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Robinhood is taking the plunge in the nascent world of web3, launching a new wallet application that allows customers to access non-fungible token markets, decentralized exchanges and swap tokens. 

The new wallet will be a standalone application from Robinhood’s existing stock and crypto platform and function similarly to other non-custodial wallets like MetaMask, the US brokerage announced at crypto conference Permissionless on Tuesday. Still, Robinhood is hoping that the sleek and intuitive design of its new app will make engaging with web3 destinations less cumbersome for newbies.

“At Robinhood, we believe that crypto is more than just an asset class. DeFi has the potential to be the operating system that powers the future of financial services, and we want to help people experience the full range of possibilities that these revolutionary technologies have to offer,” commented Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood. “With our web3 wallet, we’re building a product that will satisfy the most advanced DeFi believers while creating a secure on-ramp for those who are just starting out in crypto to go deeper into the ecosystem.”

Another bonus: the firm plans to cover gas fees, which during certain periods of activity can make swapping coins prohibitively expense.

To eat the gas fees, the firm will take a page out of its equity playbook, relying on third party liquidity providers to receive the best price on a given swap. Robinhood does not plan to take a cut of the profits as it is focusing on product market fit for the product in the short-term. 

“We’re making it not scary, easy to use,” said Robinhood’s crypto CTO Johann Kerbrat in an interview with The Block.

The move illustrates a broader trend of firms in the centralized crypto market launching products in DeFi. Coinbase announced early this week its own service that would allow clients to tap decentralized apps via its app. 

Robinhood — which has come under fire for opening unsophisticated traders to complex financial instruments like options — said it will focus on educational materials to equip users as they dabble in DeFi. 

“We will give you access to everything, but we will show you warnings on things that are risky. But at the end of the day we are not making decisions for you.”

© 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 in-house legal team at Terraform Labs resigned shortly after the collapse of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin wrought havoc on crypto markets.

A person familiar with the matter told The Block that legal operations are now being handled by outside counsel.

The LinkedIn profiles of Terraform Labs’ general counsel Marc Goldich, chief corporate counsel Lawrence Florio, and chief litigation and regulatory counsel Noah Axler show that all three stopped working for the company in May — all after less than a year at the company. 

“The past week has been challenging for Terraform Labs, and a small number of team members resigned in recent days,” said a spokesperson for the company. “The vast majority of team members remain steadfastly committed to carrying out the project’s mission. Terra is more than UST, with an incredibly passionate community and a clear vision on how to rebuild. Our focus is now on executing our plan to revive the Terra ecosystem.”

News of the resignations comes after a devastating week for Singapore-based Terraform Labs and the blockchain it stewards.

Terraform Labs, founded by Do Kwon and Daniel Shin in 2018, is the driving force behind the Terra blockchain. Terra’s UST, the third largest stablecoin by issuance, de-pegged sharply from its target price of $1 early last week. Billions of dollars in bitcoin were sold and unprecedented volumes of Terra’s native currency LUNA issued in a frantic attempt to restore the peg, but to no avail.

The price of both LUNA and UST collapsed. Terra twice halted its blockchain and investors have sustained heavy losses.

In the wake of last week’s chaos, Kwon has been promoting a plan to fork Terra to create a new blockchain — but the community seems set against the idea.

Goldich, Florio and Axler were contacted for comment but did not respond by 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.

For algorithmic stablecoins to have a long-term future they’ll need to find wider adoption for payments in the real economy, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs. 

“Stablecoins have limited use as a payments medium at this time. If that real-world use case were to grow over time, it could create a more stable demand base for these assets,” the investment bank wrote in a research report dated Monday. “Hypothetically, an algorithmic stablecoin could survive in the long-run, if it were to have ongoing transaction-related demand.”

The bank pointed out that stablecoins fulfill a need in the crypto market, by allowing investors to trade into a less volatile asset without the friction of converting to fiat currencies. And, according to Goldman, the vulnerabilities affecting these assets are nothing new to people familiar with the foreign exchange market – where some currencies, such as the Hong Kong dollar, are pegged to others.

“Unsurprisingly, algorithmic stablecoins share many of the vulnerabilities of pegged exchange rates, including the risk of speculative attacks.”

Algorithmic stablecoins are also vulnerable to similar “self-fulfilling crises.” When investors fear a currency will become devalued and they sell it, their speculation can put pressure on that currency.

Despite this, the bank believes that an algorithmic stablecoin could survive once sufficient demand and relevant use cases existed. 

“Positive network effects from greater non-speculative use cases for these protocols could contribute to a more stable demand base over time,” the bank concluded.

© 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.

Certora, an Israel-based company that provides security analysis tools for smart contracts, announced it has raised $36 million in a Series B round led by Jump Crypto.

The round featured participation from Tiger Global, Galaxy Digital and existing Series A investors, including Electric Capital, ACapital, Framework Ventures, Coinfund, Lemniscap, Coinbase and VMware, according to a statement on Tuesday.

Certora enables smart contract developers to detect mistakes before deploying code post audits. DeFi protocols including Aave, Balancer, Compound Finance, MakerDao, Sushi and others use Certora to protect their smart contracts from bugs before launch as a final checkpoint after a code audit is complete, the statement said.

The company says it secures about $50 billion in decentralized finance (DeFi) projects with techniques similar to those used for safety-critical programs such as avionics software. Certora’s technology was developed through two decades of academic research in formal verification and programming languages.

Saurabh Sharma, partner and head of investments at Jump Crypto, said: “Powered by world-class experts, Certora leverages formal verification to employ a suite of scalable and robust products that offer much higher reusability and granular testing.”

Certora is led by Shmuel Sagiv, computer science chair at Tel Aviv University and a pioneer of formal verification, the research field that powers the technology behind Certora.

Cetora’s team of 65 people has extensive mathematics and security experience and includes lecturers from Cornell and the University of Washington, as well as security engineers from traditional financial firms like JPMorgan.

© 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.

Coinshift, an Indian crypto startup that provides treasury management tools for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and web3 firms, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round as it plans to expand to new blockchain networks.

Sharing the news exclusively with The Block on Tuesday, Coinshift said Tiger Global led the round, with Sequoia Capital India, Alameda Ventures, Spartan Group, Ethereal Ventures, Polygon Studios and others participating. Angel investors include Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund, Shiva Rajaraman, vice president of operations at OpenSea, and Prabhakar Reddy, founder of FalconX.

This was an equity funding round, although the firm has plans to launch its own native token and turn itself into a DAO, the firm’s founder and CEO Tarun Gupta told The Block. Gupta declined to comment on Coinshift’s valuation with this round and any new board seats.

Last September, Coinshift raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

Multichain expansion plans

Coinshift currently provides a treasury management platform for the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. It is built on Gnosis Safe, a multi-sig smart contracts platform, and helps mass payout to crypto contributors.

“Our current V1 platform is more focused on payouts. Now we are building a multichain treasury infrastructure and it will be available on seven chains from day one,” said Gupta. Those blockchains include Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Binance Chain, Gnosis, Optimism and Arbitrum, Gupta added.

Coinshift’s next-generation platform is launching next week in beta with select partners, according to Gupta. He declined to name those partners, but said they are “some of the biggest names in the crypto industry.”

Coinshift’s current clients include Uniswap, ConsenSys, Balancer, Messari, Biconomy and Perpetual Protocol. The firm says it has helped its clients with $80 million in payouts since its launch last June.

In line with its expansion plans, Coinshift also looks to scale its current team of 16 people to around 25, said Gupta. The firm is hiring across functions, mainly in engineering.

© 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.

EY, one of the big four accounting firms, has launched a supply chain tracking service called OpsChain Supply Chain Manager on Nightfall — a Layer 2 Ethereum blockchain co-developed in partnership with Polygon.

The two firms launched Nightfall’s beta release today, and made OpsChain Supply Chain Manager as one of its first applications for businesses to track supply chains.

The way OpsChain will work is that it allows organizations to create fungible or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Nightfall. Rather than acting as cryptocurrencies, these tokens will represent assets and inventory within companies that can be traced on the Nightfall blockchain. Data and transactions made by OpsChain users will be much cheaper and faster since they’re not taking place on the main Ethereum blockchain itself, but on a layer above it.

OpsChain leverages Nightfall’s zero-knowledge (ZK)-proofs, a technology that allows for faster and cheaper blockchain transactions while also ensuring privacy. This means that the real transactional data is cryptographically hidden.

According to EY, Nightfall-based OpsChain will serve as a tool to help companies track and manage their supply chains on the Nightfall blockchain. 

“Managing complex operations across enterprise boundaries is a big step forward. EY OpsChain Supply Chain Manager significantly widens the breadth of use cases available for clients to consider,” said James Canterbury, principal and blockchain leader at EY.

While experts have long touted the use of blockchains in supply chain tracking, the lack of privacy in blockchain-based transactions held back its adoption. However, as OpsChain uses Polygon Nightfall’s ZK proofs, EY claims it will be useful in preserving the privacy of sensitive data and hence the product will be fit for the supply chain software 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.

Revolut founder Nik Storonsky is set to launch his own venture capital fund, powered by artificial intelligence. 

The new venture — dubbed QuantumLight Capital — will be worth around $200 million, with funds supplied by Storonsky and other investors, Forbes reported on Tuesday. 

“We are built as a technology company by a team of tech unicorn founders, quant traders, AI scientists and engineers,” the QuantumLight website states. The fund will identify investment opportunities using a machine called Aleph as its “proprietary quantitative decision engine.” 

According to Forbes, QuantumLight will be focused mainly on Series B and Series C rounds, based on software which eliminates “human judgement.” Storonsky argues that the model is designed to eliminate the clubby world of venture capital, where decisions are made through a crowd mentality. 

The neobank founder has spent the last year building a team of data scientists and engineers to browse LinkedIn, corporate filings and other public databases in order to identify fast-growing startups. He will also hire in a CEO to head up the fund, according to the Forbes report. 

The move comes at a time of global expansion for Revolut. In recent months it has acquired banking licenses in at least 10 European countries as it has touted adding new products to it roster, such as home loans and buy-now-pay-later.

It has also tussled with UK regulators over anti-money laundering requirements for its crypto products. It is still on the Financial Conduct Authority’s so-called temporary register, alongside crypto custodian Copper and three other firms. The register is a stopgap measure the FCA created after missing an earlier deadline to green-light companies’ operations. Their fate remains uncertain, but without full registration they could in theory be forced to stop crypto-related activities in the UK.

© 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 asset custody platform Fireblocks has launched a new web3 platform, with a suite of tools for developers to build DeFi, GameFi and NFT products and services.

The new portal will unlock secure access to the world of decentralized applications, exchanges and NFT marketplaces for alternative asset managers and capital markets participants, the company said in a release on Tuesday. Fireblocks currently serves more than 1,200 financial institutions. 

With this development, it will also offer custody of NFTs and launch a tokenization engine for managing the full lifecycle for whitelisting, minting, burning and token transfers.

The new suite of products is aiming to net business from gaming studios, NFT services and financial institutions building products for web3.

It currently serves companies such as Animoca, Stardust, MoonPay, Xternity Games, Griffin Gaming, Wirex, Celsius and Utopian Labs.

This move makes it the latest digital asset custodian to bolt on an NFT product to its core offering. Rival custodian Copper also told The Block last week that it had started offering custody solutions for NFTs for its customers in response to institutional demand.

The NFT space is far less developed and far more retail-dominated than wider crypto markets, but there are tell-tale signs of institutional adoption. In January, market making firm GSR said it planned to begin algorithmically trading NFT collections 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.

The majority of the Terra community is against the idea of forking the blockchain after its collapse last week, according to a preliminary poll on the network’s research and governance forum. 

As of 6:45 a.m. ET on Tuesday, 90% of the more than 1,000 votes in the online poll reject a fork, which would create a new, parallel version of the Terra blockchain. The ballot is open to anyone who logs into the Terra forum, whether or not they hold Luna, the network’s governance token.

Last week, the stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) lost its peg to the US dollar, causing a knock on effect that all but obliterated its related token Luna. Due to the way the two interacted, it led to a massive supply increase of Luna and a subsequent price crash to near zero. Amid the wreckage, Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon made a proposal — and then issued an updated version — that suggested the idea of a fork. 

A fork is the term used for changing a blockchain’s structure. In this case, it would be a very significant change that’s akin to starting from scratch. The updated Terra blockchain would allocate portions of its supply to previous holders of Luna and UST. Most of the tokens would be subject to vesting periods over the next 3-5 years. The proposal put forward a timeline that would, pending a governance vote, see the launch of the new chain by the end of the month.

Only the Luna community doesn’t appear to agree with the suggested path forward.

“There’s no need to wait for the proposal to be published to know what the general sentiment is. This may push for some corrections without wasting days,” stated the pseudonymous author of the poll, which was put forward today. The poll simply asked: “Fork?”

‘No one wants a fork’

The majority of comments back up the initial results of the poll with one community member writing, “No one wants a fork.”

While this poll is not an official governance vote and does not require the holding of Luna tokens to vote, it does give a strong indication which way the community is leaning. That said, it’s possible Terraform Labs and large Luna holders could push through a governance vote without the support of this forum.

The poll does, however, match with other comments across social media by Terra community members and prominent members of the crypto industry. 

 “This won’t work. Forking does not give the new fork any value. That’s wishful thinking.” Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said on Twitter on Saturday. He added that the Terra community should reduce the supply of Luna by burning coins rather than forking the network at a date in the past, abandoning everyone who tried to save the coin during its downfall.

An informal vote on Twitter today shows a similar outcome to the Terra forum poll. It asks the Luna community whether it wants to fork Terra or burn Luna tokens. It received just over 800 votes, with 93% in favor of a burn. Since this poll was on Twitter and had no “show results” option, it may be less representative of the Luna community than the preliminary poll, which was issued on its official governance forum.

There have been other proposals on the community forum that disagree with the fork proposal and suggest alternatives. Some have criticized the idea to call the original chain (if it survives) Terra Classic. Others have gathered around an idea that’s focused on maintaining the current Terra blockchain but burning tokens to reduce the supply of Luna.

That said, some members of the Luna community are supporting Kwon’s proposal. Staking provider BTC.Secure said on Twitter it supported the launch of the new blockchain and that it was backing Kwon.

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

© 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.

Yun Chang-Hyun, a representative from South Korea’s ruling People Power Party, has called for a parliamentary hearing on TerraUSD (UST) after the stablecoin’s sudden collapse last week, local news outlet Newspim reported on Tuesday.

“We should bring related exchange officials, including CEO Do Kwon of Terra, which has become a recent problem, to the National Assembly to hold a hearing on the cause of the situation and measures to protect investors,” Chang-Hyun reportedly said today at a plenary meeting of the National Assembly’s Political Affairs Committee. 

The Terra crisis began on May 7 when UST, the Terra blockchain’s algorithmic stablecoin, started to lose parity against the US dollar. Over the following days, UST collapsed to below 10 cents and is still trading at that level. Terra’s native Luna token has also tanked and is currently trading at a fraction of a cent, losing almost all of its value.

Chang-Hyun also wants crypto exchanges to account for their behavior during the crash.

“Coinone, Korbit and Gopax stopped trading on May 10, Bithumb on May 11, but Upbit did not stop trading until May 13,” he said. “Upbit, which was the last to stop trading even after seeing the crash, is the No. 1 company with an 80% share. In just those three days, it earned close to 10 billion won [$7.8 million] in commission income,” Chang-hyun added.

Upbit didn’t immediately return a request for comment from The Block. 

‘Emergency inspections’

Another major Korean outlet, Yonhap News Agency, reported on Tuesday that local financial regulators have launched “emergency inspections” into local crypto exchanges to enhance investor protection after the UST collapse, citing anonymous sources. 

Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) have reportedly asked crypto exchanges to share information on transactions linked to UST and Luna, including their trading volumes and the number of relevant investors. The two regulatory agencies have also reportedly asked exchanges to provide their countermeasures to the UST crash and their analysis of what caused it.

“Last week, financial authorities asked for data on the amount of transactions and investors, and sized up the exchanges’ relevant measures,” an anonymous official of a local crypto exchange told Yonhap. “I think they did it to draw up measures to minimize the damage to investors in the future.”

Terra fork proposal

Despite the crisis, Terraform Labs, the company behind Terra, hopes to regain the public’s confidence after the collapse. Kwon proposed forking the Terra network into a new chain on Monday because “Terra is more than UST.” The proposal will be put up for governance vote on May 18.

“We encourage Terra developers to signal support & commit to build on the fork on public channels ASAP,” said Kwon.

Terra’s investors have begun showing support for Terra’s fork. Su Zhu of Three Arrows Capital tweeted last night: “Terra2 soon.”

Meanwhile, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has said that he doesn’t think the Terra fork will work because it won’t provide any value.

© 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.