FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

A pair of Stanford University academics co-signed FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s bond, according to court documents unsealed on Wednesday. 

Larry Kramer, dean emeritus of Stanford Law School, signed a $500,000 bond, while Stanford University senior research scientist Andreas Paepcke signed for $200,000. Bankman-Fried is facing a litany of criminal charges for his alleged mishandling of customer funds at FTX, among other misdeeds.  

The former billionaire’s parents, Stanford University professors Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, co-signed his $250 million bond with Kramer and Paepcke, whose names were previously redacted from court documents.  

Kramer’s decision to co-sign Bankman-Fried’s bond was in his “personal capacity,” he said in an emailed statement, noting he does not have a business interest in the case.  

‘Close friends’

“Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried have been close friends of my wife and I since the mid-1990s,” Kramer said in a statement to The Block. “During the past two years, while my family faced a harrowing battle with cancer, they have been the truest of friends – bringing food, providing moral support, and frequently stepping in at moment’s notice to help. In turn, we have sought to support them as they face their own crisis.”

“My actions are in my personal capacity, and I have no business dealings or interest in this matter other than to help our loyal and steadfast friends,” Kramer continued. “Nor do I have any comment or position regarding the substance of the legal matter itself, which is what the trial will be for,”

Lawyers for Bankman-Fried had argued that Kramer and Paepcke would face privacy and security concerns if their names were made public. Bankman-Fried initially appealed the judge’s decision to unseal the names, but Kaplan ordered the names be made public on Wednesday, siding with news organizations that filed a motion on the issue. 

Disclaimer: Beginning in 2021, Michael McCaffrey, the former CEO and majority owner of The Block, took a series of loans from founder and former FTX and Alameda CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. McCaffrey resigned from the company in December 2022 after failing to disclose those transactions. 

© 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.

Crypto prices were up across the board, while Blur’s native token clocked huge volumes on its first day of trading. 

Bitcoin was up 3.3% over the past day, trading around $21,815 by 1 p.m. EST, according to TradingView data. 

BTCUSD chart by TradingView

Ether was higher by 2.2%, trading just below $1,600. Ripple’s XRP added 2.7% in the past day, Cardano’s ADA tacked on 1.8%, and Polygon’s MATIC jumped 3.1%. Binance’s BNB grew by 2.2% to once again trade above $300, having fallen below this level following the news that Paxos would stop minting BUSD. 

Blur’s native token was finally released on Tuesday, having been delayed last month. The token is currently trading at $0.91, according to Coinbase data.

BLURUSD chart by TradingView

The total supply of blur is capped at three billion, according to The Block Research, with 12% of tokens. (360 million BLUR) distributed by Tuesday’s unlock. The token did about $1.1 billion in volume since yesterday’s unlock, according to CoinGecko data.

The majority of the volume, $864 million, was on centralized exchanges.

© 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.

Amazon and an array of other big-name companies made another play for web3 today, backing creative NFT studio Superplastic in its $20 million Series A.

Superplastic will also benefit from what Amazon called a “first-look” tie-up with Amazon Studios. The pair are currently working on a series featuring “synthetic celebrities,” a company release said. 

The round was led by the Alexa Fund, Amazon’s venture arm that focuses on new media, smart consumer electronics, ambient intelligence, and other areas of digital technology. Craft Ventures, Google Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Kering, Sony Japan, Scribble Ventures, Kakao, Animoca Brands, Day One Ventures and Betaworks also contributed.

Superplastic is best known for creating characters who appear across the media spectrum, including in fashion, animated entertainment, and live experiences. 

The series will center on Janky and Guggimon, two characters developed by the studio that have risen to social media fame.

The company sells tens of millions of dollars in real and virtual products annually, according to the deal announcement. It has also collaborated with Gucci, Fortnite, Mercedes-Benz, Tommy Hilfiger, Christie’s Auction House, J. Balvin, Kidsuper, Pusha-T, Paris Hilton, Post Malone and The Weeknd.

This latest round brings Superplastic’s total funding to $58 million to date.

© 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 Hub, the central chain of the Cosmos ecosystem, is preparing for the anticipated Rho network upgrade that’s set to launch today around 8 p.m. EST at a block height of 14,099,412.

The upgrade will bring with it a range of improvements to Cosmos’ testing infrastructure, as well as the addition of what’s called the “global fee” software module — an added piece of code that will allow transaction fees to be collected from users and distributed globally.

The aim is to improve the security of the Cosmos network by reducing the likelihood of validators colluding or misbehaving, the core development team at Cosmos said.

Cosmos — an ecosystem of more than 200 blockchains — lets developers build new application-specific chains. The network relies on core technologies and frameworks, such as the Tendermint consensus and the Cosmos software development kit, to create individual chains such as Kava, Osmosis, Injective, Thorchain, Evmos and Canto. Such chains are connected with each other using the Cosmos Hub and Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) communication protocol.

Rho lays the groundwork for another future upgrade called Interchain Security that’s planned for release in the first quarter of 2023 and will allow individual chains on Cosmos to secure themselves by using the same security validators that run Cosmos Hub, which functions as a hub for other blockchain networks and allows for cross-chain communication and interoperability.

The Hub team has cautioned users that there may be a short downtime period during the network upgrade.

© 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.

Metaverse enthusiasts have something to cheer about, with Roblox growing on all fronts. 

Not only did Roblox increase its user numbers and the size of its platform’s internal economy in 2022, players also spent nearly 50 billion hours engaging with the platform, up 19% from the previous year. Shares of the company jumped 25% after the open.

Roblox reported that its daily active-user total grew by 23% to 56 million when comparing 2022 to the previous year. The company also said that in January its number of daily active users hit 65 million.

In the eyes of many tech leaders, Roblox’s popularity with younger users, coupled with the way the platform functions, serves as a model of an already working metaverse. 

Full year 2022 “bookings” also increased by 5%, with Roblox reporting that it generated $2.9 billion selling the platform’s internal currency. The company characterizes “bookings” as the revenue it created by users purchasing “Robux,” the currency players then use to customize their playing experience, such as their avatars.

“2022 was a year of innovation and invention for Roblox,” Roblox founder and CEO David Baszucki said in a statement. “With 65 million daily active users in January, we are driving towards our vision to reimagine the way people come together by enabling deeper forms of expression, communication and immersion.”


While Roblox is a closed system, it does allow for developers to create their own games and experiences on the platform. This provides external developers the opportunity to not only fashion the types of digital social interactions they crave, but also benefit financially when the “servers” they develop generate significant engagement.

During 2022, the total number of hours users “engaged” with the gaming and social platform came in at 49.3 billion, a 19% increase from last year, Roblox said. In 2o21, users engaged with the platform for 41.4 billion hours.

© 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.

Square Enix, the maker of Final Fantasy, is set to debut its blockchain game Symbiogenesis as it wades further into the web3 waters. 

The game, built on Ethereum Layer 2 Polygon, will be a “digital collectable art experience,” according to a company release, with an evolving storyline set on a mysterious floating continent. Holding or trading digital collectables will be key to advancing in the game. 

It will also offer players multiple endings, but only three players will get to play the final “World Mission.”

Just don’t touch Final Fantasy

Despite its push to educate existing players, purist gaming fans have expressed the concern that Square Enix’s blockchain experiment would lead to it touching its most valuable gaming IP, Final Fantasy. The company is among other gaming giants testing out new ways of entertaining, just away from their crown jewels.  

Square Enix has multiple blockchain games based on original IPs under development, some of which were announced last year. In January, it said that it is also preparing to unveil even more titles this 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.

The Securities and Exchange Commission will vote on a rule that would raise requirements for how registered investment advisers custody assets —  including crypto. 

The agency will vote on proposing a rule that would expand current custody requirements to include any client assets that a registered investment adviser holds, and would also add more protections to those assets, such as surprise examinations. The five-member commission will vote on the proposed rulemaking on Wednesday morning.

If approved the custody rule would be subject to a standard public comment period, after which the SEC could amend it.   

Registered investment advisers are subject to a custody rule, which requires them to maintain those assets with a qualified custodian, such as a bank or broker-dealer. In prepared remarks provided to press, SEC Chair Gary Gensler said that rule has not been updated since 2009.  

“Today’s proposal would cover all asset classes that an adviser may custody, such as privately issued securities, real estate, and derivatives,” Gensler said. “Further, today’s proposal, in covering all asset classes, would cover all crypto assets — including those that currently are covered as funds and securities and those that are not funds or securities.” 

The proposed rule also would require advisers to segregate their investors’ assets. The current rule requires advisers and qualified custodians to segregate funds and securities, and the new rule would expand that to all assets, Gensler said.  

Gensler also warned that depending on how crypto platforms operate, investment advisers cannot rely on them as qualified custodians. An SEC official said some investment advisers do rely on crypto platforms as custodians.  

The rule would also require advisers to enter into a written agreement with qualified custodians to make sure clients get certain protections. 

“These protections are designed, among other things, to ensure client assets are properly segregated and held in accounts designed to protect the assets in the event of a qualified custodian bankruptcy or other insolvency,” the agency said in a fact sheet.   

© 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.

Napster, the streaming service best-known for the peer-to-peer audio file-sharing platform it operated in the early 2000s, is buying music startup Mint Songs.

The company, which was acquired last year by Hivemind and Algorand, is making a play at web3 by using the startup’s experience in helping artists build their presence on the blockchain with collectibles.

It will be the first in a series of acquisitions it plans to make to speed up its web3 feature rollout plans, Napster said in a press release Wednesday.

“We are in an unprecedented era of innovation in the digital music space and it feels like there have been more music startups formed in the last two to three years than in the previous 20,” Napster CEO Jon Vlassopulos said.

Mint Songs, which developed tech to allow artists to mint songs and offer fans other NFT items, said on Twitter that it was winding down in September last year and would not mint new NFTs on its Mint Songs Factory (Polygon) and Mint Songs V2 (Ethereum).

The company worked with artists like Gramatik, Mark de Clive-Lowe and Black Dave. It had previously raised $4.3 million from investors like Freestyle Capital and Castle Island Ventures.

Napster didn’t disclose the value of the acquisition.

© 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.

Conflux Network partnered with China Telecom, the country’s second-largest telecom provider, to develop blockchain-enabled SIM cards. Its native CFX token soared on the news.  

The telecom giant will launch the first pilot program in Hong Kong later this year, Conflux Network noted in a Twitter thread following the announcement.

“The Web3 product will be the largest blockchain hardware product ever seen globally, involving the most users and applications,” according to the thread. China Telecom has over 391 million mobile subscribers.

Conflux’s native token CFX soared following the announcement, jumping over 40% by 8 a.m. EST, according to CoinGecko data. 

CFX chart by CoinGecko

Conflux revealed in January that it would integrate with Little Red Book, the Chinese version of Instagram. The partnership will allow users to display their NFTs on the platform. 

Conflux is becoming the “major bridge” for connecting “prominent internet industry players” in China, who have initiated efforts to embrace web3, said Ming Wu, CTO of Conflux, at the time. 

© 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.

Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup Ironblocks has raised a $7 million seed round to build a blockchain-native cybersecurity platform.

The round is co-led by Collider Ventures and Disruptive AI. Other investors include ParaFi, Samsung Next and Quantstamp, as well as angel investors such as the former chief technology officer of Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan and Simplex co-founder Nimrod Lehavi, said a company release.

The co-founders of Ironblocks, Or Dadosh and Assaf Eli, have both been involved in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space for several years including being part of the team responsible for creating Bancor, which is a DeFi staking and trading protocol. While working in the space, they noticed an increase in hacks and as a result started working on Ironblocks in 2022.

Last year, the crypto industry lost $3.7 billion due to hacks alone, according to research from bug bounty platform Immunefi. Ironblocks says it aims to help crypto companies and protocols mitigate these hacks and  identify suspicious activity with an automated monitoring and detection system, Dadosh said. The detection system is already live and the company will be introducing a prevention system in the coming months, he added.

Thinking outside the blocks

One of the keys to noticing is suspicious patterns within protocols is examining activity across multiple protocols or applications instead of just examining them on a case-by-case basis, Dadosh said.

“When there is a hack, usually it combines several dapps together, it’s not for a specific dapp,” Dadosh said. “If you look only on a specific dapp, most of the times will not be enough, you need to look [at an] overview for all the behaviour of the transaction and what the user actually tried to do.”

The sophistication of hacks in the blockchain space are evolving, they used to be manual and now they are often happening in one specific automated transaction, which means teams need to react at a much quicker pace, Dadosh said. One of the challenges is that the security landscape is always changing, which requires teams such as Ironblocks to think outside the box and look at the bigger picture, he added.

 “Ironblocks is harnessing artificial intelligence and years of deep native blockchain experience to disrupt the way on-chain products are done,” said Yorai Fainmesser, general partner at Disruptive AI, in the release.

Ironblocks started fundraising at the start of 2022 and closed toward the end of the year, Dadosh said. The company to use the funds for hiring and building out the product roadmap. The team is currently around 15 people, which he hopes to double this year.

“Our goal is actually to help as many projects and protocols that we can and to provide the best security that the market can find,” Dadosh said. “We saw the all-time record for money stolen by cyber theft and by attackers. The industry need to solve this problem as fast as possible.”

© 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.