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Validators for The Open Network (TON) are considering the suspension of 195 inactive addresses on the proof-of-stake blockchain, with a vote scheduled to begin on Feb. 21. In total, these addresses currently hold just over 1 billion toncoin or 21.3% of the total supply, worth around $2.5 billion at today’s valuation. 

At least 75% of validators must participate in several voting rounds for the vote to pass. If approved, the proposed suspension will last for four years, with the affected addresses not able to make any transactions for the duration of the freeze period. The “suspended list” would be visible on the public blockchain.

Wallet addresses are considered inactive if they took part in the token’s initial distribution phase between July 2020 and June 2022 but have never made an outgoing transaction. In December, the TON Foundation, a non-commercial group of supporters and contributors behind the blockchain, asked the affected wallet owners to demonstrate their continued activity by making a transaction on TON. The remaining inactive wallets can avoid the potential suspension by making a transaction at any time before voting ends. It’s important to note that addresses not part of the initial distribution will not be affected.

The distribution of toncoin made 98.55% of its total supply available for an “initial proof-of-work” mechanism. In contrast to centralized distribution strategies often decided upon by crypto project development teams, TON’s mining strategy was designed to decentralize the distribution process while remaining a proof-of-stake blockchain.

The move was a “testament to the importance of transparency to the TON community,” the TON Foundation said in a statement. “Through the potential suspension of these wallets, there is a hope that clarity about the volume of toncoin currently circulating will be provided and that the active community participating in the open-source project will continue to grow and thrive,” it added.

The Open Network was originally designed in 2018 by the founders of Telegram Messenger and later handed over to the TON community to continue its development.

Earlier this month, TON launched a decentralized file-sharing and data storage solution called TON Storage, taking on similar projects like Filecoin and Storj.

© 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.

NFT price tracker Floor said it acquired NFT analytics firm WGMI.io. Terms were not disclosed.

Floor is currently invite-only and describes itself as an app “for everything NFTs.” WGMI, founded by Thomas Mancini a year ago and named for the “we’re gonna make it” acronym common in crypto spaces, will help develop web3 analytics for Floor. 

“In talking with Thomas, we found an alignment with the Floor mission to make NFTs understandable and accessible that made acquiring WGMI a great fit,” Floor founder Chris Maddern told The Block.

The acquisition comes as prices for NFTs have plunged over the past year. Last year, Floor raised $8 million in Series A funding. The company said it grew over 700% during the 2022 bear market, with 20,000 monthly active wallets on the platform.

© 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.

BlockFi is urging the court to approve the payment of bonuses as the crypto lender struggles to retain staff following its filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

“Despite an incredibly turbulent time in the digital asset industry, the opportunities for participants elsewhere have not dried up,” Chief People Officer Megan Crowell said in a declaration filed Monday. “The war for talent remains active and the participants have many opportunities inside and outside the cryptocurrency sector.” 

The bankrupt crypto lender filed a motion on Nov. 28 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the District of New Jersey to approve a retention program for remaining critical employees. The program plans to offer top staff compensation of either 50% or 10% of base salary, depending on their role.

Both the U.S. Trustee and the official committee of unsecured creditors have submitted objections to the motion. The hearing for the motion has been rescheduled numerous times, and today’s declaration states that the committee of unsecured creditors is seeking an even longer delay. 

“While we felt these extensions prudent to allow for dialogue with the U.S. Trustee and the Committee, we have experienced both additional personnel loss and increased concern regarding the receipt (and timing) of retention payments,” said Crowell in the declaration.

A bidding war for talent

Since the petition date on Nov. 28 and the declaration filing on Jan. 23, 11 employees have resigned, with the pace accelerating in January, according to the declaration. This is despite the widespread turmoil facing the industry, where many crypto companies are laying off a significant portion of staff.

“Key employees continue to receive offers, in some instances, for compensation significantly above their current compensation,” said Crowell, highlighting that employees have moved to firms such as Google, Block Inc. and Walmart.

Crowell became BlockFi’s chief people officer in October and is now responsible for overseeing staff reductions and the retention program. She joined BlockFi in 2019 and “personally built BlockFi’s human resources infrastructure, including BlockFi’s recruitment team,” according to the declaration. Her belief is that the approval of the retention program is necessary to prevent further attrition, which would place “unsustainable” strain on BlockFi.

Execs land on their feet

It’s not just BlockFi that is seeing demand for its employees. Top executives from other collapsed crypto companies are also landing on their feet. Last week, Brett Harrison, the former president of collapsed crypto exchange FTX U.S., raised $5 million for his new startup, while former executives from Genesis, a trading firm whose lending arm just filed for bankruptcy, raised millions for a new crypto hedge fund, according to CNBC.

BlockFi implemented a retention program when the emergency restructuring transaction with FTX wiped out the executives’ equity stakes. When BlockFi filed for bankruptcy, the program was cancelled.

“The retention programs were designed, in part, to address that hole given extreme frustration from the employee base about the loss of bonus opportunities (on the back of prior frustration about losing equity),” said Crowell. “Thus, if the retention programs are not approved, employees that decided to stay based on the retention program will almost certainly leave.” 

© 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.

Moralis, a blockchain infrastructure firm co-founded by popular crypto content creator Ivan Liljeqvist (aka Ivan on Tech), is the latest crypto company to cut jobs, Liljeqvist told The Block.

“In response to significant economic change and shifting customer and market priorities, we have decided to reduce our headcount,” he said.

Liljeqvist declined to disclose the number of positions that were cut. Sweden-based Moralis currently employs 85 people, according to its LinkedIn page.

Founded in 2021 by Liljeqvist and Filip Martinsson, Moralis provides tools to developers for building web3 applications. Liljeqvist’s Ivan on Tech YouTube channel has nearly 500,000 subscribers, and he has almost 400,000 Twitter followers. As for Moralis, it is backed by some high-profile investors, including Coinbase Ventures and Fabric Ventures. The firm has raised nearly $53 million in total funding to date, with its latest Series A round being in May 2022.

The job cuts make Moralis the latest crypto firm to slash headcount as the industry continues to grapple with collapses and the bear market. Other companies cutting jobs in recent weeks include Coinbase, Crypto.com, Blockchain.com, ConsenSys and Genesis.

“We understand that this is a challenging time for each person impacted. The senior management team is committed to providing generous severance packages and conducting this process with empathy and transparency,” Liljeqvist said. “Despite the difficulties in the market, we remain confident in both the strength of our mission and the opportunities in front of us.”

© 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.

NFT shop Doodles will acquire animation studio Golden Wolf in the latest example of consolidation in the web3 market.

Once complete, the team at Golden Wolf, which worked on smash hit cartoon series Rick and Morty and with heavyweights such as Disney, will join Doodles, according to a report in Billboard. 

The tie-up also will mean the launch of a new joint venture called Active Ingredient. Through Golden Wolf’s pre-existing partnership with creative studio Psyop, it will aim to “reinvent storytelling and the tools used to make them a reality” via blockchain and AI technology, according to the Billboard report. The joint venture will aim to create tools and techniques for brands, filmmakers and producers. As part of the deal, Psyop is investing in Doodles. 

Doodles didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the size of the deal. 

Doodles, which put out its debut NFT collection in October 2021, raised $54 million in September last year in a round led by Reddit co-founder and NFT enthusiast Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm 776. At the time it said it would use the funding to expand its team to 30 people from 11.

The news comes ahead of the long-anticipated Doodles 2 collection, which there is so far scant detail on. 

Last week, web3 infrastructure provider MoonPay bought creative studio nightshift in its first deal, the terms of which were undisclosed.

© 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.

Sushi DAO is set to implement a governance action that will see all fees generated by the SushiSwap decentralized exchange diverted to the DAO’s treasury, following the results of its latest vote on Monday.

Sushi’s new “Kanpai” ratio now goes into effect following the vote. Kanpai is SushiSwap’s fee-diversion protocol. It enables the DAO to determine how much of the exchange’s trading fees can be sent to the treasury. The default Kanpai ratio is 10% but this vote has now raised the figure to 100%.

The new Kanpai ratio will last for one year or until the DAO adopts a new tokenomics model. The date of the previous signal vote — Dec. 19, 2022 — was chosen as the effective starting date for the new ratio. As such, the Kanpai ratio should revert to its original form on Dec. 19, 2023, unless a new tokenomics model is adopted before then. Sushi token holders will not receive rewards from trading fees during this period.

Sushi Head Chef Jared Grey has previously called the new Kanpai ratio a “temporary solution to a long-term problem.” The problem being the DAO’s need to ensure that the project’s resources attain a competitive level. Grey stated that diverting fees to the treasury is a better solution than selling sushi tokens to raise funds for the team.

Sushi DAO’s treasury holds $17 million worth of crypto tokens in its reserves. The bulk of this sum — $16.6 million worth — is in its native sushi token. The DAO also holds significant amounts of ether and USDC.

GoldenChain’s influence

Monday’s vote ended with almost unanimous approval from participants, according to Snapshot data. The voting page shows 747 wallets participated in the polls, with 99% in support of the move.

GoldenChain, the digital investment arm of venture capital outfit Golden Tree, was largely responsible for the success of the plan. GoldenChain’s wallet supplied 5.9 million out of the 6.7 million votes cast in support of the proposal.

GoldenChain’s voting power on the DAO was cause for some controversy during the previous vote. The signal vote that preceded Monday’s implementation vote turned out to be a whale tussle within the DAO. In the end, GoldenChain and another major voter believed to be owned by crypto trading firm Cumberland were responsible for swaying the polls.

The wallets belonging to the major opposition during the previous signal vote did not participate this time around.

© 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 proposal to deploy decentralized exchange Uniswap v3 on the BNB Chain has passed an early temperature check and will now be put up for a full governance vote on the Uniswap DAO.

Data from Snapshot shows 80% of the 6,495 wallets that participated in the preliminary polls were in favor of the move. These voters cast 20 million uni tokens in support of the proposal.

Following the vote, the proposal will now move to a full governance vote. The proposal, put up 0xPlasma Labs, seeks to deploy Uniswap v3 on BNB Chain, with Celer selected as the preferred bridge protocol. Bridges enable users to send crypto tokens across different blockchain networks.

If approved, BNB Chain will become the sixth network to support the popular decentralized exchange. The third version of Uniswap’s decentralized exchange already exists on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Celo. The protocol controls $2.68 billion across these five deployments, according to DeFiLlama. The Ethereum version is the most dominant of the lot, accounting for 90% of the total value locked.

0xPlasma Labs stated that the Uniswap community stands to gain significant benefits from the move. BNB Chain currently ranks as the third largest blockchain network for DeFi in terms of total value locked, according to DeFiLlama.

PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange like Uniswap, is the dominant protocol for making swaps on BNB Chain. The exchange currently controls $2.4 billion in total value locked. 0xPlasma Labs says Uniswap v3 on BNB Chain could capture up to half of that value.

© 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 tool built by Chainway lets Tornado Cash users prove their initial deposits were not from a list of wallets containing stolen funds — without revealing their own address.

Called Proof of Innocence, the tool is designed for those who want to use Tornado Cash but also want to show they’re not a bad actor. It’s designed for legitimate users who don’t want to be associated with nefarious activities, yet still want to maintain their own privacy.

“Nice way to prove you’re not a bad actor without giving up your anonymity,” said Roman Semenov, a co-founder of Tornado Cash, on Twitter on Friday.

Those who want to use the new tool need to provide a list of malicious wallets they don’t want to be associated with. It then uses cryptography to prove that the wallet they used to deposit the funds isn’t contained within that list.

‘Not hackers’

“By providing this proof, users can show that they are not hackers or other bad actors, and can make withdrawals from Tornado Cash with confidence,” Chainway, which describes itself as a web3 venture builder, said in a Medium post last week. “This not only improves the security and trustworthiness of the system, but also helps to protect legitimate users from being associated with illegal activities, without sacrificing their privacy.”

Currently this is possible to do within Tornado Cash, but doing so requires the user to provide their address — something that undermines the purpose of using a crypto mixing service.

© 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.

Jump Crypto is using its high-frequency trading expertise to build a new open-source validator client for Solana known as Firedancer.

In a recent episode of The Scoop podcast, Jump Crypto President Kanav Kariya explained Jump decided to build infrastructure on Solana because of the network’s emphasis on performance.

“Given Solana’s success, our participation in the ecosystem over a couple years, and the very specific technical challenges that they wanted to solve as it pertains to optimizing their network and runtime, it felt like a really great opportunity for us to come in and contribute,” Kariya said.

While Solana touts itself as a high-performance blockchain, over the last year it has suffered numerous outages that could have been prevented if there was a backup validator client such as Firedancer, according to Kariya.

Written in C

In addition to improving Solana’s resiliency, Firedancer is implemented in C/C++ which optimizes the client for on-chain high-frequency trading (HFT) activity.

While Solana’s primary validator client is written in Rust, C and C++ are the most commonly used software languages in high-frequency trading because they are “lower-level” languages.

Because C and C++ have low-level access to the computer’s hardware, it allows for more fine-tuned control and optimization of the client’s performance. Additionally, C/C++ allow for more efficient memory management and faster execution of code, which are crucial for high-frequency trading.

According to Kariya, Solana’s high-performance design combined with the experience of Jump’s engineers have in building highly efficient systems made Firedancer an attractive opportunity for the firm.

“Most folks don’t understand this about high-frequency trading firms, but they’re fundamentally great at a couple of different things: one is high-performance computing at scale… and then, ‘how do we optimize our environment overall such that we can we can get as much juice for the squeeze?’ — and the confluence of those two factors made it such that Firedancer was a pretty awesome opportunity for us.”

© 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.

London-based blockchain infrastructure company Calimero Network has raised $8.5 million in a seed round co-led by Khosla Ventures, Lyrik Ventures and Near Foundation.

The round, which closed in December 2022, also sees participation from GSR, FJ Labs and Warburg Serres among others, according to a company release.

A Near protocol spin off

Calimero Network was spun-out of the Near protocol, a high performance blockchain that launched on mainnet in 2020. Calimero’s founders, Sandi Fatic and Mario Halambek, were the Near protocol’s first infrastructure engineers, their startup builds private shard infrastructure that enables companies to protect sensitive data while using open-source blockchains. 

Sharding is splitting up a blockchain into several smaller networks, for use by individual companies. Calimero enables companies to store information on private shards while also enabling them to interact with the public blockchain.

“The companies we currently have in the [closed alpha] are mostly like web2.5 companies, either they used to be on mainnet and they’re looking for more privacy or they’re just coming into the space and don’t know much about blockchain but they know they need privacy and scaling,” said Fatic in an interview with The Block.

The startup is currently targeting the Near ecosystem but is also exploring the Ethereum Virtual Machine ecosystem through Aurora, a Layer 2 scaling solution in Near that enables Ethereum compatibility.

AWS for private sharding

Calimero offers a console, which is currently in closed alpha, that enables the management of private shards as well as an enterprise solution that is focused more on helping web2 companies scale up with  customization and support options, Fatic said.

“The console you can think of it as AWS for a private shard,” Fatic said. “Essentially it’s a management dashboard, which provides you to easily spin up the shards, to manage the shards, to remove or [add] validators [and] RPC indexer nodes, to manage the bridge [and] to manage permissions on your private shard.”

The funds from the raise will be used for managing and expanding the team. Around 95% of the startup’s expenses is staffing, and the raise will give Calimero around three years of runway, Fatic said.

Staying scrappy

“We are trying to be smart about it, hire the top quality people and just be scrappy as much as possible,” Fatic said. “Because we have seen many times in the industry that companies would rely too much on fundraising and my opinion is that we should focus more on revenue and sustainable models and keeping the team small and expand when we need it.”

The startup currently has 15 team members and will expand to around 20, Fatic said. The fundraising structure used was equity plus token warrants, Fatic said. It closed in two parts having raised from VCs in July 2022 and then securing additional capital from the Near Foundation in December.

“Privacy, data protection, and confidentiality are some of the key considerations for enterprise builders,” said Quynh Ho, vice president of investments at GSR in the release. “Calimero’s builder-first open-source SDK is highly composable with private, customizable enterprise shards, which address customer requirements for privacy while also allowing easy access to data, analytics, and seamless collaboration.”

© 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.