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Portugal’s days as a tax-free haven for crypto investors may be coming to an end. That’s according to Portuguese news outlet ECO, which reported last week that the government is planning to bring in new regulations around crypto assets.

The minister of finance, Fernando Medina, confirmed on Friday during a working session that crypto assets will be subject to taxation in the near future. The Portuguese tax authorities are currently looking at cases in other countries to inform recommendations for regulation.

“Several countries already have systems. Several countries are building their models regarding this matter and we are going to build ours,” Medina said.

He additionally emphasized that there couldn’t be any “gaps that result in there being gains related to the transaction of assets that aren’t taxed.”

At present, Portugal doesn’t view cryptocurrencies as an asset and they are instead treated as a currency, meaning that while businesses that provide cryptocurrency services are taxed, individuals investing in them are not. Medina has suggested that this is more due to a gap in the regulatory system than by actual design.

Nevertheless, the lack of tax legislation for crypto has made Portugal a popular spot for traders, with some having even dubbed it “bitcoin heaven.”

Details are still thin on the ground as to exactly what new regulations will entail, however the Ministry of Finance seems to be eyeing a capital gains tax. Following Medina’s comments, the secretary of state for fiscal issues Mendonça Mendes also floated the idea of subjecting cryptocurrencies to VAT and Stamp Tax.

The government has not yet  announced any specific dates for the introduction of new regulations.

© 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.

Japanese investment bank Nomura will launch a new company focused on cryptocurrency, decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for institutional clients, according to the Financial Times.

Nomura plans to have around 100 people working for the subsidiary by the end of next year, the FT reported, citing people with knowledge of the company’s roadmap. Current executives will run the company, although there are plans for extensive outside hiring.

Despite recent turbulence in the crypto market, Nomura last week announced its first bitcoin futures and options trades on the Chicago-based exchange CME, according to the FT. The trades were done via Cumberland, the crypto arm of trading firm DRW.

It joins companies such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, who have also been developing their crypto-asset offerings of late. 

Fifteen current Nomura staff will be transferred to the as-yet-unnamed crypto company while Nomura’s current chief digital officer for its wholesale business, Jez Mohideen, will head the new project.

© 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 platform Celsius has announced plans to take its bitcoin mining subsidiary, Celsius Mining, public.

Celsius has submitted a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which companies must file before going public in the US, according to a statement on Monday. The Initial Public Offering (IPO) process typically takes up to six months from filing the S-1.

Celsius allows retail investors to earn interest on their crypto holdings, with available interest rates as high as 17%. The company serves 1.7 million customers, according to its website.

The lender initially got involved in the mining sector in 2020, issuing loans and equipment leases to mining firms like Core Scientific and Argo Blockchain to fund expansion plans. It was recently revealed that Celsius Mining had signed co-hosting deal with bitcoin miner Mawson Infrastructure, which trades publicly on the Nasdaq.

Celsius’s expansion into mining came at a time when the firm was coming under mounting regulatory pressure over its consumer-facing products — and the IPO announcement comes just a few days after The Block reported the company had over half a billion dollars sitting in the Anchor Protocol. Terra’s Anchor Protocol had offered yields of up to 20% to depositors, before the Terra ecosystem was thrown into disarray last week when its TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin de-pegged from the US dollar. 

© 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.

Artists may soon be able to promote their non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Spotify if a trial rollout goes well, Music Ally reported on Friday.

The latest tech company to jump on the NFT bandwagon, Spotify waded into the web3 world earlier this month with the May 3 launch of “Spotify Island” on Roblox. Starting with a single pilot group of artists, among them Steve Aoki and The Wombats, Spotify will now test NFTs on the platform to specially selected users based in the US.

They will not sell NFTs directly, however, as users will need to tap through to an external marketplace to make purchases. Spotify has said it will not take a cut of the sales as part of the test.

At the same time, users have reported that Spotify is also sending out surveys and even offering some people compensation for chats with team members about users’ attitudes toward NFTs and web3. Questions, which have been shared on Twitter, include asking about sentiment, crypto-related purchases and why people bought NFTs. The questions were met with derision by some posters.

Rumors that Spotify was interested in entering web3 have been circulating since March when the company posted two job ads for working with early-stage web3 projects. The latest news comes just days after Meta announced it too would start testing digital collectibles and NFTs on Instagram.

Spotify did not respond to a request for comment from The Block by the time of publishing.

© 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.

Polygon, Juno and Fantom blockchains are trying to atract Terra-based projects, following the collapse of its ecosystem.

Last week, the collapse of the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin led to a knock-on effect of a 99.9% price crash for its related token Luna (LUNA). During the incident, the network was halted twice to stem the bleeding and while it has been restarted, several on-chain functions are still disabled. The incident led to the total value of assets on Terra falling from over $31 billion to around $400 million, according to DeFiLlama.

Facing a major liquidity crunch, some developers behind Terra-hosted applications have packed their bags for other chains. Among those who decided to close down their Terra protocols included various NFT and DeFi-based projects like Kujira, Stader Labs, LunaBulls, LunarFlip, and Hero NFT.

In response to this migration, blockchain teams are making bids to attract these developers by offering them supportive capital and other resources.

Ryan Wyatt, CEO of Polygon Studios — the NFT, gaming, and metaverse arm of Polygon — said on Twitter that his team was closely collaborating with Terra-based projects to help them migrate to its chain. 

“We will be putting capital and resources against these migrations to welcome the developers and their respective communities to our platform,” Wyatt stated.

Polygon wasn’t the only blockchain that appealed to developers building products in the Terra ecosystem.

Juno, an interoperability-focused smart contract network, introduced a new governance proposal asking approval for incentives for 1 million JUNO tokens ($7 million) for Terra projects who wish to move their apps. Juno’s proposal notified that several Terra projects had expressed interest in migrating to Juno Network. Juno’s blockchain shares similarity with Terra’s technical architecture as both of them rely on the Cosmos SDK (the code used by projects in the Cosmos ecosystem). 

The Fantom blockchain also announced that it is offering grants, marketing and ecosystem connections to Terra projects looking for a new blockchain.

Beyond this, representatives and founders from other blockchains — Regen Network, FetchAI, Stargaze and Injective Protocol — have also encouraged migrating Terra-based projects to consider their chains.

© 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.

Scream, a DeFi lending protocol on Fantom, has incurred $35 million in bad debt after failing to adjust the price of two stablecoins that lost their US dollar peg.

The two stablecoins in question are Fantom USD (fUSD) and Dei (DEI). Both coins still have a quoted price of S1, according to data from Scream’s dashboard. Yet they are trading well below peg. fUSD fell to as low as $0.69 while DEI fell to $0.52 at its lowest.

Whales took advantage of this situation to deposit large amounts of FUSD and DEI at a discounted rate and drained all other stablecoins from the Scream platform. Stablecoins like Fantom USDT, FRAX, DAI, MIM, and USDC have all been siphoned off from the platform.

As such, users with supposed deposits of these stablecoins are unable to process withdrawals from Scream.

The situation with fUSD was also further exacerbated by the fact that the stablecoin’s deposit limit was set to infinity instead of zero. Coupled with FUSD becoming depegged, this situation allowed users to borrow large sums of money against the bad debt and drain the protocol’s remaining stablecoins.

The DeFi lending protocol has also lost about 50% of the total value locked in its smart contracts, according to DeFiLlama.

Scream responded to the issue with an announcement stating that it was seeking a solution to the bad debt in conjunction with the Fantom Foundation. This workaround will involve liquidating all fUSD loans currently underwater.

With fUSD depegged, Scream says it will hardcode the stablecoin’s price to $0.81. This solution could also liquidate other users whose positions were not previously at risk of liquidation.

Deus Finance DAO, meanwhile, has proposed treasury bond sales to restore peg stability to DEI. According to the proposal, the platform will serve treasury bonds to users in exchange for collateral in the form of USDC, DAI, and FRAX.

DEI and FUSD are the latest stablecoins to lose their US dollar peg. TerraUSD (UST) kickstarted the trend last week with a dramatic drop that led to the collapse of Luna (LUNA).

© 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 CEO Changpeng Zhao said the crypto exchange made large paper gains on its investment in Luna but has now lost practically all of them.

The exchange invested $3 million into the Terra ecosystem in 2018, receiving 15 million Luna tokens. At Luna’s peak price, that investment was worth $1.6 billion, according to Zhao. Yet due to last week’s collapse of Luna — and its related stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) — that investment has now plummeted in value to just $3,400. Or, in Zhao’s words, “not much.”

Yet it’s not all bad news. The exchange received around $10.3 million worth of UST in staking rewards (likely through Anchor, which offered up to 20% yield). While that would be worth $74 million if UST was holding its peg to the dollar and not trading at its current value of $0.13, it means Binance is still up on its initial investment.

The algorithmic stablecoin UST broke from its peg to the US dollar last week, resulting in huge losses for investors in both UST and Luna, whose price was meant to support UST’s peg.

Zhao added that the exchange would rather see retail customers compensated and backed a proposal for those who lost smaller amounts of Luna to be made whole.

Zhao also confirmed that the exchange had been in talks about investing $300 million in Luna in a recent $1 billion round, but the deal never closed. 

© 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 Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) broke its silence on the state of its crypto reserves, saying that it would look to compensate users for losses suffered due to the breakdown of its algorithmic stablecoin. 

Terra’s native token Luna and stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) had gone into freefall last week as UST lost its peg from the US dollar. 

The foundation, a Singapore-based non-profit designed to defend UST, wrote in a 10-tweet thread on Monday that it would look to compensate the smallest holders first, adding that it is “still debating through various distribution methods, updates to follow soon.”

LFG’s reserves have been depleted from more than 80,000 bitcoin on May 7, to just 313 bitcoin today, LFG said. 

Analysts at The Block Research calculated that LFG has gone from having $3.1 billion in its reserves a week ago to now having roughly $87 million. 

While LFG acquired those bitcoins to save UST, it couldn’t. UST, supposed to be worth $1 at all times, has lost almost all of its value. It is currently worth roughly $0.13.

“Consistent with its non-profit mission & focus on the health of the Terra ecosystem, beginning on May 8, when the price of $UST began to drop substantially below one dollar, the Foundation began converting this reserve to $UST,” it wrote.

8/ As of now, the Foundation’s remaining reserves consist of the following assets:
· 313 $BTC
· 39,914 $BNB
· 1,973,554 $AVAX
· 1,847,079,725 $UST
· 222,713,007 $LUNA (of which 221,021,746 is currently staked with validators)

— LFG | Luna Foundation Guard (@LFG_org) May 16, 2022

The move follows widespread speculation about the state of its reserves and how it would move to compensate users who lost vast amounts of money. 

This is a developing story and will be updated.

© 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.

Grayscale Investments announced on Monday it is set to make a play for Europe, with its first exchange traded fund (ETF) in the region. 

The product, known as the Grayscale Future of Finance UCITS ETF, tracks the investment performance of the Bloomberg Grayscale Future of Finance Index, the firm said in a release. 

It seeks to offer investors exposure to companies at the intersection of finance, technology and digital assets — companies that the firm says are building the digital economy — through an ETF wrapper.

It will list on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), Borsa Italiana, and Deutsche Börse Xetra with the ticker GFOF and be passported for sale across Europe – marking the next stage in the firm’s expansion into the region. 

“This product draws upon our historical strengths, while furthering our evolution as an asset manager that helps investors build portfolios that can stand the test of time,” Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein said in the release. 

In February 2022, Grayscale listed an ETF in the United States which tracks the same index. A tracker on Grayscale’s website showed it closed at $14.69 on Friday, down from around $26 on February 1.

Its top 10 holdings include crypto exchange Coinbase, Robinhood and Block (formerly known as Square).  

© 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.

Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, tweeted late Sunday that 44 countries will meet in El Salvador on Monday to discuss bitcoin, among other things.

“Tomorrow, 32 central banks and 12 financial authorities (44 countries) will meet in El Salvador to discuss financial inclusion, digital economy, banking the unbanked, the #Bitcoin rollout and its benefits in our country,” wrote Bukele.

Those central banks and authorities are primarily from developing countries, including Nigeria, Egypt, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Paraguay, Angola, Guinea and Madagascar.

Bukele’s tweets come a day after the Twitter account “Bitcoin Beach” said several countries are flying to El Salvador, confirming the meeting. The Bitcoin Beach account describes itself as “the little community that helped Orange Pill the world’s first Bitcoin nation” in its Twitter bio.

It is unclear whether these countries are meeting especially to discuss bitcoin and what their specific agenda is.

El Salvador became the first nation to adopt bitcoin as a legal tender last September. It also holds the cryptocurrency on its balance sheet, having accumulated over 2,000 bitcoins to date (worth over $60 million at current prices).

© 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.