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Funko, the pop culture retailer behind Funko Pop! collectible figurines, has teamed up with Warner Brothers and the U.S. retail giant Walmart to sell NFT-linked comic books, CoinDesk first reported. 

These comic books come from DC’s “The Brave and the Bold” comic series, which include notable figures from the DC Universe, like Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash and The Green Lantern. Each book cover will be available as a physical item with a digital counterpart, otherwise known as a “phygital.”

Funko CEO Andrew Perlmutter told CoinDesk that this opportunity with Wamart provides a good way to test how the NFT business can expand into physical retailers. A common superstore in the U.S., Walmart selling NFT-linked physical goods helps to make this type of asset more common. 

Customers that purchase one of these phygitals can connect their wallet and claim their NFT, which will be minted on the WAX blockchain. Sales of these items will begin Oct. 7. 

Funk is not the only brand to get into phygitals. Luxury goods company Prada and sportswear firm Puma both have sold physical goods with digital counterparts.

© 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.

OpenSea has incorporated the scarcity tracking tool OpenRarity, which lets buyers know about the rarity of a particular NFT.

The popular NFT projects Pudgy Penguins, Cool Cats and Moonbirds are among the first projects to have OpenRarity on its commerce page. These NFT collections have between 8,888 to 10,000 NFTs within their collection made from algorithmically generated images.

Some of the features in these NFTs are found within less that 1% of the collection, such as a pillow case on its head in the case of Pudgy Penguins or a robot face for Cool Cats. 

OpenSea adopting OpenRarity removes opacity as to how rare certain features in an NFT are, allowing users to remain on OpenSea and forgo using third-party NFT scarcity tracking tools. 

The rarity of an NFT is now one of the first pieces of information a potential buyer sees when perusing an NFT — before even the NFT’s purchase history or who it’s currently owned by. 

To be sure, OpenSea displayed some rarity characteristics of an NFT before incorporating OpenRarity. In the case of Moonbirds #520, for instance, users can see that 3% of owls in the 10,000 NFT collection also have Lincoln hats.

But it’s because of OpenRarity that users now know that Moonbirds #520 is the 7,073 rarest of the collection. 

Aside from adding rarity data, OpenSea has made additional changes to its platform as well, such as augmenting how it does airdrops, adding a more prominent description of how much a creator’s fee is following a debate of NFT royalties, and vowing to only support proof-of-stake NFTs on Ethereum following The Merge. 

© 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.

Puerto Rico-based FV Bank has partnered with stablecoin issuer Circle so its customers can receive USD Coin (USDC) deposits into their accounts, with the aim of making international transfers easier and cheaper for its customers. 

Circle will instantly convert the USDC that bank clients receive into U.S. dollars at time of deposit, FV Bank said in a blog post. The internationally focused digital bank said these stablecoin deposits will make cross-border transactions easier.

“This allows FV Bank account holders to raise invoices to their international clients in USDC and receive it without worrying about wallets, conversions, fees etc,” the company said.

FV Bank, regulated by Puerto Rico’s Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions (OCIF), provides digital banking and digital-asset custody services. The bank will be responsible for ensuring compliance of USDC transactions as the funds move from users’ crypto wallets to their bank accounts, a chart in the blog post shows. FV’s institutional and retail clients can receive USDC deposits through the Ethereum ERC-20 token or the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain. 

Circle has disclosed that USDC is fully backed by U.S. dollar reserves, including cash and three-month treasuries. Several other banking-focused fintechs offer integration with USDC, including European crypto payment service BCB Group and corporate payments and financing platform Tribal Credit.

© 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.

A majority of mining companies trended upward Wednesday, although nearly just as many traded lower.

Bitcoin’s price reached $22,500 earlier in the day but sunk below $19,000 after the news that the U.S. Federal Reserve increased interest rates by 75 basis points.

Mawson Infrastructure Group’s stock rose 10.26%, followed by TeraWulf (+7.41%) and Marathon (+5.75%).

Meanwhile, Argo fell -8.47% on the London Stock Exchange, followed by Stronghold Digital Mining (-5.98%) and CleanSpark (-3.26%).

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Wednesday, Sept. 21:

© 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.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was receptive to new stablecoin rules during a congressional hearing, saying the technology should be “properly regulated.”

The JP Morgan boss is a self-described “major skeptic” on digital assets, he acknowledged during a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee. Dimon and a half-dozen other CEOs from the nation’s largest banks testified in Washington throughout the day on Wednesday.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) asked Dimon what is keeping him from being more active on cryptocurrencies, and whether Dimon is concerned that other countries could dominate the digital asset space if the U.S. does not take action. The New Jersey lawmaker also referenced his own bill, which would define qualified stablecoins and establish consumer and investor protections. 

“There’d be nothing wrong with a stablecoin properly—just like a money market fund—properly regulated,” Dimon said. “You have some today and they are not.”

Dimon’s comments came a day after news broke that lawmakers had drafted a new stablecoin bill that would temporarily ban the types of payment coins that are not backed by outside assets, among other provisions. 

“It’s equivalent to a money market fund, you should look at it exactly the same way in terms of disclosure, backup, gates and a whole bunch of different things,” Dimon said. 

Dimon pointed to his bank’s JPMorgan coin as an example. 

“Send it to us, we give you a US dollar. It’s a dollar deposit. It can be moved just the way cryptocurrencies can be moved. Stable value, very low cost,” Dimon said. 

Wells Fargo & Company CEO Charles Scharf said Gottheimer’s bill is “certainly an option in order to ensure that people understand the underlying value of that stablecoin.”

Dimon had harsher words for other forms of cryptocurrency, saying tokens like bitcoin are “dangerous.” 

“I’m a major skeptic on crypto tokens, what you call a currency, like bitcoin. They are decentralized Ponzi schemes. And the notion that it’s good for anybody is unbelievable,” Dimon said. “It’s dangerous.” 

© 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.

Bitcoin miner Riot has sued Northern Data over the Texas site it bought from that company last year, CoinDesk reported.

The lawsuit, filed on Sept. 7, claims that Northern Data failed to disclose $84 million in liabilities to a third party and that the German company owes Riot $114 million, according to CoinDesk. A clerk at the Court of Chancery Courthouse in Delaware confirmed the existence of a lawsuit involving the two companies, but didn’t give any further details.

Riot announced in April of last year that it was buying Whinstone in a deal worth $651 million. Per the agreement, Riot would pay Northern Data $80 million in cash and the remainder in shares (around a 12% stake).

“Riot will wholly own the largest Bitcoin mining facility in North America, with very low power costs, and one of the most talented development teams in the industry,” Riot CEO then said. The company has since been expanding the site and expects to reach 400 megawatts by the first quarter of 2021, it said in August.

A spokesperson for Riot said the company had no comment at this time. Northern Data did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

© 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.

Quick Take

• Y Combinator is a popular startup accelerator program that hosts Winter and Summer sessions every year
• Y Combinator’s alumni in the crypto/blockchain space have raised over $1B in funding
• Some of the more known names include OpenSea, CoinTracker, and Stacks, among others
• In total, The Block has analyzed and mapped out 101 Y Combinator’s alumni across 8 categories

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Crypto bridge Wormhole deployed its generic messaging layer to the AptosLabs devnet on Wednesday, according to an announcement at the Mainnet 2022 conference and on Twitter.

The messaging layer facilitates token transfers between all Wormhole-supported chains, a list that, including Aptos, now encompasses a total of 17 Layer 1 networks like Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, and others.

The Aptos devnet functions as a test environment for blockchain developers working on the yet-to-be-deployed network. Like testnets, devnets typically operate independently of the main networks they replicate

Support for the Aptos devnet will allow liquidity to flow into Aptos, offer developers enhanced composability with Wormhole’s ultralight clients, and provide access to oracle pricing and NFT markets, said Wormhole in a statement about the integration.

Aptos developers will also be able to focus on cross-chain onboarding without additional smart contract development according to Wormhole.

Volume across the protocol stands over $50 billion, with over 1,000,000 messages sent across supported chains, without double wrapping assets, according to Wormhole.

Founded by former Meta employees, Aptos recently saw a top-up in investments from Binance, on the heels of a $150 million investment round in July and a $200 million March raise, funds the company said will be used to expand its team.

© 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 markets fell on Wednesday following the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to increase interest rates by 75 basis points. 

Bitcoin was trading at $19,510 on Coinbase, down about over 1% in the last hour, according to data from the exchange.

The leading cryptocurrency by market cap appeared to have hit a brick wall at 6:00 pm UTC as the Fed issued its statement. The Fed is committed to taking “forceful and rapid steps to moderate demand,” chair Jerome Powell stressed during a press conference following the announcement.

Meanwhile, ether behaved much the same way, crashing from about $1,393 to $1,316 directly after the announcement. At the time of writing Ethereum’s native token was trading around $1,365.

By and large, most cryptocurrencies had a similar reaction following the announcement as digital assets continue to be highly correlated to equities and sensitive to major macroeconomic events. 

The Nasdaq composite reacted similarly to the crypto market, plunging from around $11,962 to $11,724, per data via TradingView.

At press time, the index was trading back above $11,900.

Elsewhere, the S&P and the Dow Jones industrial index reacted similarly to the news, before recovering back above daily lows. 

© 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.

Jesse Powell, chief executive of crypto exchange Kraken, is stepping down. 

David Ripley, currently serving as Kraken’s chief operating officer, will take on the CEO role in the coming months. 

Powell will continue to serve as chairman of the board at the crypto exchange he co-founded in 2011, according to Fortune. 

“For me, this about spending more time on stuff which I’m good at and enjoy doing like working on product and industry advocacy stuff,” Powell told Fortune.

A representative for Kraken did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This story is developing.

© 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.