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Quick Take

• Total adjusted on-chain volume increased by 40%, to $831 billion.
• A total of 137,088 Ethereum, equivalent to $429 million, was burned.
• Monthly volume of NFT marketplaces on Ethereum increased by 21.6% to $7.2 billion.
• Centralized exchange spot trading volumes decreased by 6.7% to $694.6 billion.
• Except for Ethereum options volume, derivatives open interest and trade volumes declined across the board.

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Samsung Asset Management plans to list a blockchain exchange-traded fund (ETF) on the Hong Kong Exchange in the first half of this year, the Korea Economic Daily reported on Thursday.

It will the first ETF that tracks cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech companies to list in Asia. 

The listing follows the company’s acquisition of a 20% stake in US ETF sponsor Amplify Holding Company in March.

Illinois-based Amplify’s ETF product BLOK, or Amplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF, invests at least 80% of its net assets in equity securities of blockchain companies, the daily 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.

Belgium’s Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) required all crypto-exchanges and custodial wallet services in the region to register with the agency beginning today, AMBCrypto reported.

The FSMA added that: “Providers already operating on 1 May 2022 must notify the FSMA of the exercise of their activity before 1 July 2022 and apply for registration before 1 September 2022.”

Despite some industry concerns, many see the rule as necessary for ensuring the growth and stability of the crypto sector in Belgium, the website said, because it is important for regulators to provide clarity and guidance on how crypto businesses operate.

A recent report showed that almost 2.5% of Belgium’s 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.

Validator operators of Solana, a proof-of-stake blockchain, successfully completed a cluster restart at about 11 p.m. ET on Saturday following a roughly seven-hour outage when the network failed to reach consensus, it said on Twitter.

An earlier Twitter post had said that “Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus after an enormous amount of inbound transactions (4m per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100gbps.”

Finally, late Saturday night, one of the validators coordinating through the Solana discord sent a Google doc of instructions that enabled the operators to restart the cluster at slot 131973970.

Engineers were still investigating why the network was unable to recover from the crush of transactions that caused the outage, the Twitter post said.

Last September, Solana went offline after it was overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of transactions per second and remained down for 17 hours.

© 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.

Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital is planning to move its headquarters to Dubai, according to media reports.

The move comes as Dubai opens to crypto firms while Singapore has been more conservative with its regulatory approach, Bloomberg reported.

“The energy in Dubai’s digital asset industry is electric right now,” Three Arrows co-founder Su Zhu told CoinDesk, which initially reported the story. “We have decided to move our Three Arrows headquarters to Dubai and I’m looking forward to meeting more technology startups.”

In January, Singapore’s central bank warned crypto providers against marketing their services in public areas, TechInAsia reported, while Dubai’s low tax rates, pro-business and crypto-friendly policies have attracted a recent inflow of crypto firms.

© 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 Otherside metaverse project sold out all the available 55,000 Otherdeed land NFTs within three hours of its public sale starting at 9 p.m. ET on Saturday.

According to Otherside’s official Twitter account, investors scooped up all the NFTs in an offering that accepted only ApeCoin cryptocurrency.

The mint price was 305 ApeCoin, worth about $5,800 at the time of mint. It brought in 16.7 million ApeCoin ($317 million), making it a record-setting NFT mint. A mint is a public offering in which NFTs are sold through a smart contract on a blockchain like Ethereum.

The buyers had to pass a Know Your Customer (KYC) verification and had their crypto wallets pre-approved on the project’s website.

The NFTs will give buyers rights to claim land in the Otherside metaverse, a blockchain-based virtual world being developed by Yuga Labs — creator of popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT collections.

After today’s mint, BAYC and MAYC holders will also be able to claim free land during a 21-day period.

More than 27,000 users bought the 55,000 available Otherdeed NFTs of a total 100,000 minted. The remaining 45,000 are included in an airdrop open to existing holders of BAYC and MAYC NFTs.

As a highly anticipated NFT release, the Otherdeed mint caused gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain to soar to 8,000 GWEI, per data from Etherscan block explorer.

This resulted from a gas war — a situation in which many Ethereum users tried to buy NFTs at the same time and outbid each other by using the network’s transaction fees. Such bids can cause the fees on the blockchain to spike, as was the case today.

In the end, on-chain data revealed the Otherdeed gas war led to the sale running up an additional $172 million in transaction fees that cost individual buyers between $4000 and $10,000. Such high mint fees caused many to complain they were unable to make purchases.

On Twitter, Ethereum developer Foobar critiqued Yuga Labs for writing a smart contract that was not optimized for gas wars.

Commenting on the gas war, Yuga Labs said the Otherside metaverse may be looking to migrate away from Ethereum to its own Layer 1 blockchain to improve scalability.

© 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.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett championed cash over “new forms of money” and said Berkshire Hathaway would “always have a lot of cash on hand,” as CNBC, CNN and others published live updates of him addressing the company’s annual shareholder meeting today in Omaha, Nebraska.

Buffett, 91, didn’t specify bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, though in the past he has said it has no unique value.

“The United States government affects that this became exchangeable for lawful money in the United States,” Buffett said, displaying an image of a $20 bill.

“That’s what money is,” he added. “It may turn out that it becomes worth dramatically less at purchasing power. …  But that when people tell you that they’re reaching [for] new forms of money, this is the only thing that will pay bills.”

Tron founder and CEO Justin Sun had dinner with Buffett in in Omaha in 2020, paying $4.57 million for the privilege, with the funds going to the Glide Foundation charity in San Francisco, The Block reported at the time. “It was really an honor and I’m grateful for Mr. Buffett’s dinner, wisdom, and vision,” Sun 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.

Quick Take

• Gajesh Naik, a 14-year-old boy from India, recently joined Solana Labs as an intern.
• The Block sat down with Naik to discuss his crypto journey and what he hopes to do for Solana.

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The Swiss National Bank is currently against buying and holding bitcoin as a reserve currency, Chairman Thomas Jordan said Friday at the central bank’s annual general meeting, Reuters reported.

“Buying bitcoin is not a problem for us, we can do that either directly or can buy investment products which are based on bitcoin,” Jordan was quoted by the news agency as saying. “We can arrange the technical and operative conditions relatively quickly, when we are convinced we must have bitcoin in our balance sheet.

“But from the current perspective we do not believe bitcoin meets the requirements of currency reserves, that’s why we have until now decided not to have bitcoin on our balance sheet,” he added.

© 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.

DeFi platform Rari Capital was hacked for more than $80 million in crypto assets held in multiple lending pools.

According to smart contract audit company BlockSec, an unknown hacker targeted Rari Capital’s Fuse platform — a protocol that enables DeFi developers to create lending markets of their own. The security firm said the exploit occurred through a reentrancy vulnerability in the protocol’s smart contract.

Among those losing funds was Fei Protocol,  a development team that runs a decentralized US dollar-pegged stablecoin called Fei USD. The Fei Protocol team manages lending markets on Fuse, where users can deposit funds for an annual yield and also take out loans in FEI stablecoin. 

In a Twitter post, Fei Protocol acknowledged the massive exploit and asked the hacker to return the funds in exchange for a $10 million bounty.

© 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.