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Lido DAO members have signaled their intent to maintain the platform’s dominance of the Ethereum 2.0 (ETH2) staking market as the majority of the community are voting against imposing a self-limit on the liquid staking platform.

Lido Finance, a liquid staking platform, accounts for almost a third of all ether (ETH) tokens staked on the Ethereum Beacon chain. This has caused fears about its level of centralization, concerns that led to a month-long debate in the Lido community forum.

The vote, which began on June 24, still has about a day to go but the outcome seems set. Data from the voting page shows over 99.8% of voters have chosen that Lido should not self-limit. If the vote fails, Lido will pursue other avenues of minimizing the risks posed by its staking dominance.

The platform is currently considering a proposal to introduce a dual governance structure for Lido. This dual governance architecture will involve including staked ETH (stETH) holders in the decision-making process for the DAO.

Staked ETH is the liquid staking derivative token given by Lido in exchange for ether staked by users on the platform. stETH is a tradable token and as such can be deployed on other DeFi protocols like Aave and MakerDAO.

Lido’s current governance is controlled by Lido DAO (LDO) token holders. Only LDO owners propose and vote on governance actions. The dual governance proposal, if passed, will grant veto powers to stETH holders over voting decisions made by LDO owners.

The proposal also includes a time-lock component that will freeze the implementation of a vote to allow for review and possible veto action by stETH holders.

© 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.

Weather XM, a weather network that utilizes crypto incentives to improve the accuracy of forecasts, has raised a $5 million seed round led by Placeholder VC. 

According to a news release, other investors in the round included Metaplanet, ConsenSys Mesh, Protocol Labs and Border Capital among others. 

Weather XM’s personal weather stations, priced at $420, began shipping earlier this year and it claims that it has more than 4,000 pre-orders for its next-generation devices, due to ship in the third quarter. 

These stations allow owners to become weather station operators and earn rewards for collecting and validating data. The company says that this decentralized internet of things model should result in increased accuracy of forecasts for areas that lack weather infrastructure. 

“The current weather data collection and forecasting model is mostly designed, funded and operated by governments,” said WeatherXM CEO Manolis Nikiforakis in a statement. “We all take advantage of it every day but it’s far from perfect as data collection requirements are completely different per use-case and often government priorities are not aligned with people’s needs.” 

The project is in the early stages, currently in beta. Its token rewards are still on the Polygon testnet, with a mainnet launch being prepared. 

WeatherXM isn’t the only company working to create a decentralized IoT business model that has raised funds recently. Earlier this week, web3 vehicle network Peaq raised $6 million in a round led by Fundamental Labs. 

Earlier this year, decentralized wireless network Helium raised $200 million in a round that included investors Tiger Global and FTX Ventures.

© 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.

Sequoia Capital India and Quona Capital co-led a $6 million seed round for decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol MoHash, according to a news release. 

Jump Crypto, Hashed Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Ledger Prime and CoinSwitch also participated in the round. The Block reached out to a company representative for the valuation, but it had not been disclosed by the time of publication. 

Founded in 2021, MoHash is a DeFi protocol that uses crypto assets to provide access to capital and liquidity for private debt in fast-growing economies. It primarily uses stablecoins to achieve this. 

“MoHash is bringing real world assets to DeFi users globally and providing sustainable, uncorrelated, and hard to access yields on-chain for the first time,” said Shailesh Lakhani of Sequoia India. “We think that this is exactly the type of product DeFi needs – one that leverages the strengths of blockchains and helps solve a real-world problem.” 

The raise comes as fellow players in the crypto lending space face increased pressures on their ability to sustain operations. Earlier this month, Crypto lender Celsius paused withdrawals and transfers due to market conditions. The firms’s lawyers are now pushing management to file for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that its risk profile was almost double that of a US bank at the time of a fund raising last year. 

© 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 Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) today reprimanded embattled crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, known as 3AC, for providing false information and exceeding the assets under management threshold permitted by the regulatory authority. 

In 2013, the authority granted the hedge fund registered status under the conditions that its assets did not exceed S$250 million. 

However, according to a release, the authority says the company breached its AUM threshold between July 2020 and September 2020 and between November 2020 and August 2021. It also reprimanded 3AC for its failure to notify changes to directorships and shareholdings and also failing to notify MAS regarding the common shareholder of 3AC’s offshore entity, Su Zhu. Zhu is also the director of 3AC. 

MAS added that, since there is speculation that the hedge fund may no longer be solvent, it is assessing whether there were any further breaches of its regulations.

This comes just days after a court order in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) placed 3AC into liquidation. The court appointed financial advisory firm Teneo to handle the liquidation. As a liquidation handler, Teneo’s main job is to protect the assets of 3AC and understand who its creditors are.

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© 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.

OSL, a licensed crypto exchange based in Hong Kong, has become the latest crypto exchange to cut jobs — joining rivals including Coinbase, Gemini and BitMEX.

The company has trimmed between 40 and 60 jobs, or about 15% of its workforce, two people familiar with the matter told The Block. The cuts were announced internally on Wednesday, the sources said. 

An OSL spokesperson confirmed the layoffs, without commenting on the specific numbers. “OSL has made the difficult decision to reduce headcount,” the spokesperson said. “This decision was not made lightly, and we understand the impact that this may have on employees.”

OSL says it is the first and only insured and Securities and Futures Commission-licensed digital asset platform, providing exchange, brokerage, custody and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products for institutional clients and professional investors. Besides operating an exchange in Hong Kong, OSL also provides SaaS solutions from Singapore. BC Technology Group (BC Group), a Hong Kong public company, is the parent company of OSL.

The OSL spokesperson added that the company has “adjusted our business model to renew our focus on SaaS, and professional and institutional counterparts.”

The spokesperson stressed that the jobs cuts are not due to OSL’s exposure to any troubled crypto firms or tokens, including staked ether (stETH) and TerraUSD (UST).

“It is important to note that OSL has not had any exposure to stETH, luna or UST,” they said. “Nor have we had exposure to any of the firms reportedly facing solvency issues.”

They went on to say that “Our regulatory requirements provide significant levels of investor protection which we believe will likely become mandatory for licensed participants over time.”

OSL’s parent BC Group is backed by high-profile investors, including Fidelity International and GIC, a Singaporean sovereign wealth 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.

NFT marketplace OpenSea has suffered a data breach after an employee at its email delivery partner leaked user data.

In a blog post published late on June 29, OpenSea said that an employee of Customer.io had “misused their employee access to download and share email addresses – provided by OpenSea users and subscribers to our newsletter – with an unauthorized external party.”

The company advised customers that they should assume they have been impacted by the news if they had shared their email address with OpenSea in the past.

OpenSea added in the blog post that the company is assisting Customer.io with its own internal investigation, and that the incident has been reported to law enforcement.

Screenshots shared on Twitter show that OpenSea has also contacted customers by email to inform them about the breach.

© 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.

Crypto asset management firm Grayscale Investments has filed a lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission, the United States regulator.

The company announced on June 29 that it would challenge a decision by the watchdog to deny its bid by to convert its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund.

The SEC had announced that decision earlier the same day.

In a statement, Grayscale’s CEO Michael Sonnenshein said he is “deeply disappointed by and vehemently disagree with the SEC’s decision to continue to deny spot Bitcoin ETFs from coming to the U.S. market.”

“Through the ETF application review process, we believe American investors overwhelmingly voiced a desire to see GBTC convert to a spot Bitcoin ETF, which would unlock billions of dollars of investor capital while bringing the world’s largest Bitcoin fund further into the U.S. regulatory perimeter,” he continued. “We will continue to leverage the full resources of the firm to advocate for our investors and the equitable regulatory treatment of Bitcoin investment vehicles.”

© 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.

Hopes that former movie rental company Blockbuster would reemerge in the web3 space under the control of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) seem to have been extinguished — at least for now.

The organization behind the project, R3WIND, wrote in a post titled “Blockbust” on Wednesday that the company that currently owns the now-defunct business, Dish Network, refused to sell it.

R3WIND said that it held thirteen meetings with Dish executives between January and May 2022, before the deal fell through.

Back in December of last year, R3WIND said that it intended to raise $5 million to buy Blockbuster via the sale of BlockbusterDAO NFTs. According to the post on Wednesday, Dish had bought the Blockbuster brand in 2011 for $320 million.

“They believed it was still worth more than any community like ours would be able to raise,” it read. “Our position, to the contrary, was that its value had depreciated considerably since its bankruptcy.”

R3WIND said that the project had received “swift and enthusiastic” support from the community but that it had decided to make sure they could “deliver on the promise to buy Blockbuster” before dropping an NFT collection.

According to the post, Dish did not want Blockbuster to be controlled by a DAO. R3WIND then came up with a proposal that would give the DAO 65% ownership of Blockbuster initially. The idea was to create a limited-liability corporation that would progressively become decentralized. R3WIND made a product presentation on May 10, but ultimately the company opted out weeks later.

“In their exact words, they wanted to be ‘in the driver’s seat’ and ‘did not want to license the brand to a DAO,'” the post read.

R3WIND said it still wants to see the project through, stating that its ambition is “greater than ever.” The organization’s vision is to have a “content ecosystem that gives creators more control over their art and their businesses.”

© 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.

Crypto exchange operator FTX is seeking to acquire BlockFi outright, The Block has learned.

The development comes in the wake of reports that FTX was in talks to buy a stake in the crypto lender, which struck a $250 million credit agreement with FTX earlier this month.

A source with knowledge of the process told The Block that the credit deal gave FTX an option on 50% of BlockFi equity. The remainder would be purchased for $25 million. Another source also said the latter.

Details from an investor call leaked earlier this week — revealing a bid by Morgan Creek to assemble investors to buy a majority stake in the crypto lender — had suggested that FTX possessed the right, via its credit deal, to convert loans into BlockFi’s equity without restriction. A BlockFi representative previously told The Block that such comments are “highly speculative.”

It’s not immediately clear at this time whether the FTX deal will go through, given the possible existence of other offers. Any FTX deal will also be subject to approval by BlockFi shareholders.

BlockFi has faced severe financial headwinds amid a significant crypto market downturn. The firm was among a number of industry companies that announced cost-saving measures such as layoffs, and sources previously told The Block that BlockFi was seeking a fresh round of capital at a lower valuation compared to previous funding rounds.

According to the two sources, BlockFi’s staff count will be significantly reduced if the FTX deal goes through. They say as many as 80% of the team could be let go.

The Block has reached out to BlockFi for comment and will update this story should we hear back.

© 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 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has denied Grayscale’s proposal to convert its flagship product into a spot-bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).

The securities regulator issued a rejection order for the conversion of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) today after repeated extensions on the application. The SEC has yet to allow a spot-bitcoin ETF to list, though it’s green-lit multiple futures-based products.

In its rejection order, the agency said:

“This order disapproves the proposed rule change, as modified by Amendment No. 1. The Commission concludes that NYSE Arca has not met its burden under the Exchange Act and the Commission’s Rules of Practice to demonstrate that its proposal is consistent with the requirements of Exchange Act Section 6(b)(5), which requires, in relevant part, that the rules of a national securities exchange be “designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices” and “to protect investors and the public interest.”

For its part, issuer Grayscale has already attempted to push back on this argument.

In the wake of other spot ETF rejections, it sent a letter to the regulator arguing that its willingness to allow a futures product but deny spot offerings could constitute a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act. Because a futures product is priced based on the underlying market, Grayscale and other advocates argue it’s inconsistent to deny a spot product on the grounds of insufficient protections against market manipulation when the approved products are priced based on that underlying market. 

In the lead-up to the decision, Grayscale prepared for approval through a deal with Jane Street and Virtu to close the discount of GBTC upon conversion. That deal cannot move forward without approval.

Still, at the time, Grayscale said it was preparing for all possible outcomes and had beefed up its legal resources in the lead-up to the decision. In the lead-up to the decision, Grayscale said it was committed to converting the product.

© 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.