estimated 128 billion baht revenue ($3.7 billion) from investment token offerings during the period.

Utility tokens are, however, not covered in this crypto tax exemption policy. This position is due to the fact that their use depends on the promotional activity of their issuers, the finance minister stated.

© 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.

Canaan Inc. shared its unaudited fourth-quarter and full-year financial results for 2022 — showing a big decline toward the end of the year.

Total computing power sold in Q4 2022 decreased by 45.8% to 1.9 million Thash/s from 3.5 million Thash/s in Q3. Worse yet, Canaan saw a decrease of 82.1% from Q4 2021.

Meanwhile, revenues decreased by 59.9% from Q3 2022 and 82.1% from Q4 2021. However, mining revenue increased by 16.3% from Q3 2022 and 368.2% from Q4 2021.

Year-over-year decreases are also reported in total computing power sold and revenues, with the former dropping by 32.4%.

“We went through a tough fourth quarter as the further sinking bitcoin price during the quarter led to lackluster market demand for mining machines as we expected,” said Canaan Chairman and CEO Nangeng Zhang.

Canaan CFO James Jin Cheng noted that the company’s gross loss was, in part, due to greater depreciation resulting from its growing bitcoin mining fleet.

© 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 amount of bitcoin mined daily by Argo Blockchain and the mining company’s revenue increased in February.

Last month, the dual-listed blockchain technology company mined 162 bitcoins or equivalents, equating to 5.7 bitcoins per day — an increase of 7% over January’s average — it reported in a statement.

Considering February’s daily foreign exchange rates and crypto prices, Argo’s mining revenue amounted to $3.76 million — an increase over January’s $3.42 million.

Argo’s statement notes that it was able to see these increases despite a double-digit monthly rise in Bitcoin’s average network difficulty.

The company held 101 bitcoins or equivalents on Feb. 28, and its total hash rate capacity remains at 2.5 EH/s.

© 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.

Media and web3 infrastructure player Forkast Labs created a suite of index trackers for digital assets, which measure data from different parts of the sector in real-time. 

These include trackers called the Forkast 500 NFT, Forkast SOL NFT Composite and Forkast ETH NFT Composite, which are meant to be the crypto equivalent of stock market indexes such as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite, which track equities. 

Forkast Labs emerged in January this year following the merger of media company Forkast.News and NFT tracker CryptoSlam. The pair are portfolio companies of software investment giant Animoca Brands. At the time, Forkast Labs’ editor in chief and co-CEO Angie Lau, who is a former Bloomberg anchor, said part of the mission statement of the pairing was to regain trust in crypto. 

“The world is speeding towards a digital economy, but the traditional metrics often only give a myopic view as they are largely fragmented, price-centric and incomplete,” said Lau in a statement. 

Randy Wasinger, founder of CryptoSlam, said the undertaking has been something of a “passion project,” and is a result of work done collecting data since around 2018. “We had the same vision of what was needed in the digital economy,” he said of the tie-up in an interview with The Block. “We want this to be accepted first as the source of truth,” he added. 

A flagship NFT index

The Forkast 500 NFT will be the flagship index, and is intended to act as a proxy for the entire NFT market. It is powered by billions of on-chain data points indexed, organized and updated in real-time, the company said. The index includes up to 500 eligible smart contracts on any given day, from blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Cardano, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Cronos and others. The data set for the Forkast 500 NFT begins at Jan. 1 2022. The methodology can be found here.

“By deploying standard methodologies, Forkast Labs can provide a deeper and more substantive view of fundamental performance of digital assets. These tools can help every investor and participant to navigate the digital economy with greater clarity,” said Lau. 

The team also intends to expand the product offering in the future. That could include breaking out sector-specific data such as a measure of virtual real estate or fashion NFTs. 

© 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.

Grayscale is set to present oral arguments in its case against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.

The asset manager brought the case against the regulator for rejecting its proposal to convert its flagship fund, GBTC, into a spot bitcoin ETF.

Don Verrilli, lead counsel for Grayscale, laid out his key arguments during a breakfast last month. The former U.S. Solicitor General said basic norms govern the actions of agencies like the SEC, meaning they have to “conduct themselves in a manner that is not arbitrary and capricious, and they’ve got to engage in reasoned decision making.”

An agency can act in an arbitrary and capricious manner if they take like cases and treat them differently, Verrilli argued.

© 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.

Yuga Labs’ experiment with Bitcoin Ordinals drew 288 winning bids, with one reaching nearly $160,000 for a single NFT.

The 24-hour auction of the collection, named TwelveFold, ended at around 3 p.m. PT. It marks Yuga Labs’ first dalliance with Bitcoin NFTs, having so far dominated the market on Ethereum with blockbuster collections Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks. 

The top bid was worth 7.1159 BTC, equal to roughly $159,600. The lowest was 2.2501, or about $50,400. 

“The TwelveFold auction has ended. Congratulations to the top 288 bidders – you will receive your inscription within one week,” Yuga Labs tweeted. “Valid bids that did not rank in the top 288 will have their bid amount returned to their receiving address within 24 hours.”

Through this minting method, Bitcoin NFTs are inscribed onto satoshis on the Bitcoin blockchain. Inscriptions, also known as digital artifacts, are created when a file, such as an art image like those created for TwelveFold, is written (or inscribed into) units of Bitcoin called satoshis, the smallest individually identifiable units of Bitcoin.

The process is made possible through the Ordinal Theory protocol, with such NFTs simply donning the name “Ordinals.”

Ordinals have gained popularity, given past upgrades to the Bitcoin blockchain that made it cheaper to store data in single transactions.

Critics pile in TwelveFold

While Yuga will be celebrating another NFT sellout, some market watchers were perplexed at the format of the auction, which saw the company take custody of bidders’ bitcoin. 

“Yuga is establishing REALLY bad precedence running an auction like this,” wrote one Ordinal technical fellow on Twitter. “They are taking custody of bidders’ bitcoin with a promise to send back unsuccessful bids. Not doubting they’ll do that, but this model is a scammer’s dream, and credible players need to set better example.”

Others called it a “dangerous precedent” for a larger company in the space to set.  

Yuga responded to these criticisms, saying it is excited that Ordinals managed to crack a permissionless method for on-chain NFTs on Bitcoin.

“This space is incredibly nascent and TwelveFold was always meant to be an experiment,” Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano wrote in an emailed statement to The Block. “Many things we take for granted on Ethereum – like smart contracts, and trustless transactions – don’t exist yet on ordinals, where inscriptions trade over-the-counter on discord with bids tracked on Google spreadsheets and the existing marketplaces appear to be governed by multi-sig escrows.”

The company is excited to see new tools for trustless auctions and marketplaces, Solano added, concluding that the hope is TwelveFold can attract the builders to contribute to that. 

© 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.

Bitcoin mining stocks tracked by The Block were mostly lower on Monday, with seven gaining and the other 12 declining.

Bitcoin fell 0.3% to $22,418 by market close.

Here is a look at how the individual miners performed today:

© 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.

Lovably cantankerous head of “Hell’s Kitchen” Gordon Ramsay is getting the full blockchain treatment.

Metaverse gaming platform The Sandbox announced that Ramsay — a Michelin star chef and main draw of the reality cooking show “Hell’s Kitchen” — is being turned into a collection of non-fungible token (NFT) avatars that users will be able to mint later this month. There will be a total of 2,333 Ramsay avatars, The Sandbox said via Twitter.

Users of The Sandbox will be able to roam and play games inside the blockchain-enabled metaverse platform using one of the Ramsay avatars. The Sandbox has also dropped an NFT avatar collection based on the web3 enthusiast and musical celebrity Snoop Dogg. The rapper’s avatar collection has generated nearly $12 million in trading volume, according to OpenSea.

Web3 gaming and metaverse platforms have generally struggled to go mainstream and attract a significant number of users, but some companies, including The Sandbox, have been highly successful in attracting major corporate partners and some celebrities keen to get in on the ground floor. Late last year The Sandbox announced a partnership with ITV Studios and plans to create a metaverse experience inspired by Ramsay’s show “Hell’s Kitchen.”

Screenshot from Gordon Ramsay avatar teaser trailer on Twitter.

The Sandbox has also worked with large companies like HSBC, Warner Music, PlayBoy, Gucci and Ubisoft. Additionally, long-time celebrity influencer Paris Hilton struck a deal with the company last year.

While speaking at NFT Paris, Sebastien Borget, chief operating officer of The Sandbox, told The Block he believes that the brand recognition his company has achieved thus far will eventually help lure independent creators to build on the platform. The Sandbox has said it has 201,000 monthly active users. 

The Sandbox plans, in the coming days, to release more details on how users will be able acquire a Ramsay avatar.

© 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.