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Bitcoin miner Argo entered into an agreement to take up to $70.6 million in loans from crypto financial services firm NYDIG.

The new capital will be used to continue the development of its Helios facility in Texas, the company announced Wednesday.

The first tranche was scheduled for April 29 and the subsequent ones will be on May 31 and June 30. All of them have a 12% interest rate and are secured by mining machines at the Helios facility.

The company has announced other loans to help build out the Texas facility in the past few months, including $26.66 million from NYDIG in March, $25 million from Galaxy Digital in September and another $20 million from the same company in June.

Construction for the 200 megawatts Texas facility broke ground in July of last year. According to a recent update, mining operations are expected to start in the second quarter of 2022.

Argo is headquartered in London, UK and has two facilities in Quebec, as well as its flagship center in Texas. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and launched an IPO in the United States last year.

Argo saw a 291% revenue increase in 2021, according to the results announced last week.

© 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.

Just two weeks after its initial launch, crypto exchange Coinbase is opening up its NFT marketplace beta to all prospective users.

“[W]hat does it mean to be in open beta? It means we’re still working on adding more features to the product, but eager for you to help us build in public,” the company tweeted Wednesday afternoon. 

The marketplace was open only to a select group of users from an October 2021 waitlist of 1.5 million users. For the past two weeks, those select users were able to buy or sell NFTs. Everybody else just had access to view it but not use it.

The marketplace also enabled communities to engage on the network. 

“We’re building a marketplace where you can buy and sell NFTs, of course, but more importantly, you can engage,” Saxena said at a press briefing attended and reported by The Block. “You can engage with the creator. You can engage with the collector. And you can engage with fellow collectors from a community around that NFT. This is an important piece of our strategy.”

Other crypto exchanges have also launched NFT marketplaces of their own, including Binance, Okcoin, and FTX. 

In a blog post two weeks ago, Coinbase outlined its plans for the marketplace going forward.

“In the coming weeks and months, we’ll add more features that will gradually bring our vision for a web3 social marketplace to life,” the firm said. “We’re planning to add drops, minting, token-gated communities, and the option to buy NFTs with your Coinbase account or a credit card. We’ll also add support for NFTs on multiple chains. And over time, we intend to decentralize more features by moving them from Coinbase tech to decentralized solutions.”

© 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.

A former Messari research analyst and a notable crypto investor have drummed up $85 million for a new crypto hedge fund.

Ryan Watkins, who recently left his position at crypto research firm Messari, and Daniel Cheung, a popular investor and Twitter personality, have together co-founded Pangea Fund Management. The fund will employ a long term strategy, investing in crypto projects that have already emerged as winners in the space. 

“Pangea Fund Management is a thesis driven hedge fund making high conviction, concentrated investments in the secular winners of the cryptoeconomy,” reads the fund’s website. 

Watkins tweeted that Pangea runs a “concentrated portfolio anchored by 3-7 high conviction liquid tokens.”

“We aim to be active participants in protocol governance and support the cryptoeconomy’s leading infrastructure protocols as they ride up the S curve to global adoption.”

According to Bloomberg, two secured funding from investors including Bain Capital and ParaFi, as well as Union Square Ventures co-founder Brad Burnham, Apollo Global Management co-founder Josh Harris and other crypto natives like Terraform Labs’ Do Kwon and Alameda Research’s Kyle Samani. 

Cheung and Watkins both tweeted that the fund is hiring, particularly in data science and engineering roles. 

© 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.

Amberdata, a startup that provides digital asset data to financial institutions, has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round.

The funding will go toward product innovation and increase market presence in the US and globally.

“The rate of institutional adoption of crypto is truly astounding,” said Shawn Douglass, CEO at Amberdata, in a statement. “We’ve seen our revenue double in the first quarter of this year as the world’s largest financial institutions come to us for the critical data they need for research, trading, risk, analytics, reporting and compliance as they enter digital assets.”

The funding will also be used to grow the company’s customer success team, expand its DeFi coverage, and develop “digital asset indices, market intelligence, and risk analytics applications,” said Douglass. 

The round was led by Knollwood Investment Advisory, with participation from Susquehanna International Group, Nasdaq Ventures, NAB Ventures, Chicago Trading Company, Nexo, Coinbase, and Innovius. 

Last year, the company raised $15 million in a Series A to grow its research team, in a funding round led by Citi. Previous investors like Citi, Franklin Templeton, Aspenwood Ventures, Rovida Kruptos Assets, and Boldstart Ventures also joined in on this round.

Crypto analytics and data-providing startups have attracted growing interest from investors in recent months. Dune Analytics, a crypto analytics platform, recently hit unicorn status after a Series B fundraise in February. Last year, Paris-based crypto data provider Kaiko, raised $24 million in a Series A funding round.   

© 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.

Every month, The Block Research publishes its Latest Research and Analysis which is a compilation of the most relevant research articles from the month prior. 

In this month’s report, we compare DeFi protocols dYdX and ZigZag, we explore the most interesting insights in the world of NFTs, gaming and the metaverse, we dive into the mechanics and developments behind major areas of Web3, and we get an overview of the various crypto investment vehicles over the past year. 

Lastly, we survey some of the most interesting data and developments across the Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchain landscape and analyze the recent trends in the Bitcoin mining ecosystem. 

To access the full report in PDF format, please click here.

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Issuer Valkyrie Investments has launched an Avalanche-focused trust to join its family of crypto funds.

The Valkyrie Avalanche Trust (VAVAX) launches today. The trust invests solely in AVAX, the native token of the Avalanche network.

“The primary investment objective of the Trust is to reflect the value of Avalanche held within and to offer investors access and exposure to the digital asset in an insurable, cost-effective manner,” the firm said in its announcement.

It is the sixth single-asset trust, which includes vehicles with exposure to bitcoin, polkadot, dash, tron and zilliqa. The Avalanche blockchain launched in September of 2020 by Ava Labs and is the fourth-largest blockchain, with Ava Labs is reportedly raising $350 million at a $5.35 billion valuation to continue its work on the network.

This is the second trust Valkyrie has launched in 2022, and the first also held AVAX. In addition to the single asset trusts, the Valkyrie Multi-Coin Trust launched in late April, and invests in blockchain networks and tokens launched after the creation of Bitcoin and Ethereum, including Avalanche (AVAX), Binance (BNB), Terra (LUNA) and Polygon (MATIC), among others.

“AVAX is growing rapidly in terms of adoption, largely as a result of its blazing fast transaction speeds,” said Valkyrie Investments CIO Steven McClurg in the announcement. “By launching this trust, we are able to give qualified investors exposure to a protocol that they have been increasingly asking about as DeFi projects, NFT platforms, and many other projects have increasingly begun to build on the Avalanche blockchain.”

© 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.

Before Jon Cheesman became the global head of FTX Access — a new division of the crypto exchange founded by billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried which caters to institutional clients – the seasoned market-veteran served as head of forex sales to banks and hedge funds in London at HSBC, spent time as a partner at crypto venture firm Distributed Global and was a VP at Goldman Sachs.

Despite having over a decade of professional experience with global financial markets, Cheesman thinks we are currently living through “the most uncertain macro period” he’s ever seen.

In this episode of The Scoop, Cheesman discusses the various macro headwinds which have hit the crypto market so far in 2022, and explains why he believes “a good tailwind is often an end of a headwind.”

Cheesman contended that tightening monetary policy hurts crypto in the short-term, but it doesn’t affect the value proposition behind crypto:

“There’s no question that inflation and what that means for central bank policy is a significant headwind for crypto assets in the near term. But, I think people are comfortable to separate temporary cyclicality with longer term structural tailwinds.”

Some of the “structural tailwinds” Cheesman thinks are gaining traction include the idea of “the death of fiat currencies” because of central bank activity, and also the recent focus amongst “high net-worth individuals” on being able to lay claim to one’s assets in light of the removal of some Russian banks from the SWIFT payment messaging network. 

As data from The Block shows, total daily volume rose for BTC/RUB pairs in March.

In addition to, “the more structural tailwinds of the supercycle thesis,” Cheesman also believes both extremely high, and low inflation bode well for crypto.

As Cheesman explained:

“In deflation where central banks just have to print like we haven’t seen anything yet, then of course something like bitcoin which has a fixed supply will be attractive.” On the other hand, Cheesman added, “if inflation goes so high and central banks just kind of give up and you end up with something like the Weimar Republic, where people were wheelbarrowing money around to go out to dinner, an asset that has a fixed supply will again, be very attractive.”

 During this episode, Chaparro and Cheesman also discuss:

• What sidelined institutional capital is waiting for
• Why a strong dollar is bad for the global economy
• How VCs harvesting gains is unavoidable

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.

About Coinbase Prime
Coinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.

About Cross River
Cross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/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.

Polkadot has enabled a messaging system called Cross-Consensus Messaging format (XCM). This allows all Polkadot-based blockchains to directly communicate with each other for the first time.

Polkadot is an ecosystem of connectioned blockchains. One way to imagine it is to think of a wheel with a hub and spokes. The spokes represent each blockchain, known as a parachain, and the hub is the native blockchain element that connects everything together. The goal was always to make it possible for these parachains to talk to one another — something that XCM now enables.

XCM is a messaging protocol facilitating the exchange of assets across Polkadot’s parachains. It allows parachain users and developers to exchange data and crypto assets between them. This will make it easy for users of these blockchains to send tokens from one parachain to another.

The initial Polkadot parachains went live in December 2021 and until now had remained fragmented. With the launch of XCM, Polkadot has achieved its main goal of being a fully interoperable ecosystem.

“Now that Polkadot’s cross-chain messaging protocol has been enabled, Polkadot has fulfilled its objective to be a fully interoperable multi-chain ecosystem,” said Shawn Tabrizi, lead developer at Polkadot, in a statement shared with The Block. 

XCM is not dependent on traditional bridges that rely on the “wrapping” of assets to move them from one blockchain to another. Rather the developers baked the XCM protocol in the Relay Chain, Polkadot’s central hub that secures all parachains. This means the whole network of connected parachains will now support this flow of tokens.

This setup is considered more secure than bridges alone, which can have centalized weakpoints and have often been hacked for significant amounts of crypto. Future iterations of the XCM will allow messages to be sent between parachains without needing to be stored on the Relay Chain.

“With XCM, we have a stable and reliable inter-chain messaging channel that is far superior to the fragmented bridges, ”Hoon Kim, said chief technical officer of Astar, a smart contract service on Polkadot.

© 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 1.21 Gigawatts Fund (121G), which was launched last week by serial entrepreneur Ryan Carson to buy non-fungible tokens (NFTs), said it has received commitments worth $40 million from investors.

121G’s website was launched on April 25 and interested investors had to commit 100 ETH ($280,000) to participate in the fund. There were 99 available spots for accredited investors. Carson, the former COO of the popular NFT projects Moonbirds and Proof Collective, tweeted on Tuesday that the fund has seen over 14,000 ETH in commitments and that it will start buying NFTs in July.

The 121G fund, whose name is a reference to the movie Back to the Future, is exclusively focused on acquiring and holding “historically significant blue-chip NFTs,” Carson said on Twitter last month. “We will focus on collecting a broad range of important NFTs across the following categories: generative art, photographs, token-gated communities, metaverses, PFPs [profile pictures], 1/1s and more,” he added.

The fund has a longer-term view on NFTs, holding acquired pieces for 3-10 years, according to Carson. Like many alternative investment funds, it charges a 2% management fee and a 20% fee on profits.

Carson said the majority of the 121G fund will be used to acquire “a strategic ratio of blue-chip floor and rare NFTs” and the remainder will be invested in “up-and-coming promising projects.”

Carson left Moonbirds and Proof after launching 121G. Proof is the media startup behind Moonbirds and Proof Collective, two popular NFT collections. They both are in the top 15 collections in terms of floor price.

The current floor price of Moonbirds, which was launched on April 16, is around 29 ETH and Proof Collective’s floor price is over 100 ETH, according to OpenSea.

The 121G fund aims to acquire such popular NFTs “before large institutional investors enter the market,” according to its website.

© 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, the billionaire Tesla CEO in the process of buying Twitter, appeared to change his profile picture on the social network to a composite image featuring multiple Bored Ape Yacht Club Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Wednesday.

As of Wednesday morning, Musk’s Twitter avatar featured a picture of dozens of Bored Apes, with Ape 5809 in the centre. The image appeared to be a stock photo. 

The price of apecoin, the token launched by Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs, climbed following the revelation. APE rose 16% to $16.96 over the past hour, according to Coinbase data. 

© 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.