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Avalanche-based DeFi trading platform Trader Joe and the associated Joepegs NFT marketplace will deploy on BNB Chain by the end of March.

This means BNB Chain users will be able to participate in the launch of new NFT collections using the Joepegs NFT Marketplace, as well as trade tokens using Liquidity Book, according to a company release. 

Trader Joe has the highest total trading volume across all applications on Avalanche, but has seen significant decreases since June, according to DeFiLlama. Joepegs has 34,000 users and has facilitated more than $9.5 million in secondary sales, the release added. 

“We believe the efficiency and security of BNB Chain, combined with the user-friendly offerings of the Trader Joe DEX and Joepegs NFT Marketplace, will drive growth and success for the wider NFT and DeFi ecosystem,” Alvin Kan, director of growth and ops at BNB Chain, said in a statement. 

Ethereum expansion

Trader Joe also moved to expand on Ethereum scaling platform Arbitrum last month, the first time it had ventured from Avalanche since its launch in 2021. 

Trader Joe’s integration with Arbitrum an d BNB Chain follows a trend of other decentralized finance protocols deploying on multiple chains. Protocols such as Uniswap and Aave have deployed on several chains over the past year, with the rationale that more chains will result in reaching more users.

© 2022 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.

Australia-based blockchain gaming studio Illuvium will release an alpha version of Illuvium: Zero tomorrow.

Open to the roughly 6,500 holders of Illuvium land NFTs on mobile and PC, Zero joins the team’s two existing games. Monster battler Illuvium: Arena and open world Illuvium: Overworld, the latter of which launched in December, are both in the beta testing phase. While access to all three is currently limited, the company expects to open its universe up fully to the public midway through 2023.

Zero is a building game where players can develop and manage their “digital industrial complex.” Among the features, land NFT holders will be able to earn from their NFTs by extracting fuel and selling it on the game’s marketplace.

Built using Unreal Engine 5 on ImmutableX’s blockchain, Australia-based Illuvium wants to build a product capable of competing with non-blockchain games. 

Competing with the mainstream

Web3 gaming has struggled to compete with mainstream gaming titles. Some top triple AAA games attract millions of players a day, while even the most popular blockchain games often struggle to reach that number in a month.

A lack of interest in the game’s content, dislike of crypto and difficult onboarding processes have all been cited as reasons for the lack of uptake. Among the top games currently available, some still have very limited gameplay, attracting web3 gaming enthusiasts due to financial products embedded in the games such as opportunities to earn yield and cash-out tokens.

More ambitious gaming studios, which have announced plans for full MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role player games), may take years to deliver a complete product.  

And while some top gaming studios such as Square Enix have embraced web3 gaming, most remain wary. Mojang Studios and Rockstar Games, makers of Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto respectively, have both banned creators from using NFTs on their games’ servers.

Top figures at the likes of Steam creators Valve and Microsoft have also been critical of NFT and blockchain usage in gaming. 

© 2022 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 latest upgrade for the Evmos blockchain has introduced automated conversions for token swaps in and out of its ecosystem.

Evmos is a Cosmos ecosystem blockchain with native support for Ethereum applications and tokens. Its goal is to bring the two blockchain ecosystems closer and allow tokens to flow more freely between them.

Automated conversions were added in the latest version 10.0 upgrade on Jan. 5. When someone sends a token native to the Cosmos ecosystem to Evmos, it will be automatically converted to an Ethereum-compatible token so it can be used immediately on Evmos and sent to Ethereum-compatible blockchains. The aim is to make the experience of using the blockchain and moving between Cosmos and Ethereum more streamlined.

“No longer will users need to convert their Cosmos assets into their respective [Ethereum Virtual Machine] asset types and vice-versa. This will be done under the hood for users!” said Evmos on Twitter.

This will also mean users can transfer Ethereum-based tokens to other Cosmos blockchains from Evmos in a single transaction without swapping the tokens manually.

This will only apply for token pairings — the Ethereum and Cosmos versions of the tokens — that have been associated together through Evmos’ governance system. Tokens that haven’t been mapped in this way won’t be automatically converted.

A key feature in the Cosmos ecosystem is IBC, a form of communication that lets blockchains send tokens to each other much more easily (a function that isn’t too easy in the blockchain world). Making it easier for Ethereum tokens to be switched for Cosmos-compatible tokens that can be sent using IBC could open up more communication between Ethereum and Cosmos-based blockchains.

Other features in the upgrade include more support for the crypto hardware wallet Ledger and some bug fixes.

© 2022 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 on-ramping service Juno encouraged users to withdraw their cryptocurrencies from the platform because its payment partner, Wyre, may be about to shut down.

The news comes after Wyre started doing layoffs, with two former employees telling Axios that the company plans to shut down this month.

Juno recommended that its users withdraw their funds to their own self-custody wallets or sell them for fiat currency on its platform.

After informing its clients to do so, the amount of crypto assets held on the platform has fallen to $1.25 million.

© 2022 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.

Solana NFT marketplace Magic Eden offered refunds to users affected by the posting of unverified NFT collections on its marketplace. 

A new feature deployment had caused a user interface issue that allowed 25 unverified NFTs to be sold across four collections, including dupes of blockbuster Solana collection y00ts, the company said in a blog post.

To fix the verification issue, its Snappy Marketplace and Pro Trade features were disabled, and an extra verification step was added to block similar types of attacks. It also advised users to refresh their browsers. 

“We are actively monitoring the development of this issue and will refund any impacted users. If users have any questions about security, they can contact help.magiceden.io,” the company wrote. 

Magic Eden thanked the community for alerting it of fake ABC, or Abracadabra, NFTs in a tweet on Wednesday — adding that affected parties should contact its help desk.

Earlier, Solana’s biggest NFT marketplace blamed third-party cachers for NFT projects displaying wrong images — even adult content — for its collections and claimed it wasn’t hacked.  

© 2022 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 United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico issued an order of detention for Mango Markets exploiter Avraham Eisenberg.

The decision follows a detention hearing, where it was concluded that “the defendant must be detained pending trial because the Government has proven: By a preponderance of evidence that no condition or combination of conditions of release will reasonably assure the defendant’s appearance as required.”

Eisenberg’s potentially lengthy incarceration period, if convicted, and his significant ties outside of the United States were also cited as reasons driving the decision.

Eisenberg was arrested on Dec. 28 for market manipulation and fraud charges relating to the exploit of Solana-based decentralized exchange Mango Markets, which he admitted to being at least partially behind. At the time, he claimed it was a legal act on the basis that he used the protocol as it was designed.

© 2022 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.

Collapsed crypto exchange FTX’s former top lawyer, Daniel Friedberg, shared his knowledge of founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s use of customer funds with U.S. prosecutors.

Friedberg joined a meeting on Nov. 22 in the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York office with Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, and Securities and Exchange Commission officials, Reuters reported — citing a source close to the matter and confirmed by scheduling emails.

In the meeting, Friedberg explained how FTX’s sister trading firm, Alameda Research, worked.

FBI agents reportedly contacted Friedberg a few days after the crypto exchange filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November. He is not under criminal investigation and expects to be a witness in Bankman-Fried’s trial, which is scheduled for October.

Bankman-Fried is charged with fraud and accused of misusing billions of dollars worth of FTX customer funds and funneling them into Alameda. He pled not guilty in a New York federal court on Tuesday. In contrast, his counterparts, former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison and former FTX CTO Gary Wang, pled guilty to fraud charges in December.

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.

© 2022 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.

Animoca Brands has cut in half the amount it hopes to corral for a new web3 and metaverse investment fund.

Yat Siu, the Hong Kong-based company’s chair, said in a Twitter Spaces interview that it is now looking to raise around $1 billion for Animoca Capital this quarter, according to a Bloomberg report. Siu had told Nikkei as recently as November that Animoca would target $2 billion for the fund, which will make mid- to late-stage bets in the sector.

The news comes with the crypto sector still reeling from the spectacular collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX in November. Around a dozen of Animoca’s portfolio startups were affected, Siu told Bloomberg.

“Q1 is the goal and then let’s see what happens,” Siu told Bloomberg of Animoca Capital’s plans, adding that market conditions may mean the fund raises less than its target. “It is fair to say it’s a challenging market. But we have quite a bit of interest.”

Animoca Brands is one of the most prolific investors in web3, having made more than 380 investments as of Dec. 6, according to a company spokesperson. Accounting for so great a haul of tokens, however, has proven tricky. The company was recently granted an extension for filing its audited financial report for 2020, which had originally been due to Australian regulators by the end of last year.

Animoca did not immediately respond to The Block’s request for comment.

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.

© 2022 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 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged eight individuals and businesses for the alleged sale of unregistered securities via the blockchain tech firm CoinDeal. 

The accused are Neil Chandran, Garry Davidson, Michael Glaspie, Amy Mossel, Linda Knott, AEO Publishing Inc, Banner Co-Op, Inc and BannersGo, LLC, according to an SEC release.

Chandran, Davidson, Glaspie, Knott and Mossel allegedly claimed that CoinDeal would be sold for trillions of dollars, despite no acquisition ever being made or funds allocated to investors. Chandran also allegedly used millions of dollars in investor funds for buying a boat, real estate, cars, and other personal uses. 

The SEC filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.

“We allege the defendants falsely claimed access to valuable blockchain technology and that the imminent sale of the technology would generate investment returns of more than 500,000 times for investors,” Daniel Gregus, director of the SEC’s Chicago Regional Office, said in a release. 

Neil Chandran had been detained in the U.S. for crimes related to wire fraud and two counts of engaging in monetary transactions in criminally derived property since Sept. 14, 2022.

The SEC alleged that Chandran defrauded more than 10,000 victims through his investment fraud schemes involving CoinDeal and other firms. 

© 2022 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.

Data analytics platform DeFiLlama’s new decentralized exchange aggregator, an application that optimizes transaction costs for swaps, was the second most used application over the past 24 hours, according to the 0x platform that aggregates liquidity across the majority of the top DEXs.

DeFiLlama has slowly become one of the most popular data platforms in crypto and is now making a push into decentralized finance. The DEX aggregator is still in beta but has shown promising signs since its launch earlier this week, bouncing between the number one and number two spots on the 0x explorer. It’s currently ranked higher than Metamask and Coinbase in total volume.

“Impressive launch,” Eliézer Ndinga, director of research at 21.co, wrote on Twitter, noting that the aggregator had been launched without incentives including a liquidity mining program. “One thing is clear — users want a platform with data analytics, form their own opinions, and act on them with a click of a button.”

DeFiLlama says it allows users to obtain the best price on swaps across eight other aggregators that include 1inch and Matcha. The aggregator doesn’t charge users fees, and it has integrations with the majority of EVM-compatible chains. The aggregator also allows users to transact privately by routing transactions through its own server, which doesn’t store IP data.

Many DEXs have turned to liquidity mining programs over the past two years to try and attract users. That model, however, hasn’t been conducive to long-term growth and sustainability, as Sushiswap noted in its latest tokenomics revamp proposal. DeFiLlama took a different approach, first growing its free-to-use data platform and then launching DeFi applications once it had a strong user base.

© 2022 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.