FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

A cohort of investors, including former executives from Binance and Yield Guild Games, has orchestrated a community buyout of blue chip NFT collection 0N1 Force. 

The group was led by blockchain investment firm Old Fashioned Research (OFR), according to a statement. It did not disclose the sum paid. 

First minted in August 2021, 0N1 Force is a collection of 7,777 NFTs featuring side-on faces. It was one of the first anime NFT collections on the market and has since accumulated over 54,000 ETH ($90 million) in transaction volumes across all marketplaces.

Although the founders of 0N1 Force have left the venture, current project leader Henry Finn (also known as Starlordy) will become CEO of the group and existing community moderators will also be retained, according to the release. 

OFR was founded in late 2021 by former Binance VP of M&A Ling Zhang and Wayne Fu, previously Binance’s head of corporate development. It came out of stealth with a $100 million fund in May last year. While at Binance, Zhang led the exchange’s acquisitions and investments into FTX, Multicoin Capital and CertiK, among others. 

Changing of the guard

A community board will be formed to oversee the 0N1 Force project, featuring Finn, Zhang, OFR Strategic Adviser and ex-Binance CFO Wei Zhou, as well as new Chief Strategy Officer William Tong and Yield Guild Games COO Colin Goltra, who will be joining the project as a senior adviser and investor.

The group has said it intends to “deploy significant funds into the growing 0N1 Force franchise, with a view to establishing it as a leading metaverse-native IP.”

The project’s 2023 roadmap includes a 50 ETH Artist Fund to support community talent and a graphic novel series created and led by community contributors.

The buyout marks the latest attempt at consolidation of valuable IP in the NFT market as projects shift into a higher gear. Last week, HadesDAO, the organization associated with the Hadeswap protocol, acquired SolanaMonkeyBusiness (SMB) and its IP. SMB is one of the most valuable collections on the Solana blockchain. 

© 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.

Outlier Ventures is launching a new 12-week accelerator program to support startups building on Aptos.

The program will kick off in May with teams participating in person in Palo Alto, California, said the company in a release.

UK-based Outlier Ventures runs one of the biggest accelerators in web3. The Outlier team have taken 187 early-stage web3 startups under their wing since it started running the program in 2019. 

The new Aptos initiative will join Outlier’s existing roster of programs including a Filecoin basecamp, a Polygon basecamp and a basecamp focused zero-knowledge proof technologies. It will be called “The Aptos x Outlier Move Accelerator.”

Outlier generates some of its revenue  from enterprise partners such as FarFetch and Polygon, who pay to participate in accelerators, founder and CEO Jamie Burke said in a recent interview with The Block.

Aptos deepens its partnerships

Aptos is a relatively new Layer 1 blockchain. It launched on mainnet late last year and has raised over $350 million from investors since the start of 2022.

The blockchain’s foundation is sponsoring the program and the Aptos Labs team will provide support throughout the 12 weeks on topics such as product roadmap, community building and entity structuring.

The accelerator is just one of a number of partnerships that Aptos has announced as of late, including an equity investment in social media app Chingari, a widereaching partnership with Google Cloud, which also includes plans for an accelerator program, and a partnership with Moonpay.

Applications open from today and accepted startups will receive $100,000 in funding as part of the program.

Since the start of the crypto bear market, there has been an uptick in the number of accelerators launching. Just this week, developer framework service Tatum launched an accelerator to fill the gap between traditional and web3 accelerators. Investing titan, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it received over 8,000 applications for its rebooted crypto startup school. 

© 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.

Multichain wallet Blocto has closed a Series A funding round at a valuation of $80 million.

The startup would not disclose the funding amount for this round. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, IPX and returning investor 500 Global participated in the raise,  the company said in a release. Cuban’s involvement with the startup was announced late last year.

Blocto most recently raised funds in 2021. It closed a $8 million Series A round in April 2021 led by Animoca Brands and with participation from CMS Holdings, Double Peak Group and collapsed trading firm Alameda Research, according to Crunchbase data. Not long after this raise, the startup also closed an $8 million private token round that featured investors such as SevenX Ventures, Alameda Research and Roham Garegozlou, the CEO of Dapper Labs.

The startup’s valuation has increased eightfold, the company said in the release, without specifying a timeframe for that gain. It was launched back in 2019 by its parent company Portto. The funds from the raise will  be used to support Blocto as it develops the infrastructure to onboard users into crypto.

“We believe the continuous growth of Blocto users in the current environment is indicative of Portto’s commitment to be one of the most influential blockchain companies in the industry,” Tony Wang, a managing partner at 500 Global, said in the release.

Blocto recently rolled out on Aptos and natively supports other chains such as Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Flow and BNB Chain. The startup also rolled out a $3 million Aptos ecosystem fund late last year.

© 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.

Multi-sig startup Den raised $2.8 million to build a wallet that will help dispersed teams and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) easily and quickly execute transactions.

The round, which closed early last year, is led by IDEO CoLab Ventures. Other investors include Gnosis, Lemniscap and Spice Capital, as well as angel investors such as former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan and Not Boring Capital’s Packy McCormick.

The idea was formed out of a frenzied few days experienced by Jonah Erlich and Ittai Svidler who played a core role in ConstitutionDAO. They had tried to get multiple DAO members to sign off on an essential transaction ahead of the auction to buy the U.S. Constitution.

The DAO raised over $40 million to buy the Constitution but ultimately lost out to Kenneth Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel, who had the winning bid of $43.2 million.

The inside story of ConstitutionDAO

“A lot of people know the story from the outside,” Svidler said in an interview with The Block. “But what they don’t know is on the inside we had to do what was called proof of funds to show that we had the money to participate in the auction. Originally we were told that we could do it in ether, but 48 hours before the deadline we actually were told that we had to do it in fiat, which led to us finding a way to swap all the assets into fiat to participate in the auction.”

As the DAO’s assets were managed using a multi-signature wallet, the DAO need to have nine of 13 multisig signers approve the transaction.

“We were running around Manhattan trying to get the signers to sign off on the transaction,” Svidler said. “Going to coffee shops, co-working spaces, offices, just trying to find them to get them to approve it.”

“That process was a nightmare and so that’s what led us to Den,” he added.

Erlich and Svidler found that they weren’t alone with these struggles and started building Den straight after ConstitutionDAO in November 2021. The startup is already working with over 200 teams including PleasrDAO and OlympusDAO.

“It wasn’t that we built it and sold it,” Svidler said. “It was really building it alongside these DAOs to make sure that we actually solve their problems.”

Nailing the user experience

For many of these teams there is a lot of fear using existing wallets with several building workarounds to help optimize the process, Svidler said. Den is trying to cater to those needs with features such as automatic recurring notifications as well as simplifying and automating as many technical transaction details as possible.

“Trends are diverging where, on one end, on-chain interactions are becoming more complex, and on the other end, on-chain users are becoming less technically sophisticated as more and more folks on board over time,” said Erlich, adding that Den is trying to make complicated transactions possible in a way that is straightforward for less technical teams.

Den’s lead investor IDEO CoLab Ventures has a rich history in product design and user experience, which is a core focus for the team, Erlich said. Den’s wallet is currently for desktop based on existing customer needs.

“I think one of the most exciting parts of the fundraise was that a ton of the teams or individuals that were really using Den within these teams wanted to participate in the round after they used the product,” Svidler said. 

The funds from the raise have been put toward building out the product, Erlich said. The three-person startup is currently hiring for engineers, 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.

Coinbase’s fourth-quarter revenue beat estimates thanks to USDC interest income, analysts said.

Interest income for the quarter came in at $146 million, up more than 100% from the previous quarter, even as full-year revenue came in 57% lower than in 2021. 

The exchange said itself and the industry were “largely resilient” despite “major shocks to the system” during the quarter and a 64% drawdown in the price of digital assets during 2022. COIN added about 1% to trade at $62.64 by 8:10 a.m. EST, according to Nasdaq data. 

COIN chart by TradingView

“The quarter was made by much higher than expected interest income on USDC,” said Needham analyst John Todaro. Management’s outlook was “positive with the company, in our view, having a clear path to positive adjusted EBITDA for 2023, with new expense guardrails management put in place.”

“That being said, the segment that has seen the fastest quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for COIN has the most recent regulatory hair on it, and that is Subscription & Services, which includes staking and USDC ecosystem,”  he said, referring to the SEC’s recent warning that it has set its gaze on staking services. 

KBW analysts, led by Kyle Voigt, echoed this sentiment, saying “USDC market cap has continued to trend lower which may eventually mute some of this benefit.”

While interest income was encouraging, “retail trading volumes continued to deteriorate in the quarter and came in worse than expected, down 23% from the third quarter of 2023,” they said. Still, KBW raised its 2024 gross profit estimate by 12% on the back of a 40% move in the crypto market cap since its last model revision. 

© 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.

Bitski today rolls out a new wallet targeting crypto natives and newcomers alike. 

Backed by major investors such as A16z, Galaxy Digital and Kindred Ventures, Bitski brings to Ethereum users an option to set up logins via email and password, similar to services like the Wax Cloud wallet on the Wax blockchain, and Dapper wallet on Flow Blockchain.

The Bitski wallet, which features both an iOS and browser extension, gives every user “a Bitski Vault Wallet and has the ability to import their existing wallets,” Bitski CEO and co-founder, Donnie Dinch, told The Block.

The vault is designed to make crypto wallets more accessible to non-crypto natives, according to Dinch.

“Bitski Vault wallets are hosted in our hardware-security modules. Keys never leave hardware and all transactions are signed in hardware. This allows users to traverse web3 seamlessly without needing to become key-management experts,” Dinch said.

In addition to the vault, the wallet also features self-custody support.

“When a Bitski user imports a self-custody wallet, it is securely stored on the device they’re imported on,” said Dinch.

The wallet also features a transaction simulator that Bitski said will help users to avoid being the target of phishing scams and a number of other features including a transaction feed, alerts for price changes as well as on and off chain activity, and a decentralized application browser.

© 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.

Archblock, the issuer of TrueUSD stablecoin, said it will use Chainlink’s proof-of-reserves system to let users verify its reserves are fully collateralized on the blockchain via an automated data feed.

“We’re excited to use Chainlink’s Proof of Reserve to enhance the transparency and verifiability of our stablecoin,” said Ryan Christensen, CEO of Archblock. “As the industry-standard decentralized oracle network, Chainlink will help ensure that TUSD is always collateralized by off-chain fiat reserves.”

TUSD is backed by US dollars and is the sixth-largest stablecoin, with a market capitalization of $966 million. Integrating with Chainlink’s proof of reserve (PoR) system will allow TUSD holders to verify on-chain that its stablecoin reserves are fully collateralized through automated off-chain data feeds.

The Network Firm (TNF), an independent accounting firm, will aggregate the oracle data for TUSD. This firm will collect real-time data on all reserve holdings (US dollars held at financial institutions). This will be provided on-chain through Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network, Archblock stated in a note shared with The Block

Using TNF’s data feed, The TUSD smart contract will automatically check whether the total supply of TUSD exceeds the total amount of US dollars held in reserve before any new stablecoins are minted.

© 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 core developers of the Ethereum blockchain scheduled the launch of the Shanghai-Capella upgrade on the Sepolia test network for Feb. 28 at epoch 56832, per an official announcement.

Shanghai-Capella, also known as Shapella, is an upgrade aimed at enabling ether (ETH) withdrawals from network validators — a feature that wasn’t enabled during the network’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus, called The Merge.

The upgrade combines changes to the execution layer (Shanghai) and the consensus layer (Capella). Shanghai will upgrade the execution layer of Ethereum, while Capella will upgrade the consensus layer of the blockchain.

To reach the final upgrade in March, developers have planned multiple phases of public testing. The upcoming launch on Sepolia is the second public testnet to deploy the upgrade. Shapella has already been tested on the Zhejiang testnet earlier this month. As expected, the testing on Zhejiang revealed some minor bugs that have been worked on.

After deploying Shapella on the Sepolia testnet, developers will move to the Goerli testnet for the final phase of dress rehearsal ahead of the mainnet launch — expected to happen in March.

© 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.

Episode 14 of Season 5 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and 1kx Founding Partner Lasse Clausen.

Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Feedback and revision requests can be sent to podcast@theblockcrypto.com.

After sitting on the sidelines during the bull market mania of 2021 and the early part of 2022, early-stage investment firm 1kx has been deploying at a “frantic” pace since the third quarter of last year, according to Founding Partner Lasse Clausen.

“We really like the bear markets,” Clausen said, “We know that this is the good time to be very actively investing.”

1kx has a policy of holding onto its crypto investments for at least three years, which Clausen suggests is a good guideline given the industry’s rapid rate of development:

“The space overall just innovates much much faster than anything else, so I think a three to five year time frame makes sense for crypto venture.”

During this episode, Chaparro and Clausen also discuss:

• Why 1kx is betting on zk-tech to take Ethereum from ‘0 to 1’
• Opportunities in ‘NFT financialization’
• Development of on-chain identity

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Circle, Railgun, Flare Network, NordVPN

About Circle
Circle is a global financial technology company helping money move at internet speed. Our mission is to raise global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. Visit Circle.com to learn more.

About Railgun
Railgun is a private DeFi solution on Ethereum, BSC, Arbitrum and Polygon. Shield any ERC-20 token and any NFT into a Private Balance and let Railgun’s zero-knowledge cryptography encrypt your address, balance and transaction history. You can also bring privacy to your project with Railgun SDK and be sure to check out Railgun with partner project Railway Wallet, also available on iOS and Android. Visit Railgun.org to find out more.

About Flare
Flare is an EVM-based Layer 1 blockchain designed to allow developers to build applications that can use data from other blockchains and the internet. By providing decentralized access to a wide variety of high-integrity data from other blockchains and the internet, Flare enables new use cases and monetization models. Build better and connect everything at Flare.Network.

About NordVPN
NordVPN is essential for keeping crypto transactions secure, hiding your IP address, and protecting your devices from hackers and data theft. Get premium cyber-security on up to six devices for the price of a cup of coffee a month. Get your exclusive NordVPN Deal and try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee: Visit https://nordvpn.com/thescoop

© 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.

Australian blockchain gaming firm Immutable cut 11% of its staff — the second round of layoffs since the end of July — according to the Sydney Morning Herald. 

The cuts were blamed on the need to elongate the company’s runway and put resources toward its most important projects, the report said — citing a note to staff from CEO James Ferguson.

Changes will also include outsourcing the development of the more traditional aspects of its games to partners to focus on the web3 components and reorganizing some of its divisions. 

Cuts last summer from the developer, which makes blockchain trading card game Gods Unchained, hit “more than 20” employees — or around 8% of the business’s total headcount. 

Immutable did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Founded in 2018, the studio has built a reputation for being one of the pioneers of blockchain and NFT gaming — attracting bumper funding rounds and high valuations. The news follows an announcement in June that the company is launching a $500 million fund for web3 game adoption.

It also raised $200 million in Series C funding in March, reaching a $2.5 billion valuation. It has previously received backing from big-named players such as Coinbase Ventures, Animoca Brands, Tencent and Temasek. 

© 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.