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The Japanese video game company Square Enix, which is behind popular titles such as Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and Dragon Quest, signed a deal Monday to sell off some of its intellectual property and studios in order to fund new blockchain, AI and cloud investments.

Swedish gaming firm Embracer is paying Square Enix $300 million for two North America-based studios, Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Interactive, and the popular game series Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief and Legacy of Kain, among others.

The move is in line with Square Enix’s growing interest in blockchain gaming. At the beginning of 2022, the company’s president Yosuke Matsuda said that the firm intended to invest more in blockchain technology throughout the year. 

Square Enix first got into NFTs in March of 2021 after partnering with the Japanese blockchain gaming tech company Double Jump Tokyo, creating digital assets for the video game franchise Million Arthur.

© 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.

Two banks in Argentina have launched crypto trading features on their platforms.

Banco Galicia, one of the largest private banks in Argentina, confirmed on social media today that it has added a crypto trading option to its website. The digital bank Brubank then confirmed that it has done the same. 

Twitter users spotted Banco Galicia’s new crypto feature on May 2, which the bank’s official Twitter account confirmed to one user. “Yes! We are adding new investment options,” it said in response to a person saying the crypto trading feature was confirmed. 

CoinDesk confirmed this by logging into the bank’s website that it is offering the ability to purchase bitcoin and ether, plus the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) and Ripple (XRP). 

A few hours later, Brubank tweeted that it has also added crypto trading functionality to the investment part of its website. 

“Yes, we already have crypto!” it tweeted. “It is a functionality that is being progressively enabled for all our users. When you have it enabled you will be able to view it by entering ‘Investments’ from the app,” the tweet said. According to the website CriptoNoticias, Brubank is offering bitcoin and ether trading, as well as the stablecoins USD Coin (USDC) and DAI. 

Banco Galicia was founded in 1905, and is considered to be one of the most important banks in Argentina. The financial institution counts more than 4.2 million corporate and individual clients according to its LinkedIn page. Brubank is a totally digital, regulated bank launched in 2017. 

© 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.

Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the non-profit organization supporting Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, will no longer accept cryptocurrency donations. 

Among the main reasons for the removal were environmental sustainability concerns related to crypto and the Wikimedia community’s perceived risk to its reputation for accepting cryptocurrencies. 

The proposal to remove the WMF’s use of cryptocurrency first appeared on January 11. “Accepting cryptocurrency makes a joke out of the WMF’s commitment to environmental sustainability,” wrote a pseudonymous editor named Gamaliel on January 11, 2022.

WMF first began accepting cryptocurrency donations in 2014, which the foundation notes has consistently been the “least utilized methods of donating.” Wikimedia received over $154 million in donations during the 2020-2021 fiscal year. During that time, 347 donors gave $130,100.94, or 0.08% of the total revenue, through cryptocurrency donations — which was mostly bitcoin.

“The financial effect of no longer accepting crypto donations would be minimal, and far outweighed by the reputational harm to the Wikimedia project of being seen to endorse a technology so strongly tied to various environmental and social harms,” wrote  TrueAnonyman on April 9.  

Those in favor of keeping crypto donations argued for the use of less energy-intensive cryptocurrencies such as those that run on proof-of-stake consensus, noted cryptocurrencies “provide safer ways to donate and engage in finance for people in oppressive countries,” and mentioned fiat currency also has environmental sustainability issues. 

 “In 2014, Wikimedia took the step to take donations in crypto long before anyone knew it existed. We’re now approaching the 8th year since, and the only fundamental thing that has changed is its popularity,” someone writing under the name JusCurt posted on January 13. “I don’t blame Wikimedia for that move as cleaner competitors simply did not exist as they do today, and the scale of transactions did not pose any environmental threat.”

Community members argued over the proposal until April 12. The final decision was made on May 1. The WMF closed its account on payment processor BitPay and removed the ability for a user to donate crypto. 

“The Wikimedia Foundation will continue to monitor the evolution and discussion around cryptocurrency,” said the WMF in a statement. “These ongoing conversations represent a powerful example of how the Wikimedia movement engages in thoughtful debate, remains flexible and adapts in response to changing conditions.”

© 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

• Crypto Raiders is a semi-idle Polygon-based game, in which players can choose to either play actively or passively as a Raider character or Mobster character, respectively.
• Crypto Raiders is based on a “pay-to-play” model. Players can either gradually level up their characters using the limited free keys distributed each week, or quickly level up by purchasing additional dungeon passes, equipping themselves with a horse NFT, and purchasing potions from the DEX.
• A major distinction between Crypto Raiders and other P2E games is some of its in-game assets are fungible, allowing players to trade them on decentralized exchanges.

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Christine Sandler, former executive at the crypto division of asset manager Fidelity, has left the firm for a new position as general partner at crypto asset investment firm Walden Bridge Capital. Sandler announced the news via her LinkedIn. 

Sandler was at Fidelity for just over 3 years as the head of sales and marketing for its digital assets division. In an interview last year with The Block, Sandler shared that the crypto unit experienced 4x growth during 2020. 

“Our overall account growth was absolutely phenomenal,” Sandler said at the time. “We saw participation across all segments. So whether it was corporations adopting it and putting assets on their balance sheet, or hedge funds beginning to approach this from a strategic perspective, registered investment advisors, family offices, ultra-high net worth individuals.”

Sandler previously held positions at Coinbase as Director of International Sales and the New York Stock Exchange as Executive Vice President of Global Sales. Her new role, effective today, is at Walden Bridge Capital, a crypto asset investment firm based in Chicago, as General Partner.

© 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 Blockchain Association — a trade association that lobbies US politicians on behalf of the crypto industry — saw explosive growth in 2021, thanks in part to the controversy surrounding the crypto tax reporting provisions that were included as part of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that went through Congress last year.

In this episode of The Scoop, Kristin Smith, Executive Director of the Blockchain Association, appears on the show for a record-breaking fifth appearance (pulling ahead of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried by one) to explain the crypto-friendly momentum that she sees building among American politicians.

According to Smith, there are three main reasons why the crypto lobbying industry is gaining influence in Washington:

“Between the professionals on the ground, the political giving, and the people back at home that care about this space, the crypto industry is in a much, much better position than we’ve ever been to date.”

Although total US crypto trade association lobbying decreased from $1,034,663 in Q4 of last year to $917,406 in Q1 of 2022, the Blockchain Association increased their Q1 lobbying efforts from $540,000 to $590,000 — over 60% of the industry total for the quarter.

Relative to the total crypto market cap — which peaked at just over $3 trillion last November — the amount of money being directed towards crypto lobbying may seem low. But according to Smith, “the amount of money it takes to influence Washington is laughably small.”

In the US, direct donations to candidates are limited to $2,900 per election, or $5,800 per cycle. 

Although they are limited in size, direct donations carry weight with politicians because the funds go directly to the campaign, says Smith:

“When the crypto industry comes together and you get ten people or twenty people that will write $5,800 checks, all of a sudden you’re doing a $100,000, maybe close to $200,000 fundraiser for a member of Congress — and that’s money that they get to decide how to use as opposed to a super PAC where the super PAC independently is deciding how to use it — that’s actually incredibly powerful.”

During this episode Chaparro and Smith also discuss:

• Bipartisan support for crypto
• Politicians’ interest in NFTs
• How to support crypto-friendly regulation

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.

Exchange and service provider Crypto.com has hired Visa’s Head of regulatory affairs for Europe as its new Vice President, Policy and Engagement for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). 

Roeland Van der Stappen revealed his move to the crypto firm today on LinkedIn. 

“Looking forward to dive into #crypto and #Web3 policy issues and begin sharing all the great things my colleagues are working on,” he wrote in his announcement post.

Van der Stappen is based in Brussels, according to his LinkedIn page. He helmed Visa’s regulatory affairs for Europe for the past 3.5 years. Prior to that, he worked as Barclay’s Vice President of Government Policy and Public Relations. 

Crypto.com has ramped up its policy tactics stateside as well, making a major move into federal lobbying at the start of this year. In the UK, the advertising regulator banned two advertisements from the firm in January.

© 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.

VanEck, a New York-based investment management firm behind a bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund (ETF) launched last year, plans to release a collection of 1,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The Ethereum-based collection, called the VanEck Community NFT, will revolve around a caricature of Alexander Hamilton, named “Hammy,” as he explores past, present and future financial policy. The purpose of the collection is to demonstrate real-world utility for digital assets, to provide community for VanEck investors and to educate holders on the crypto space. 

VanEck partnered with the NFT creative services firm NUMOMO to help with the launch.

“Our NFTs will all feature eye-popping 3D avatars and narrative-style videos that will help create a real sense of story and spur discussion, debate and community,” said JP Lee, VanEck Community NFT Co-Founder, in a statement. “Our character ‘Hammy’ is going to be an outstanding guide for anyone interested in seeing the past, present and future of finance unfold.

The collection will include three tiers: 750 “common,” 230 “rare” and 20 “legendary” NFTs. Each level will afford the owner more special access to VanEck events, digital asset research and other exclusive benefits. An airdrop to people who sign up for the project will occur the first week of May in 2022. 

This is its first foray into NFTs, but VanEck has long been an advocate for Bitcoin ETFs in the US. The US Securities and Exchange Commission rejected VanEck’s proposed bitcoin spot ETF last year, the firm’s bitcoin futures ETF launched in November of 2021.

© 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.

Over 50 of bitcoin mining’s biggest advocates have put their names to a letter addressed to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pushing back on recent claims made by a group of US House Democrats.

Last week, over 20 House representatives co-signed a letter to EPA administrator Michael Regan asking the agency to investigate possible negative consequences related to bitcoin mining. The letter referenced electronic waste from hardware replacement, greenhouse gas emissions and the reopening of former gas and coal plants among other concerns.

US Representative Jared Huffman led that initiative, which garnered signatures from Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Brad Sherman among others. 

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor revealed the new response letter Monday morning on Twitter. “We have authored a response to clear up the confusion, correct inaccuracies, and educate the public,” tweeted Saylor. 

Saylor organized the response with the help of his Bitcoin Mining Council, a coalition of mining and mining-adjacent firms that seeks to push back on negative narratives in the public around mining. The group sent their own letter to the EPA today, saying the Representatives’ letter is “premised on several misperceptions about Bitcoin and digital asset mining,” and seeking to set the record straight.

“The undersigned individuals agree that by embracing the Bitcoin Network and bitcoin mining, the United States of America will be more innovative, economically resilient, and ultimately stronger into the future,” reads the letter.

Signatories included Block Head Jack Dorsey, Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz, Susquehanna’s Global Head of Digital Asset Strategy G. Bart Smith, SkyBridge’s Anthony Scaramucci, Fidelity’s Tom Jessop and Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, among others.

The arguments

The letter directly responds to seven points made in the Representatives’ letter. These responses mainly contend with the idea that bitcoin mining generates carbon emissions.

The signatories argue that miners utilize electricity like any other data center, and mining itself does not create emissions. Instead, goes the argument, miners primarily use power sources that can create emissions — and those emissions can be reduced or eliminated with policy decisions.

If a data center is abiding by the regulations put forth by the agency, there’s no reason it should be treated differently from other power-using processes, according to the signatories. 

The letter also asserts that some claims in the Representatives’ letters are false, like the claim that Bitcoin mining alone produces 30,700 tons of electronic waste yearly. The signatories argue this figure comes from a notably biased source and that the paper it cites fails to meaningfully prove the claim.

They also take aim at the claim that a single Bitcoin transaction could power the average US household for a month.

“The ‘per-transaction’ energy cost analysis is a deeply flawed way to reason about Bitcoin, since projecting future energy growth is not a function of transaction count, but instead of value of Bitcoin issuance (which is a function of price and supply growth), together with the fees users are willing to pay to transact,” argues the letter.

© 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.

Nym Technologies, a Swiss privacy startup that shields online activity from surveillance using a mixnet, today unveiled a new $300 million fund to entice developers to its ecosystem.

The Nym Innovation Fund has secured $300 million in commitments from a range of venture capital investors, according to an announcement shared exclusively with The Block. Those backers include Polychain, Greenfield One, Huobi Incubator, Tioga Capital, Eden Block, NGC Ventures, HashKey Capital, Figment, Fenbushi Capital, OKX Blockdream Ventures, Tayssir Capital, KR1, Lemniscap and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Grants under the program will range from roughly $50,000 to several million dollars, according to Nym’s CEO, Harry Halpin. Nym has not taken in the full $300 million up front, but instead plans to draw on the commitments it has received when necessary. 

“We want to incentivize open source and decentralized developers who we don’t know to start building on this network,” said Halpin in an interview with The Block.

Halpin described Nym as a “decentralized mixing network” which uses blockchain technology to mix the so-called packets — containing potentially sensitive metadata — generated by all internet transactions, including cryptocurrency trades. Haplin said Nym’s mixnet technology shuffles these packets like a deck of cards, preventing even an “NSA [National Security Agency] level adversary” from determining who might be behind them.

Nym’s platform has a potentially wide range of use cases — not all of them in crypto. It could, for example, be used by messaging app Signal to scramble packets connected to communication. The company raised $13 million in a round led by a16z in November last year, bringing its valuation to $270 million.

The launch of the Nym Innovation Fund comes just a few weeks after Nym launched its token across a number of exchanges including OKX and Huobi. Privacy advocate Edward Snowden spoke at the launch event.

Incentivized packet mixing

While similar in some ways to the mammoth incentive funds rolled out in recent months by Ethereum challengers like Avalanche and Algorand, the Nym Innovation Fund doesn’t offer “liquidity mining” rewards.

Halpin explained that the Nym mixnet is somewhat similar to Bitcoin in terms of its incentive structure, except that nodes mix packets in exchange for rewards in NYM, instead of solving puzzles in exchange for bitcoin.

The $300 million committed to the developer fund by venture capital firms will be boosted, over time, by allocations of NYM from the company’s treasury as those tokens begin to unlock, according to Halpin. Indeed, the first batch of grants made under the new development initiative — which began to be distributed a few weeks ago — were funded by Nym itself.

They went to Carmela Troncoso, co-inventor of a privacy-enhanced COVID-19 contact tracing framework; cryptography expert Daniel Bernstein, who will be working on speeding up Nym’s packet format; Tails, the software used by Edward Snowden to leak NSA secrets; and Nymbox, hardware designed by the community that plans to use Nym’s technology to keep computer traffic private.

A group of cryptography experts will preside over dishing out the grants. They are ex-Meta employee George Danezis; Aggelos Kiayias of IO Global and University of Edinburgh; Ben Laurie of Google; and KU Leuven’s Bart Preneel. 

These four form the basis of a newly formed Nym Foundation, which will publish an open call for proposals in late May. To apply, developers simply pitch their ideas to the panel.

In a statement in Nym’s announcement, Halpin said that though the new fund seems large, “it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the endless amounts of cash possessed by vested interests at Silicon Valley companies and nation-states that benefit from mass surveillance.”

He added: “We have new partners that are waiting in the wings to join the fund that we can’t even announce in this initial fund. I’m just thrilled that developers now can finally get paid for building privacy-enhancing technologies.”

© 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.