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NiceHash, a cryptocurrency mining software company, tweeted on Saturday that its new software could fully unlock Nvidia’s light hashrate (LHR) mining limiter on some graphics cards for mining ethereum.

Last May, computing hardware maker Nvidia reduced the possible hash rate production of its GeForce graphics cards to discourage their use for mining, The Block reported at the time. Prices for graphics cards have been on a steady decline since at least the beginning of the year.

The problem was that dedicated gaming computers were being utilized for ethereum mining, which in turn drove up hardware prices and created shortages, making the product less accessible to those looking to use it for its intended use. 

Currently, only NiceHash Quickminer (Excavator) supports the unlock, the company said on its website, adding that support for NiceHash Miner would be coming soon.

NiceHash is the first to fully unlock mining performance on LHR cards, according to Forbes, which also cited a YouTube video by Son of a Tech showing the software “living up to its claim.”

On Sunday, the NiceHash Rig Manager was briefly down, according to the company website, possibly from an influx of traffic.

© 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.

In this new monthly roundup, The Block collected information on the production, growth efforts and other activities of some of the world’s publicly traded bitcoin miners.

Hive

The company produced 268.8 bitcoin in April and grew its hashrate by 8%, from 2.0 EH/s of bitcoin mining at the beginning of the month to 2.15 EH/s by the end of the month.

It also produced 2,537 ETH, with that dedicated hashrate growing from 6.1 to 6.26 terahash per second (TH/s) during April.

Hive is keeping in line with its HODL strategy as of May, owning 2,832 BTCand 15,914 ETH.

Hive said that it “continued its strong momentum in hashing power expansion” and was able to grow its hashrate through “ongoing optimizations and electrical upgrades.”

Hut 8

In April, Hut 8 produced 309 BTC — 15% of which was derived from Ethereum mining, for which gets paid in bitcoin.

“As unseasonable weather drove increased power demand from residents and businesses, we reduced our consumption to ensure a steady supply on the grid,” the company said in a statement, adding that it also limited consumption at its Drumheller facility due to an electricity price spike.

As of April 30, the firm held a total of 6,769 BTC as part of its strategy.

Hut 8 announced in April that by the end of the month it would no longer host miners and become a fully self-mining company.

CleanSpark

During April, CleanSpark mined 313 BTC and converted a total of 285 BTC to fund its own growth and operation. As of April 30, it held 448 BTC.

CleanSpark’s total hashrate is 2.4 EH/s, backed by a fleet of 24,000 “latest-generation” bitcoin miners.

The company brought in approximately $11.9 million from the sale of bitcoin in April, most of which was invested into its Norcross facility.

Bitfarms

After surpassing 3 EH/s in early April, the company reached 3.3 EH/s by the end of the month, due to the start of operations at Leger, its ninth facility, located in Québec, Canada. This represents a 22% increase from 2.7 EH/s at the end of March.

“We continue to be on track to complete the build-out of Leger in May, as well as the second phase of construction at The Bunker in June,” said Bitfarms CEO Emiliano Grodzki.

In total, Bitfarmed mined 405 BTC last month. As of April 30, it held 5,646 BTC, valued at around $217 million, per the company’s announcement.

The company also debuted a revamped miner management system that has been in the works for nine months, improving its capacity to manage and track miners.

Marathon

Marathon also saw a dip of 30% in bitcoin production in April compared to the previous month, due to “maintenance issues” that caused their facility in Montana to operate below normal levels.

Overall, the company said it’s still on track to meet its previously announced goal of reaching 23.3 exahash per second (Hh/s) in early 2023.

In April, 4,183 miners were installed — representing 0.4 EH/s — at a facility in Texas run by Marathon’s partner Compute North. They were supposed to be powered starting April 17, which would have brought the hashrate up by 11% but that was delayed until May due to a requirement from the energy provider.

On its Q1 earnings call Wednesday, Marathon also announced a net loss of $13 million, despite hitting a “record” level of bitcoin production.

Iris Energy

Iris Energy mined a total of 137 BTC in April, a 13% increase over the previous month.

The Australia-based company increased its average operating hashrate to 1.038 EH/s. Monthly operating revenue also went up by 6% to $5.4 million.

It commission 0.3 EH/s ahead of schedule at its facility in Mackenzie, Canada, with the goal of reaching 1.5 EH/s (the equivalent of 50 megawatts) in an initial phase.

The company also broke ground in a new facility in Texas in April.

Northern Data

In April, Northern Data mined 324 BTC (a 13% month-over-month increase) and 4,583 ETH, a decrease of 9% justified by “​​planned maintenance for inventory.” 

As of Thursday, the company owned close to 1,390 ETH and 39,800 ETH, with a value of approximately €153 million.

By the end of April, the company had a fleet of 44,900 miners and a hashrate of 4.07 EH/s. It plans to reach a total of 100,000 miners, equating to 9.3 EH/s, by the end of the year.

Gem Mining

GEM Mining produced 244.8 BTC during April, a 3.2% decrease from the previous month.

However, the company increased its hashrate from 1.85 EH/s in March to 1.88 EH/s in April. By the end of the month, it had a total of 19,175 miners.

The company also reported $10.15 million in revenue in April, a decrease of 4.3% compared to March.

GEM Mining’s CEO, John Warren, said April’s results were the second-best in the company’s history.

“We will continue to build on this success as we bring our additional 13,000 fully funded and hosted machines online by the end of 2022,” he 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.

US asset manager WisdomTree hopes its forthcoming consumer-facing crypto wallet will offer an approachable experience for less tech-savvy users intimidated by the current crop.

The smartphone-based wallet, known as WisdomTree Prime, was announced in January and will have a limited US launch this summer before a full roll-out across America next year, Jason Guthrie, Wisdomtree’s European head of digital asset product and head of digital assets, said in an interview with The Block.

WisdomTree Prime represents a first foray into direct-to-consumer finance for a firm that’s currently best known for offering exchange traded funds (ETFs) through third parties. That’ll put Wisdomtree on a course to competing with crypto startups including MetaMask and Strike, neobanks such as Chime and traditional consumer banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.

“Two hundred million people use crypto today. These are the early adopters,” Guthrie said. “I really care not about the 200 million that are in but the next 2 billion that come on — and how we help them connect to, and use, and benefit from this space.”

Guthrie sees blockchain technology as a great tool to reduce the frictions and costs resulting from the myriad middlemen involved in financial transactions. Still, he says the end-user experience of most crypto wallets is far too complicated for the average person at the moment.

WisdomTree — which manages about $75 billion — sees an opening in the market between self-custody crypto wallets, which require a certain technical ability to operate, and the centralized accounts offered by crypto exchanges like Binance and FTX. 

“There’s a big gap in terms of what’s out there at the moment that enables people to come into this space,” Guthrie said. Self-custody wallets like Ledger are “fine if you’re really into the technology and you’re an early adopter or you’re very computer savvy or literate. But that’s not really a viable user experience for mainstream.”

Tokenized assets

Guthrie has huge ambitions for WisdomTree Prime, seeing it as an app that can “sit at the center of somebody’s financial life.”

Users will be able to deposit their paychecks, connect a debit card for day-to-day spending, invest in a selection of tokenized assets – and, over time, integrate with innovations happening in decentralized finance (DeFi).

At least initially, all assets in the wallet will be WisdomTree’s tokenized versions. So users’ dollars will be stored as WisdomTree tokenized dollars and any investments — such as bitcoin — will also be WisdomTree’s tokenized version. 

Guthrie said the app’s initial offering should include versions of the dollar, US government bonds, gold, bitcoin and ether. He hopes to eventually add extra investing choices, such as tokenized stock market indexes.

WisdomTree, which has separately been seeking to launch a spot bitcoin ETF in the US, has some tools to compete in the cutthroat market for crypto wallets. For one, it has years of experience adapting investments so they can trade on other venues, including converting gold into a gold ETF. It also has a brand that’s familiar to more maintream investors.  

The app’s pitch is to allow users all the functionality of traditional banking and investment — getting your salary paid, transferring money to friends, saving for retirement — while discarding the decades-old technology of the traditional financial system.

“We can make this experience manageable, feel like what they’ve got, but be attached and natively built on this new set of technology,” Guthrie said. 

No Matt Damon

While WisdomTree will ramp up marketing as next year’s full launch approaches, it’s not planning to splurge on the types of eye-catching stunts employed by some consumer-focused crypto brands.

“If you’ve got a very good product that has a compelling value proposition you can attract clients without naming a stadium or hiring Matt Damon,” Guthrie said.

Still, he sees the public nature of blockchains as a potential challenge to their wider adoption in consumer finance. Because transactions happen in full view, some users might be concerned about acquaintances learning their wallet address — although crypto mixing tools might help avoid this.

As Guthrie puts it, “I want to send you 10 bucks to pay for beers last night. I don’t necessarily need you to be able to then go and see my whole bank account.”

Overall though, Guthrie is bullish on the potential for crypto to disrupt financial services. 

“I don’t think financial services had its ‘internet moment,’” he concludes. “People fill out forms online, but they’re nominally the same as what they did in-branch 20 years ago. The experience and the business model is fundamentally the same. And I think that is ripe for disruption.”

© 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, one of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges, disabled its derivatives services in Spain while seeking regulatory approval from Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV), the Crypto Times reported on Saturday.

The website of Binance in Spain removed its derivatives drop-down and local newspapers reported that the company had temporarily suspended derivatives offerings to comply with regulations and eligibility criteria set by the government agency.

Currently, Binance is on a gray list of CNMV, along with other crypto exchanges including Coinbase and Bit2Me. The gray list identifies organizations not allowed to operate as fully licensed entities.

Last week, Binance received a digital asset service provider license from the financial markets regulator in France, The Block reported.

© 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.

Julian Sawyer’s time as CEO of Luxembourg-based crypto exchange Bitstamp appears to have ended.

Sawyer’s Twitter page now says: “Ex-CEO at @Bitstamp, co-founder at @Starlingbank, Honorary fellow at @Bayes Business School and advisor at @Voltbank. All views my own.” His LinkedIn account says: “Ex-Chief Executive Officer at Bitstamp.”

The Block reached out to Sawyer through Twitter and LinkedIn seeking his response but had not received any reply by the time this story was published.

It was only about 18 months ago that Sawyer took over one of the world’s longest-running crypto exchanges: Bitstamp, which was founded in 2011 by Nejc Kodrič and has more than four million individual customers as well as a number of institutional partners.

Sawyer was previously at Gemini, which he joined in December 2019 to lead its European expansion. Gemini Europe Services was able to achieve registration by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority as a regulated crypto asset business in August 2020. Still, by that time Sawyer was gone.

Before entering the crypto industry, Sawyer served as co-founder and chief operating officer of Starling Bank, a British neo bank with 1.7 million customers. 

Bitstamp, which was acquired by private equity firm NXMH in 2018, controls only about 2% of the market for spot trading between crypto and fiat, compared with about 27% by market leader Coinbase.

Sawyer and Robert Zagotta, head of Bitstamp’s US division, said in an interview during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami last month that the company was keen to reach an older, more cautious demographic, and eager to highlight that it’s one of only four exchanges awarded a AA-rating by Cryptocompare. 

They said Bitstamp was pinning its future on solid customer service and reliability as it targets “underserved” audiences including women and older investors. 

© 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.

Fashion label Under Armour’s Curry Brand is launching non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to celebrate every time NBA basketball player Stephen Curry makes a three-point shot during the ongoing playoff games. 

Curry, who plays for the Golden State Warriors, is known for his high-arching three pointers, scored from anywhere outside the 22-foot arc around the basketball net.

The NFTs, which will be given to fans on a first-come, first-serve basis, will come with something called “serums,” which are kept in digital wallets and allow owners to change the looks of their avatars.

Starting in June, the brand plans on dropping an additional 20,000 basketball NFTs.

Luxury and fashion brands have been increasingly experimenting with NFTs and blockchain-backed games in an effort to tap into what’s estimated to be an $800 billion metaverse market by 2024. Luxury fashions more specifically are estimated to be a $50 billion revenue opportunity by 2030, according to Morgan Stanley.

For Under Armour and Stephen Curry, this is not the first move into the NFT space. In December, Curry Brand launched wearable sneakers that can be used on multiple gaming platforms including Decentraland, The Sandbox, Gala Games and Rumble Kong League. 

In September 2021, Curry secured a partnership with crypto exchange FTX to demystify the crypto space, just a day after he turned to Twitter to solicit crypto advice.

© 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 Korea Society of Fintech & Blockchain (KSFB) and the Korea Digital Asset Service Provider Association (KDA) said President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol’s cryptocurrency policy proposals were disappointing because they left out crucial objectives, Forkast reported on Friday.

Yoon will take office on May 10. 

While the incoming administration released 110 national tasks earlier this week that included supportive policies on cryptocurrencies, it omitted the establishment of a government agency dedicated to digital assets and detailed plans on promoting the cryptocurrency market, the groups said in a statement. 

They were especially disappointed at the lack of a negative regulatory system, a structure that would define what is prohibited while permitting the rest, as that would allow companies’ freedom to pursue all aspects of business except those specifically banned.  

Still, the groups welcomed the inclusion of digital assets and preparing the groundwork for the approval of initial coin offerings (ICOs). More than 10% of the South Korean population holds crypto.

© 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

• There were 244 crypto funding deals in April — the highest-ever monthly count.
• Multiple new VC funds were also launched, including from Dragonfly Capital, Union Square Ventures and Framework Ventures.

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Two crypto market colleagues have started a hedge fund that will take a “long-only” strategy after receiving $85 million in first-round funding, Bloomberg reported earlier this week.

Pangea Fund Management was recently formed by Ryan Watkins, 25, a former analyst at Messari, and Daniel Cheung, 26, formerly of Jennison Associates.

Pangea is backed by investors including Bain Capital, ParaFi, Alameda Research, Do Kwon of Terraform Labs and Kyle Samani of Multicoin Capital, the report said.

“Our thesis is that in the long run, there’ll be very few winners in each category” within crypto, Watkins told Bloomberg. “So for us, we’d much rather bet on some of the early winners we’re seeing.”         

Pangea’s strategy is taking long positions in three to seven established tokens, Watkins said, making the fund unusual when most investment from crypto venture capitalists goes into new projects, the report 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.

Former President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Twitter seeking to lift his permanent suspension from the social media giant was dismissed by a federal judge on Friday.

San Francisco federal District Judge James Donato wrote that Trump’s argument that the ban violated his First Amendment right to free speech was not persuasive because Twitter is a private company. “The First Amendment applies only to governmental abridgements of speech, and not to alleged abridgements by private companies,” Donato wrote, adding that Trump’s suit failed to show that his suspension was attributable to the government.

The ruling came almost two weeks after Trump told CNBC he would not return to Twitter even if his ban were lifted by Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief whose $44 billion offer to buy Twitter was recently accepted by the company’s board.

Twitter banned the former president two days after last year’s January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

© 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.