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Digital Currency Group (DCG), a cryptocurrency investment firm founded by Barry Silbert in 2015, has officially launched its long-heralded wealth management subsidiary.

Named HQ Digital, it will offer private investments, estate planning, risk mitigation and insurance, among other services, according to its website. It will complement DCG’s existing slate of businesses, which includes asset manager Grayscale, trading business Genesis Global and news site CoinDesk. 

“You could think of HQ as a re-envisioned multi-family office, but we prefer to call it your delta team for optimizing life,” the firm’s website says.

According to LinkedIn, the wealth management unit will be helmed by Alana Ackerson. Previously, Ackerson was co-founder of Figure, the blockchain-focused fintech firm led by SoFi’s former CEO Mike Cagney. Her bio reads that she is currently leading a new DCG subsidiary that will work with “the world’s preeminent crypto, blockchain, and DeFi entrepreneurs and investors.” 

The Block previously reported on HQ in December 2020 where it was understood that it would serve as a conduit for Grayscale’s investment products, offering clients advice on where to invest.

Digital Currency Group competes with The Block in supplying news and research on crypto markets.

HQ didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the launch.

© 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 attacker who sniped 20 million Optimism (OP) tokens meant for crypto market maker Wintermute has sent 1 million of those coins to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s wallet address, according to PeckShield.

Data from Etherscan shows the transfer occurred at 12:26 AM UTC with the attacker sending tokens worth about $874,000. It is unclear why they sent the tokens to Buterin’s wallet having previously sold a large chunk of them. One element may be that the tokens are largely illiquid on decentralized exchanges, since there is very little liquidity left, and so can’t be sold for much at present.

The exploiter also delegated voting rights for the 1 million tokens to Ethereum Foundation security researcher Yoav Weiss. Buterin had also previously delegated his 1,746 OP tokens from the Optimism airdrop to Weiss as well. Weiss has tweeted that he is not the hacker but suggested that the person might be a white hat hacker.

The attack happened due to a mistake made by Wintermute. The crypto market maker secured a 20 million OP token grant from Optimism but provided a multi-signature Ethereum address that was yet to be deployed on the Optimism network.

This error allowed the hacker to claim the undeployed address on Optimism thereby siphoning all the funds. Wintermute says it bought the 1 million tokens immediately sold by the attacker following the exploit.

Wintermute has asked the hacker to return the stolen OP tokens while offering a consulting role to the entity responsible. The exploiter has one week to respond to Wintermute’s offer but — having sent this further amount to Buterin — now only 18 million of the stolen 20 million are left in their wallet.

© 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’s head of non-fungible tokens (NFT) and fan tokens, Helen Hai, said today that the exchange is looking to offer courses to empower women to make money from NFTs.

In an on-stage conversation at the Money 20/20 conference in Amsterdam, Hai spoke about the benefits of blockchain for removing intermediaries in the art world and beyond. She said that the ultimate goal for NFTs is a “technological Renaissance” in art.

She said that the answer to the question of whether a technology has value or not is whether it solves real-world problems.

“Tech should be a tool to bring value,” she added. “Anyone with our platform can become an artist.”

The comments come as the exchange giant pushes into the world of NFTs with its own marketplace. When the exchange announced the launch back in April, a Binance spokesperson told The Block that it was a “strategic move” as it supports the “fundamental value and potential of NFT application in the long run.” 

At the time, Binance said the NFT platform will offer two main features: “Premium events” and trading. Premium events will allow creators to exhibit and auction their work on the platform.

Binance said it would charge 10% fees for these events, and 90% of the proceeds would go to the creators as profit.

© 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 Bored Ape community has voted to keep building within the Ethereum ecosystem, rather than move the ApeCoin token its own blockchain as creator Yuga Labs had suggested.

According to a snapshot vote that ended today, the ApeCoin governance mechanism — known as the ApeCoin DAO — voted 53.6% in favor of staying within the Ethereum ecosystem. The vote was close, with 3.8 million APE voting for the proposal and 3.3 million APE voting against it.

“Migrating to a different chain is a costly, risky, and complex endeavor with many moving parts that may, if not thoughtfully considered, result in catastrophic loss, or at worst, abandonment by Yuga Labs,” said the proposal.

Some large token holders that voted had a big impact. One investor who came out against the proposal did so with 1.2 million APE, representing 17% of the total vote. The top 13 voting holders controlled 56% of tokens in the poll.

Why is the DAO voting on this?

The vote came about after Yuga Labs — creator of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) — kicked off discussion over the future of its native token ApeCoin, which is currently running on the Ethereum blockchain. After it sold parcels of land in its yet-to-be-built Otherside metaverse for $317 million in April, it blamed the Ethereum network for not being able to cope with demand. 

“It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We’d like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction,” Yuga Labs said on Twitter at the time.

This led to a flurry of proposals from other blockchain projects that ApeCoin — and even the entire Otherside metaverse — should migrate to their ecosystems. 

The first proposal was by Ava Labs, the team behind Avalanche. It said Otherside and ApeCoin should be launched on an Avalanche subnet, a type of blockchain running on the Avalanche network. This would let it use its own token for transaction fees as well as control its level of decentralization and security.

The second proposal was by Immutable X, an Ethereum-based platform that’s designed for creating and trading NFTs. It suggested that using its platform would provide for a faster and smoother experience, while remaining in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Neither of these proposals have gone to a vote as of yet. It’s also worth noting that ApeCoin DAO only has direct control over ApeCoin itself, while Yuga Labs remains in control of its other projects like Otherside — alongside partners like Animoca Brands. While the DAO may be able to influence Yuga Labs’ decision-making process, it isn’t able to force its hand.

© 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.

Tether announced today that it is launching its USDT stablecoin on the Tezos blockchain, just days after it expanded to Polygon.

Tether has been enlarging its network reach amid heavy redemptions of USDT in recent weeks. Over the past month, USDT’s supply has declined by 6 billion, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard. 

Tezos is the 12th blockchain on which USDT will be available, after Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, Algorand, Tron, Omni, EOS, Liquid Network, Kusama and Bitcoin Cash’s Standard Ledger Protocol.

Tether says USDT’s launch on Tezos will help the blockchain network’s DeFi ecosystem. “Several notable projects have launched on Tezos, including those in the fashion, music, gaming, and art industries,” Tether told The Block in a statement. Still, Tezos’s ecosystem is currently tiny, with a total value locked (TVL) of $36 million, according to data from DeFi Llama.

While USDT is available across many blockchains, its usage on Ethereum and Tron is the highest, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard. Tether told The Block that it plans to launch USDT on “any and all blockchains as well as L2 [Layer2] protocols.”

© 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 has agreed to invest in Southeast Asian crypto exchange Zipmex as part of its latest fundraising round after deciding against a full acquisition.

A purchase of Zipmex by Coinbase had been discussed by the pair, but ultimately they settled instead on a strategic investment, according to people familiar with the matter. Coinbase signed a term sheet committing to that investment in March.

Zipmex has been courting investors in recent weeks as it attempts to raise around $40 million at a valuation of $400 million, according to one other person close to the talks. They added that Babel Finance may lead the round, but a spokesperson for Babel declined to comment.

A spokesperson for Zipmex said: “We are in process of raising Series B+ and are speaking to a range of investors. We have not finalized lead investors or valuation. We cannot comment on market speculation or rumors.”

Founded by CEO Marcus Lim in 2018, Zipmex has already hauled in some $52 million in Series B funding — spread across investments of $41 million and $11 million in September 2021 and March this year, respectively. Its existing investors include B Capital, TNB Aura, V Ventures, Bank of Ayudhya’s Krungsri Finnovate, Master Ad and MindWorks Capital. The proceeds of those rounds were earmarked for boosting Zipmex’s presence across Southeast Asia.

While legally headquartered in Singapore, Zipmex has deep roots in Thailand — where it has a digital assets exchange license issued by the Ministry of Finance, the local regulator. In December of last year, The Bangkok Post reported that Zipmex accounted for roughly a quarter of the turnover of the digital assets market in Thailand.

The company also has offices in Singapore, Thailand, Australia and Indonesia.

Cash conservation 

After going public through a landmark direct listing on Nasdaq in April last year, Coinbase is currently in cash conservation mode. Last week, the US exchange operator said it would extend a hiring freeze and rescind some job offers, in an effort to adjust to a tougher macro environment and volatile crypto markets.

A few weeks earlier, it had announced plans to slash spending and boost revenue, after posting a net loss of $430 million in the first quarter of this year.

© 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.

OpenSea’s co-founder and CEO Derin Finzer said the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace would redouble its efforts to curb fraud and plagiarism on the platform. 

In a blog post on Wednesday, Finzer wrote that although fraud, intellectual property (IP) theft and plagiarism are prohibited under OpenSea’s terms, “at our scale, comprehensive policies aren’t enough.”

Up to now, the platform has built systems to try to combat the bulk of banned activities, with a new verification system, an image scanning “copymint prevention system” and an improved search functionality to help people find authentic content. 

Still, fraud and hacks in the ecosystem are rife, and OpenSea – the largest platform by share of market volume according to data from The Block Research – has previously been criticized for being slow to act on incidents where stolen NFTs were sold on. 

One step OpenSea says it will take to prevent future incidents is to automatically hide suspicious NFT transfers, to lower their visibility on individual profile pages. It also said it has begun working with key rights holders to build image-detection models for automatic takedowns, and will expand this work “tremendously” in the coming months.  

A third measure it has put in place is creating a moderation team as well as adding auto-detection methods for copyright issues and other vectors of fraud.

“With new technology and rapid user adoption come novel challenges. We recognize that as leaders, we have a responsibility to play an outsized, active role in solving these issues,” Finzer 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.

A Vietnam-based blockchain gaming guild named Ancient8 has secured another capital injection, despite growing caution among venture capital firms that saw at least one prior investor decline to participate.

Ancient8 has raised $6 million in a private token sale led by Makers Fund and C² Ventures, according to a statement on Thursday. New and existing backers including Pantera Capital, 6th Man Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Folius Ventures, Morningstar Ventures, Th3ia Capital, Sky9 Capital and Play Ventures also participated. The company didn’t disclose the valuation the latest funding gives it. 

However, at least one investor in Ancient8’s last round declined to back this deal as VC firms reassess their investments following May’s dramatic collapse of the Terra ecosystem, according to people familiar with the matter.

Dragonfly Capital — which co-led in Ancient8’s $4 million raise in January — tried to renegotiate a possible investment before backing out altogether, people familiar with the talks told The Block. No term sheet or deal-related documents had been signed when the negotiations collapsed, according to one person. Crypto.com Capital also pulled back from the Ancient8 deal over its valuation, according to two sources.

“We continue investing in the best entrepreneurs helping build the future of crypto every week. We never comment on any specific transactions other than to say that we honor all our signed commitments,” said a Crypto.com Capital spokesperson. “In general, we recognize that the macro environment has changed and this has an impact on valuations and it has to be reflected in ongoing investment discussions.”

The spokesperson added that Crypto.com’s $500 million fund, which launched in March 2021, invested in more than 70 deals in its first 12 months — including 20 in the last three months alone.

Ultimately, Ancient8 raised the $6 million at the original valuation it had sought, according to one person with knowledge of the deal.

GameFi infrastructure

Founded less than a year ago, Ancient8 builds software for GameFi operations. It helps studios home in on promising gamers and target them with “web3-native” ads. Gamers themselves can use Ancient8’s technology to burnish their profiles, showcase achievements, and so on.

So far, Ancient8 has built a community of more than 200,000 members, it said in the press release. It manages the largest blockchain gaming guild in Vietnam, which boasts over 3,500 so-called “scholars.”

The cash injection will be used to speed up the development of its GameFi infrastructure products.

“We will continue to expand our product offerings, partner with more innovative projects and games, and grow our influence and reach with a large global community,” Howard Xu, co-founder of Ancient8, said in the statement. “As cultivators of the first native generation of metaverse citizens, we are excited to be building the foundational infrastructure that will drive mainstream GameFi adoption.”

© 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 payments startup Request Finance has won the backing of venture capital firm Balderton Capital and gaming firm Animoca Brands in a $5.5 million seed round. 

The startup, which simplifies and automates invoicing, expenses and payroll for both centralized and decentralized companies, also attracted investor interest from VC XAnge and angel investors, such as Aave founder Stani Kulechov and Sebastian Borget, co-founder of The Sandbox.

Founder and CEO Christophe Lassuyt said that Request Finance sees itself as a “web3 Bill.com” — a crypto-native invoicing solution complete with on-chain payment confirmations and market-rate crypto exchange rates. 

“Bill.com helps customers pay hundreds of invoices in one click and that’s what we do with Request Finance,” said Lassuyt in an interview with The Block. “You can pay 100 invoices in 50 different currencies to 20 different countries in one click.” 

The company claims to have processed over $200 million in invoices since launching in January 2021. Lassuyt said that it currently has 20 clients including The Sandbox, Polygon, MakerDAO, and Near Protocol. 

With the new funding, the company plans to hire more staff and boost marketing for the product. It hopes to tap into the networking benefits of having fintech VCs such as Balderton on its cap table, alongside crypto VCs such as Animoca Brands.

© 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.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Rostin Benham is looking to research and incentives to address energy usage in bitcoin mining. 

During the Washington Post’s “Evolution of Money” event, Benham responded to concerns about bitcoin being “extremely energy-intensive” by pointing to research provisions in the newly introduced legislation from US Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand.

The legislation calls on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to create a report on energy consumption in the digital asset industry. 

Benham said it’s not yet clear how the industry will change and evolve over time as it addresses energy usage, but the current state of things includes “a pretty significant dislocation” of energy. Benham said that dislocation needs to be addressed, whether it be through a shift in technology, like moving to proof-of-stake mechanisms, or other ways.

But the minimum change, said Benham, is increasing the flow of information to investors and consumers. With the right and accurate disclosures, Benham said he expects people will move away from energy consumptive behavior.

“On the one hand, we need the industry to transition and change and understand that the energy consumption is too big,” he said. “But we also need consumers to understand and appreciate what’s at stake so through essentially economic incentives they can steer their choice away from the more energy consumptive behavior.”

© 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.