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Binance has changed its payment provider in Brazil after suspending transfers to and from the country’s Pix instant payment system last week.

The exchange had been using services from Capitual to provide deposits and withdrawals to users’ Pix accounts, but said on June 24 that it will now be working with Brazilian payment provider Latam Gateway going forward. Latam Gateway was founded in 2019. 

Binance explained that it would use Latam Gateway’s services as it works to acquire Brazilian brokerage Sim;paul.

“With the exchange, Binance will offer a better solution for clients as it conducts the process of acquiring local brokerage Sim;paul, a company authorized by the central bank and the Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM), announced in March,” Binance said.

As reported by outlets including Portal do Cripto and CoinDesk Brasil, Binance stopped supporting Pix withdrawals and deposits in Brazilian reais on June 17. The news outlets reported that the issues had to do with new policies from Brazil’s central bank, based on an image shared by Binance users stating the Pix deposit and withdrawals were being blocked. This was due to the channel being unstable following updated central bank policies, the message said.

CoinDesk Brasil reported that the blocked transactions coincided with a central bank deadline requiring Pix providers to adopt new know-your-customer (KYC) requirements.

Binance said in a statement to The Block that Capitual had not been offering services to its users since last week. In its June 24 update, it said the integration process with Latam Gateway would be completed “soon” and that it would let users know when Pix transactions are up and running normally again. However, it did not give a firm date. In the meantime, Binance directed users to its peer-to-peer system and said it had an “alternative provider” for its users to buy crypto using Pix and bank transfers. 

However, a June 24 article in Portal do Bitcoin quotes Capitual as saying, in Portuguese: “The services provided to the international exchanges with which it has a partnership are operating normally, so the information that it interrupted operations for Binance is not valid.” In other words, Portal do Bitcoin explained, Capitual suggested that Binance decided to stop using Capitual’s services.

Separately, Binance announced on June 23 that it will soon be hosting a three-day workshop in Brasília for Federal Police investigators and other guests about crypto assets and blockchain. The exchange said it would discuss its anti-money laundering (AML) policies and its processes for collaborating with authorities against crime.

© 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 miners ended the week of trading on a high note, as Bitcoin’s price climbed back above $21,000.

Hive Blockchain’s stock rose 10.53% on Nasdaq and 9.55% on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Other companies that did well include Bitfarms (+8.70%), Hut 8 (+7.45%) and Bit Digital (+6.45%).

BIT Mining, which fell the day before by 39.85%, saw its stock go down further 3.46% on Friday.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Friday, June 24:

© 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 Friday, Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee held a closed briefing on Bitcoin’s environmental impact⁠ today, The Block has learned.

Three sources confirmed the noon briefing to The Block. A memo for the briefing seen by The Block identified four witnesses who were unanimously anti-crypto.

One, Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan, tweeted shortly before appearing that “blockchain has so far proven useless. Worse, it’s proven a costly distraction to people and communities who are trying to solve real problems.”

Another, Yvonne Taylor, leads an environmental organization that is working to shut down mining operations in upstate New York, calling it “the test case for the encroaching wave of cryptocurrency mining that could result in the conversion of nearly 30 shuttered upstate power plants.”

Attendance to the briefing, however, was sparse.

A Supreme Court decision Friday morning overturned the Roe v. Wade decision, ending the federal right to abortion. Consequently, protests have surrounded the Supreme Court complex and pulled in a number of the Democrats on the committee, including Chair Maxine Waters.

A source with knowledge of the briefing noted that no representatives attended, with very few staff. Prior to addressing the main issue of environmental impact, those in attendance focused on recent crashes in crypto, especially Celsius and Terra. 

Staff for Waters had not responded to requests for comment as of press time. 

© 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

• Besides mint revenues, NFTs projects lean on royalty earnings as the second major pillar for revenue generation
• Collectively, the top 10 NFT projects have amassed 92.6K ETH ($112.4mm at today’s ETH price) in cumulative royalty revenue
• The two performed case studies hint at a rather undifferentiated fund management between primary and secondary revenues

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Austrian investing platform Bitpanda is letting go of about 730 people and rescinding offers of employment made recently.

The company announced the layoffs during a call Friday, per a statement put out on its website. Bitpanda’s current workforce is roughly 1,000, according to the website.

“While this is a tough decision to make, it was nonetheless necessary to make sure we’re robustly well-capitalized to navigate the storm and get out of it financially healthy, no matter how long it takes for markets to recover,” Bitpanda said.

The company also shared a message it sent to employees over Slack, in which it stated that it was growing too fast while trying to keep up with the industry.

“We reached a point where more people joining didn’t make us more effective, but created coordination overheads instead, particularly in this new market reality. Looking back now, we realize that our hiring speed was not sustainable. That was a mistake,” the company told employees.

Bitpanda joins a series of other firms in the crypto space that have cut back on their staff in recent weeks including Coindesk, BlockFi, Gemini and Crypto.com. Thousands of jobs have been cut.

Bitpanda told employees that it would offer those who were laid off support ranging from 1:1 coaching with talent acquisition partners to mental health support and an employee assistance program.

© 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.

Lido DAO members are currently voting on whether the liquid staking protocol should take steps to reduce its dominance of its Ethereum 2.0 staking pool, the project announced on Friday.

Lido Finance is a decentralized protocol that provides customers tradeable tokens, called staked ETH (stETH) in exchange for crypto assets, which Lido then stakes on the Ethereum Beacon chain — a precursor to Ethereum 2.0 (ETH2).

The popular service, called liquid staking, allows users to effectively unlock the value of their staked crypto, which must remain locked in the network for a set period of time. Lido users can deploy their stETH on other DeFi protocols like MakerDAO and Aave.

The vote, which began on Friday at 5:00 a.m. EDT, is coming after a month-long debate among community members over the merits of reducing the community’s staking influence. Data from this Dune Analytics dashboard shows that Lido currently accounts for over 31% of all staked on the Ethereum Beacon chain.

The debate was triggered by concerns that Lido’s dominance of the ETH2 staking pool will pose a security risk to Ethereum after it transitions from proof of work to proof of stake. Critics, including Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan, have argued that Lido’s staking dominance combined with its governance structure is a potentially dangerous point of centralization. 

The voting process will end on July 1 at 5 AM ET. If the majority votes yes, there will be another governance vote on how the self-limiting process should work. 

© 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 an effort to expand its institutional offerings, Binance is launching a new platform for “VIP” users. 

Dubbed Binance institutional, the new product includes over-the-counter (OTC) services, asset management and custody services, a broker program and a liquidity program, the company said in an announcement Thursday.

More details on the new services are laid out on the Binance Institutional page. The company didn’t disclose many details about how the new platform works internally.

Binance institutional is targeted at a wide array of institutional investors including asset managers, hedge funds, liquidity providers, miners and high-net-worth individuals, the company said.

Despite the bear market, Binance has kept expanding on a number of fronts lately. While many firms have recently announced layoffs, Binance is seemingly charging ahead in the opposite direction, even announcing recently that it was looking to fill 2,000 new positions.

On Friday, CEO Changpeng Zhao said in an interview that the company was considering about 5,200 proposals from crypto companies and looking into possible loans, minority investments and majority acquisitions.

This week the company also announced a multi-year deal with soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, involving a series of NFT collections.

© 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 founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club branded claims by artist Ryder Ripps and YouTuber Philion that they are Nazis “bullshit” in a Medium post published on Friday.

“We’ve become the target of a crazy disinformation campaign accusing us — a group of Jewish, Turkish, Pakistani, and Cuban friends — of being super-secret Nazis. Even though the @ADL, which exists to protect Jewish people around the world from just this sort of hatred and slander, has confirmed this isn’t true, trolls are still spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories online and using them to sell knockoff NFTs (surprise!),” the group said in the statement.

Earlier this week, an hour-long YouTube video on Philion’s channel laid out a list of claims about the founders’ supposed links to Nazism and called for Twitter users to campaign against the group using the hashtag #BURNBAYC. The aim was to encourage famous Ape holders to destroy their NFTs.

BAYC has faced a flurry of criticism over the last few months spearheaded by US-based artist Ryder Ripps, who said on his website that he has been “investigat[ing] extensive connections between BAYC and subversive internet nazi troll culture” since De cember.

In mid-May he launched RR/BAYC, a collection of NFTs that copied the designs of the original BAYC NFTs.

Ripps and Philion’s claims center around the idea that the BAYC collection is full of subtle nods to Nazi ideology that would only be apparent to those deeply immersed in internet subculture. They point to an array of so-called evidence including ostensible similarities between the BAYC logo and the Nazi Totenkopf (a skull-and-crossbones image), online names chosen by the founders, phrases in the social media profiles of family members and numbers featured in the collection that may have significance to right-wing extremist communities. 

BAYC’s response laid out their explanations as to why they chose specific names and designs, including emails detailing the design process for the logo, which they said is a mix of inspiration from punk, streetwear and skate references, maritime flags and pennants and old yacht club flags.

“We never wanted to take ourselves too seriously, so the look of the club is ramshackle and divey. Everything about the BAYC was meant to convey a spirit of irreverence and absurdity… Overall, we think it’s crazy that these conspiracy theories have been able to proliferate. It really shows the power that a demented troll on the internet can have,” the founders 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.

Crypto lender Celsius continues to weigh a possible bankruptcy amid serious financial woes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The firm — which froze withdrawals, swaps and transfers earlier this month — has reportedly hired Alvarez & Marsal, a management consulting firm, to advise on the ongoing process. The Journal characterized the advisors hired as “restructuring consultants.”

The Journal, citing sources with knowledge of the process, previously reported that bankruptcy or restructuring was on the table at Celsius, which saw its fortunes fall dramatically amid a crypto market downturn that began this year. 

Celsius has offered little in the way of information since freezing withdrawals. In a June 19 notice, the firm said that “our objective continues to be stabilizing our liquidity and operations. This process will take time.”

At the time, Celsius added that it would stop holding community Q&A sessions. 

© 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.

Binance is examining about 5,200 proposals from crypto companies amid the recent market stress, CEO Changpeng Zhao said.

In a Friday interview with Yahoo Finance, Zhao added that Binance was actively looking for ways to help struggling crypto companies, either through loans, minority investments or majority acquisitions.

“We definitely look at all of that. We’re looking at 5,200 deals,” Zhao said. “Everyone knows we have the largest cash reserve in the industry. Everyone’s talking to us.”

The company has already agreed on some deals, he said, while adding that Binance would only announce agreements with large companies, citing the privacy of smaller firms. “If the projects can recover on their own, just taking loans or minority investment … we don’t need to advertise that they’re close to bankruptcy.”

The market downturn has put pressure on many crypto firms. Some companies, including CoinFLEX and Babel Finance have suspended withdrawals, citing “extreme market conditions” and “unusual liquidity pressure,” respectively. Some firms have been forced to dismiss workers and others have declared insolvency.

Zhao highlighted the importance of clear regulatory guidelines for different types of crypto businesses. The guidelines should lay out “the amount of required transparency in disclosure,” because some companies stopped communicating with investors when things went bad, 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.