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A group of former founders and cryptographers launched a research house focused on building the deep infrastructure of web3.

UK-based Geometry will launch and support web3 projects using zero-knowledge systems and other applied mathematics in infrastructure, decentralised finance, virtual environments and other applications.

The 12-strong team of engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs have backgrounds in projects including Celo, Aztec, the Ethereum Foundation and Semaphore.

“The focus of Geometry is zero-knowledge research and engineering. We don’t do consultancy. But there’s a small fund on back of this thing and we’ve made some investments in zero-knowledge infrastructure companies,” Thomas Walton-Pocock, formerly CEO and cofounder at Aztec Network, told The Block.

Prior to its official launch, Geometry led a $4 million seed investment round for Israel-based zero-knowledge semiconductor company Ingonyama. It was also a participant in the seed and Series A rounds for Ethereum layer-two network Scroll, and led the seed round for Soap Labs, which is aiming to bring cross-venue liquidity to the NFT market.

“We are also running a program for researchers in residence for highly ambitious people who want to come and spend time in a cryptography or deep mathematics rich setting. Typically they will be engineers – but by no means always – and want to build a company based off some corner of this industry,” Walton-Pocock said.

Developed in the 1980s, zero-knowledge proofs are a way of verifying information without being given access to the entire information set. It has been touted as a way of addressing scalability issues on blockchains.

© 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 lender CoinFLEX announced plans on Monday to issue a new yield bearing token, just four days after halting withdrawals. 

CoinFLEX revealed on June 23 that it was pausing all withdrawals due to “extreme market conditions and continued uncertainty involving a counterparty.” The business clarified that the counterparty was not the under-fire crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. 

In order to restart withdrawals on its platform, CoinFLEX plans to raise funds by issuing a new token that promises a 20% annual return. The token will be named Recovery Value USD (rvUSD).

The firm will begin issuing $47 million worth of tokens on Tuesday and, depending on sales, hopes to restart withdrawals from June 30. The token will only be available to “non-US resident sophisticated investors,” according to the whitepaper.

High yield tokens have come under persistent scrutiny over the past few months following the collapse of Terra’s blockchain ecosystem, home to the Anchor protocol that offered investors upwards of 20% yield annually before collapsing. 

CoinFLEX was founded in 2019 as a platform for physically-delivered futures, it has since pivoted its focus to build a repo market for crypto.

© 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 data firm Kaiko has bagged $53 million in fresh funding even as venture capital investors tighten their purse strings.

Eight Roads led the Series B fundraise, which was announced in a statement today, with Revaia participating alongside existing investors Alven, Point9, Anthemis, and Underscore.

Kaiko will use the funding to expand globally. It currently has offices in Paris, London, New York and Singapore.

CEO Ambre Soubiran said in the statement: “The blockchain industry has experienced tremendous institutional interest and with it, the need for high quality data has never been greater.”

Kaiko was founded in 2014 and offers institutional investors market data, portfolio solutions, rates and indices, pricing services, DeFi data and research, according to its announcement.

The company raised a $24 million Series A round roughly one year ago. Recently, it acquired quantitative decisions tools provider Kesitys, and bought Napoleon Index from CoinShares, the crypto asset manager.

© 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.

Last Thursday, two men were arrested in Virginia for their alleged plan to steal tens of millions of dollars in Bitcoin from a Westchester County home.

Between May 18 and May 24, 2020, the accused allegedly planned to break into the home in the middle of the night and force its residents to provide the code to a private key.

Dominic Pineda and Shon Morgan, the defendants, were indicted on Friday and charged with conspiracy to commit Hobbs Act robbery, which carries a maximum term of twenty years in prison. 

“As alleged in the indictment, the defendants participated in a violent plan to break into a family’s home in the middle of the night and force its residents to provide the code to what the defendants believed was tens of millions of dollars in Bitcoin currency,” US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.

The indictment was unsealed on Friday in White Plains federal court, where the case will be handled. 

© 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.

Bitcoin mining stocks were down on Monday, as Bitcoin prices fell closer to $20,000 after staying above $21,000 for most of the weekend, according to data from TradingView.

As of press time, Bitcoin’s price was back up to around $20,900.

Core Scientific saw its stock drop by as much as 12.92%. Other companies that experienced losses include CleanSpark (-8.11%), TeraWulf (-7.95%) and Marathon (-7.68%).

On the other side, Iris Energy was up by 12.13% and BIT Mining by 11.82%.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Monday, June 27:

© 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.

In a tan stone building with a widescreen view of the Mediterranean, the American University in Beirut houses the premier business school in the Middle East. 

But the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business has fallen on hard times, as has the rest of the country. 

Last year, a gunfight broke out between Hezbollah and Christian-backed militias over investigations into the Beirut port explosion. Many feared a return of the bloody civil war of the 80s. AUB canceled midterms. 

Mercifully, Lebanon did not descend into war. But the crisis continues. For AUB, pound-denominated tuition and professors’ salaries have dropped by roughly 90%. While Beirut has long been one of the Arab world’s cultural hubs, recent years have seen Lebanon’s economy racked by cronyism, corruption and some of the worst hyperinflation in the world. 

The Lebanese lira remains officially pegged to the dollar at a rate of 1,500 to 1, but the black-market exchange rate is more like 30,000 to 1. And banks have indefinitely frozen customer withdrawals on pre-crisis dollar accounts, cratering faith in them as an institution.

Amid such a crisis, Lebanon’s future business leaders are turning to blockchain tech.

“The crazy thing is,” says Harry Halpin. “Walking through Beirut, it doesn’t feel like chaos. It feels like this could totally happen in New York.”

A founding programmer of privacy-focused Nym Technologies, Halper, an American, found himself in residence at the beginning of last semester. He taught the inaugural “Blockchain for Business” course.

The blockchain program is new to the university. By his own account, Halpin drew inspiration from current chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission Gary Gensler’s courses at MIT, which Halpin took while working at the university. 

The first semester of the blockchain course culminated in several students pitching LebAid, a platform for refugee remittances, to the business school’s start-up accelerator. 

A hackathon at the end of May saw competing teams, including a third of the undergraduate students from the fall semester, propose solutions for Lebanon’s particular problems. One team that is now in the university’s incubator program put together a system of prepaid cards, which scratch off to reveal private keys granting holders access to USDT wallets with small balances. 

The new curriculum was enough of a success that the university has expanded, adding a DeFi module for professionals starting in July, and aiming to set up separate courses for graduate students with more of a programming background.

“What you really need is skilled programmers who can apply those skills to practical problems that they understand better than anyone else, in the language they speak — like Arabic,” Halpin says.

Meanwhile, however, the AUB is struggling to maintain its current staffing, given the collapsing value of professor salaries. The university is even considering switching its tuition from pounds to dollars — which would then make it prohibitive for a huge chunk of prospective students. 

© 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

• Founded in 2017, BlockFi offers various crypto financial services, including interest accounts, trading, wallet, crypto credit card, crypto loan and institutional services
• With the $100 million SEC settlement, Celsius ripple effect, 20% headcount cut and 80% reduction in valuation ($5 billion to $1 billion), BlockFi is having a rough 2022
• This June, BlockFi signed a term sheet with FTX to secure a $250 million revolving credit facility to bolster BlockFi’s balance sheet and platform strength

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Robinhood’s stock price jumped as much as 12% on Monday afternoon on news that crypto exchange company FTX is internally mulling an acquisition bid.

Bloomberg reported that, according to sources familiar with the matter, such discussions are taking place within FTX, which is led by Sam Bankman-Fried. The report stressed that no official bid has been received by Robinhood and that FTX may ultimately decline to pursue such a deal. 

$HOOD, which opened Monday at $8.12, popped as high as $9.72 once the Bloomberg report dropped — a move that prompted a temporary trading halt. The price has since lost some of those gains, and at press time is trading at $9.08. 

Bankman-Fried currently owns a 7.6% stake in Robinhood, according to filings by the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

© 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 hacker responsible for stealing $100 million from Horizon, a cross-chain bridge tied to the Harmony blockchain protocol, has begun laundering the funds, according to reports by PeckShield.

Data from Etherscan show the wallet used by the hacker in the attack sent out about 18,000 ETH ($21 million) to another wallet. The hacker used this other wallet to disburse the funds to three other addresses, sending about 6,000 ETH ($7 million each).

The first intermediary address has already laundered the funds received via Tornado Cash, a coin mixing service. The second wallet is in the process of doing so in batches of 100 ETH ($116,000) while the third wallet still has the 6,000 ETH in it as of the time of publishing.

These fund transfers come even as Harmony offered a $1 million bounty for the return of the stolen funds. The blockchain project has even offered to waive any law enforcement action should the hacker return the stolen crypto assets.

The hacker’s wallet still holds over $80 million in ETH tokens as well as about $65,000 worth of other tokens stolen during the bridge exploit as of press time.

Thursday’s Horizon bridge attack saw the theft of more than 85,000 ETH worth $98 million at the time. Security experts like Mudit Gupta, the chief information security officer at Polygon, say the hack happened because the bridge’s multi-signature wallet was compromised, as previously reported by The Block.

Muti-signature wallets work by having a smart contract with several private keys controlling the use of the wallet. The smart contract usually includes a provision for the minimum number of keys required to approve a transaction. As such, these keys are shared among different persons with the logic being that the decentralized approval process will make it harder for malicious actors to break into the wallet.

There is, however, the problem of setting a low minimum number of keys to approve transactions. This was reportedly the case in the Horizon attack. According to Gupta, the bridge was set to a “2 of 5 multi-sig.” This means the hacker only needed to compromise two of the keys to steal the funds.

A similar situation also led to the Ronin bridge hack in March, when the hackers stole about $600 million worth of crypto. The Roin attacker — later identified by the US government as the North Korea-tied hacking group Lazarus — compromised five out of the nine validators used by the bridge 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.

Issuer Grayscale is preparing for a decision on the conversion of its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) to an exchange-traded fund (ETF) next week, and CEO Michael Sonnenshein says the firm is  “unequivocally committed” to the conversion.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has repeatedly delayed a decision on the conversion of GBTC, which would mark the first available spot-based bitcoin ETF in the US. A decision must come by July 6.

The SEC has rejected similar proposals from a number of issuers, most commonly citing concerns of market manipulation and a lack of surveillance sharing agreements in the underlying market. Those pushing for approval have argued that the SEC’s willingness to green-light a bitcoin futures ETF is inconsistent with this position since futures are priced based on the underlying spot market. Grayscale, for its part, argued in a letter to the SEC that the difference in treatment between spot and futures products could constitute a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act. 

Grayscale has long been angling to convert its GBTC to an ETF, saying that was always the plan for the life-cycle of the product. The SEC has continued to delay the decision. 

In an investor letter published today, Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein said that while the firm is encouraged by the SEC’s actions over the past eight months, it’s preparing for “all possible post-ruling scenarios.”

“Most important, GBTC is operationally ready to convert to an ETF the moment we are given the appropriate regulatory approvals,” said the letter.

Indeed, Grayscale announced a deal today with Wall Street firms Jane Street and Virtu Financial to close the discount on GBTC when it’s converted to an ETF. The deal will only take effect if the product gains approval.

In the event that it doesn’t, Grayscale is exploring its options. The firm has already put forth arguments for the product with its in-house legal team and attorneys at Davis Polk, in addition to retaining former U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., as a senior legal strategist.

“We have created the strongest possible legal team to help us articulate the importance of this issue,” said the letter.

© 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.