FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Gemini announced the launch of a new feature called Gemini Staking that allows users to stake crypto assets.

Prior to the Gemini Staking product launch, users would have to natively go on-chain to stake their tokens and earn rewards for validating various blockchain networks.

Gemini will support Polygon initially, with plans to support Ethereum, Solana, Polkadot, and Audius in the future.

Gemini stated in their announcement today, August 18 that Gemini Staking will cover associated gas expenses, reimburse users if their funds are slashed (penalty for malicious validators), and manage user private keys with their in-house security features.

This announcement comes three weeks after Coinbase announced on August 1 it would be expanding its Coinbase Prime (a product geared toward institutional investing) staking offerings to support Ethereum post-proof-of-stake 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.

Flow, a new residential real-estate startup founded by former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann, is planning to launch a digital wallet that can store cryptocurrency, following an investment from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). 

The venture capital firm decided to invest in Neumann thanks to his “direct strike” as “a visionary leader” on the US housing problems, Marc Andreessen wrote in a blog post on Monday. 

The planned digital wallet, which also will store fiat currencies such as the US dollar, cannot be used to pay rent for apartments managed by the real estate startup, Flow spokesperson Davidson Goldin said to Forbes. The wallet can be used for outside transactions and that a rewards program could include crypto, the spokesman said. 

Neumann received a $350 million investment from a16z for his real estate management software venture, The New York Times first reported on Monday, but only few details of the deal were revealed. Neumann left WeWork in 2019, a company he co-founded in 2008, following pressure from investors. 

After he left WeWork, Neuman was known for buying properties in secondary markets like Nashville, Tennessee, and Norwalk, Connecticut, while also investing in property management software company Alfred, according to Forbes. 

Forbes first discovered the digital wallet plan from a job ad posted by a recruiter, who promoted a role at a “ground breaking venture that will be one of the largest implementations of blockchain in the economy, involving a multi-faceted approach that will be spearheaded by Adam Neumann.” 

Neumann is building a “next generation multi-family property management system with a propriety payment system” which will include “a full financial services wallet, a tokenized reward program and crypto payment methods,” the ad further said, according to Forbes.  

While confirming the digital wallet plan, Goldin called the job description largely false. He provided an alternative description that did not mention “crypto” or “blockchain,” but a task to “analyze the technology ecosystem and services in the multifamily industry.” The recruiter later admitted that they “made a mistake and misrepresented the job.”

Neumann has previously worked in crypto by founding crypto startup Flowcarbon. The company raised $70 million to develop its blockchain-based carbon trading tools in a funding round also led by a16z’s crypto unit. But roughly two months after the funding round, Flowcarbon announced the postponement of its token launch and slowing operations, citing market turbulence. 

© 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.

Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Rarible published a proposal to create a bespoke NFT marketplace for the ApeCoin DAO on Wednesday, the latest in a string of offers.

Rarible said its marketplace will charge no fees and require no investment by the DAO.

This marks the third proposal to build an NFT marketplace that the ApeCoin DAO, the governance mechanism for the ApeCoin ($APE) token, has received recently. Magic Eden last week made a similar proposal for a marketplace with low transaction fees, also at no cost to the DAO. A third contender, startup Snag Solution, also submitted a proposal hours after the publication of Magic Eden’s.

In each case, the marketplace would be primarily for buying and selling NFTs from Yuga Labs. Although the DAO is populated by holders of Yuga’s NFTs, which includes the Bored Ape Yacht Club, it is not controlled by it.

“Bored Apes, and the whole Yuga ecosystem, is a crown jewel of NFT projects on Ethereum,” Evgeniy Medvedev, Rarible’s head of partnerships told The Block. “We definitely want to be there.”

High transaction fees have led to demand for bespoke marketplaces as scams abound and communities lack control of collections. Marketplaces like Rarible and Magic Eden have started offering services to create white label marketplaces that give brands more dominance over the sales of their NFTs and make it harder to pass off fakes.

“We want to reduce the number of scams in the space, and this is a way we can do it,” said Medvedev. “You are also not depending on the centralized marketplaces [which could] delist your collection.”

The proposals will now make their way through the ApeCoin DAO’s governance system. Magic Eden told The Block that so far the response to their proposal has been really positive.

“Rarible’s submission is a reflection of a healthy DAO ecosystem and we welcome the competition,” a Magic Eden spokesperson said.y Magic Eden.

© 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 one of the most significant events for the space in recent years. 
• As the Merge becomes more imminent, speculation about a potential proof-of-work fork has returned. 
• Several common Merge-related trade themes have emerged in markets in recent weeks, which will be discussed here.

This research piece is available exclusively to
members of The Block Research.
You can continue reading
this Research content on The Block Research.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure and product developer Primitive announced it has raised $9 million in a Series A round led by Bain Capital Crypto. 

Other investors in the round include 1Confirmation, Nascent and Robot Ventures, according to a press release issued Thursday. 

Founded in 2020 by Alexander Angel, Primitive builds innovative products focused on Automated Market Makers (AMMs). 

What is an AMM?

AMMs power decentralized exchanges (DEXs), a type of exchange that enables transactions to occur directly between traders without the need for a third party to settle the trade. 

On a centralized exchange, professional market making firms such as Susquehanna Capital Group and Wolverine Trading provide liquidity for traders. 

 

To remove the risk of liquidity being controlled by a select few parties, decentralized exchanges leverage AMMs that offer liquidity pools. Anyone can contribute assets to the pool and the AMM uses algorithms to price the assets in the pool, balance the pool, and trade with DEX users. 

Building an AMM discovery platform

The proceeds of the Series A round will enable Primitive to build products that make it easier to discover popular AMM liquidity pools, as well as new strategies to participate in, per the release. These products will be enabled through a new protocol and suite of development tools. 

“Primitive offers advanced financial products and market-making strategies while retaining the elegance and simplicity of automated liquidity provision,” said Alex Evans, partner at Bain Capital Crypto, in a statement. “We are excited to work with the excellent Primitive team as they broaden access to powerful crypto-native financial instruments.” 

Primitive previously raised $3 million in a seed round in May 2021, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The team is currently led by Angel, Zach Thielemann and Matt Czernik, and is looking to hire in New York and remotely this year, per the release. 

The Block Research’s latest funding recap shows that DeFi funding volumes increased 37% month-over-month and 17% by deal amount in July. 

The report notes that the frequency of DeFi deals had tapered off in the months leading up to summer. However, DeFi deals have increased for two consecutive months now, which could suggest investor interest is rebounding. 

Monthly blockchain/crypto venture funding from The Block Research

© 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 bitcoin mining difficulty rose by 0.63% in the network’s latest adjustment.

The change was reflected in an update posted on Thursday by BTC.com. The network’s hash rate has also gone up by about 1.5% since August 4, the date of the last update, according to data compiled by The Block Research.

Mining difficulty refers to the complexity of the mathematical process behind mining, during which miners are repeatedly trying to find a hash below a set level. Miners that “discover” this hash win the reward for the next transaction block. It adjusts every 2,016 blocks (roughly every two weeks) in sync with the network’s hash rate.

Bitcoin’s difficulty has largely declined since the crypto market crashed in May. The latest slight increase follows a rise of 1.74 percent on August 4.

Zack Voell, an analyst at mining firm Braiins, told The Block that we will probably see slight positive adjustments through the rest of the summer as miners deploy more machines. “But large increases in hash rate and difficulty are unlikely until the market significantly recovers,” he 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.

Unlockd, a protocol which allows users to borrow against non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has raised $4.4 million in a seed funding round led by Blockchain Capital, the company announced on Thursday.

Sfermion, Spartan Group and Play Ventures,  were also among those that participated in the round. Unlockd said the funding will be used for product and development, cross-chain expansion, a tier 1 auditor to ensure protocol security, and marketing. It declined to share a valuation.

Founded earlier this year by esports club MAD Lions founder Jorge Schnura and Carlos Otermin, who has a background in consulting, e-commerce and managing a gaming guild, Unlockd’s pooled liquidity model allows NFT holders to borrow against their NFTs while still being able to use them.

The eight-strong team at Unlockd already has a beta version on a testnet and its protocol is undergoing auditing. It will launch the UI for the testnet in September and launch on the mainnet in October.

During the first phase of launch, the protocol will support more than 25 NFT collections based on Ethereum. It will later expand to include more collections and Polygon NFTs over the coming months.

Schnura told The Block that Unlockd will initially focus on supporting gaming guilds, several of which are already investors in the project, because he sees Unlockd as a way for them to use their NFTs for liquidity while continuing to generate revenue with them through things like gaming.

“The other use case with guilds is when they pre-buy assets from games that are not launched. Those assets are unproductive assets. They just buy them at a discount. The good thing with this is that you can now borrow against them so you get liquidity from those assets and now suddenly they do become productive assets,” he said.

Other investors included IDEO CoLab, Bitscale, Sanctor Capital, Eden Ventures, Caballeros Capital, Emfarsis, Crypto Plaza, Yield Guild Games (YGG), YGG SEA, BreederDAO, BlockchainSPACE and angel investors such as YGG founder Gabby Dizon.

© 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.

Web3 venture studio SuperLayer has announced a new $25 million fund led by anchor investor and strategic partner Polygon, an Ethereum scaling solution. 

“Given SuperLayer’s focus on speed and quality, Polygon is a natural partner with industry-leading protocols designed to fix blockchain scalability issues that have slowed innovation,” said Kevin Chou, managing partner of SuperLayer in a release on Thursday. 

SuperLayer launched in October 2021 with a focus on funding and supporting brands and companies implementing tokenized economies using the RLY protocol. 

The studio operates differently from a traditional VC firm by co-founding the projects with entrepreneurs and providing them with seed funding to develop the concept internally. SuperLayer supports them in areas such as community, compliance, go-to-market strategies and partnerships, according to a release. 

SuperLayer’s co-founders Kevin Chou and Mahesh Vellanki are both experienced entrepreneurs themselves having played founding roles in Rally.io, a creator economy protocol on the RLY network, and in blockchain gaming platform Forte. 

The studio is also backed by several big-name investors and builders from a variety of industries including Animoca Brand’s founder Yat Siu, celebrity Paris Hilton and Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon. 

The new funding will be used to expand SuperLayer’s operating model and invest in new projects, according to the release. 

“With this investment and strategic partnership, SuperLayer is enthusiastic about shipping projects to lead the way on Polygon,” Chou said in the release. 

When SuperLayer launched in October, the company said it would begin by deploying $25 million to seed the development of web3 startups and that it would continue to raise funds on a rolling basis, according to a release. 

© 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

• Bain Capital Ventures, a venture capital arm of Bain Capital, was founded in 2001 and currently holds around $10 billion in AUM
• Some of the largest deals Bain Capital Ventures participated in included BlockFi, Crusoe Energy Systems, and Basis
• In total, The Block has noticed and mapped out 27 companies across 6 verticals

This research piece is available exclusively to
members of The Block Research.
You can continue reading
this Research content on The Block Research.

A new system for gathering data on malware is live, with the goal of rewarding users with crypto for the information they collect.

PolySwarm, a cybersecurity data firm, is taking its crowdsourced reporting system live today. Users can download the NectarNet browser plug-in, which will gather URL and domain data that they encounter malware in the digital wild. The plug-in will reward users with the ERC-20-ready NCT token with greater rewards on new and rare strains.

While plenty of threat intelligence services focus on identifying crypto-related malware, the use of a blockchain to incentivize threat data sharing represents a fairly new concept.

“Effectively what we’re trying to do here is Pokemon Go for threat hunting,” CEO Steve Bassie tells The Block.

Roughly four hundred existing users have installed the app already on an invite-only basis. A PolySwarm rep says that those users have been earning roughly $2 per day in NCT rewards. It’s a system similar to how Brave Browser rewards users for ad viewing using their Basic Attention Token.

The user data itself, Bassi says, remains under lock and key: “Only when a user gets rewarded for a sighting does a customer see an impact in their data.”

He compares to what he calls the re-centralization of the internet, by which giant service providers centralize and sell user-gathered domain data without recompensing users.

Source: CoinMarketCap [replace on Aug. 18]

The NCT token itself has traded around $0.017 to $0.02 for the past month, with a 22% spike to $0.022 on the eve of the launch. 33% of the reported volume coming from its listing on Coinbase, though this is likely an underestimate given limited confidence in other major market, BTCEX. NCT tokens do not redeem any services with PolySwarm and, the firm says, derives some of its value proposition from the altruism of helping identify threat networks.

The end clients are outside security firms paying five- and six-figure sums for contracts to the security data that NectarNet provides. The new program passes, Bassi estimates, 10-20% of that revenue on to the end users via the plug-in.

© 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.