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Daphne Kwon, who most recently served as chief strategy officer at Meredith Corporation, joined blockchain analytics firm Flipside Crypto. 

Kwon will work to grow the company’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) strategy as general manager of DAOs, Flipside said in a press release. She’ll assume the role effective immediately.

“The future of organizations will be shaped by what is evolving right now in the DAO space,” Kwon said in the statement. “My role at Flipside puts me right at the center of it all, working with a vibrant community of Web3 thought leaders.”   

DAOs are a decentralized system for organizing a group of people – like a digital co-op with a shared bank account. These organizations are typically without leaders or centralized leadership, instead operate by bringing proposals to the DAO and giving token holders a chance to vote on them.

Kwon’s hiring comes after Flipside Crypto announced in April that it had raised $50 million at a $350 million valuation. Flipside analyzes blockchain networks to gain insight into the impact of on- and off-chain activities on holders, miners, voters and token holders.  

In October 2021, the company contributed intellectual property to MetricsDAO, to help organizations access analytics for crypto projects. During its funding announcement in April, it said the funds would also be used to activate more DAOs over the coming year. 

Prior to her stint at Meredith, Kwon held a position as COO at Betaworks Studio and CFO at Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness company, Goop.

© 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 Coinbase user is suing the exchange for failure to provide the secure crypto wallet access that it advertises. 

The plaintiff, George Kattula, filed the class action on behalf of all Coinbase wallet and account holders saying that the company doesn’t employ standard practices to secure accounts and it “improperly and unreasonably locks out its consumers from accessing their accounts and funds.”

The complaint, filed in a district court in Georgia on Aug. 15, also said Coinbase “does not disclose that the crypto assets (or
“cryptocurrency”) on its platform are securities.”

Coinbase’s trading platform has historically crashed during periods of market volatility when volumes increase. A representative for the exchange did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Coinbase has seen business boom amid the interest for crypto assets during the pandemic as prices peaked last year. For the fourth quarter, Coinbase reported 11.2 million monthly transacting users (MTU), the most ever and up from 2.8 million a year earlier. 

“Coinbase’s user growth has outpaced its ability to provide the account services and protections it promises to consumers,” the complaint says. “Coinbase was aware it was woefully incapable, understaffed, and overstretched, such that it could not perform its promises and obligations to consumers like plaintiff.”

Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has noted that such volatility and subsequent operational problems make holdings on such platforms look more like securities, with users reliant upon the efforts of a third party to access their assets. In July, the SEC designated nine tokens trading on Coinbase to be securities, amid a case against alleged insider trading based on new token listings at the exchange, to which Coinbase responded that it does not list securities.

The complaint also claims that Coinbase does not disclose that the crypto assets on its platform are securities and it “boldly flouts federal and state laws by proclaiming it does not need a registration statement for those securities and by refusing to register as a securities exchange or as a brokerdealer.”

© 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.

Digital Currency Group has backed Mural, a startup building decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) treasury tools for brands, in a $5.6 million seed round.

Galaxy Ventures, Firstminute Capital, AlleyCorp and 186 Ventures also took part according to an announcement Tuesday. When asked by The Block, the startup chose not to clarify the lead investor in the round nor reveal its valuation.

The deal closed in the second quarter of this year amid a period of turbulence for crypto startups looking to raise venture funding. 

A DAO is a decentralized structure that gives investors the ability to vote on proposals ranging from a protocol’s marketing efforts to a new product. Investors are able to vote by using the DAO’s native governance token, which can also be sold to raise funds.

In a sign of the increasing importance of such structures, in March of this year, the total assets under management controlled by DAOs hit more than $8 billion after reaching a high of more than $16 billion previously according to The Block research. 

Mural is building tools so that brands can take advantage of DAOs, offering tooling to ease the launch of DAOs and the management of treasuries. For instance, it allows brands to easily deploy funds to those invested in the community, along with financial reporting tools. 

© 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.

Thorswap, a multi-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator built on THORChain’s cross-chain liquidity protocol, has launched cross-chain swaps for the majority of Ethereum-based tokens.

This addition of supported assets, paired with its aggregated liquidity from DEXs such as Uniswap and Sushiswap, allows users to swap native crypto assets on the Thorswap platform without needing to use a third-party bridge.

A native token is one running directly on a blockchain (say ether on Ethereum), while a non-native token is a derivative token on another blockchain (like wrapped ether on Solana).

Thorswap gives users the choice of what type — non-native or native — tokens they want to transfer. It supports bitcoin, ether, BNB, dogecoin and other coins. The protocol currently holds approximately $361 million in Total Value Locked (TVL).

Cross-chain swaps let you swap a token from one blockchain to a different token on another blockchain. They either happen through one single protocol or take use of multiple protocols (combinations of decentralized exchanges and bridging protocols).

In this case, Thorswap uses Thorchain, which is a single protocol for cross-chain swaps. This is what enables users to make cross-chain swaps without using non-native assets.

© 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 BendDAO community has voted to change its liquidation protocol for NFT auctions, in a move that could see items from popular collections like Bored Apes being sold at highly discounted prices.

BendDAO itself is a non-fungible token (NFT) finance platform. The protocol enables NFT owners to deposit their NFTs as collateral to borrow ether (ETH). Lenders can deposit ETH to earn interest from the platform.

Data from Snapshot show the vote ended with a 97% approval from participants who pooled 60,000 veBEND tokens in support of the proposed changes. BendDAO’s native token is BEND and veBEND is the staked version of the coin that offers voting privileges to holders.

The vote will reduce the current requirements for liquidating NFTs when loans have become undercollateralized. It will slowly lower the requirements, encouraging liquidators to liquidate the loans and help the platform work as it’s supposed to — and avoid building up too much bad debt.

What’s changing?

This just-concluded vote was in response to the platform’s liquidity issues. Some BendDAO lenders carried out a bank run on the platform last week amid fears of rising bad debt within the platform. Some borrowers had begun to default on their loans as the rapidly falling floor prices of their NFT collateral and the high-interest rate for borrowing made repayments difficult.  

When borrowers default on their loan positions on BendDAO, their NFT collateral goes up for a liquidation auction. Liquidators bid on the NFTs to service the debt.

The platform’s previous liquidation parameters were, however, not attractive for liquidators. BendDAO’s liquidation process required that starting bids were at least 95% of the NFT’s floor price. The process also required liquidators to lock up their ETH for 48 hours. This meant that NFTs were not getting liquidated.

With the vote passed, the liquidation threshold will reduce by 5% on a weekly basis. This seven-day rolling drawdown will begin with 85% on August 30 up until a baseline of 70% on September 20. The threshold here refers to the spread between the starting bid for the liquidation auctions and the floor price of the affected NFT collateral

600 blue chip NFTs on the line

September 20 might become a target for NFT whales due to a number of factors. The threshold falling to 70% on that date could mean that several blue-chip NFTs can be scooped on the cheap. This is because starting bids can be set at a price much lower than the floor price of the NFT on marketplaces like OpenSea. If the floor price falls before September 20, the spread could be even become much greater.

BendDAO only accepts seven popular NFTs as collateral. These are Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, CloneX, Space Doodles, Doodles, and Azuki. Data from the project’s website show that as many as 600 of these popular NFTs could be up for liquidation by late September if market conditions remain largely unchanged. BendDAO currently owes over 13,000 ETH ($21 million) to lenders. The platform needs these liquidations to pay off its creditors while also trying not to rack up bad debt from defaulted loans.

The BendDAO auctions are already drawing attention in the NFT market. DeFine, another NFT finance platform, is looking to scoop a Bored Ape during the auction. DeFine DAO is currently voting on a governance proposal to buy a Bored Ape during the auction using funds from its $3.3 million treasury. The vote, which ends on Wednesday, already has 96% of participants in support of the move.

© 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.

SudoRare, a decentralized non-fungible token (NFT) exchange, has gone offline on Tuesday — six hours after it launched — with tokens worth over $800,000 removed from the platform’s wallet address.

Data from PeckShield show the funds have already been sent to three different wallets. PeckShield has identified one of the wallets as belonging to a user of crypto exchange Kraken.

PeckShield and other commentators have speculated that the founders of the project were behind its collapse. This is because they were the only people likely to have access to the liquidity in the pool; the hack happened very shortly after launch; it was an anonymous team and the team deleted all of the social media accounts and related websites moments after the event. As such, it’s likely it was what’s known as a “rug pull” — an event when a project’s founders take all the money they can from their own project and abandon it.

The rug pull drained ether (ETH), looksrare (LOOKS), and USD Coin (USDC) tokens from the NFT exchange platform. The LOOKS and USDC tokens have already been swapped for ETH on Uniswap. In total, the rug pull drained 519 ETH ($815,000) from the platform.

Tuesday’s rug pull comes barely six hours after the NFT platform’s launch. The platform’s social media accounts and websites have also been taken offline, including its Medium blog page. There were several warnings on Twitter that SudoRare may be a scam project before the rug pull happened. Critics mostly pointed to the anonymous team as the reason for their suspicions.

SudoRare was supposed to be a combined fork of SudoSwap and LooksRare. Both are NFT marketplaces. SudoSwap functions as a decentralized exchange for trading NFTs, one that allows for the creation of liquidity pools for NFT collections. LooksRare is more of a standard NFT marketplace (like OpenSea) but it has a native token called LOOKS used for rewarding users who buy or sell NFTs on the platform.

SudoRare was supposed to combine these two functions, allowing users to stake SR — the project’s native token — to earn ETH trading fees on the platform. That was, until all the money disappeared.

© 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.

Ready Player Me, a platform that allows people to create virtual avatars that can be used across the metaverse, has raised $56 million in a Series B funding round amid the crypto funding slump.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round, with Konvoy Ventures, Collab Currency, Taavet Hinrikus and Sten Tamkivi’s Plural Platform and comedian Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat Ventures participating. High-profile angel investors, including Roblox co-founder David Baszucki, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and Punk6529, also backed the round.

As part of the deal, a16z’s Jonathan Lai and Plural’s Tamkivi have also joined Ready Player Me’s newly created board of directors, Ready Player Me’s co-founder and CEO Timmu Toke told The Block in an interview.

But the Ready Player Me avatar system isn’t new. Toke started the effort in 2014 with a company called Wolf3D, which built custom avatar systems for companies like Tencent, Verizon and HTC. The Ready Player Me platform is based on Wolf3D’s technology. Toke said that over the years, the company made hardware, scanned over 20,000 people with around 100 cameras, and collected a proprietary database of face scans, which allowed it to create Ready Player Me around two years ago.

Ready Player Me caters to both direct users as well as developers. Users can create avatars on its platform for free and developers can integrate the platform into their apps to fetch ready-to-use avatars, also for free.

Toke said more than 3,000 partners, including VRChat, Somnium Space and Nike-owned NFT studio RTFKT, have integrated the Ready Player Me platform. Top fashion brands such as Adidas and Dior also work with the firm to allow their users to make custom avatars.

The next step is to build “content tools” for avatars, Toke said, meaning anyone could create accessories for avatars. “We’re building tools to scale our platform so that any individual artist or creator can take part, create assets and sell them on the open marketplace,” he said.

As for Ready Player Me’s business model, the firm generates revenue from the sale of in-game assets through its partners, according to Toke. “We take a revenue share from all of the purchases that happen through our ecosystem,” he said.

To help meet its expansion plans, Ready Player Me is also scaling its team at a time when layoffs are currently commonplace in crypto and beyond. The firm’s current headcount is around 50 and plans to double its headcount by the next year, said Toke.

Ready Player Me’s overall goal is to open up the metaverse. Toke said today’s games and virtual worlds are “closed ecosystems” where one has to buy new assets for every game and virtual platform. Ready Player Me, on the other hand, is interoperable and the same avatar can be used across virtual worlds, he said.

The Series B round brings Ready Player Me’s total funding to date to $72 million. The firm has previously raised $16 million in two rounds, Toke said. He declined to comment on the firm’s valuation with the latest round.

© 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.

Citi’s long-standing global head of foreign exchange, Itay Tuchman, has left the bank after more than two decades.

The top exec was one of the chief architects of a push into digital assets within the institution, and while his destination is not yet clear, a source with close knowledge of the matter told The Block he is set for a role in digital assets. 

Stuart Staley has been serving as co-head of forex alongside Tuchman since earlier this year, and with his departure, will become sole head of the department.

© 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-based game DeFi Kingdoms (DFK) has found a new home for the Serendale-based part of its game on the metaverse-focused blockchain Klaytn, the company has announced.

A spokesperson for DeFi Kingdoms confirmed to The Block on Monday that this means it will be leaving Harmony completely. The move comes two months after the Harmony blockchain network announced an attack on Horizon, its cross-chain bridge to Ethereum. Hackers made off with nearly $100 million in ETH.

Only the first of DFK’s game maps, Serendale, will be affected, with Crystalvale remaining on the DFK Chain, an Avalanche subnet.

New partner Klaytn is the product of South Korean internet giant Kakao Corp and has been around since 2019. Earlier this year it pivoted to become a metaverse, gaming and creator-focused chain. 

Few details have been released about the terms of the new relationship with Klaytn, although Kingdom Studios president Dreamer admitted in an AMA on Thursday that “this is another major chain paying for a collaboration with DFK.”

“We have come to an agreement on good incentives for us to consider the move as being worth it not just for the initial work but also to extend our runway and to align our mutual interests in DFK and their success in Klaytn,” he said.

The decision is hardly unexpected. DFK has been looking for a new blockchain for Serendale for some time due to difficulties working with Harmony.

Harmony didn’t respond to a request from The Block for comment, but the departure of its most popular project is likely a blow for the ecosystem.

Top Harmony dapps by volume over 30 days leading to Aug 23, 2022. Source: DappRadar

According to DappRadar, over the last 30 days, $8.62m entered DFK’s smart contracts. Second ranked, the Harmony arm of Sushi Swap, saw $6.16 million over the same period and the second biggest game dapp, Knights and Peasants, just $14.68k.

The DFK community will get the chance to ask further questions in a Discord AMA on Thursday.

© 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.

Emilie Choi, president and chief operating officer at Coinbase, joined identity firm Okta’s board of directors, according to an announcement today.

Choi’s appointment is effective as of August 19. She joined Coinbase in 2018 after more than 8 years at LinkedIn, initially as VP of business and data before taking on the role of COO in 2018.

Founded in 2009, San Francisco-based Okta is an identity management firm that went public on the Nasdaq in mid-2017, and today boasts a market capitalization of nearly $15 billion. More than 15,800 organizations rely on its technology to help staff access software products in a secure way.  

“Emilie’s passion for entrepreneurship, technology, and scaling mission-oriented businesses has helped build some of the most influential technology companies of the last two decades,” said Todd McKinnon, Okta’s CEO and co-founder, in a statement.

Choi — who has previously served on the boards of ZipRecruiter, Naspers, and Naspers subsidiary Prosus N.V. — said in a statement that she looks forward to working with Okta as the company “executes on its mission of freeing anyone to safely use any technology and creating a world where your identity belongs to you.”

© 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.