FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

ProShares plans to launch a short bitcoin exchange traded fund (ETF) to allow investors to bet on declines in the largest cryptocurrency. 

The ProShares Short Bitcoin Strategy ETF will give investors the opportunity to profit from a decline in bitcoin’s price, or to hedge their exposure to crypto, according to a statement on Monday. The product will launch on Tuesday with the ticker BITI as markets reopen following the Juneteenth holiday.

“As recent times have shown, bitcoin can drop in value,” ProShares CEO Michael L. Sapir said in Monday’s announcement, adding that the product will enable investors to obtain short exposure to bitcoin through a traditional brokerage account. 

BITI will aim to deliver the opposite performance of the S&P CME Bitcoin Futures Index. It will obtain exposure through bitcoin futures contracts. 

Alternatively investors will also have the option of investing through ProFunds, an affiliated mutual fund company of ProShares, which will launch a short bitcoin strategy ProFund (BITIX) on Tuesday. 

Previously ProShares was the first issuer to offer a crypto ETF product in the US, with the launch of its ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF — which topped almost $1 billion in its first day of trading in October 2021.

While this is the first product of its kind in the US, several short bitcoin exchange traded products (ETPs) already exist in markets from Europe to Canada.

The launch comes as trading in bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies was flat on Monday, following a tumultuous week that saw bitcoin fall below $20,000 for the first time since December 2020.

© 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 2013, Nubank is the largest neobank in Latin America with +50 million users in Brazil, Mexico and Columbia
• After its Series G round in June 2021, Nubank went public in December 2021 – the company raised USD $2.6 billion and was valued at USD $41.5 billion during the time of the IPO
• In 2022, Nubank is focusing on increasing market share in Mexico/Columbia and expanding its product offerings to accelerate growth
• To increase profitability, Nubank should concentrate on increasing the average revenue per active customer (ARPAC) and expanding its credit portfolio to include more lucrative products such as mortgages

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

Bancor, a decentralized exchange on Ethereum, has paused one of its main features called impermanent loss (IL) protection. The DEX cited large sales of Bancor (BNT) tokens for its action.

Bancor first launched in 2017 as one of the very first decentralized exchanges on Ethereum. Later it became widely known for its feature of offering protection against impermanent loss — a type of loss incurred when someone supplies two unrelated crypto assets to a liquidity pool. 

This impermanent loss comes into play when the price of any two tokens supplied together to any liquidity pool diverges. Impermanent loss occurs when the value of liquidity provider (LP)’s position is less than what LP would have had if they didn’t invest in the liquidity pool and just held the assets in their wallet instead.

While most decentralized exchanges like Uniswap don’t provide protection against impermanent loss, Bancor subsidizes it by paying out newly minted Bancor tokens as rewards. It’s up to LPs if they want to hold or liquidate these tokens on the market.

In a Sunday blog, the Bancor team noted amid turbulence in crypto markets, large centralized entities have recently sold large amounts of BNT tokens paid to them as IL rewards. Dune Analytics shows that during June, there was huge spike in the amount of BNT minted for impermanent protection feature, much of which is said to have been sold off. 

To protect the BNT token from getting further depreciated in value, the team decided to temporary halted IL rewards, before adding that those will be be reactivated after the market stabilizes. 

“The need to pause IL protection is a result of the recent sell-off of emissions that were accumulated over the last 18 months,” the Bancor stated in a blog post. “The temporary measure to pause IL protection should give the protocol some room to breathe and help BNT recover.” 

Bancor Network (BNT) token traded at about $0.52 at the time of writing, up 5% over the past 24 hours — but still 40% lower than its price a week ago.

© 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.

Metaverse game developer and publisher Bisonic launched the first playable demo of its Forgotten Runiverse on Monday, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on the NFT collection Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult.

The game has been in development since late last year in cooperation with blockchain studio Machine Magic. While the company is hoping for a V1.0 release in early 2023, it said in a statement that it wanted to give players an “early look” at the platform.

“This first playable build won’t have any purchases. It’s really about letting people see the start of the world that we’re building,” said TetraTiger, Bisonic’s head of marketing.

Players will be able to explore the game’s different regions and hunt for frogs in the Runiverse. These frogs will grant in-game power-ups and an improved spot on the allow list for the upcoming land sale.

Forgotten Runiverse is one of several projects that have started marketing themselves as “create-to-earn,” an alternative to the popular but struggling play-to-earn monetization model that focuses on rewarding players who add value to the community through the creation of items and use of land.

“Each item in the game is unique depending on who makes it, their crafting ability, and the combination of materials used,” said TetraTiger. “So you can create a really cool, or really powerful item that you actually on-chain, and then you’re at liberty to sell it and earn from your efforts… A player who builds a forge on their plot could gain a crafting fee whenever another player uses it or could sell tickets to a poetry reading or other event in their Guild Hall.” 

The launch follows a private land sale announced in April led by Swiss crypto fund Dialectic. Seven Seven Six, founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, also joined the initial investment round, alongside Libertus Capital, Kenetic Capital, Placeholder, 1confirmation, Wenew Labs, No Goat Milk (Future Corp) and crypto Twitter anons Fiskantes, Deeze and Soby.

According to data provider CryptoSlam, the Forgotten Runes collection currently ranks 136th in all time sales volume for 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.

Metaverse building company LandVault and in-play advertising platform Admix said on Monday that they would merge and rebrand – a move that brings together over 160 staff, including 100 metaverse developers and artists, as well as $25 million in growth capital.

According to a statement from the company, the new entity has been valued at $300 million.

CEO and founder of Admix Sam Huber will lead the new entity while LandVault’s founders move onto a new venture. Huber founded Admix in 2018 and has worked with brands such as McDonalds, Calvin Klein, and Formula 1 to create product placements within games. It recently launched a metaverse offering and to date has raised $37 million in funding.

The younger company in the merger, LandVault was founded just last year but saw growth from five to 100 builders within six months. It focuses on building infrastructure for projects in the metaverse, mostly in The Sandbox.

Despite Admix’s CEO taking the reins, the merged company will operate under LandVault’s name.

Admix’s entire management team is also staying on and will operate autonomously.

The move comes as NFT projects up the ante in terms of selling virtual land. Earlier in June, Illuvium, a monster-battle roleplaying game that incorporates non-fungible tokens (NFTs), announced that it raised over $72 million in digital land sales.

Yuga Labs sale of metaverse land for its Otherside project also briefly crashed the Ethereum blockchain in May due to its popularity. The mint price was 305 ApeCoin, worth about $5,800 at the time of mint. It brought in 16.7 million ApeCoin ($317 million), making it a record-setting NFT mint. 

© 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.

Episode 55 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and NFT.NYC Founders Jodee Rich and Cameron Bale.

Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblockcrypto.com.

This week approximately 15,000 non-fungible token (NFT) enthusiasts from around the world descend on New York City for the fourth annual NFT.NYC conference, which features more than 1,500 speakers over four days.

In this episode of The Scoop, NFT.NYC conference founders Jodee Rich and Cameron Bale sit down with host Frank Chaparro to share details of the upcoming conference and its origins — and to analyze the boom and cultural adoption that NFTs have witnessed over the last few years.

As Jodee Rich explains during the show, although he has worked with multiple forms of emerging technologies over the years, he has never seen a new technology embraced as readily as NFTs have been:

“I was very early in the social media boom, very early in telephony, mobile telephony, very, very early in microcomputers… I’ve never seen a particular technology being adopted so quickly — and it’s way beyond trading, which is the very interesting thing.”

As data from The Block shows, NFT sales have grown exponentially over the last two years.

For this year’s NFT.NYC, the organizers specially partnered with NFT intelligence platform Mnemonic to analyze the crypto wallet addresses provided by attendees. As Cameron Bale explains, Mnemonic’s findings showed that most attendees acquired their first NFT within the last two years:

“Something super interesting is that 68% of our attendees got their first NFT in 2021 and 22% of them got their first NFT in 2022, and that’s from a survey of 15,000 attendees.”

During this episode, Chaparro, Rich, and Bale also discuss:

• NFT use cases outside of art and collectables.
• How luxury brands are utilizing NFTs.
• The advantages of NFT ticketing.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.

About Coinbase Prime
Coinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.

About Cross River
Cross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/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.

Prosecutors in Korea have blocked Terra developers and former developers from leaving the country as investigations into the failed crypto project continue.

According to Korean media outlet JTBC News, the newly reconstituted Financial and Securities Crime Joint Investigation Team says the travel embargo is to prevent persons of interest in the case from leaving the country. This move could also be in preparation for additional investigative actions such as search and seizures, as well as subpoenas for other persons involved.

One former Terra developer, Daniel Hong, said on Twitter that developers like himself had not been notified of the travel embargo. He said, “[to be honest] people being treated as potential criminals like this is absolutely outrageous and unacceptable.”

Do Kwon and Terraform Labs are already the subject of several ongoing investigations and lawsuits in different jurisdictions both in Korea and abroad. These regulatory troubles stem from the collapse of luna and the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin.

Terraform Labs is also under investigation for possible tax evasion in Korea to the tune of about $78 million. Kwon has previously responded that the company does not have any outstanding tax liabilities in the country.

© 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 financial services firm Babel Finance, which abruptly suspended withdrawals last week, has announced several steps to improve its liquidity situation.

Sharing the news with The Block in a statement on Monday, Babel Finance said it carried out an emergency assessment of its business operations to understand its liquidity status and has also reached “preliminary agreements on the repayment period of some debts” with major counterparties and customers, “which has eased the company’s short-term liquidity pressure.”

Today’s announcement doesn’t mean withdrawals — which were suspended on Friday because it was facing “unusual liquidity pressures” — are resumed, however. The company said it has “actively communicated with shareholders and potential investors, and will continue to communicate and obtain liquidity support.”

Amid reports that Babel Finance has informed partners it’s insolvent, a company spokesperson told The Block that “no, we never told partners that.”

When asked whether Babel Finance is facing liquidity issues due to exposure to troubled crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, the spokesperson said, “Babel Finance has no business with Three Arrow Capital.”

Unicorn issues

Last month, Babel Finance entered the unicorn club firm after raising $80 million in a Series B funding round at a $2 billion valuation.

Investors in the round included Jeneration Capital, Dan Tapiero’s 10T Holdings, Dragonfly Capital and Circle Ventures.

Founded in 2018, Hong Kong-based Babel Finance provides lending and trading services to institutional investors. It claimed to have about 500 clients and 170 employees as of last month.

The liquidity issues of Babel Finance mark the latest blow to the crypto space. In recent weeks, Terra, Celsius and Three Arrows Capital have all suffered financial problems.

Last month, Terra’s ecosystem completely collapsed, losing $40 billion in value. Last week, crypto lending firm Celsius halted customer withdrawals. And earlier this week, top crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital faced massive liquidations after failing to meet margin call requirements.

© 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.

Bybit, the second-largest crypto futures exchange, joined rivals in cutting jobs to weather the ongoing downturn in crypto markets. 

Affected staff will be “accorded a severance package and access to Bybit’s employee career support in their job transition,” a spokesperson for Bybit told The Block on Monday. They declined to comment on how many jobs will go or how many people the exchange currently employs. Bybit has more than 660 employees, according to its LinkedIn page.

Bybit is the latest crypto exchange to announce layoffs. In recent weeks, Coinbase, Gemini, BitMEX and Crypto.com have all cut jobs. A minimum of 1,500 people have lost jobs in the crypto space in the past two months, The Block reported recently.

Bybit employed “a few hundred” people at the start of 2020 and has expanded by 300% since then, according to an email to staff from CEO Ben Zhou seen by The Block. Bybit’s spokesperson declined to comment on whether the message was genuine. 

“Our organization size had grown exponentially but the overall business growth did not grow in the same way,” Zhou said in the email. “During the latest staff review, internal efficiency is still the biggest problem that Bybit has now. This means our operational efficiency has gotten worse despite our growing size. It’s evident that we haven’t utilized our fast-growing resources properly.”

Bybit was founded in 2018 in Singapore and quickly grew popular in the derivates space. It is currently the second-largest crypto exchange in futures trading, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard.

Bybit’s “fundamentals remain strong” with more than 6 million users in over 160 countries, the spokesperson said.

“We are committed to continuously investing in strategic web3 projects and acquisitions, as well as sponsoring non-profit organizations as we streamline our expansion plans based on our business priorities,” they added.

© 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.

Iran will cut electric power to all its 118 legal crypto mining centers this month as the country faces increased energy demand.

According to a Bloomberg report, electricity to all 118 legal crypto mining centers in Iran to cease from June 22 ahead of a seasonal spike in power demand, Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi, spokesman for the country’s power industry, said during an interview with Iranian state TV. Mashhadi also warned the country of increased power shortages this week as demand surpasses 63,000 megawatts. 

Iran’s relationship with crypto mining has been fraught. In 2020, it gave over 1,000 miners licenses to operate following legalization. Such moves have meant that licensed bitcoin farms have popped up in the country, hoping to capitalize on the country’s cheap power. According to studies, Iran has also used crypto mining to lessen the impact of sanctions levelled upon the country. 

At the same time, however, the country has cracked down on illegal mining activity — seizing 7,000 crypto mining units in June of last year. It has also made moves to shut down illegal cryptocurrency mining farms, disconnecting them from the national power grid and prosecuting the miners in question. It also previously imposed a ban on its authorized crypto mining centers in December for power-saving measures. 

Such policies have had an impact on the mining industry in Iran. It was estimated by Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic in May of last year that 4.5% of all Bitcoin mining took place in the country. It is now down to 0.12% as of January, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF). 

© 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.