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Seven blockchain infrastructure companies have added support for Pyth Network, an oracle service on the Solana blockchain. These include Everstake, P2P, Syndica, Figment, Triton1, Coinbase Cloud, and Blockdaemon.

Pyth Network’s oracle solution aggregates off-chain data needed by applications such as those in the decentralized finance sector.

Today’s announcement comes as Pyth Network is looking to expand the infrastructure requirements for its oracle solution. The network relies on more than 50 called publishers that cover financial services players, trading firms and crypto exchanges. Some of the biggest publishers on Pyth include Alameda Research, Jump Trading, Chicago Trading Company, CMS, FTX Exchange, Galaxy Digital, Genesis Global Trading, Wintermute and others.

These data publishers give accurate information for DeFi applications on Solana that hold over $6.5 billion in total locked assets.

According to a media statement from Pyth Data Association, a Swiss association managing the project, these companies will support Pyth’s data providers and assist them in maintain their node infrastructure. The seven infrastructure companies will enable data publisher clients to run nodes by staking the native PYTH tokens.

© 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.

Bybit is officially launching in Brazil and setting up a dedicated team to offer cryptocurrency trading and services to those in the country, the company said on Thursday.

Bybit, which moved its headquarters to Dubai from Singapore earlier this month, will allow customers to make purchases in Brazilian real through the Central Bank of Brazil’s instant payment platform Pix. It will also offer spot trading, earning products including dual asset investments, and access to its NFT marketplace.

Bybit boasted the third-biggest trading volume in March behind Binance and Coinbase, with almost $10 billion in daily transactions, according to research by The Block.

While use in Brazil was not previously restricted, and in December last year it started offering crypto staking through Pix, this marks the company’s official entry into the country.

The move follows regulatory issues in several jurisdictions last year, as some exchanges found their ability to operate stymied. 

As such, it is little surprise the country is now entering markets where regulation is on the agenda. Earlier this week, the Brazilian Senate passed a bill regulating cryptocurrency transactions, although it still needs to pass the Chamber of Deputies and be signed into law before being implemented.

This is expected to happen before the end of the year and would provide a clear regulatory framework for crypto assets.

© 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.

Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s largest investment and private equity firms with over $450 billion in total assets, has hired Christine Moy, a former crypto executive at JPMorgan, as it looks to invest in the web3 industry.

Moy has joined Apollo as partner and head of digital asset strategy, a source familiar with the matter told The Block. Bloomberg first reported the news.

“She might be the most senior woman or even person in tradfi [traditional finance] asset management dedicated to digital assets,” the source said.

Moy left JPMorgan in February as its global head of metaverse within the bank’s Onyx team. She had worked for JPMorgan for more than 18 years and that had been her only employer to date, according to her LinkedIn profile.

At Apollo, Moy will help the firm invest in blockchain and web3 startups. John Zito, deputy chief investment officer of credit at Apollo, told Bloomberg that the firm is unlikely to invest in bitcoin, tokens or protocols unless there are revenue-generating businesses attached to such projects.

Apollo will make bigger investments, with its checks ranging from $50 million to $250 million, Zito told Bloomberg.

© 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.

Twitter reported an increase in first-quarter revenue on Thursday, three days after accepting Elon Musk’s bid to take the company private.

The US social media company made what could be its last public earnings announcement, which showed first-quarter revenue up 16% to $1.2 billion. Net income for the quarter was $513 million, boosted by the sale of its MoPub mobile ad platform. 

As the Twitter board accepted Tesla CEO Musk’s bid to take the company private on Monday, the standard post-earnings conference call with analysts was canceled. 

“In light of the proposed transaction with Mr. Musk, as is customary during the pendency of an acquisition, Twitter will not be hosting a conference call, issuing a shareholder letter, or providing financial guidance in conjunction with its first quarter 2022 earnings release,” the report read.

Twitter’s earnings report showed that daily active users rose 16% to 229 million during the first quarter, but the social media platform revealed it miscalculated active user figures between 2019 and 2021. The mistake overstated user numbers by between 1% and 2% over the period.

“In March of 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between accounts. An error was made at that time, such that actions taken via the primary account resulted in all linked accounts being counted as mDAU. This resulted in an overstatement of mDAU from Q1’19 through Q4’21,” the report noted.

Since the $44 billion bid was accepted there has been debate over what impact Musk will have on Twitter. While he has openly talked about championing free speech on the platform he’s also addressed issues with spam bots – which might have a positive impact on Crypto Twitter.

Speaking at a recent TED talk, Musk addressed his concern with bots, noting that the spam bots negatively impact the user experience on Twitter. “They make the product much worse. If I had a dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, I would have a hundred billion dogecoin.”

Musk has been the target of several impersonation attempts in the past and recently scammers have used popular NFT projects to scam users, even targeting Bernie Sanders’ son’s verified account.

Blockchain technology has been muted as one solution to these issues and recently Twitter became the first company to test out payment platform Stripe’s new payment system, Stripe Connect.

Stripe will support payments through the USDC stablecoin on the Polygon blockchain, according to an announcement made last week, these payments will be accessible through Stripe Connect.

This will enable verified content creators on the platform to receive earnings through USDC and Stripe has plans to introduce additional currencies in the future. Musk pushed the use of cryptocurrency at Tesla, allowing customers to use dogecoin for purchases, and the likelihood of Twitter exploring integrations with cryptocurrency and blockchain technology further is one possibility once his takeover bid is complete.

© 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

• In this weekly series, we dive into some of the most interesting data and developments across the Layer 1 blockchain landscape, from DeFi and bridges to network activity and funding
• The Avalanche network’s premier scaling solution is being put to the test as subnets begin to roll out
• Anchor’s yield reserves are drawing down quickly as Terra’s UST continues its rapid expansion across L1 ecosystems
• The Polkadot ecosystem nears a major milestone with the pending arrival of XCM

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After years of development, Evmos (formerly called Ethermint) went live on the Cosmos network, its developers announced Wednesday.

The launch means users and developers can now access it as a Layer 1 blockchain on Cosmos — an interoperability protocol whose ecosystem contains more than 250 apps and services.

In particular, the Evmos launch allows users to deploy smart contracts and assets from Ethereum and use them in the Cosmos ecosystem. Evmos had been slated for a February launch that was delayed amid technical issues.

Evmos’s EVM Ambitions

Evmos was first conceptualized in 2016 as Ethermint by its development team Tharsis.

What’s unique about Evmos is that unlike most other Cosmos chains, it is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, a computing environment used by developers on the Ethereum blockchain.

By integrating the EVM mechanism, the Evmos team hopes to make it more appealing to Ethereum developers and to attract applications and assets from them. Over the last year, EVM has become the most widely adopted standard for smart contracts, and is now found across a number of blockchains trying to replicate Ethereum’s success. These include Avalanche, Polygon, BNB Chain, Fantom and Moonbeam.

To kick-start its ambitions, the Evmos developers plan to first achieve interoperability with Ethereum through bridges. The team is working with bridge applications including Connext, Celer, Nomad and others so token transfers can be made between the two chains. “Through these bridges, crypto users will be able to move assets to Evmos and use them on Evmos’s own applications,” Federico Kunze Küllmer, the co-founder of Evmos and and CEO of Tharsis, told The Block. 

There are plans for Evmos to expand within the Cosmos ecosystem as well. Using a protocol called Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), the Evmos blockchain has the ability to share data and assets with other Cosmos-enabled chains.

This interoperability opens up direct interactions for Evmos applications with Terra — a Cosmos-based blockchain containing $29 billion in crypto assets that is home to the third-largest stablecoin, TerraUSD (UST). Terra’s governance has already proposed a collaboration with Evmos for UST and allocated $8 million to boost liquidity on Evmos. 

There are also applications set to launch on Evmos — decentralized exchanges, money markets and NFTs, including EvmoSwap, QuantumSwap, Diffusion Finance, Nomad, Coslend and others.

© 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.

Soccer media company OneFootball has raised $300 million in a Series D funding round, the Berlin-based startup announced on Thursday.

Blockchain fund and incubator Liberty City Ventures led the round, with additional investment from Animoca Brands, Dapper Labs, DAH Beteiligungs GmbH, Quiet Capital, RIT Capital Partners, Senator Investment Group and Alsara Investment Group. 

The money will support the company’s expansion efforts, investments in web3 companies, and OneFootball Labs, a new joint venture with Animoca Brands and Liberty City Ventures, according to an emailed statement. OneFootball didn’t say what valuation the new funding placed on the company.

The company stated that OneFootball Labs will “enable clubs, leagues, federations and players to release digital assets and fan-centric experiences based on blockchain technology.”

As part of the round, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, Yat Siu, will join the boards of OneFootball and OneFootball Labs.

“Over the last year, the sporting universe has made progress in harnessing the potential of NFTs and gaming, offering fans new digital experiences based on the important principles of true digital ownership and decentralization,” said Siu in a statement.

“Animoca Brands is proud to have played a role in nearly every significant milestone in the development of true digital property rights via NFTs,” 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.

A multi-chain DeFi protocol called Deus Finance DAO suffered a flash loan exploit on Thursday, with the hacker making off with about $13.4 million.

The unknown perpetrator carried out the exploit using a flash loan at around 2:40 AM UTC, according to on-chain data. Flash loans are loans taken out with a requirement that the borrowed sum be returned in the same transaction. These are made possible with smart contracts.

While flash loans are meant for arbitrage trading and improving capital efficiency, hackers have abused them to manipulate DeFi price data feeds — known as oracles — and carry out exploits.

According to blockchain security firm PeckShield, the Deus hacker took a flash loan to manipulate the price oracle within one of its liquidity pools on Fantom, involving a token called DEI paired against the USDC stablecoin. 

In today’s incident, the flash-loan assisted manipulation caused DEI’s price to increase a lot, PeckShield explained in a post. This inflated value of DEI was then used as collateral to borrow additional capital, within the same flash loan transaction.

This additional borrowed capital was sold for USDC stablecoin, after which the hacker repaid the flash loan — netting about $13.4 million. The culprit then moved the exploited funds from Fantom to Ethereum, where they routed them through Tornado Cash, a mixing protocol used to obfuscate Ethereum transactions.

In response to today’s incident, Deus Finance said it halted lending of the exploited DEI tokens. It further claimed that “user funds are safe” and more details will follow later.

This wasn’t the first security incident for Deus Finance. The protocol lost $3 million to a flash loan exploit last month too. The incident added to the debate around flash loans and the potential risk they pose to DeFi protocols. 

© 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.

Crypto market data provider Kaiko announced on Thursday that it has acquired French data firm Kesitys. The deal will pave the way for the launch of a new business unit dedicated to quantitive analytics products.

The unit will create a complete suite of products to assist traders throughout the entire portfolio life cycle: from strategy design, to strategy execution to reporting, the firm said in a release shared exclusively with The Block.

Kaiko wants to become the go-to source for consolidated financial market information in crypto. Customers of its trade and order book data feeds include the likes of CoinShares, Messari, Paxos and Ledger.

The two firms had previously worked in a partnership – the acquisition solidifies this and brings Kesitys staff in-house. 

The new unit will continue to be led by Kesitys’ founders Anne-Claire Maurice, Mnacho Echenim and Emmanuel Gobet. 

The first products Kesitys launched with Kaiko were designed to meet the needs of risk management (with a Value-at-Risk estimator), investment portfolio optimization (Implied Volatility Surface generation) and compliance and reporting (valuation services). Other products will be rolled out in early Q3. 

Kaiko declined to reveal the size of the deal. 

The acquisition follows a $24 million Series A funding round for Kaiko, led by Anthemis and Underscore VC. It also closed a $5 million seed raise in September 2019, again led by Anthemis, with Kima Ventures, Point Nine Capital, ConsenSys Ventures, Olymp Capital and CoinShares also participating.

© 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.

Argent, the London-based startup vying to build a DeFi super-app, has raised $40 million in a Series B round.

Fabric Ventures and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn’s investment firm Metaplanet led the investment. Existing investors Paradigm, Index Ventures and Creandum also participated, alongside new strategic backers Starkware, Jump Crypto and Animoca Brands.

The money will be used to accelerate Argent’s plans to support a wider spectrum of activities across DeFi and web3.

“Argent still feels very finance-centric, and we want to play a big role in other NFT verticals — so NFT gaming, virtual real estate,” co-founder and CEO Itamar Lesuisse said in an interview with The Block. “We want to be the de facto wallet for gaming.”

Fulfilling that vision will involve rolling out new functionality for crypto games, such as infrastructure for onboarding new players and signing in-game transactions.

Currently, Argent users are able to store certain non-fungible tokens (NFTs) within their wallets through connections to marketplaces like OpenSea. 

Mexico bound

Proceeds from the raise will also be used to build out Argent’s services in Latin America, beginning in Mexico, where Lesuisse sees strong demand for the product. Some money will also go towards hiring in-house legal, finance and treasury management experts, as well as for a new research team focused on Layer 2 protocols, according to Lesuisse.

Founded in 2017, Argent resembles a fintech “smart wallet” app but built for DeFi — allowing users to buy, store and send crypto. Argent says its app has had more than 500,000 sign-ups.

In March, the startup officially launched a new version of its crypto wallet built on zkSync, an Ethereum-focused scaling solution, with the broad aim of cutting the cost and environmental impact of interacting with DeFi.

Argent has also built a wallet named Argent X on rival Ethereum-scaling solution StarkNet, which is the reason Lesuisse described Starkware’s participation in the Series B round as strategic. “We are doing a massive push on StarkNet and their permissionless network with Argent X,” 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.