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Chipotle, the popular Mexican-style fast-food restaurant chain, will now accept cryptocurrency payments through Flexa, a digital payments platform.  

Flexa supports around 98 currencies, including BTC and ETH. Customers can use the app to pay for food items in any of the nearly 3000 Chipotle restaurants in the United States. 

To pay with Flexa, customers will need to download Gemini or SPEDN app, both of which store digital assets. Customers can then use the app and tap it in-store to make a payment.

Chipotle joins a long list of restaurants that currently accept cryptocurrency. Subway, one of the first to accept Bitcoin in stores, started as early as 2013. Pizza Hut in Venezuela also began accepting crypto back in 2020. Starbucks, like Chipotle, accepts cryptocurrency as payment through Flexa. 

Other fast-food chains are trying to experiment in blockchain and crypto in other ways, trying to create hybrid digital-physical experiences. Taco Bell, KFC, Chick-fil-A, and Carl’s Jr. are just a few chains to have recently filed for brand trademarks for NFTs. 

In April, Wendy’s worked with Meta to launch a virtual Wendy’s store, where users can create an avatar and sit at virtual tables with virtual food.

Chipotle was even earlier to the virtual store trend, with a virtual restaurant on Roblox for Halloween in 2021. Players could dress up their avatars in Chipotle-themed costumes like using a bag of chips as a ghost or a burrito mummy. In this experiment, the first 100,000 users got free burritos online, which could be redeemed for real ones in physical stores.

© 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.

Kanye West’s Yeezus brand has filed for 17 trademark applications indicating a possible move into the NFT space.

The applications, dated May 27, come months after West criticized non-fungible tokens in a now-deleted Instagram post in February.

The applications, accessible through the US Patent and Trademark Office, mention “blockchain-based non-fungible collectibles, assets, currencies and tokens” and “online retail store services featuring downloadable movies, videos, television, music, entertainment, digital art.”

It’s unclear if there’s an immediate intent to use the trademarks and how exactly they will be used. The filings are on a 1B basis, which means there’s a bonafide intent to use the trademarks in the future, but applicants don’t have to detail when that will be.  

This is in contrast to 1A applications, which are filed when a trademark is already in use.

© 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.

Wednesday was a difficult day for most Bitcoin miners on the stock markets.

Some fell by double digits, like Core Scientific (-14.16%) and Hut 8 (-11.31% on the Toronto Stock Exchange).

Bitfarms, which put out an operational update about the month of May, saw its stock go down by -6.47% on Nasdaq and -6.69% on the Toronto Stock Exchange. 

Per the statement, daily average production of bitcoin increased to 13.9 BTC a day — up 3% from April. Biftfarms mined 431 BTC in May, ending the month with 3.4 exahash per second online.

“Bitfarms’ mining operations remain profitable, even with the drop in Bitcoin prices,” said Ben Gagnon, chief mining officer of Bitfarms.

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Wednesday, June 1:

© 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.

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Meta, will depart the company after 14 years.

Sandberg took the role of COO at Meta, then known as Facebook,  in March of 2008, after having met Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg at a Christmas party.

Prior to her tenure at Facebook, Sandberg had built the advertising business at Google. In 2012, Sandberg become the eighth board member and first female board member of Facebook. At the social media giant, she oversaw the advertising business that helped businesses target users through data collected from their profiles and user activities.

Sandberg wrote in the post, shared Wednesday:

“When I took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years. Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life. I am not entirely sure what the future will bring – I have learned no one ever is. But I know it will include focusing more on my foundation and philanthropic work, which is more important to me than ever given how critical this moment is for women.”

During her tenure, she also oversaw operations including sales, marketing, human resources, and communications.

Sandberg will officially leave the company this fall, after transitioning her direct reports over the coming months. 

“Over the next few months, Mark and I will transition my direct reports and I will leave the company this fall. I still believe as strongly as ever in our mission, and I am honored that I will continue to serve on Meta’s board of directors,” she 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.

Bitcoin mining revenues fell in May by 21.6%, according to data compiled by The Block Research.

Last month, miners brought in about $906.2 million in revenue.

Compared to October 2021, that’s an even bigger drop of about 47%. Monthly revenues have generally decreased since, with a slight uptick in March.

Most bitcoin revenues came from the block reward subsidy ($890.01 million) and only a small portion from transaction fees ($16.18 million). The share of Bitcoin transaction fees over total revenue increased in May to about 1.87%.

Ethereum miners made 1.08 times more in revenue than Bitcoin miners in May.

© 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.

Solana is facing downtime after the production of new blocks on the network has ceased. 

According to data from Solana Beach block explorer, Solana’s validators have not processed new blocks for the last five hours, causing a total shutdown of all of its applications.

A recent post from Solana Status said that the mainnet beta now needed a restart from validators. “Validator operators should prepare for a restart in mb-validators on Discord,” the post read. As of press time, discussion toward a restart was ongoing in the validator Discord chat. 

To mitigate this situation, the Solana team has asked validators to restart the network. It has released instructions for validators, which includes taking a snapshot of a specific time slot from where the network can be rebooted.

Solana touts itself as a high-performance blockchain. But over the last year, it has suffered numerous outages and suffered from block congestion. Just last month, in a similar fashion as Wednesday, Solana froze for about seven hours before it was brought back online via a validator restart.

© 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.

Genesis Global, one of the crypto market’s biggest lending and trading firms, is ramping up its decentralized finance footprint by contributing $75 million to Maple’s Solana-based lending platform. 

Genesis’ contribution to Maple Solana will make it the first centralized trading firm to serve as a pool delegate for its Solana-based platform. Maple launched its Solana platform earlier this year, having also run a lending platform on Ethereum as well. 

Trading firms Wintermute and Amber Group plan to borrow from the pool, according to Genesis.

To be sure, the $75 million represents a small fraction of Genesis’ total loan book, which stood above $14 billion as of March 2022. Through its subsidiary Genesis Capital, the firm originates tens of billions of dollars worth of crypto loans per month.

Yet the contribution to Maple reflects how large crypto firms are increasingly turning to decentralized finance — and in this case, the Solana network — to execute trades and lend out funds. Genesis said that running part of their loan book through Maple’s infrastructure translates into lower operating costs by replacing traditional software tools with on-chain capabilities.

Unlike Wall Street, the barriers to entry to participate in the Maple ecosystem are not as onerous, allowing any “sophisticated” underwriter to form a pool. Borrowers on the platform go through a due diligence process that is overseen by pool delegates in order to mitigate credit risks. 

“We fully expect most of the large CeFi players in crypto to utilize Maple’s infrastructure to enhance their on-chain lending businesses over the next year,” explained Maple’s founder Sid Powell. 

Despite the volatility of the crypto market, which has seen bitcoin’s price decline by more than 30% this year, Maple claims that none of its borrowers have missed interest payments since its inception in May 2021.

© 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 court has charged the former head of product at non-fungible token (NFT) platform OpenSea on wire fraud and money laundering charges after an insider trading scandal.

Nathaniel Chastain was arrested Wednesday morning in New York, New York. He is slated for presentation in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, according to a Wednesday press release from the Department of Justice.

Chastain was previously accused of using secret Ethereum wallets to purchase NFTs based on confidential information that they’d soon be featured on OpenSea’s home page. He was allegedly responsible for selecting which NFTs would be featured on the homepage, according to the indictment. From about June 2021 to September 2021, he sold these pieces for two to five times his initial purchase price shortly after the value jumped from a front-page feature, according to the DOJ’s indictment.

The actions were compared to frontrunning and insider trading, activities in which an individual profits off of non-public information. Those activities are prohibited in traditional financial markets, but it was unclear how those laws might apply to the NFT space. 

Law enforcement indicates that those laws will apply just the same.

“NFTs might be new, but this type of criminal scheme is not,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in a statement. “As alleged, Nathaniel Chastain betrayed OpenSea by using its confidential business information to make money for himself. Today’s charges demonstrate the commitment of this Office to stamping out insider trading – whether it occurs on the stock market or the blockchain.”

FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Michael J. Driscoll said the FBI “will continue to aggressively pursue actors who choose to manipulate the market in this way.”

OpenSea later published a blog post acknowledging Chastain’s actions in the wake of the accusations in September of last year. 

For more breaking stories like this, make sure to subscribe to The Block on Twitter.

© 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.

FTX overtook Coinbase’s spot in May as the second biggest centralized crypto exchange in terms of market share, according to data compiled on The Block Research.

The dominant player in the market was still Binance by far, which commanded a 64.1% share, followed by FTX (10.8%) and Coinbase (9.6%) during the monthly period.

Coinbase has recently faced some struggles, posting a net loss of $430 million for Q1 2022 and falling on the stock market by roughly 36% in May.

The company has pointed toward current market conditions — with declining prices in crypto across the board — as a driver for its most recent results, as well as a reason to tread with caution. It recently announced that it was slowing hiring and launching an initiative to cut spending.

Last week, Coinbase became the first crypto company to enter the Fortune 500.

After Coinbase, the most popular centralized exchanges during the period were Kraken (3.7%), Bitfinex (2.6%), and LMAX Digital (2.6%).

Overall, crypto trading volumes increased by 19.6% in May, hitting in total of $830.4 billion, according to The Block’s legitimate volume index.

© 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 startup Size raised $6 million in a seed round led by Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and market markers Wintermute and Mgnr.

The funding round also included other companies like Alameda Research, D1 Ventures and Genblock Capital, according to an announcement on Wednesday. A group of angel investors from the crypto community also participated in the funding effort. 

Per the company’s description, Size offers users a way to “easily participate in sealed bid auctions for vested or unvested tokens.”

It is currently focusing efforts on growing its community size and supporting its “peers in the ecosystem,” according to the announcement.

© 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.