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Anchor Protocol’s token called Anchor (ANC) has lost more than 70% in the last day, in part due to a sharp decline of overall deposits on the protocol and TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin failing to meet its dollar peg.

Anchor’s native token has fallen from $0.85 to $0.20, per CoinGecko. The ongoing price separation of UST from the US dollar may have contributed to a large selloff of the Anchor (ANC) token, analysts say, since Anchor depends on UST for its operations. The algorithmic stablecoin is currently trading at about $0.30 — a deviation of about 70% from its supposed dollar value.

“The ANC price crashed due to the loss of confidence in UST and the Terra ecosystem as a whole, as a result of the UST de-pegging,” said Eden Au, research director at The Block Research.

Anchor is a lending protocol on the Terra network, which pays out a yield of up to 20% to UST depositors through yield reserves. The protocol generates new ANC tokens to fund Anchor’s lending and borrowing activity. 

The crisis surrounding UST’s dollar peg has seen users make large withdrawals from Anchor. These users likely rushed to withdraw their UST deposits so they could no longer be exposed to the volatile stablecoin.

“There has been a mass exodus from Anchor because of UST de-pegging, as UST depositors rush to withdraw and offload their UST tokens,” Au added.

As UST constitutes the majority of the deposits on the flagship Anchor’s Earn product, the value of deposited assets Anchor has dropped significantly since last Friday, going from 14 billion UST to now 3.7 billion UST. That’s in part due to both withdrawals and the decrease in the price of UST.

ANC has suffered from a similar fate as LUNA, Terra’s main asset used in maintaining its peg. It has declined from $30 to $2, down 93% 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.

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Blockchain data analytics firm Chainalysis has raised $170 million in their latest funding round at a valuation of $8.6 billion, more than doubling its $4.2 billion valuation from last June, according to The Information.

According to the report, current investor GIC, which is one of three investment entities in Singapore that manage the government’s reserves, is leading the Series F round.

Chainalysis was first valued at over a billion dollars in its Series C round in November 2020. That then rose in March 2021 to over $2 billion, before doubling again in June of the same year during its Coatue Management-led Series E.

Launched in 2014, New York-based Chainalysis provides blockchain data and analysis for preventing crime and money laundering to both government agencies and private companies. Per its Crunchbase profile, the latest round puts the total amount of money raised to date at $537 million.

Chainalysis isn’t the only company to boast a massive valuation of late. MoonPay hit $3.4 billion in November, India’s CoinDCX doubled its valuation to $2.15 billion last month, and reports suggest The Sandbox is eyeing one at $4 billion.

According to research from Galaxy Digital, last year VCs invested more than $33 billion into crypto and blockchain startups. Of that, two-thirds went to fundraising rounds totaling above $100 million. In the fourth quarter of 2021, valuations in the crypto and blockchain space were 141% higher than in the rest of the VC space.

Even against the backdrop of declines in the market, rises in valuations have continued in 2022, according to Pitchbook. Late-stage, post-money valuations for VC-backed crypto companies have increased by an average of 91% to $3.95 billion so far this year.

These high valuations led Digital Currency Group founder Barry Silbert to take to Twitter on May 3 and call some valuations “insane,” adding it “feels like the calm before the storm.”

Despite being an early entrant into the world of blockchain analytics, and still its biggest company, Chainalysis is also having to contend with competition out to challenge it. In September 2021, Mastercard bought out CipherTrace for an undisclosed sum. The following month London-based Elliptic raised $60 million in its Series C round.

And in April this year, Coin Metrics snagged $35 million in Series C financing, led by Acrew Capital and Bank of New York Mellon.

© 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.

Luna (LUNA), which has been in freefall along with its related stablecoin TerraUSD (UST), fell below $1 on Wednesday. 

Luna is currently trading at $0.86 at 9am ET, down 97% from $31.06 just 24 hours previously, according to Binance data. The token has fallen as low as $0.69 in the last 30 minutes.

The entire Terra ecosystem is coming under pressure as holders unload Luna and TerraUSD. 

TerraUSD is the algorithmic stablecoin that is meant to maintain parity with the US dollar through a combination of burn mechanisms involving Luna. A Luna holder can always swap $1 worth of Luna for one TerraUSD, meaning if TerraUSD falls below $1 more Luna is created to make TerraUSD more scarce and bring the price back up to its $1 peg.

However, the stablecoin lost its peg on Saturday and again on Monday jeopardizing the whole ecosystem. As such when people sell large amounts of TerraUSD, putting downward pressure on the price, more Luna will be printed and supply could increase exponentially.

The Terra community is even planning to increase this, allowing for the minting of more LUNA — even though this will put even greater downward pressure on its price.

© 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.

Web3 development platform Moralis said on Wednesday that it has snagged $40 million in a Series A funding round. 

Investors in the platform, which launched last June, include EQT Ventures, Fabric Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Dispersion Capital, among other angels. 

The Stockholm-based business, which provides infrastructure for developers to build and launch apps, games and NFTs cross-chain, said in a release that it will use the money for product development, improving user experience and scaling to both increase its client capacity and support larger clients.

Moralis declined to reveal its valuation. 

The raise follows a $13.4 million seed round in 2021, which was also backed by EQT. 

Its software provides solutions for developers facing challenges when switching from web2 systems to building decentralized blockchain applications. These could include issues with user authentication, event watching and data aggregation and indexing. 

“We are absolutely convinced that web3 represents the next iteration of the internet and we see ourselves as the perfect partner for developers wanting to move from web2 into web3,” said Ivan Liljeqvist, co-founder and CEO.

The company says that feedback from users indicates its platform has helped save developers more than $86 million in engineering costs.

This is the latest move which shows investors flocking to web3 adoption projects in their droves. In April, Fabric Ventures unveiled two web3-focused funds worth $245 million collectively. 

© 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.

Montreal-based crypto startup Lighthouse Labs raised $7 million in seed funding ahead of the summer launch of its metaverse search engine.

Following the round led by Accel, BlockTower and Animoca Brands, the company said in a statement that the platform would make places, events, communities and people across different metaverses searchable from one entry point.

“Right now, discovery in the metaverse feels more like gaming, where you need to jump from one game to the next to find things, than the internet, where you can access everything from a single entry point,” Jonathan Brun, co-founder and CEO of Lighthouse, said in the statement.

For on-chain data, co-founder and CTO Justine Massicotte explained that the company would use subgraphs to index information, while for off-chain data, Lighthouse will collect it through direct partnerships with metaverse companies.

Although the company said it wasn’t sharing its valuation or which metaverse companies it was currently working with, it highlighted its links to metaverse companies through the funding round. Investor Animoca Brands, according to its website, has 21 metaverse companies in its portfolio, and its sister company The Sandbox’s founders are general partners at Sparkle Ventures, another participating investor.

White Star Capital, Gemini Frontier Fund, and The Graph core developer StreamingFast also participated in the round, joined by individual investors including Nansen founder Alex Svanevik, POAP founder Patricio Worthalter, Messari founder Ryan Selkis, and Exclusible founder Thibault Launay.

© 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 Democrats of the Senate Banking Committee fear that their Republican colleagues are not taking the risks associated with crypto seriously. 

“Their whole caucus are believers in cryptocurrency,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the chairman of the committee, in conversation with The Block. “Their whole caucus seems indifferent to the risk that cryptocurrency poses.”

“Unlike Republicans, we recognize that there is real risk to the system when billionaires are created out of — if we ask where the money comes from, these people making billions of dollars, they look at you blankly,” Brown continued, comparing the situation with the OTC derivatives market that led to the financial crisis of 2008.

Brown also said that the recent fall of TerraUSD’s peg “underscores the seriousness of this threat to the financial system, because it’s unregulated.”

Brown, as the head of the committee, sets the tone for a great deal of financial legislation. He is not alone; Senator Elizabeth Warren (S-MA), a noted critic of the crypto industry on the committee, told The Block:

“We have to deal with the risks that stablecoins pose to consumers and to our economy overall. If they are not adequately overseen and are representing that they have assets that in fact are not there, then that’s a risk to the whole financial system.”

“We do need a regulatory framework for stablecoins,” said Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) in a May 10 Banking Committee hearing. “The cryptocurrency market is now larger than the subprime mortgage market that triggered the global financial crisis.”

As to the solution, that remains up in the air. While Representative Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) has drafted legislation that would essentially codify the Biden administration’s requested stablecoin policy in the House of Representatives, the Senate has seen no such proposals other than from Republicans. 

“I know that because of the cryptocurrency lobby here, we can’t pass any legislation. Doesn’t mean we’re not trying legislatively. But we can work with the SEC, the Fed, the FDIC, and the CFTC and the Ag Committee. And the OCC,” Brown said.

© 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.

After the stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) lost its peg to the US dollar this week, many investors in the related token Luna (LUNA) have been left unable to sell. 

Stuck on the sidelines are those who own Luna tokens and have them staked. These holders are watching the value of their tokens sink and aren’t able to do anything about it.

According to Terra Analytics, around 152 million LUNA is being staked on the network — excluding liquid staking through Lido, where tokens aren’t as tied up . That represents 30% of the circulating supply of LUNA. 

When coins are staked, they are locked up indefinitely and the holder receives tokens as rewards. When the holder chooses to unstake them, they are able to get their tokens back after a period of time and then no longer receive rewards. Staking periods can range between different cryptocurrencies, but for Luna, it’s 21 days that you have to wait to get your tokens back.

Normally this isn’t a big problem. While crypto prices are volatile, stakers typically accept this and are used to day-to-day fluctuations. If the market starts declining, worried holders can unstake their tokens and cash out within a few weeks.

Yet the collapse of Luna and UST has happened incredibly quickly and with painful results. As UST has lost its peg to the dollar, a lot of investors have tried to cash out in case the stablecoin’s price drops even further. While some have sold on the open market, others have swapped 1 UST for $1 of Luna (the key mechanism designed to keep the stablecoin, well, stable).

Yet this process mints a lot of Luna. In the last two days, more than 145 million LUNA has been minted to enable stablecoin holders to cash out. This has worsened the price drop of Luna as more tokens have flooded the market, alongside normal traders selling the token based on the current negative sentiment.

Today alone, the price of Luna has dropped from $31 to $2 — down 93%. The token has lost 97% of its value in the past week. This price crash has happened faster than Luna stakers have been able to blink, let alone unstake their coins and cash out. 

“My Luna, though, which is still staked and will take days before being removed, will stay there forever, I guess,” Artem Sinyakin, co-founder of crypto media company Oak Invest, told The Block. 

Sinyakin added that he was disappointed this collapse might cause people to leave crypto and dissuade other people from getting involved with it. He also said it puts stablecoins under the light for regulators — something we saw yesterday with US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen using UST as an example to ask for greater stablecoin regulation.

“Just feeling numb,” 0xKowloon, a pseudonymous developer at CoinGecko, told The Block. “Already wanted to sell a few weeks ago but didn’t end up doing it precisely because of the amount of time it takes to unstake.”

© 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.

Ruja Ignatova, the founder of Ponzi scheme OneCoin, has been added to Europe’s list of most wanted fugitives as of Wednesday.

Ignatova is known for being the head of OneCoin, one of the biggest scams in the history of crypto, and the basis of the BBC podcast series, “The Missing Cryptoqueen.”

She has now been added to Europol’s most wanted list, with officials saying she’s suspected of being the “driving force and intellectual inventor” of OneCoin, which “induced investors all over the world to invest in this actually worthless currency.” 

OneCoin’s business was built on selling educational cryptocurrency trading packages to its members, who were incentivized with commissions to sell to yet more new members. OneCoin claimed its membership was as large as 3 million people during the peak of the scheme, including victims across the globe. 

As a result, US prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged the leaders of OneCoin with wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering in 2019. This included Ruja Ignatova and Konstantin Ignatov, her brother, as well as Mark Scott.

Konstantin Ignatov was arrested in March 2019 while Scott was arrested in September 2018, however Ruga Ignatova remains at large. 

The addition of Ignatova to Europe’s most wanted list and the cash reward of €5,000 (about $5,250) for information on her head widens the scope of the search and increases the likelihood that she will be brought to justice.

Scott was found guilty by a federal jury in Manhattan in 2019 while Ignatov signed a plea deal in the same year which meant he would not face further criminal charges. 

© 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.

South Korea’s major exchanges have issued warnings about trading of Luna (LUNA) following the crypto’s current price downturn.

The price of Luna is down 87% in the last 24-trading period and has fallen 96% from its all-time high of $119 in April.

Coinone, one of the “big four” crypto exchanges in South Korea, has suspended trading of Luna, citing its abrupt price slump. Korbit and Bithumb have issued “designated investment warnings” on the coin citing similar concerns as well.

For Bithumb and Korbit, these warnings do not necessarily mean that Luna will be suspended. These designated investment warnings usually last for 72 hours after which the exchanges will decide whether to halt or continue trading.

The situation, however, does offer an insight into the level of unease among Korean crypto investors concerning Luna’s current decline. Bithumb is the ninth-largest exchange for Luna trading volume in the last 24 hours, according to data from Coinranking.

Luna’s downward spiral comes amid the ecosystem’s major algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) losing its peg. UST, which is supposed to be pegged to the US dollar, is currently down to $0.47 having rebounded from as low as $0.27 earlier in the day.

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© 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.