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Solend, a lending and borrowing protocol on Solana, has reversed yesterday’s controversial DAO decision to take control of its largest user account. A new governance vote has passed that invalidates yesterday’s move, with 99% of the votes supporting the new decision.

This all started when, on Sunday, the Solend team put up a governance vote asking to take over a large user loan in order to prevent a on-chain liquidation event.

The issue was that an unknown user held a $108 million stablecoin loan collateralized by 5.7 million Solana (SOL) tokens ($170 million) on Solend. The proposal to “mitigate risk from the whale” noted that the user in question had 95% of the SOL deposits in Solend’s main pool.

The main problem was that if the price of SOL dropped to $22.30, the whale’s account would be liquidated.

In its proposal, the Solend team claimed that a liquidation of this size on-chain was risky due to thin liquidity on the lending protocol. The team further made the case that if the on-chain liquidation went through, Solend would be at risk of accruing bad debt due to a cascading drop in SOL’s value.

The team suggested that rather than a protocol liquidation, the loan should be wound up via an over the counter (OTC) deal. The Solend governance system then hurriedly passed a vote that gave the team full power to confiscate the user’s position. In this vote, 88% of the voting power came from a single address.

Later on social media, the governance decision received a lot of criticism from many commentators who berated the team for undermining the ethos of decentralization. In response, the team today said it took note of the criticism and put up a second proposal seeking to invalidate yesterday’s decision. The DAO voted today with 99% of votes in favor of invalidating the last proposal.

“We’ve been listening to your criticisms about SLND1 and the way in which it was conducted. The price of SOL has been steadily increasing, buying us some time to gather more feedback and consider alternatives,” the Solend team wrote. 

© 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 lending firm Celsius Network said it’s working with regulators and remains determined to find a resolution a week after stopping clients withdraw funds from their accounts. 

“We want our community to know that our objective continues to be stabilizing our liquidity and operations. This process will take time,” the company wrote in blog post. 

Celsius built up billions of dollars in client assets by offering retail investors an easy way to earn double-digit yields on their crypto holdings. The firm froze withdrawals and paused transfers between accounts on June 12, citing “extreme market conditions” as crypto prices slid. 

On Friday, Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky cancelled his weekly “ask me anything” event, where for years he’s been answering queries from all comers. The company said in the blog post it will be pausing these AMAs — along with its Twitter Spaces — until further notice so that it can “focus on navigating these unprecedented challenges.”

© 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.

Christie’s head of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) announced on Sunday that he would be joining industry heavyweight Yuga Labs as brand leader for its recently-acquired collection CryptoPunks. 

Noah Davis wrote on Twitter: “I really can’t overstate how incredible this journey out of the old Art World and into Web3 has been and I can’t wait to see where the road ahead leads… I only know it will continue to be wild and weird. And I like it that way.”

At Christie’s, Davis was responsible for bringing Beeple’s piece ‘The First 5,000 Days’ to auction. The sale made headlines at the time in March 2021 for its $69 million price tag, a figure which  put Beeple “among the top three most valuable living artists.”

Until recently, Yuga Labs’ headline asset was the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). But in March this year, the company bought out CryptoPunks intellectual property rights – a move which many believed would mean turning over commercial rights to NFT holders. This prompted speculation about what changes Yuga would make to the way people could use their NFTs. At the time, Yuga pledged that it would not look to emulate the club model it had created for BAYC and would look to add utility in other ways for Punk holders. 

In his announcement, Davis pledged not to “fuck with” CryptoPunks, adding that he would not be emblazoning the pixelated characters on lunchboxes or making “cringe TV shows/shitty movies.”

BAYC co-founder Garga wrote on Twitter on Sunday that new terms for Punks would be rolled out in the next couple of weeks. 

“Why the hold up on that?,” he added. “These were frankly too significant to rush, and too impactful for the NFT community at large to risk developing them in silo.”

“We’re committed to a slow and thoughtful approach to Punks that takes into account the community’s involvement and support. We’re humbled to be the stewards of this historic IP, and we have the utmost confidence in Noah and the Punk community.”

The announcement of the hire comes amid a rapid rise in the CryptoPunk collection’s floor price and trading volume. According to data provider Cryptoslam, CryptoPunks sales volume had hit $10.4 million in the last 24 hours, a more than 230% increase from yesterday. 

What’s more, the floor price for the collection had begun to spike even before the announcement went out on Twitter, according to data from Coingecko.

© 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.

Users of Solend, a decentralized protocol for lending and borrowing on Solana, today voted overwhelmingly in favor of a proposal aimed at mitigating risk imposed by a specific user with a big margin position on Solend.

The proposal to “mitigate risk from the whale” noted that the user in question had 95% of SOL deposits in the protocol’s main pool and had not been heard from in 12 days, among other points.

If SOL were to drop to $22.30, the proposal said, the whale’s account would become liquidatable for as much as 20% of borrowings, which would be difficult for the market to absorb and in the worst case, Solend could end up with bad debt. This could cause chaos and put a strain on the Solana network.

The proposal’s authors said they had been unable to get the whale to reduce the risk, so it was clear that action had to be taken, and hence the vote.

A “no” vote was to do nothing, while a “yes” vote was meant to: “Enact special margin requirements for large whales that represent over 20% of borrows and grant emergency power to Solend Labs to temporarily take over the whale’s account so the liquidation can be executed OTC.”

The proposal also noted that emergency powers granted by a “yes” vote would be revoked once “whale’s account reaches a safe level.”

© 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.

Employees at an Apple store in Towson, Maryland voted on Saturday to join a union, making it the first unionized Apple store in the US, CNBC reported.

Apple has opposed efforts to unionize, the report said. The vote, which ended on Saturday evening, may motivate workers at its other retail locations to move forward with organizing.

The Towson store is one of several Apple locations that have announced union drives, and other retail organizers were watching the results closely, CNBC said. Two high-volume stores in New York, the Grand Central Terminal and World Trade Center locations, have signaled that they are unionizing, but have not yet advanced to voting.

About 110 employees were eligible to vote on joining the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which ended with 65 in favor and 33 opposed, according to the report.

The National Labor Relations Board still needs to certify the results, which could take a week. Apple will be required to bargain with the union over working conditions after the vote is certified, according to the NLRB.

© 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 Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub on Friday revealed the first three projects of its forthcoming Eurosystem Centre.

Eurosystem Centre will open locations in Frankfurt and Paris and work with all 19 euro area central banks and the European Central Bank.

Its first project is a cryptocurrency market intelligence platform, a need that has been highlighted by the collapse of many stablecoins and decentralised finance (DeFi) lending platforms. The goal is to create an open-source market intelligence platform to shed light on market capitalisations, economic activity and risks to financial stability.

A second project involves post-quantum cryptography and securing the privacy of payments systems. Quantum computers may be capable of breaking the cryptography used by central banks and the private financial sector to secure payment and settlement systems. The goal is to test use cases in various payment systems and examine how the introduction of quantum-resistant cryptography affects their performance. 

Increasing the transparency of climate-related disclosures is the third BIS project. Central banks are increasingly looking into how climate change may affect financial stability, inflation and other issues. The hub aims to build an open-source database of corporate reports coupled with a full-text search engine to identify sustainability-related disclosures.

In addition to the Eurosystem initiatives, the Innovation Hub’s Hong Kong Centre will partner with the Bank of Israel and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority on a study of central bank digital currency and cybersecurity.

© 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.

Elon Musk tweeted his support today for Dogecoin, in spite of a class action lawsuit filed against him on Thursday claiming his actions involving the meme-themed cryptocurrency constituted a Ponzi scheme.

Musk tweeted: “I will keep supporting Dogecoin” early today in an exchange with another user, who urged him to keep buying it. “I am,” Musk tweeted in reply.

Keith Johnson, a US citizen, lodged the suit against Musk and his businesses Tesla and SpaceX in the Southern District of New York on behalf of himself and those similarly situated, claiming Musk and his business’s activities around Doge defrauded him and other investors.

The complaint alleged that Musk’s consistent messaging that he was a fan of the cryptocurrency led directly to its price spike, and when market conditions changed, investors lost out.

Musk has a long history promoting Dogecoin and the complaint highlights the greatest hits of Musk’s Doge tweets since a satirical article piqued his interest about the meme coin in 2019. The complaint points out that Dogecoin grew in value after Musk’s tweets about it in 2019.

© 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 Bank of Israel is working with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority on testing a new digital currency against cyber security risks, the Bank of Israel told Bloomberg in a statement. 

The joint project will start in the third quarter, using a two-tier central bank digital currency (CBDC), Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

The retail CBDC is being designed to allow intermediaries, such as banks, handle it with no financial exposure to their customers, and the testing process will assess whether this makes it less vulnerable to hackers.

Such an “exposure-free” CBDC may carry “less financial risk for the customer, more liquidity, lower costs, increased competition, and wider access,” Bloomberg cited the Bank of Israel as saying. 

The Bank for International Settlements’ Innovation Unit will also take part in the trial. 

© 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 continued falling today after breaking through the $20,000 mark on Saturday, plunging below $19,000 amid a broader market downturn.

Bitcoin was trading at $18,426.46 on Coinbase via TradingView at press time.

Ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network and the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, also saw its price continue to trend downward, as ETH was trading at $965.03.

The market developments come amid multiple crises in the crypto space. Celsius, a major crypto lender, halted withdrawals and transfers last week, and has since remained quiet about future steps. 

Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital is facing insolvency after seeing its positions liquidated by multiple counterparties in the market. 

© 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.

Coinbase, a digital currency wallet and trading platform, faces a class action lawsuit filed on Thursday in California Northern District Court in relation to its promotion of cryptocurrency TerraUSD, according to court documents accessed by The Block and published on its server.

The lawsuit accuses Coinbase of failing to disclose the risks inherent to TerraUSD and misleading the plaintiffs and class into believing that they were purchasing a “reserve-backed stablecoin,” a type of cryptocurrency that is generally less volatile than its counterpart.

Because TerraUSD was purportedly pegged to the US government-issued currency, specifically the world’s reserve currency, it was marketed as a type of investment that could “virtually eliminate volatility,” the filing said, adding that “in reality, TerraUSD is not backed by actual US dollars or any other tangible assets held in reserve.”

The complaint also contends that investors lost about $18 billion in a matter of days in May from the devaluation of TerraUSD.

The lawsuit was filed by the Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman law firm.

A message sent to a Coinbase representative seeking comment was not returned by time of publication.

© 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.