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Magic Eden, the largest non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace on the Solana blockchain, has launched an investment arm to back the web3 gaming sector.

Announcing the news in a statement on Tuesday, Magic Eden said the new unit, Magic Ventures, will invest in web3 game developers and infrastructure builders. The firm believes that gaming has the potential to bring millions of users to the blockchain.

“The world of gaming is a massive market that has just started to venture into the world of web3,” Jack Lu, co-founder and CEO of Magic Eden, said in the statement. “We intend to deepen our relationships with both gamers and game developers alike to champion the future of games on the blockchain.”

The launch of Magic Ventures comes less than a month after Magic Eden raised $130 million in a Series B funding round at a $1.6 billion valuation. It is unclear how much money Magic Eden intends to park for its ventures unit and whether it has already invested in some startups. Lu did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Magic Eden is not new to gaming, having launched a hosting platform called Eden Games in March. Eden Games claims to have launched more than 50 games and seen over 300,000 users mint or trade gaming-related NFTs on its marketplace.

Given its focus on web3 gaming, Magic Eden has today also announced the appointment of Tony Zhao to head its venture unit. Zhao comes from Tencent Games, where he focused on investing in games, acquiring gaming studios and forming strategic partnerships across the Tencent Games portfolio.

Eden Games said it has recently finalized partnerships with various game developers, including Aurory, Genopets, Mini Royale: Nations and Sugar Realm. Zhao plans to increase such partnerships for Magic Eden.

Besides Zhao, Magic Eden has also announced appointments of Yoonsup Choi, Harrison Chang and Matt Biamonte. The trio, specialized in gaming and NFTs, will advise and support game developers in their go-to-market strategy.

© 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.

Gnosis Safe has raised $100 million in a token sale led by 1kx as it seeks to expand the smart contract account ecosystem.

Smart contract accounts are accessed and controlled via smart contract code rather than a private key or a seed phrase. The project says these accounts prevent hacks and also provide tools such as authentication via decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), spending limits and automation, and recovery and inheritance mechanisms. 

Other investors in the round, announced on Tuesday, include Tiger Global, A&T Capital, Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, Greenfield One, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, ParaFi, Lightspeed, Polymorphic Capital and Superscrypt. The funding will go to the project’s foundation, a non-profit organization that aims to protect its strategic assets, confirming a report from The Block report in February.

Originating as a side project within prediction market project Gnosis, the raise is also aiming to crystallize its differentiation from Gnosis through a rebrand to Safe. This follows an April approval by the Gnosis community to spin off Gnosis Safe from Gnosis Ltd., giving the project the get-go to launch as a separate entity. 

“How it emerged initially is in 2017, when we launched a token for Gnosis, we had many digital assets to manage so we wanted to do this self custody in a secure way,” Gnosis Safe lead Lukas Schor explained in an interview. “And so we built our own multi-sig smart contracts to manage these assets. We open-sourced this and saw adoption and suddenly it grew from an internal tool to an ecosystem project with a team working on it.” 

The project says the majority of the raised funds will be used to build out an ecosystem of applications and wallets using Safe accounts via grants and accelerator programs. Schor also noted that it raised such an amount so that the project could weather an extended bear market and not be forced into the position of raising again in a few months’ time. 

While Safe declined to share the valuation during this interview with The Block, it was reported that the project was worth $1.25 billion in February.

Safe’s spinout from Gnosis follows similar moves by CoW protocol, which underlines the decentralized exchange CowSwap. The Block exclusively reported in March that it raised $23 million via a token round as it spun out from Gnosis DAO to become an entity in its own right. 

© 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.

Animoca Brands, a Hong Kong based gaming and venture capital company, has completed a $75.32 million raise at a pre-money valuation of $5.9 billion, the company announced on Tuesday.

In January, the company hit a valuation of more than $5 billion after raising $358.88 million in new funding. The current funding is a second tranche of this funding, which was done for due diligence. 

Investors included Liberty City Ventures, Kingsway Capital, Alpha Wave Ventures, 10T, SG Spring Limited Partnership Fund, Generation Highway Ltd, Cosmic Summit Investments Limited, and others. Liberty City Ventures had led the round in January.

“Over the next decade, humanity will discover and embrace the game changing power that blockchain based digital ownership of assets will bring to countless aspects of daily life,” said Emil Woods, managing partner of Liberty City Ventures, in a statement. 

The company executed subscription agreements with investors to raise the money at a subscription price of A$4.50 (approximately $3.03 USD) per share, for a total of 23,237,058 new shares. Following this raise, Animoca Brands will have a total of 1,836,142,334 fully paid ordinary shares on issue, according to the company statement.

The new capital will be used to continue to fund strategic acquisitions, investments, and product development, secure licenses for popular intellectual properties, and advance the open metaverse, including through its efforts to promote digital property rights for online users, according to a statement from the company. 

“Digital property rights represent a society-defining generational shift that impacts everyone online and will set the stage for the emergence of the open metaverse,” said Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, in a 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.

Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu Su broke his silence with his first tweet in nearly four weeks, accusing the firm’s liquidators of “baiting.” 

“Sadly, our good faith to cooperate with the Liquidators was met with baiting,” Zhu said in the tweet, which contained screen grabs of two emails from Christopher Anand Daniel of Advocatus Law addressed to a person called Russell.

This is a breaking story and will be updated. 

© 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.

Bravo Ready, an independent video game studio based in Montreal, Canada, has raised a $3 million seed round to accelerate game and software development.

Investors include Solana Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, and Shima Capital.

Bravo Ready created BR1: Infinite Royale, which allows gamers to pay $1 to spawn and earn SOL for every win. The survival-style game places new characters far away from other players with little access to items. As players continue to play, they encounter more players and items. 

“In Web3 gaming, the game always needs to come first and the economic model has to support the game,” said Jon Cohen, CTO & co-founder of Bravo Ready, in a statement.

“Providing tangible value for the time players spend in video games requires people to want to spend their time playing that game on a daily or weekly basis. Without a fun game that appeals to a wide audience, the most well thought out economic model will crumble under small demand.”

The team is aiming to create more games while driving value for players in the ecosystem.

“This isn’t just a new game – it’s a new way to game. It fundamentally reinvents the financial side of being a player,” said Evan Ryer, CEO and co-founder of Bravo Ready. “Our mission is to be at the crossroads of great games that people love and a business model that will drive value for all stakeholders, whether you are a gamer, audience member, content creator or game investor, the BR1 ecosystem is designed to drive incentive and reward all while creating a truly next level gaming experience.”

© 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.

Popular Brazilian mobile payment app PicPay announced Monday that it plans to start supporting cryptocurrency payments, as well as launch its own cryptocurrency exchange and a stablecoin pegged to the Brazilian real.

In a company blog post, PicPay said it plans to offer an exchange through the app so that people can buy and store cryptocurrencies. It will initially support bitcoin, ether and Paxos’s Pax Dollar (USDP) stablecoin. 

According to Brazilian news website NeoFeed, which first reported the story, PicPay could start offering this exchange component within its app as early as next month. Furthermore, PicPay hopes to support 100 different cryptocurrencies through the app by the end of the year, the report said. 

The firm also plans to launch its own stablecoin pegged to the Brazilian real, which will be called the Brazilian Real Coin (BRC). 

“PicPay will enter the crypto market to lead its popularization not only as an investment, but also as a way to decentralize payments and other financial services,” vice president of technology and products Anderson Chamon said in the blog post. 

PicPay started in 2012 and became known for offering mobile peer-to-peer and QR code payments (its name is short for “Picture Pay”). Today it counts 30 million active users, Chamon noted in the company’s July 11 blog post. PicPay surpassed 65 million user registrations through its app this year. 

“The scenario of the world economy, such as high interest rates, has weighed on investments in cryptocurrencies, as well as in other risky assets, including the stock exchange,” Chamon said in the blog post. “Despite this, the technological proposal of this market is still the same. We believe cryptocurrencies will grow again as new ways of using them appear, and become commonplace.”

PicPay is not the only fintech in Brazil embracing cryptocurrencies. Nubank, the Warren Buffett-backed neobank that went public in December, announced a deal with Paxos in May to start offering bitcoin and ether trading in its app. 

© 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.

Cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX has delayed the listing of its native token BMEX, citing market volatility. 

While the crypto futures and spot exchange said in a statement today it’s ready to list BMEX for trading, it called present market conditions “not ideal” for holders of the token. Recent market turbulence has seen bitcoin drop below $20,000 from a high of more than $60,000 in November. 

“Bear markets are not easy; we have seen our share over the years and stayed strong, even with bitcoin at much lower levels,” said the statement. “As we look to the future, listing BMEX on our spot exchange remains our top priority and we hope to celebrate this milestone with you soon.” 

The exchange didn’t immediately respond to a request for further comment on the postponed listing date. 

BitMEX announced the launch of its native token in December last year and had airdropped 1.5 million tokens to users as of January this year. The company says it’s continuing to airdrop the token to traders and new joiners. 

The tokens have a maximum supply of 450 million units and are vested over a period of up to five years. Users can currently utilize the token by staking it to receive trading fee discounts and withdrawal funds.

© 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.

On Monday, an unknown hacker reportedly stole from a wallet believed to be a liquidity provider on the Uniswap decentralized exchange (DEX). 

Smart contract security firm PeckShield told The Block that the liquidity provider had inadvertently fallen victim to a phishing tactic, which allowed the hacker to steal more than 7,500 ether ($8 million). 

Prior to the incident, the hacker targeted the victim using a fake Uniswap airdrop token as a phishing bait. When the victim claimed the token, they interacted with a malicious smart contract that inadvertently gave the hacker full control over the victim’s wallet.

At the time of the attack, the wallet was providing $8 million to a WBTC/USDC liquidity pool on Uniswap version 3 (making it a liquidity provider, or LP).

After gaining illegitimate access to the wallet, the hacker exited the user’s liquidity position, swapped the assets and transferred them out. While doing this, the hacker routed the funds through Tornado Cash, a transaction mixer on the Ethereum network.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was the first to flag the incident. In a Twitter post, he initially claimed that there was a potential exploit in the protocol itself, before later making an update that noted that wasn’t the case — and that it was just a phishing attack.

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams concurred, saying that the phishing attack was “totally separate from the protocol.”

© 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 crypto startup founded by former Meta execs is seeking to raise at least $200 million in a new round of funding with a target valuation of $2 billion.

Mysten Labs is building out a new blockchain network for web3 applications. The Series B round, according to The Information, would be led by FTX Ventures.

Talks around the funding round are ongoing, and according to the outlet, the $2 billion valuation is subject to change based on whether equity investors “receive additional warrants giving them the right to buy tokens that would work with its blockchains, as well as the strike price to exercise those options, one of the people cautioned.”

The valuation of its $36 million Series A, which was led by Andreessen Horowitz in December 2021, is not known.

Mysten’s Series B round would be a notable feat at a time when crypto markets have fallen since the start of the year. Despite the current market trends, big-name VCs are not shying away from web3-related investments.

a16z announced a $4.5 billion crypto fund in the spring, and FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried has made investments through FTX Ventures, its $2 billion venture fund. 

© 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.

As bitcoin prices once again fell below $21,000 over the weekend, mining stocks had a negative day on the market Monday.

Core Scientific, Bitfarms and Riot Blockchain fell by double digits — 17.02%, 12.50% (on the Nasdaq) and 10.81%, respectively.

Bitcoin’s price was around $20,400 as of press time, according to TradingView.

Greenidge Generation announced Monday that it had mined roughly 18% more bitcoin in June. The company’s stock was down by 3.91% at the end of the trading session.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Monday, July 11:

© 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.