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As FTX looks to convince market participants to get on board with its proposal to launch crypto-tied derivatives in the US, there’s one unusual group the exchange operator is looking to assuage: American farmers.

FTX president Brett Harrison took to Twitter this weekend to comment on an article published by the Financial Times that highlighted the concerns of some groups in the agricultural industry.

While FTX and its American affiliate FTX.US are known for operating in digital assets, FTX’s proposal could give it the ability to clear a wide range of financial derivatives and engage directly with clients rather than through third parties. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is currently reviewing the firm’s application, which was the subject of a public roundtable last week. 

According to the Financial Times, farmer groups fear that the around-the-clock nature of FTX’s liquidation system would require farmers — which typically hedge their crops with derivatives products — to stay up with the market to top up their positions. 

Harrison said that FTX has “no imminent plans to propose physically settling agricultural products under our margin model.”

Harrison added that even if the firm did begin to work with agricultural derivatives, farmers could still rely on third-party futures commission merchants and brokers to hedge — emphasizing FTX’s longstanding point that its proposal offers choice. 

“Furthermore, in a hypothetical future in which physically settled commodities trade on FTX US, we could easily match trading schedules for those products with the contracts and spot markets that currently trade,” Harrison added, in response to comments from Nelson Neale of CHS Hedging, a brokerage firm of a US farming cooperative. 

© 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.

On Tuesday’s trading session, a mix of bitcoin mining companies saw their stocks rise and fall in the market.

After announcing the first closing in its acquisition of mining hardware company Bee Computing on Tuesday, BIT mining was up by +11.05% on Nasdaq.

Companies that saw their stocks drop on Tuesday include Hut 8 (-8.15% on the Toronto Stock Exchange), Hive Blockchain (-6.59%) and Core Scientific (-4.34% on Nasdaq).

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Tuesday, May 31:

© 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.

Optimism experienced a debilitating high load after its governance token OP launched, causing delays on the Optimism blockchain mainnet and remote procedure calls (RPCs). 

The network delays are particularly notable given the attention Optimism’s token drop has received, following in the wake of other high-profile airdrops that encountered turbulence as well in their efforts to dole out tokens to community members and other stakeholders. Compounding the issue are indications that some participants were able to claim tokens ahead of the official announcement.

Optimism responded to the transaction delays following the OP token launch on Twitter: 

“Sup sleuths—as you might have guessed, OP Drop #1 launches today. We have NOT officially announced yet, but we’re already experiencing an all-time high demand … We’re working to heavily provision more capacity before our official announcement—in the meantime the public RPC may respond slowly.”

An RPC is a set of communication protocols that allows another entity, such as MetaMask, to interact with other protocols, such as the Optimism layer 2 blockchains. With Optimism’s RPCs going down, users could not buy or sell OP since they couldn’t access the Optimism blockchain via apps that default on its RPC.

This also means that many apps defaulting on top of Optimism’s RPC such as Uniswap or MetaMask cannot communicate a request to execute Optimism transactions either.

As The Block previously reported, 231,000 addresses could claim a portion of the 214 million OP tokens dropping today. Only 14% of the supply reserved for airdrops was released today.

© 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 governance token for the rollup-based Layer 2 network Optimism has gone live. 

The token is set to shift Optimism’s structure by fueling The Optimism Collective, a bicameral governance system for funding composed of Token House and Citizens’ House. The token will trade under the ticker OP and be distributed via airdrop to early users. 

Individuals who used Optimism before March 25 can claim an airdrop of OP. A total of 231,000 addresses can claim 214 million OP tokens (5% of the total 4.29 billion supply) at an average of 860 tokens per address. The claim process has now officially begun.

Today’s airdrop fleshes out Token House so that OP holders can vote on Optimism-centric projects. Citizens’ House comes later in 2022 after the establishment of Token House, in which Citizens’ House facilitates and governs funding for projects aimed at promoting the public good. 

Exchanges such as OKX, LBank, MEXC and AAX have stated that they’ll list OP at various points on May 31. 

Rumors of Optimism’s governance token emerged after individuals spotted the OP token page on Coinbase on April 20, The Block previously reported. Optimism then laid out its plans for OP and The Optimism Collective on April 26. 

Today’s event represents the first OP airdrop and an additional 14% of its overall supply has been reserved for future airdrops. Besides the user airdrop to users, a portion of OP supply will be distributed to projects operating on Optimism. More airdrops will occur throughout Q2. 

As a Layer 2 initiative, Optimism aims to allow apps to achieve faster and cheaper transactions than on the Ethereum blockchain. According to data from The Block, Optimism hosts over $600 million in total value locked across apps like Synthetix, Uniswap, Perpetual Protocol, Lyra, Curve and Aave.

© 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.

Chinese crypto mining company BIT Mining announced the first closing of its acquisition of Bee Computing, a manufacturer of mining hardware.

The Company issued 16,038,930 of its Class A ordinary shares to the selling shareholders, according to an announcement on Tuesday.

“(We) are excited about the progress Bee Computing has made in developing and manufacturing cryptocurrency mining chips and machines,” said Xianfeng Yang, CEO of BIT Mining.

Bee Computing produces both chips and machines for the mining of various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. It is currently developing three types of mining machines.

Per the announcement, the company should achieve a series of milestones, including the development and mass-production of a new generation of Bitcoin mining machines and the successful development of high-performance and mass-producible Ethereum ASIC mining machines.

“Going forward, we plan to devote additional resources to assist Bee Computing in its development and manufacture of more mainstream cryptocurrency mining chips and machines with increasingly cost-effective performance advantages,” Yang said.

The company announced results for the first quarter of 2022 last week, reporting a 40% dip in revenue.

© 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

• As the blockchain space evolves into segregated Layer 1 chains, liquidity and ecosystems become increasingly fragmented
• While ecosystems can technically be “bridged” by porting code across compatible chains, the liquidity remains isolated across chains
• Cross-chain bridges are essentially liquidity pools that allow users to move liquidity across supported chains
• Several cross-chain bridges have surfaced over the past year, and while they fundamentally share the same concept, there are minor differences in their implementations
• As cross-chain bridges start growing in total value locked, it becomes increasingly important to understand the security assumptions associated with each of these bridges

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The global standard setter for banking regulation want to finalize its treatment of crypto assets near the end of this year.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) published an update related to its May 27 meeting today. During that meeting, it says it made progress on a second consultation paper on the “prudential treatment of banks’ cryptoasset exposures.”

The body published a first consultation paper last year, proposing to strict capital requirements for banks that have exposure to crypto in addition to applying the existing framework to crypto and issuing guidance to fill in any gaps. It received feedback on the public consultation from external stakeholders, which the following consultation will build on. It plans to release that paper “over the coming month, with a view to finalising the prudential treatment around the end of this year,” it said in its update.

“Recent developments have further highlighted the importance of having a global minimum prudential framework to mitigate risks from cryptoassets.”

In recent weeks, crypto markets have seen a significant downturn, and the algorithmic stablecoin UST lost its peg. The first consultation paper addressed credit and market risk requirements for stabilization mechanisms in tokens, among other concerns.

 In addition to its crypto plans, the body also addressed climate-related financial risks, risks and vulnerabilities to the global banking system following the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict and the treatment of cross-border exposures within the European Banking Union.

© 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 has hit out against Dogecoin founder Jackson Palmer in a string of tweets, particularly over some help that Palmer gave him four years ago.

In 2018, Musk was complaining about Twitter bots that were pushing cryptocurrency scams in the replies to his tweets. At the time, Palmer offered to share a snippet of code that would help fix the problem for him. Palmer said at the time: “Elon has the script… we had a good chat on how @jack and the Twitter team should definitely automate and fix this problem on their end though.”

Fast-forward to today and it’s certainly an even more relevant issue for Musk, who is in the process of buying Twitter — and would have the ability to actually make changes and attempt to fix such issues. (Although the deal is being held up over concerns that there may be more fake accounts on Twitter than the social media site claims.)

Yet Musk alleges that Palmer’s code was of no help. “You falsely claimed ur lame snippet of Python gets rid of bots,” said Musk on Twitter. “My kids wrote better code when they were 12 than the nonsense script Jackson sent me.”

Musk’s comments were made in response to a tweet about an interview between Australian news outlet Crikey News and Palmer. Palmer has not replied to any of the comments as of press time.

© 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.

Optimism’s upcoming governance token OP will likely hit be launched today and be available for trading on centralized exchanges, according to multiple announcements by third parties.

Several exchanges, including OKX, LBank, MEXC, and AAX, have released blog posts announcing plans to list the Optimism token at different times later today. Optimism has not yet made an official statement.

As a rollup-based Layer 2 network, Optimism lets Ethereum applications achieve faster and cheaper transactions while retaining security from the main Ethereum blockchain.

Last month, Optimism unveiled a new governance structure powered by its own token. The initial supply will be handed out through a retroactive airdrop to users including early Optimism adopters as well as active participants on Ethereum, such as signers of multi-signature wallets, DAO voters, and Gitcoin donors. A snapshot of their addresses was taken on 25 March.

According to its initial announcement, 248,000 addresses were allotted 214 million OP tokens (5% of the total 4.29 billion supply), with average eligible address pocketing 860 tokens. Yet 17,000 of these addresses were later removed, dropping the expected total to 231,000 addresses.

Optimism raised $150 million in a March round led by Paradigm, with the project valued at $1.65 billion.

© 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.

Digital storage has come a long way since the early 1900s.

Back then, we used punched cards to store and represent digital information – stiff paper with information represented by the presence or absence of holes.

Flash forward a century – the world of digital storage has evolved from local offline storage to global online storage, with the rise of cloud storage services like Amazon S3 in 2006.

However, despite the increasing pace at which revolutionary developments have been achieved in storage technology, there hasn’t been a major revolution since the advent of centralized cloud storage.

Now, we may be at the dawn of the next big thing. In the past decade, we have witnessed the rise of blockchain-enabled decentralized storage networks, a kind of cooperative cloud storage.

Leading this potential storage revolution are the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Filecoin, with other prominent protocols like Sia, Storj, and Arweave also making waves.

These protocols were inspired by the rise of Bitcoin, which itself was born out of the turmoil of the 2008 financial crisis. People’s distrust in banks and their role in the financial system grew as they watched the house of cards come tumbling down.

As Bitcoin is disrupting traditional banking systems by operating a currency with P2P software and cryptography instead of banks and governments, decentralized storage networks are disrupting traditional cloud storage by operating a cloud with P2P software and cryptography instead of AWS.

Like Bitcoin, the total addressable market (TAM) for this new kind of cloud storage is huge – potentially several trillions of dollars.

Storing the planet’s most important data in cooperative cloud storage instead of centralized cloud storage is both a mission for the public good and an opportunity to capitalize on multibillion-dollar markets.

The web3 community faces a massive opportunity to seize value by developing and deploying apps in this new storage space. And if there’s going to be a seismic shift in how we store our data, it will be important for people to understand the transformation in computing happening behind the scenes.

To this end, we offer a primer to understand the nascent decentralized storage industry – its core technologies, economic systems, and ecosystem developments.

© 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.