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Crypto lender Nexo has issued a cease and desist letter in an effort to silence an anonymous Twitter account.

The account, which styles itself in the third person as ‘Otter,’ published a series of tweets on June 26 claiming that Nexo’s co-founders had stolen funds from a charity. The tweets have generated thousands of likes and retweets.

Later the same day, Nexo published two items on its website — one of them a cease and desist letter taking aim at the Twitter account, the other a blog post that seeks to debunk some of the claims made by Otter.

The exchange comes at a moment of high tension for crypto lenders. Several large lending firms — notably Celsius and Babel — have halted withdrawals. Rival lender BlockFi got a $250 million bailout in the form of a revolving credit facility from FTX, the exchange, on June 21.

Nexo, which offers interest rates of 18% on crypto holdings, claims to serve more than four million customers. It has over $12 billion in assets, according to its website.

© 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.

Ripple announced the opening of a new office in Toronto, its first in Canada, which will serve as an engineering hub supporting its growth in North America, the company said in a news release.

The distributed ledger tech company plans to hire 50 engineers in Toronto with the goal of expanding to hundreds of blockchain software engineers, including applied machine learning scientists, data scientists, and product managers, it said on Wednesday.

“Crypto and blockchain present an incredible opportunity for engineers to tackle difficult problems, with the potential for these solutions to impact the movement of value around the world,” said Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple.

While others in the industry have announced layoffs, Ripple’s priority remains bringing in talent that will help us innovate for years to come, the statement said.

The opening of the Toronto office furthers Ripple’s commitment to a region that is already a tech hub where it can tap into a local talent pool and recruit engineers to foster crypto innovation, it 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.

Harmony Protocol, a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, today tweeted an offer of a $1 million bounty for the return of $100 million in crypto stolen from the hack of its Ethereum-linked Horizon bridge on Thursday, as well for information on how the hack took place.

The company added that it would “advocate for no criminal charges” if the funds were returned.

Harmony Protocol’s founder and CEO, Stephen Tse, also tweeted that there was “no evidence of smart contract code breach. No evidence of any vulnerability on the Horizon platform was found. Our consensus layer of the Harmony blockchain remains secure.”

While the Harmony team is continuing its investigation, security experts on Friday had offered some insights into the hack. According to Mudit Gupta, Polygon’s chief information security officer, the perpetrator gained control of a multi-signature wallet used in deploying Harmony’s bridge, probably by compromising two private addresses, and drained the funds.

Today, Tse said that his “team has found evidence that private keys were compromised, leading to the breach of our Horizon bridge.”

He added that while the investigation was ongoing, Harmony would “continue taking steps to further harden our operations and infrastructure security.”

© 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.

Singapore-based crypto exchange Bitget plans to double its workforce to 1,000 employees over the next six months despite the current market downturn, it said in a news release on Thursday.

Since the beginning of the second quarter, the overall crypto market has been on a downward trend, which has cut short a lot of projects and led to headcount reductions in various global crypto operators.

Still, Bitget, which was founded in 2018 and offers its users crypto copy trading, has been experiencing growth and generating strong cash flow amid less-than-perfect market conditions.

Managing director of Bitget, Gracy Chen, said: “Earlier this year, we announced our derivatives trading volume had reached an all-time high of $8.69 billion in March 2022. In the last 12 months, our trading volume grew by over 10 times … moreover, our user base also grew significantly to two million users worldwide.”

In the beginning of 2021, Bitget had a team of 150, achieving a threefold increase by mid-2022. Moving forward, the company aims to make about 500 new hires by the end of the year, mostly in the product development and customer service fields.

Chen added: “As we continue to endure the crypto winter, it will be a perfect opportunity for us to attract talent in the market and strengthen our foundation, prioritize growth and be prepared to welcome the next round of crypto adoption when the market regains strength.”

© 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.

Albania is set to begin taxing income derived from cryptocurrency next year, according to a draft law, local English-language website Exit News reported on Friday.

Some have questioned whether the country can properly regulate crypto and prevent it from being used for money laundering, as it has struggled to do with fiat currency, the report said.

Still, the draft law, which is at the public consultation stage, introduces the concept of taxing crypto and virtual asset income. It also provides Albania’s first definition of a virtual asset.

“A digital representation of a value that can be deposited, traded or transferred in digital form, and that can be used for payment or investment purposes or as a medium of exchange, including but not limited to cryptocurrencies,” the draft reads, according to Exit News.

Any income derived from business transactions or mining will be classified as income from business under the new law, with different tax rates depending on the type and size, the report said. In cases of individuals, they will be subject to an investment income tax of 15%, except for dividends.

© 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 digital payments revolution that began during the pandemic is driving Latin American interest and use, as 51% of consumers in the region have made a transaction with crypto, a Mastercard survey shows.

Additionally, more than a third said they’ve made a purchase with stablecoin, according to Mastercard’s New Payments Index 2022, a survey conducted between March and April among more than 35,000 people around the world and released on Wednesday.

In its second edition, the study shows that financial innovation — cryptocurrencies, DeFi solutions, blockchain, NFTs — registers significant activity in the region, with consumers eager to learn more about the ecosystem.

“Increasingly, Latin Americans are turning to technology to conduct their financial transactions and this trend is expected to continue to rise, with an overwhelming 95% planning to use a digital payment method in the coming year and 29% acknowledging having used less cash in the past year,” said Walter Pimenta, executive vice president for products and engineering, Mastercard Latin America and the Caribbean.

In Latin America, 54% percent of consumers surveyed are optimistic about the performance of digital assets as an investment, and two-thirds want greater flexibility to use crypto and traditional payment methods interchangeably.

Most consumers in the region, 82% of those surveyed, said they would like to have cryptocurrency-related functions available directly from their current financial institution.

The survey also showed that consumers would feel more confident investing (69%) and making/receiving payments (67%) in cryptocurrencies if they were issued or backed by a trusted organization.

© 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’s decline is making it more difficult for some miners to repay as much as $4 billion in loans that are backed by their equipment, Bloomberg reported on Friday.

Analysts say an increasing number of loans are underwater, as many of the mining rigs that lenders accepted as collateral have halved in value, along with the price of Bitcoin, the report said. Ethan Vera, co-founder of Seattle-based mining company Luxor Technologies, estimated there was as much as $4 billion in loans backed by machines.

Few miners have defaulted so far, but some have sold Bitcoin reserves, which puts further pressure on prices, according to the report. The cost of equipment may fall even lower if lenders begin to liquidate mining rigs that they repossess.

“Bitcoin miners, broadly speaking, are feeling pain,” Luka Jankovic, head of lending at Galaxy Digital, told Bloomberg. “Machine values have plummeted and are still in price discovery mode, which is compounded by volatile energy prices and limited supply for rack space.”

While some big mining companies are still enjoying decent profit margins, this may not be true for all. Total costs for some miners may already be above $20,000, which is about Bitcoin’s current price, Wilfred Daye, chief executive officer of Securitize Capital, told Bloomberg.

© 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.

Goldman Sachs is seeking to raise $2 billion from investors to potentially purchase assets from troubled crypto lender Celsius, two people familiar with the matter told CoinDesk.

The investors would be able to acquire Celsius assets at discounts in the event of a bankruptcy filing, the people were cited as saying.

Goldman seems to be soliciting commitments from web3 crypto funds, funds specializing in distressed assets and traditional financial institutions, according to a person cited in the report.

Goldman Sachs did not respond to a request for comment, CoinDesk said.

Celsius said on June 12 that it would pause withdrawals on its platform, citing market conditions as the price of Ether and other cryptocurrencies tumbled. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Celsius had hired management consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal to advise on the ongoing process.

© 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.

Yuga Labs, creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), has sued artist Ryder Ripps and several associates, accusing them of producing and selling “copycat NFTs” that devalue the originals, according to its Twitter feed and that of the Bored Ape Gazette, which tweeted a lawsuit filing with inserted illustrations.

The lawsuit claims that the artist sought to “devalue the Bored Ape NFTs by flooding the NFT market with his own copycat NFT collection using the original Bored Ape Yacht Club images and calling them “RR/BAYC” NFTs.”

The suit points out that Bored Ape NFTs “often resell for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, and prominent celebrities are proud holders of Bored Ape NFTs,” adding that only 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs exist and that each is unique.

Yuga Labs seeks a judgement restraining Ripps and associates from “engaging in further interference with its prospective economic relations,” as well as damages and attorneys’ fees.

An email seeking comment on the lawsuit from Ripps was sent to an address on his website, but no response had been received by time of publication.

Ripps said earlier this year on Twitter that he had been “researching and posting about BAYC Nazi ties.” The Bored Ape founders pushed back against these allegations in a blog post on Friday.

The Yuga Labs lawsuit was filed on Friday in US District Court of Central California by law firm Fenwick & West, and a 43-page document was tweeted early today by the Bored Ape Gazette.

© 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.

Salvatore Ferragamo, a luxury fashion brand headquartered in Florence, Italy, has installed a non-fungible token (NFT) booth in New York City, where customers can design and mint their own Ethereum-backed NFTs on OpenSea.

The booth is part of a larger launch of a Salvatore Ferragamo concept store in the SoHo district of the city, which opened its doors on Friday. Only 256 NFTs can be minted in total, and are free to all visitors. The fees that cost to mint an NFT will be covered in advance by the brand.

For the launch, the brand is working with artist Shxpir, who has previously worked with companies like Coach to design holographic handbags. For Salvatore Ferragamo, Shxpir has created 3D digital visual elements for the NFTs. 

The launch comes just a day after NFT.NYC – a conference about non-fungible tokens in Times Square – wraps up after a week of discussions about how fashion brands can lean into the Web3 and NFT space. Big-name brands like Gucci, Prada, Bulgari and many others have all recently launched NFT collections of their own. 

This isn’t Salvatore Ferragamo’s first step into the virtual world.

Last year, the brand worked with Obsess, a virtual and augmented reality software platform that helps companies launch virtual experiences and interactive e-stores. The virtual store, called “House of Gifts” allowed customers to play around in a digital villa that showcased Ferragamo products. 

© 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.