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Puma launched an interactive metaverse space called Black Station to showcase limited edition NFTs of its sneakers.  

The sneaker NFTs are part of the German athletic brand’s “Futrograde” collection that will be showcased during New York Fashion Week, which begins in earnest tomorrow. These NFTs can be redeemed for physical sneakers, according to a Puma release. 

Puma now joins Adidas originals as the latest sportswear brand to launch digital collectibles. 

“Twenty years ago, Black Station was PUMA’s home for our most innovative designs in fashion,” said Adam Petrick, Puma’s chief brand officer. “Given the boundaries we are pushing from a product design and digital standpoint, we found it fitting to bring Black Station back as a new portal for digital exploration across fashion, sport performance, our heritage classics, and innovation.” 

Puma’s Futrograde collection is the latest in a trend of clothing and luxury brands releasing physical items tied to digital assets, called “phygitals.” In May of this year, the luxe brand Prada released NFTs that could be redeemed for physical items like shirts.  

Puma’s use of a metaverse space is not new either. Brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Estee Lauder have designed similar spaces for individuals to browse digital representations of their products up-close.  

© 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 federal judge presiding over the Tether class action has set a hearing for Oct. 3 to discuss requests made by parties involved to remove embattled law firm Roche Freedman from the case.

U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla set an in person hearing around multiple requests from parties involved in the case. 

“The parties shall come prepared to discuss the substance of the recently-submitted letters regarding Roche Freedman LLP, and any other relevant matters,” Polk Failla said in her order setting the hearing date. Two of those letters came from defendants Tether, Bitfinex, Poloniex and Bittrex, who face allegations of colluding in market manipulation to the detriment of traders.

In recent weeks multiple parties in the case, including two plaintiff law firms, have submitted letters calling for the removal of Roche Freedman as lead counsel in the class action. The legal maneuvering came after the posting of an undercover video in which one of the founding partners of the firm, Kyle Roche, is heard talking about his relationship with Avalanche blockchain developer Ava Labs. The video was published by the anonymous blog Crypto Leaks, which accused him of bringing class actions to benefit Ava Labs. Both Roche and Ava Labs have vehemently denied the claims.

Soon after the videos surfaced, Roche filed to withdraw from several class actions, including the Tether case. Roche Freedman says he has been removed from the class action practice to mitigate concerns over abuse of the discovery process. The two plaintiff law firms calling for Roche Freedman’s removal are also seeking to replace the firm as lead counsel in the class action.  

The hearing on Roche Freedman’s possible removal will take place at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse in New York City at 3:30 P.M on Oct. 3. 

© 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.

Bessemer Venture Partners has unveiled a new investment fund worth $3.85 billion for early stage investments.

The fund, the firm’s twelfth, will cut across a broad array of industries, including fintech. “This new fund allows us to continue backing entrepreneurs at scale, bolstering our established focus on early-stage investments,” the company said.

The news comes nearly six months after the firm unveiled a $250 million fund for investments related to decentralized technology, including on consumer crypto, such as the rising adoption of blockchain technology like Sorare, which allows global football fans to have ownership over digital collectibles.

Bessemer has a portfolio of more than 200 companies and over $20 billion of assets under management. Early stage investments have included Pinterest, Shopify, Yelp and LinkedIn.

© 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

• Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus (“The Merge”) is slated to take place next week. 
• While there aren’t many new user-facing changes, The Merge represents a significant milestone for the protocol. 
• Clarity on the pace of further protocol changes and the next milestones in the scalability roadmap is likely to improve and will be explored here.

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The company behind the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) has filed suit against domain registrar GoDaddy over the sale of a Web domain it previously owned.

According to the complaint, filed by True Names Ltd., GoDaddy is alleged to have wrongly declared the eth.link domain expired and sold it to a third party. Plaintiffs True Names and Virgil Griffith — who is serving a prison term following a conviction earlier this year — characterized this as a breach of contract. 

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona. In addition to GoDaddy, two other companies, Dynadot and Manifold Finance, were named in the complaint. The plaintiffs are being represented by the law firm Crowell & Moring LLP.

ENS offers decentralized names that can serve as a replacement for default alphanumeric Ethereum wallet addresses. The service, widely used within Ethereum apps, relied on the web domain eth.link to allow the use of crypto addresses in Web browsers. This was the domain ENS had registered with GoDaddy.

Allegations timeline

While True Name used the eth.link domain for its operations, the company said in its complaint that it was first registered in 2018 by Griffith, a former employee.

Griffith later drew headlines after being accused in 2019 of helping North Korea violate sanctions after Griffith gave a speech during a crypto conference in that country. He was ultimately sentenced to 63 months in prison.

True Names said that it initially failed to renew the domain name in July 2022 because Griffith was in prison, but they claimed that during the grace period after the domain expiry, a re-registration was performed by a service called easyDNS on True Names’ behalf, as announced on the ENS community forum.

GoDaddy allegedly proceeded to declare the domain expired despite that re-registration on August 25, per the complaint, which alleges that GoDaddy subsequently sold the eth.link domain to Dynadot on September 3 without notifying the plaintiffs. The complaint claimed that the plaintiffs tried to reach GoDaddy multiple times but the requests were ignored.

After the sale, Dynadot allegedly resold the domain for $852,000 in a September 3 auction to Manifold Finance, a cryptocurrency project. On September 3, Manifold confirmed its acquisition of the domain on Twitter.

Since losing access to the eth.link domain, True Names has begun using another domain called eth.limo as the new Web gateway for ENS names.

GoDaddy and Dynadot did not immediately respond to The Block’s request for comment. True Names and Manifold Finance were not immediately available for comment when reached. 

A copy of the complaint is embedded below: 

Complaint by MichaelPatrickMcSweeney on Scribd

© 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.

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis and US law enforcement recovered $30 million in stolen crypto from the North Korea-linked hack on Ronin, the main blockchain for the web3 play-to-earn game Axie Infinity. 

“This marks the first time ever that cryptocurrency stolen by a North Korean hacking group has been seized, and we’re confident it won’t be the last,” Erin Plante, Elliptic’s global head of investigations, wrote in a blog post.  

The recovery occurred nearly six months after North Korean hackers, which were part of the Lazarus Group, hacked five of the nine validator keys on the Ethereum sidechain, The Block previously reported. At the time of the heist, 173,600 ETH worth about $590 million at the time and 25.5 million worth of USDC were stolen.  

The $30 million in stolen funds were recovered through using Chainalysis blockchain tracking tools to see where stolen funds were laundered, according to the blog post. 

“We see that the hacker bridged ETH from the Ethereum blockchain to the BNB chain and then swapped that ETH for USDD, which was then bridged to the BitTorrent chain. Lazarus Group carried out hundreds of similar transactions across several blockchains to launder the funds they stole from Axie Infinity, in addition to the more conventional Tornado Cash-based laundering,” Plante said. 

The recovered funds make up a fraction of crypto stolen by North Korean hackers, Plante points out, as Chainlaysis figures over $1 billion was stolen in 2022.  

© 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 new White House report encouraged a broad policy push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and urged the use of clean energy by U.S. crypto mining companies — and potentially more restrictive measures should such efforts fail to reduce the industry’s environmental impact. 

A report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy proposed that U.S. lawmakers and policymakers consider legal limitations or outright restrictions to reduce crypto mining’s environmental impact if other strategies fail to catch on.

The report, which was mandated by executive order earlier this year, called for efforts to minimize the environmental impacts from crypto assets.

Government institutions like the Environmental Protection Agency “should provide technical assistance and initiate a collaborative process with states, communities, the crypto-asset industry, and others to develop effective, evidence-based environmental performance standards for the responsible design, development, and use of environmentally responsible crypto-asset technologies.”

Those proposed standards focus on the use of clean energy, low water and low energy intensities, among others, the report said. 

“Should these measures prove ineffective at reducing impacts, the Administration should explore executive actions, and Congress might consider legislation, to limit or eliminate the use of high energy intensity consensus mechanisms for crypto-asset mining,” according to the report, which mentioned proof-of-work (PoW) consensus, currently used by bitcoin and other digital assets to create the next block of transactions on the network. The miner that creates a block is rewarded with both a subsidy — currently 6.25 BTC — as well as transaction fees, but the process is highly energy-intensive.

Miners run specialized hardware around the clock and they make a profit when the cost to produce blocks is greater than what they paid for power and other resources. Numerous U.S. crypto companies have emerged in recent years, particularly in Texas. 

Such growth has sparked opposition, most notably in New York where lawmakers advanced and passed a two-year moratorium on some crypto mining operations. The legislation has yet to be officially signed into law by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and officials such as New York Mayor Eric Adams have called for a veto of the legislation.

Other proposals in the report include more comprehensive data collection on crypto mining energy use and the development of “energy conservation standards for crypto-asset mining equipment, blockchains, and other operations.”

© 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

• Reported Q2’22 earnings on August 15, 2022 after filing a delayed filing notification due to goodwill impairments, market turmoil and macro factors 
• Trades at $6.40 per share, a 71% decline year-to-date
• Reported revenues of $72.9mm, a 112% YoY increase over $34.3mm in Q2’21 
• Produced 1,395 BTC during the 3-months of Q2’22

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Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee want more information from the Federal Reserve System on a potential US Central Bank Digital Currency, ahead of a deadline set by President Joe Biden’s executive order on digital assets. 

Lawmakers wrote a letter to Board of Governors Vice Chair Lael Brainard on Wednesday, asking for clarification the Fed’s thinking around a potential digital dollar, including whether curtailing the use of digital assets is part of the Fed’s motivation. 

Brainard testified in May on the potential impacts of a Fed-issued digital currency. She told a banking industry conference on Wednesday that the central bank still needs to answer key questions around the possible creation of a digital dollar and suggested that a decision was not imminent.  

The lawmakers, led by the committee’s top Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), want more information on whether Fed leadership believes it needs Congressional approval to move forward with a digital dollar, and whether the Fed would create accounts for individual Americans a move that could significantly disrupt the banking industry. 

During her May testimony, Brainard said that the Fed would need support from Congress and the executive branch to issue a digital currency. Republicans signing the letter pressed for an explicit answer as to whether that meant the Fed thought a digital dollar would require a new law from Congress. 

“In your opinion, does support mean an explicit law from Congress authorizing the Fed to issue a digital currency?,” the lawmakers wrote.

The officials requested Brainard respond in writing by Sept. 30. 

© 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 should be “appropriately regulated” to play a role in the financial system, Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell said on Thursday.

“We need legislation on this,” Powell said. “There isn’t a regulatory framework that really gets after payment stable coins, you know, and so I think that’s what’s needed.”

Powell made the comments during a livestream appearance at a Cato Institute conference on Thursday, during which Cato President and CEO Peter Goettler interviewed the Fed chair. 

“We don’t want to stand in the way of appropriate innovation … But we think that something like that which is purporting to be money would need to be appropriately regulated,” Powell said. “I think you need regulation. If people are going to think something is money it needs to have the qualities of money. I don’t think you want to take money and make it into just another consumer product.” 

Stablecoins should provide consumers with clarity, transparency and “full reserves of very liquid high-quality assets,” Powell said.

Washington lawmakers have been working behind closed doors on a stablecoin bill for months. House Financial Services Committee chair Maxine Waters and ranking Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry pushed to release draft text of stablecoin legislation in July, but they were unsuccessful. 

Powell also addressed the possibility of a digital dollar during his 40-minute interview. The Fed is evaluating whether to issue a central bank digital currency, and weighing issues like privacy. 

“We do not intend to proceed with the issuance of a CBDC without clear support from both the executive branch and Congress, ideally in the form of a specific authorizing law,” Powell 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.