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Quick Take

• The Ceramic Network is a decentralized network that supports mutable and composable data streams across an application ecosystem.
• The network infrastructure is centered around user data streams and decentralized identification which allows users to be in full control of their own data while allowing different applications to build features from them.
• Recent investor funding and early project development traction highlight Ceramic Network’s potential to further expand its community of users and ecosystem of applications.

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Bitcoin miner Crusoe Energy Systems has acquired electrical manufacturer Easter-Owens Electric Co in a bid to vertically integrate the company.

The Denver-based miner operates modular 100 data centers, using natural gas that would otherwise be flared.

Easter-Owens’s acquisition will allow Crusoe to optimize manufacturing throughput, capacity, cost, quality and supply chains, the company said Wednesday. It will also help speed up the process of prototyping new data center systems.

“Crusoe and Easter-Owens have worked together closely for several years, and we see many strategic opportunities through the integration of Easter-Owens’ design and manufacturing capabilities into Crusoe’s business,” said Crusoe’s co-founder and CEO, Cully Cavness.

Easter-Owen’s employee base of more than 70 will be integrated into the Crusoe team, per a press release. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Crusoe recently raised $505 million in a Series C round to accelerate the growth of its mining operation. At the time, the company said that it planned to expand its workforce to 250 people by the end of the year.

The company started a pilot project in North Dakota with oil and gas behemoth Exxon.  It involves converting gas into power mobile generators used for mining operations on-site.

© 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 CoinFLEX announced today it’s pausing all withdrawals due to “extreme market conditions and continued uncertainty involving a counterparty.”

The firm said that the counterparty is not Three Arrows Capital or any lending firm. “We are confident that this situation can be repaired fully with a restoration of all functionality, namely withdrawals.”

Both Three Arrows Capital and lending protocol Celsius are facing significant fallout from liquidity issues. Celsius paused withdrawals and transactions last week and has yet to communicate a path forward. Three Arrows Capital is facing potential insolvency in the aftermath due to lender liquidation and is struggling to make good with clients. 

CoinFLEX provided an estimated timeline for a path forward. It hopes to give an update on the situation by June 27th and have withdrawals operating by June 30th. Though, those dates are based on the firm’s current understanding of the situation, it said, and it plans to give more clarity on the details as soon as possible.

“We fully expect to resume withdrawals in a better position as soon as possible,” said the post. “We will fully communicate with you as we find out more.”

In 2019, CoinFLEX emerged as a platform for physically-delivered futures. Since then, it overhauled its strategy in 2020 to focus on building a repo market for crypto. Its backers include Polychain Capital and Digital Currency Group.

© 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 team behind Solana is seeking to gate-crash the telecom industry with the launch of an Android phone and a new subsidiary focused on web3 mobile apps. 

At an event in New York City, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko unveiled the new Android phone, dubbed Saga. The team is developing the device to be purpose-built for web3, which spans NFT marketplaces to decentralized trading platforms.

The phone will feature a 6.6-inch display and 512 GB of storage as well as private key security measures built into the device. 

The move into mobile reflects Yakovenko’s background as an engineer at Qualcomm, where he lead groups that built technology leveraged by the likes of Samsung, LG, and Google.

“Almost 7 billion people use smartphones around the world and more than 100 million people hold digital assets – and both of those numbers will continue to grow,” said Yakovenko, a Solana co-founder. “Saga sets a new standard for the web3 experience on mobile.”

Saga is the flagship product of a new subsidiary of Solana Labs, Solana Mobile. In addition to building out Saga, Solana Mobile will offer developers a toolkit to create mobile-first crypto applications on the Solana blockchain.

The so-called Solana Mobile Stack “provides a new set of libraries for wallets and apps, allowing developers to create rich mobile experiences on Solana,” according to a press release. Solana is pouring $10 million into a new ecosystem fund to incentive developers to build apps leveraging Solana Mobile Stack. 

The focus on hardware represents a notable shift to put Solana in the hands — proverbially and literally — of mobile web3 users. At the same time, the network has faced numerous technological hurdles in the past year, including several network stoppages, the most recent of which occurred in early June.

The device is available for pre-order for a $100 deposit and could cost as much as $1,000. Solana Mobile expects to ship the phone by early 2023.

© 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.

Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo has signed a multi-year partnership with Binance to launch a series of NFT collections, the cryptocurrency exchange and NFT marketplace announced Thursday.

“I’m delighted to announce my partnership with Binance,” Ronaldo said in a short video posted to his Twitter account. “Together we are going to change the NFT game and take football to the next level. And this is just the beginning.”

Ronaldo will have a role in creating the designs for the first NFT collection, the blog post said, which will be available only on Binance’s NFT platform. Binance said that the collection is scheduled to debut later this year, but did not give a firm launch date. The financial terms of the partnership are also unknown. Binance users in “select countries” can use Binance Pay to buy the Ronaldo NFTs. 

As of now, specifics about the utility of the NFTs are also unclear. According to the blog post, Ronaldo’s project will provide “a one-of-a-kind experience for football fans worldwide, with a series of NFT collections that will launch exclusively on Binance’s official NFT platform.”

This is not the first time Ronaldo has been associated with a crypto project. In 2019 he played with Italy’s Juventus Football Club, which launched a token called $JUV that unlocked voting power and rewards for fans.

Binance has several other soccer partnerships with different teams and clubs including the Argentine Football Association, the Brazilian Football Confederation, S.S. Lazio in Italy and FC Porto in Portugal. 

© 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 broker Voyager digital announced on its website Wednesday that it would drop daily withdrawal limits from $25,000 to $10,000.

The policy change was announced as the firm seeks to shore up its finances following a sharp decline of the company’s share price—dropping by as much as 60% throughout the day and closing at a 50.84% loss. 

The price collapse came after Voyager publicly revealed loans it made to crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC). According to Voyager, there are over $650 million in outstanding loans—made up of 15,250 BTC and $350 million USD Coin (USDC).

Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm owned by FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried, announced on Monday that it would be extending a $500 million loan to support Voyager’s losses from 3AC. The deal will consist of a $200 million line of credit made up of cash and USDC stablecoins, as well as a 15,000 BTC revolving line of credit, worth roughly $300 million at the current market price.

Voyager announced that intends to recover the funds from 3AC and is now in talks with its advisors “regarding the legal remedies available.”

The firm has sent a request for payment to 3AC, which specifies that $25 million be paid by Friday and the total balance be paid on Monday. If 3AC does not comply with these requests, Voyager says it will consider it an event of default.

© 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.

Fashion brand Gucci is joining its first decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) through a partnership with SuperRare, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace.

The news was announced on Tuesday at NFT.NYC in a discussion between SuperRare’s SVP of Business Development Zack Yanger and Nicolas Oudinot, the CEO Gucci Vault, the company’s experimental online store. 

Gucci acquired 150,000 $RARE tokens, worth around $31,000 total at press time, to join the DAO and earn governance rights within the SuperRare community, a company representative confirmed to The Block. 

The buy-in was part of the brand’s larger vision for its “Vault Art Space.” The virtual space will be powered by SuperRare technology and showcase and sell artworks from NFT artists, Jonathan Perkins, co-founder and chief product officer of SuperRare, told CoinDesk. 

In the past year, Gucci has become heavily involved in the NFT scene. In June 2021, Christie’s auctioned its first NFT, a four-minute film. In January of this year, the company launched an NFT collection called SUPERGUCCI. The company launched another NFT project, called the Gucci Grail collection, in March.

Gucci Vault project launched in February to experiment with web3 initiatives. The project has acquired virtual land in The Sandbox.

Gucci’s debut exhibition in virtual space, titled “The Next 100 Years of Gucci,” will present a selection of NFT artworks from 29 artists that show “collectible fragment of Gucci’s kaleidoscopic heritage,” according to a statement from Gucci. The exhibition will be showcased and auctioned off using ETH directly on Vault’s website in three drops. 

“This project is very, very dear to us. Because it sits at the crossroads of art and fashion,” said Oudinot on stage at NFT.NYC. 

© 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 Bitcoin network mining difficulty has dropped by 2.35%, representing the second-biggest single fall this year so far, according to BTC.com.

The drop follows a 1.29% rise in difficulty in the beginning of June. Before that, in late May, it had fallen 4.33%.

Mining difficulty refers to the complexity of the mathematical process behind mining, during which miners are repeatedly trying to find a hash below a set level. Miners that “discover” this hash win the reward for the next transaction block. Mining difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks (roughly every two weeks) in sync with the network’s hash rate.

Meanwhile, the network’s hash rate has decreased by about 2.6% since June 8, the date of the last update, according to data compiled by The Block Research.

© 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

• In this weekly series, we dive into some of the most interesting data and developments across the Layer 1 blockchain landscape, from DeFi and bridges to network activity and funding
• A recent liquidity crunch in crypto markets has put the stability of pegged assets to the test. With the spread of stablecoins throughout L1 ecosystems, destabilizing events can now have significant trickle down effects across chains
• Meanwhile, Solana begins a major evolution with the introduction of QUIC and fee markets, and Cosmos ecosystem protocols continue their push for deeper connections with EVM chains

This research piece is available exclusively to
members of The Block Research.
You can continue reading
this Research content on The Block Research.

This research piece is available exclusively to
members of The Block Research.
You can continue reading
this Research content on The Block Research.