FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

BlackRock will use Kraken’s CF Benchmarks bitcoin index pricing product for its first crypto offering. 

The world’s largest asset manager’s bitcoin product will be benchmarked by CF Benchmark’s indexes, the latter company’s CEO Sui Chung told The Block. Last month, BlackRock announced a deal with Coinbase to offer institutional investors access to crypto, and subsequently said it launched a private trust offering exposure to spot bitcoin toU.S.-based institutional clients.  

BlackRock did not immediately reply to a request for comment regarding the CF Benchmarks news.

CF Benchmarks is trying to be the MSCI index of the crypto world as interest and demand continue to grow despite the plunge in crypto asset prices. Several other players are creating crypto indexes, including the industry leader, S&P Dow Jones Indices, which created new cryptocurrency indexes last year. 

CF Benchmarks is a member of the Crypto Facilities group of companies, a member of the Payward group of companies. Payward is the owner and operator of crypto exchange Kraken Exchange, one of the oldest such platforms.

About five years ago, when CF Benchmarks first launched, it had a single product and one client: the bitcoin reference rate and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), respectively. The London-based firm now covers clients around the globe, including Hashdex in Brazil and Wintermute in Europe.  

Chung noted a the increasing interest institutions have demonstrated over the past couple of months, compared to even six months ago.

“The understanding of digital assets themselves is much greater than it was, people we talk to now understand the difference between bitcoin and ether,” Chung said. People no longer lump bitcoin and ether into the same bucket and are more aware of the fundamentals of the assets.  

The agreement with BlackRock has been in the works since 2021, Chung said.

They wouldn’t launch a product unless there was demand, Chung said. Firms like BlackRock don’t do this sort of thing as a “kite flying exercise, because let’s face it, it’s not a decision that carries no risk.” 

This isn’t BlackRock’s first exposure to bitcoin. The firm’s Global Allocation fund revealed in early 2021 that it had gained some exposure to bitcoin, through the CME’s bitcoin futures offering, per a filing – these trades are cash-settled and use CF Benchmarks reference rates. 

© 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.

NFT marketplace Sudoswap revealed a new token to help transition the project to a decentralized autonomous organization, a structure in which a community of users can make collective business decisions.

The Sudoswap team said today that the SUDO token will be used for governance of the marketplace. The team is decentralizing the protocol to its community, something that typically involves a token for crypto projects.

Launched in July, Sudoswap is a rising NFT marketplace with an automated market maker (AMM) model similar to Uniswap. This model uses liquidity pools that allow users to instantly swap between two assets.

On Sudoswap, any user can create an NFT pool from a particular collection paired with ether. Such pools offer trade quotes to buyers and sellers of NFTs and can instantly swap them for ETH, or vice versa.

The total supply of SUDO tokens will be 60 million, a portion of which will be distributed as an airdrop to its early contributors and holders of XMON tokens, which are discussed below. 

Token distribution

The Sudoswap team allocated the 60 million SUDO tokens to be gifted across multiple user categories based on certain criteria. The largest share of the tokens will go to those who lock the crypto token XMON, the native token of an NFT collection called 0xmons that was previously founded by the Sudoswap team.

Per the distribution details, 25.12 million SUDO tokens, or 41.9% of the supply, will be up for grabs for XMON token holders who lock their XMON in smart contracts to receive the airdrop. XMON token holders will have to lock their funds for three months, after which they can be withdrawn.

0xmon NFT holders will receive a 1.5% supply, or 900,000 SUDO tokens.

The Sudoswap team also announced a retroactive airdrop for its liquidity providers (LPs), which are users who have deposited NFTs and ether to its pools. These LPs will receive a 1.5% supply of SUDO divided equally among them.

Based on the distribution, 15% (9 million) of the SUDO supply has been set aside for initial team members. Another 15% will be awarded to SudoRandom Labs, the core development company working on the project. These tokens allocated to team members and SudoRandom Labs will be subject to a three-year vesting period and a one-year cliff.

The last category to receive the tokens is the project treasury, which is set to receive 25.1% or 15.08 million tokens. These funds will be overseen by the community members for growth and expansion activities. At this time, SUDO tokens cannot be claimed and will only be unlocked after a governance vote at a future date.

Today’s event makes Sudoswap the latest crypto project to issue its own token with a retroactive reward.  So far this year, other projects including Optimism, CowSwap and Hop Bridge have also unveiled governance tokens along with airdrop plans for early adopters.

© 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.

Coinbase is taking action to retrieve funds from Georgian crypto traders who took advantage of a decimal point error in the foreign exchange rate for crypto pairs using Georgian Lari (GEL) to withdraw more funds than they held.

The mistake was discovered on Aug. 31 and has been attributed to an unnamed third-party provider. For a short time, it meant that accounts using GEL showed up on Coinbase as holding a hundred times their value.

Coinbase told The Block the issue was fixed upon detection.

But not soon enough for an estimated 900 users to make off with funds, which one Georgia-based crypto trader described to The Block as an “excellent arbitrage opportunity.”

Traders have since reported via groups on Telegram and Facebook that their bank accounts — mostly from the country’s two main banks, Bank of Georgia and TBC Bank — have been frozen and blocks put on their cards.

Crypto trading is common in Georgia, and indeed in many of the neighboring countries in the Caucasus. Crypto ATMs are a common sight in shopping malls in the capital of Tbilisi, which is also home to a growing community of foreign crypto traders attracted by the country’s favorable visa policies for digital nomads.

In a country of less than 4 million people, the World Bank also estimated that in 2018 around 5% of the population were involved in cryptocurrency mining or investments. Earlier this year entire villages were made to swear on the bible that they would stop mining because of the strain it was putting on the national grid. 

© 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 infrastructure platform Coinbase Cloud announced the launch of Solana archival nodes yesterday, a tool to help developers build products and services that run on the network. 

Previously, Coinbase Cloud launched dedicated standard Solana nodes to enable builders to access and verify transaction data from the blockchain. Expanding into Solana archival nodes provides developers with access to all historical data back to the Solana genesis block, with Coinbase Cloud doing the heavy lifting.  

Many projects building on the blockchain, such as analytics and data providers, need secure, easy-to-use and reliable infrastructure beyond access to the most recent 128 blocks that a standard Solana node provides. 

While Solana’s high-throughput design makes it well-suited for use cases like trading, it makes managing archival nodes technically challenging. Solana currently processes over 3,000 transactions per second and requires approximately 100 terabytes of storage for historical data, meaning archival nodes are time-consuming and expensive to maintain. 

Coinbase Cloud is one of the largest infrastructure platforms to offer the service, continuing its support for the Solana blockchain since it first began operating validators on the network. The news also represents further industry expansion for Solana’s blockchain infrastructure following a similar move by QuickNode and Jump Crypto’s validator client announcement last month.

© 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

• Last month, fintech startups raised $2.5 billion, according to Dealroom statistics. That was the lowest total so far this year. 
• The payments subsector continued to see investor interest with mega-rounds from Tamara and PayIt. 

This feature story is available to
subscribers of The Block News Plus.
You can continue reading
this News Plus feature on The Block.

Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs dropped a new teaser for its forthcoming online game Otherside on Thursday night, which hints at a troubled backstory.

The two-minute clip opens in a temple-like space full of statues of Kodas — the mysterious creatures created by Yuga which live in Otherside. It also included mages resembling some of the Otherdeed land NFTs, including mycelium, molten and botanical lands.

Blue light trickles around these images, but then the video zooms out to reveal an ominous red light surrounding and mixing with the blue. A single Koda with a sword on its back appears. It collects some of the blue light in a bottle.

But not sooner does it do so than a chaos portal opens up. The Koda runs desperately as the objects around it are sucked into the portal. A second, green chaos portal appears and, trapped between the two, the Koda is sucked into the red one.

It falls through the air and collapses on the ground as the bottle rolls into the water nearby. It travels with the current before it is fished out by the Bored Ape named Curtis, marking the start of a previous Otherside trailer released in May.

What are Kodas?

Little is known about The Kodas save for a few cryptic hints dropped by Yuga Labs. They are briefly mentioned in the Otherside litepaper alongside something called “The Decoupling.”

A leaked pitch deck for Otherside published online in March described them as the last surviving race of celestial creatures created during the Big Bang. However, Yuga Labs co-founder Gargamel described the pitch deck as old and outdated on Discord. 

Not much is known either about the role The Kodas will play in the metaverse. Some Otherdeed land NFTs contain Kodas on their lots, and these NFTs tend to sell for much higher than their non-Koda counterparts.

The tweet accompanying the video also hinted about something coming in Q4. While it’s unlikely the company’s metaverse is ready for rollout quite yet, it could be an indication that another trip is upcoming. The “first trip,” an early look at the world for NFT holders, took place on July 16.

© 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.

Episode 82 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Bitfinex CTO and Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino.

Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblockcrypto.com.

Last time Paolo Ardoino came on The Scoop podcast back in 2019, the USDT stablecoin had a market cap of less than $5 billion.

Today, that number has risen to more than $66 billion, according to data from The Block’s Data Dashboard.

While Ardoino serves as both the CTO of Tether (the issuing company behind USDT), as well as CTO of the crypto exchange Bitfinex, recently he has been focusing much of his attention on developing Holepunch — a fully encrypted platform for peer-to-peer applications.

In this episode of The Scoop, Paolo Ardoino shares his vision for the future of peer-to-peer technology, which he believes is in line with “the original ethos of the World Wide Web.”

According to Ardoino, we already possess the hardware necessary to facilitate peer-to-peer data transfer in a more efficient way than existing centralized platforms allow:

“The biggest lie ever is that our hardware, our devices, our iPods, phones don’t have the capacity to do great things — actually, they are much more powerful than what we think.”

While our devices may be powerful, Ardoino suggests that having to route data through centralized servers creates unnecessary latency which limits performance:

“I’m talking to you, I’m calling you, and there is no reason why my signal — all my data — should pass through a centralized server. There is today, in 2022, no need for that.”

The first app to be deployed on the Holepunch peer-to-peer technology is a video calling service named Keet. Whereas centralized video streaming platforms are forced to compress data to facilitate global demand, the direct peer-to-peer connection provided by Holepunch allows Keet to facilitate much higher quality video connections.

According to Ardoino,

“You have to take a shower before using Keet because we get 4K video from you, and it’s not compressed.”

During this episode, Chaparro and Ardoino also discuss:

• How Tether is reducing commercial paper holdings
• What healthy ‘maximalism’ looks like
• Why issuing tokens for projects is not always the optimal strategy

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Tron, Chainalysis & IWC Schaffhausen

About Tron
On August 1st, 2022, Poloniex launched a faster and more stable trading system along with a brand new user interface. Poloniex was founded in January 2014 as a global cryptocurrency trading platform. With its world-class service and security, it received funding in 2019 from renowned investors, including H.E. Justin Sun, Founder of TRON. Poloniex supports spot and margin trading as well as leveraged tokens. Its services are available to users in nearly 100 countries and regions with various languages available. For more information visit Poloniex.com.

About Chainalysis
Chainalysis is the leading blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

About IWC Schaffhausen
IWC Schaffhausen is a Swiss luxury watch manufacturer based in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Known for its unique engineering approach to watchmaking, IWC combines the best of human craftsmanship and creativity with cutting-edge technology and processes. With collections like the Portugieser and the Pilot’s Watches, the brand covers the whole spectrum from elegant timepieces to sports watches. For more information, visit IWC.com.

© 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.

Snapchat parent Snap Inc. appears to be shuttering its web3 team in light of a company-wide restructuring plan that calls for reducing overall staff by about 20%. 

One of the team’s founders, Jake Sheinman, tweeted on Aug. 31 that it was his last day at the company after almost four years. 

“As a result of the company restructure, decisions were made to sunset our web3 team,” Sheinman tweeted. “The same team that I co-founded last year with other pirates who believed in digital ownership and the role that [augmented reality] can play to support that.”

Snap did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Snap said it would start experimenting with a feature that would allow users to import NFTs into its platform to act as filters, the Financial Times reported in July. The company also worked with developers to incorporate augmented reality (AR) effects into the latest generation of its high-tech glasses, Spectacles. 

However, it appears Snapchat will continue to work on AR initiatives even after shuttering its web3 team. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel cited AR as one of the three key areas the company would continue to pursue.

“We are restructuring our business to increase focus on our three strategic priorities: community growth, revenue growth and augmented reality,” Spiegel said in an Aug. 31 letter to employees. “Projects that don’t directly contribute to these areas will be discontinued or receive substantially reduced investment.”

Snap said it would slow its hiring rate in July after its second-quarter results missed analyst estimates.

“Our forward-looking revenue visibility remains limited, and our current year-over-year [quarter-to-date] revenue growth of 8% is well below what we were expecting earlier this year,” Snap said in the Aug. 31 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.

The latest hearing in lender Celsius’ Chapter 11 bankruptcy case is setting the stage for future key decisions, but little tangible action was accomplished on key issues today.

The hearing came just hours after Celsius’ counsel filed a motion in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York requesting the authority to open withdrawals for specific custody and withhold accounts. That request won’t be settled until an Oct. 6 hearing, but various parties still gave feedback for a significant portion of the three-hour hearing.

The motion indicates that Celsius has discerned that the funds are not part of the estate, meaning they should be released to the custodial account holders. However, there is contention about who qualifies.

It has discerned assets in the Earn and Borrow programs belong to the estate per the terms of service. Celsius says it has not yet completed the necessary analysis to discern if certain custody customers, such as those who transferred funds from the firm’s Earn and Borrow programs, qualify. Counsel for Celsius customers is requesting the relief go to all holders of custody accounts. 

Celsius called the current, narrowed request “phase one” and said it’s possible they will seek to release all the funds in the future. 

“While today’s motion, which will be considered at a later hearing, would apply only to a certain group of customers, we are preparing to address matters related to all customers as we move ahead. We continue to pursue all available avenues as quickly as possible,” Celsius said in a tweet after the hearing.

What’s in a name?

Judge Martin Glenn also considered whether to redact information about Celsius creditors, but ultimately kicked the decision to the upcoming Sept. 14 hearing. Celsius counsel is seeking to redact all identifiable information from the public docket, but Glenn made it clear he’s opposed to the idea of allowing creditors to be fully anonymous.

“I’m not going to allow anonymous proofs of claim, I can tell you right now,” he said.

Usually, creditors must be identifiable in order to lodge claims, but Celsius argues disclosing this information could leave its customers vulnerable to cyber threats since this case deals heavily in the crypto sector, where hacks and digital theft are common. Celsius would prefer creditors volunteer this information to be made public in order to prove their claims in court rather than having that information automatically on the public docket, as is usual in the bankruptcy process.

Although Glenn said he’d be amenable to sealing other information, like email and home addresses, at this time he believes the names should be public.

“While I’m not ruling today, I want to make clear I have the strongest reservations about not requiring the disclosure of the names,” he said. “I think addresses, home addresses, email addresses is a completely different matter. I’m very sensitive to that issue, so I want to give the parties who’ve addressed this issue in their papers to try and see whether they can reach a consensual resolution of it.”

The remaining agenda

Glenn also approved an interim motion related to cash management, but larger questions surrounding cash management, including the safety and storage of assets, will come to a head on Oct. 6.

Celsius disclosed it will receive another $61 million back from a loan due to a technicality, allowing the funds to be returned in cash rather than stablecoins, as was originally thought. This relieves some pressure on the estate, which previously reported it could run out of cash as soon as October. 

Glenn also granted the de minimis asset sale motion, a point of contention at the previous second-day hearing. At the time, the U.S. Trustee argued it was unclear which assets Celsius was looking to sell, calling Glenn’s attention to the vagueness of the request. Now, the parties have reached an agreement in which Celsius will consult with other parties before the sale of the assets. 

Glenn also approved the sealing of certain parties that have signed non-disclosure agreements in the bidding process and an extension for Celsius to file their schedules and statements. 

© 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.

KyberSwap, a multichain DEX aggregator, disclosed Thursday that a frontend exploit resulted in the theft of $265,000 in user funds.

KyberSwap told victims of the hack it will compensate any funds lost and offered a 15% bounty for the hacker if all the funds are returned.

The code exploit was initially flagged at approximately 2:30 a.m. EST. KyberSwap gave more details about the exploit in its official notice writing: “We identified a malicious code in our Google Tag Manager (GTM) which inserted a false approval, allowing a hacker to transfer a user’s funds to his address.”

“The script had been discreetly injected and specifically targeting whale wallets with large amounts.” the post further explained.

The exploit was neutralized two hours after the team began investigations, and the team urged users to proceed using its platform with caution.

The 15% bug bounty is contingent on all the funds being returned and the hacker speaking directly with the KyberSwap 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.