FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Quick Take

• The BNB Chain ecosystem has gained outsized attention in recent weeks after what started as a public dispute between the founders of Binance and FTX eventually spiraled into FTX’s collapse just a few days later
• Growing concerns about stablecoin volatility in the wake of the FTX crisis have become visible on BNB Chain, which hosts a significant amount of stablecoin liquidity and trading activity for the broader DeFi ecosystem
• In spite of a general drawdown in TVL among L1s, the BNB Chain ecosystem has remained notably resilient during this recent period of heightened market volatility

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ZkSync, an Ethereum scaling protocol, passed its first security audit in preparation of expanding access to users this year.

Security auditing for new protocols has become more important after the worst hacking year in crypto history, according to Chainalysis. The security audit adds an extra layer of trust in zkSync’s network security for builders and users of protocols.

For example, several well known decentralized finance protocols such as Aave and Uniswap have committed to launch on zkSync. The audit allows protocols and users to have more trust in expanding to the new network and transacting on them. 

OpenZeppelin, a leading crypto auditing firm, conducted the audit, which took place over a four-week period. OpenZeppelin is providing on-demand security feedback in between future audits and has assigned technical and security advisors to oversee zkSync.

© 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.

ApeCoin DAO is getting a new NFT marketplace that will sell Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Bored Ape Kennel Club and Otherdeed NFTs.

The community has anticipated a bespoke marketplace since August, when it was propositioned by several companies interested in building it. Among them, Magic Eden’s proposal was rejected, and Rarible withdrew its proposal. Another contender, X Marketplace, also threw its hat in but was unsuccessful.

Ultimately, a two-man team of Zach Heerwagen and Jason Jong, the founders of Snag Solutions, gained enough traction to win over the support of the community.

The startup, which launched in July and is currently closing its pre-seed funding round, builds white label marketplaces for NFT collections. Bespoke marketplaces, often called white-label or white glove marketplaces, are experiencing a surge of interest among NFT collections looking for more control over how their NFTs are traded. In addition to being able to offer lower transaction fees than many traditional NFT marketplaces and enforce royalties, they offer collections social and data tooling, as well as help prevent buyers being scammed by fake NFTs.

In September, Snag Solutions created a marketplace for Goblintown makers Truth Labs. It has also worked with the Crypto Chicks and Pirates of the Metaverse NFT collections. In total, Heerwagen said the company has worked on around ten white label marketplaces so far.

Creator royalties

The new marketplace will honor creator royalties and pass half the seller fees for each transaction back to the ApeCoin DAO community. For listings it aggregates from non-royalty enforcing marketplaces, it will add royalties fees payable to creators.

Whether royalties should be enforced continues to be a massive debate in the NFT space. They are a major source of income for creators but platforms where royalties are optional have increased their marketplace share over the past few months.

As a white label marketplace built specifically for the DAO, it also features integrated NFT metadata on its dashboard and soon-to-be-launched ApeCoin staking.

The new ApeCoin marketplace doesn’t currently support other Yuga Labs collections Meebits, CryptoPunks or the newly-acquired Beeple-created 10KTF. Like ApeCoin DAO itself, it isn’t officially affiliated with the company either.

Nevertheless, Heerwagen said that lines of communication were open with Yuga and that he has spoken with the founders. 

Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Otherdeed are the second, third and fourth most popular NFT collections of all time by volume. Yuga Labs itself is valued at $4 billion.

© 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.

Stablecoins could offer central banks a shortcut to having their own digital currencies, a New York Federal Reserve advisor said at an event in London on Tuesday. 

“Instead of issuing a retail [central bank digital currency], central banks could support stablecoins by allowing them to be backed one-for-one with balances in a central bank account,” said Antoine Martin, a financial stability advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

“Adapting our regulatory and legislative environment to support stablecoins is already a formidable task, but it is probably easier than managing a CBDC for retail use, especially as the private sector currently provides all retail digital means of payments on legacy technology,” he told policymakers at the Gillmore Centre Policy Forum at Warwick Business School in London, according to a statement. 

Martin drew a comparison between stablecoins and the Chinese payment platforms Alipay and Tenpay, describing them as “very close cousins.” When users of those services transfer money, the platforms need to hold the equivalent yuan in the Chinese central bank, much like stablecoins could.

A possible shift in thinking

The comment suggested a possible shift in thinking on stablecoins, as the New York Fed advisor had previously argued that stablecoins are “unlikely to be the future of payments,” according to a blog post published in February. 

The authors said stablecoins “that do not tie up liquidity are risky and less fungible,” suggesting that their use within a banking system would be unreliable. Existing forms of digital money are sufficient and could be adapted by issuing tokenized deposits, Martin and others added.

In another New York Fed blog post from April 2021, Martin co-wrote that stablecoins are “riskier” than CBDCs since “the value of the assets backing the coin could fluctuate, or these assets may not be present, despite promises made.” The authors also noted that, unlike CBDCs, “some stablecoins still try to avoid a central intermediary.” 

While the New York Fed recently launched a pilot “regulated liability network” for private banks to experiment with digital liabilities, the Federal Reserve has previously expressed a slower, calculated approach to developing a digital dollar.

“We do not see ourselves making that decision for some time,” Fed chair Jerome Powell said in September.

© 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.

Ethereum developers have released a developer network to test validator staking withdrawals, a feature currently missing on the network.

Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden said the devnet will help prepare Ethereum to open up validator staking withdrawals next year with a planned upgrade called Shanghai. The lack of the feature has raised some fears about centralization risks after Ethereum migrated to proof-of-stake consensus.

“It’s the first devnet that enabled withdrawals on all of these implementations and is a big step forward,” Van Der Wijden told The Block. “It also helps other clients to test their implementations by joining the network.”

Ethereum clients, teams that build validator software, are testing staking withdrawals to prepare for Shanghai and find any potential bugs, Van Der Wijden said. He clarified that the ongoing devnet only focuses on withdrawals and separate Shanghai features have yet to be tested.  

Why are staking withdrawals important?

A necessary condition for Ethereum’s migration to proof-of-stake consensus, also called The Merge, was that users had to stake or pool assets on the network. They could stake themselves or delegate ether to firms offering staking services, the latter being the more convenient choice.

Once users staked enough ether, however, a new issue came to light — users couldn’t withdraw from staking providers, as that mechanism remains to be implemented. 

After The Merge, staking entities such as Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, Staked.us, Bitcoin Suisse, stakefish and Figment have come to control a significant portion of ether deposited in validator nodes and make decisions on behalf of stakers. Since a large majority of network stake and validators are currently overseen by few entities, experts within the Ethereum community have previously expressed concerns that the network was now prone to centralization risks.

Some of these concerns can be alleviated when ether withdrawals are reopened, as that would allow users to remove their stake from validators they don’t agree with. Once the feature is live, users can also perform “solo staking,” a process of running independent validators. Shanghai will give users the ability to swap staked ether (stETH), a popular liquid staking token, to normal ether. The former token is often plagued with liquidity issues.

A total of six client teams are participating in the devnet including Lodestar, Teku, Lighthouse, Nethermind and Geth, Van Der Wijden said.

© 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 Japanese central bank will begin experiments with a proof-of-concept digital yen early next year, Nikkei reported. 

The Bank of Japan will work with several unnamed financial institutions to stress test a central bank digital currency. Tests will include how deposits and withdrawals can work, and also what happens when no internet access is available. 

A decision will be taken in 2026 on whether to formally adopt a digital yen.

Most large economies are trying to develop some form of state-backed digital currency, with some, including China and Nigeria, already rolling out wallets for public use. Those experiments may prove unsuccessful but it’s important for central banks to ensure there was a widely available digital settlement asset, Jon Cunliffe, deputy governor of the Bank of England said on Monday. He warned that a few large commercial players might otherwise dominate and control crucial payment services.

Tom Matsuda contributed reporting for this story.

© 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.

ENS DAO, the decentralized community for the Ethereum Name Service project, has voted to select the treasury management platform Karpatkey DAO to manage its endowment fund.

The vote, which began on Nov. 18, ended on Nov. 23, according to details from Snapshot. Karpatkey was among four other choices that included DeFi management protocols Avantgarde and Llama, as well as an option for none of the above. The vote was via ranked choice, which meant voters had to rank the options in their order of preference. Karpatkey emerged as the most popular option, securing over 57% of the votes cast.

There was some drama near the end of the vote as Coinbase and Ethereum wallet platform Rainbow voted for none of the above as their preferred option. The vote cast by both parties temporarily swung the polls in favor of their preferred option. Defending its choice, Coinbase posted on the ENS DAO forum that the risk and reward didn’t seem reasonable. “We’d prefer to wait for the treasury management space to mature further,” Coinbase added.

Following the conclusion of the vote, the ENS meta-governance stewards will work with Karpatkey to develop an initial treasury allocation. Karpatkey’s original bid to the DAO called for a $52 million endowment fund. The treasury management outfit promised to grow the fund to $69 million.

The endowment fund will come from the ENS DAO treasury, which is currently worth $926 million. ENS, the project’s native token, forms the bulk of this sum as the treasury holds $880 million worth of ENS. The ENS treasury also holds $43 million in ether and $2.4 million in USDC.

The endowment fund is part of the DAO’s treasury management efforts. Treasury management has become a major concern for DAOs amid the current market decline. The ENS endowment fund is supposed to enable the project to meet its financial obligations even if the current bear market decline continues.

© 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.

Altcoins led a rally across crypto asset prices, with some adding double-digit gains. Binance’s BNB rose 13%, and Litecoin’s LTC was up over 15%.  

Bitcoin rose 3.2% over the past 24 hours, trading above $16,500; ether tacked on 5.6% as it changed hands for $1,164 at 8:00 a.m. ET, according to CoinGecko data. Cryptocurrencies rose in line with equities. 

We’ll get a flurry of economic indicators shortly, as well as the minutes of the Fed’s meeting, which could provide clues for the next interest rate decision in three weeks. Yet another increase could prompts the dollar to drop further and bitcoin to keep rising. 

BTCUSD chart by TradingView

The DXY — which measures the U.S. dollar versus a basket of other currencies — was down 0.18% today to 106.951. Bitcoin’s price in dollars moves higher when the dollar weakens.

Equities rise

U.S. stock index futures were up pre-market. S&P 500 futures rose 0.15%, while Nasdaq 100 futures jumped 0.23%.

Coinbase gained 3.5% to trade around $45, according to Nasdaq data via TradingView. Shares in the crypto exchange had traded higher on Tuesday, closing up 5%, after trading at an all-time low on Monday.

Crypto bank Silvergate was up more than 5% in pre-market today, trading around $27. The La Jolla-based bank tacked on 4% on Tuesday. 

Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood — who doubled down yesterday on her prediction that bitcoin would reach $1 million by 2030 — also added Silvergate and Coinbase shares last week. 

Jack Dorsey’s Block was up 1%, and MicroStrategy was unchanged in pre-market trading. 

© 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.

Onomy, a Cosmos-based decentralized finance protocol, has raised $10 million in a private token funding round.

The round was backed by investors including Bitfinex, GSR, Ava Labs, CMS Holdings and DWF Labs, Onomy said Wednesday, adding that there was no specific lead investor in the round. The funding was secured via a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT), Onomy Co-founder Lalo Bazzi told The Block.

Onomy has been under development since Dec. 2020. When asked why it raised funds after nearly two years, Bazzi said that the project had been raising capital over the last two years to finance the development of its products and it is finally closing the round. He added this is the final raise ahead of the mainnet launch.

Onomy aims to converge DeFi and forex markets. Its offerings include a Layer 1 blockchain network and a blockchain bridge, as well as a decentralized exchange called Onex and a non-custodial mobile wallet.

“Products are built in an agnostic way to add support for other blockchains and protocols we have partnered with, such as Polygon, Avalanche, and IOTA to bring a seamless user interface and user experience to the cross-chain and multi-chain world,” said Bazzi.

With fresh capital in hand, Bazzi plans to continue enhancing the protocol and “methodically” scale the team. There are currently 15 full-time employees working for Onomy and Bazzi looks to add some more developers in the near future.

Going live on mainnet

Onomy’s mainnet is set to launch in the coming days. It said its testnet saw over 800,000 transactions and 40,000 unique users.

Upon its mainnet launch, Onomy will convert itself into a decentralized autonomous organization or DAO, providing holders of its native token NOM with the opportunity to vote on its decisions.

Cosmos is an ecosystem of separate blockchains that operate with an ability to swap value between them. The total value locked across all of these blockchains is around $1.17 billion, according to DeFiLlama. Onomy’s products “have the potential to play a pivotal role in Cosmos,” Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino said in a statement.

© 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.

Bo Shen, founding partner at Fenbushi capital, said his private crypto wallet was hacked in an incident on Nov. 10, which resulted in a $42 million loss of various crypto assets. 

The majority of the tokens, some $38 million, was taken in the stablecoin USDC. The rest of the stolen assets included tether (USDT), uniswap (UNI), reputation (REP), and liquity (LQTY) tokens, on-chain data from the wallet shows.

“A total of 42M worth of crypto assets, including 38M in USDC were stolen from my personal wallet ending in 894 in the early morning of November 10 EST,” Shen said in a tweet.

Shen said he reported the exploit to relevant law enforcement agencies. He clarified the stolen assets were personal funds and were separate from Fenbushi and its related entities. 

Blockchain security firm Beosin confirmed the exploit happened, explaining it likely resulted from a “private key compromise.” The hacker, after gaining illegitimate access to the wallet, drained all of its assets to two Ethereum addresses under their control, Beosin added. 

© 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.