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Ondo Finance, a crypto startup that provides structured products built on top of decentralized exchanges, has raised $20 million in Series A funding as it looks to build a decentralized investment bank.

Peter Thiel’s iconic VC firm Founders Fund and Pantera Capital co-led the round. This is the first time Founders Fund has led an investment in a token-based project, Ondo’s founder and CEO, Nathan Allman, told The Block. Founders Fund has previously participated in a token round for Parallel Finance.

An Ivy League endowment also joined Ondo’s Series A, said Allman, while declining to name it. 

The fundraising was via an equity round but with token rights, according to Allman. Its native token ONDO and a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) are expected to launch “in the next few weeks.”

Other investors in Ondo’s Series A funding included Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, GoldenTree Asset Management, Wintermute, Flow Traders and Steel Perlot, a deep tech management company led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

How Ondo Finance works

Ondo provides investment products known as “vaults” built on top of decentralized exchanges. It offers two types of vaults: fixed yield and variable yield. Depositors in fixed yield vaults receive a fixed percentage of yield over their initial investment. Depositors in variable yield vaults receive all excess returns after the fixed yield vaults receive their payout, said Allman.

Ondo also provides liquidity-as-a-service to DAOs. It pairs DAOs with underwriters (for now, stablecoin issuers) to establish liquidity pools. DAOs provide their governance token and underwriters provide a base like stablecoins, which Ondo uses to establish liquidity providers, said Allman.

“The goal is to help DAOs establish their own liquidity without having to rely on liquidity mining or market making firms,” he said, adding that these can be “both expensive and unsustainable.”

Ondo has partnered with more than 10 DAOs — including NEAR, Synapse and UMA — and underwriters including Fei, Frax, Terra and Reflexer, according to Allman.

Ondo currently only supports Ethereum-based protocols on its platform, but that is about to change. The platform plans to integrate several Layer 2 networks and alternative Layer 1s in the near future, said Allman.

The current total value locked in Ondo Finance stands at $120 million, according to data from DeFi Llama.

Ondo plans to expand its team of around 20 people by hiring across various functions, including engineering, design, marketing and business development.

The Series A round brings Ondo’s total funding to date to $24 million. Last August, the project raised $4 million in seed funding led by Pantera Capital. Ondo is looking to raise more funds in the near future, said Allman, a Goldman Sachs alum. 

© 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.

MoonPay is recruiting a number of founding engineers for its new HyperMint service, a platform it bills as Amazon Web Services for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as the company adds more product lines to its core payments offering.

According to a company job post seeking a Solana engineer, the new service will enable brands, creators and web2 companies to create and deploy crypto tokens through a “UI wizard.”

“We abstract away the complexities of deploying an NFT/token strategy and cut time to market from months to weeks or even days. Think AWS for NFTs,” the company said in the job advert. Amazon Web Services, or AWS, provides key tools that underpin the modern internet and accounts for a substantial chunk of Amazon’s revenue. 

MoonPay appears to making a play for the “minting-as-a-service” market – a space currently occupied by incumbents such as Cargo, Manifold and Moralis, which offer batch handling of NFTs. Analysts at The Block Research say that current tools on the market are still fairly basic propositions.

HyperMint’s early clients include high-end fashion houses and record labels. 

The Solana engineer role has a salary band ranging from $80,000 to $180,000 and offers “substantial equity” in the MoonPay subsidiary.

Another job ad has put out the call for an Ethereum engineer for HyperMint. A third looks for “an AWS and DevOps expert,” as it builds out its founding engineering team. 

Focusing on Ethereum and Solana plays to the chains used by OpenSea, the current largest platform for NFT sales. Solana is also increasingly popular in the world of NFTs because of its lower transaction fees.

HyperMint was incorporated on Companies House in the UK in February. It was co-founded by Semyon Germanovich, who has been with MoonPay since December 2020; Adrian Pang, who joined in November 2020; and Frederick Becker, who joined in May last year. Germanovich will lead on product and engineering, Pang will head up operations and strategy and Becker will lead on sales and growth.

Changing MoonPay’s core proposition?

The new endeavor is the latest deviation from MoonPay’s core business of crypto payments infrastructure. Its NFT concierge service for celebrities has grabbed headlines over the past months, as the “white glove” service brokered the acquisition of a number of high-value items for A-listers. MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright has said that this was more of a play for “education” in the NFT space and fostered a marketing and PR push for the brand.

The company also recently partnered with OpenSea to roll out direct card payments to simplify the process of acquiring an NFT for those who don’t own crypto. This was more of a technical solution to onboarding non-crypto native people into the crypto world.

MoonPay first launched its plug-and-play service for buying and selling NFTs with a credit card in January. This came as Mastercard announced that it was joining forces with Coinbase to enable people to buy NFTs with cards.

In October 2021, the company raised $400 million in an inaugural round which saw the start up valued at $3.4 billion. 

© 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.

Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN) is preparing legislation addressing dividend-producing stablecoins, The Block has learned.

A discussion draft of a bill obtained by The Block would allow “stablecoins that include a dividend component” to register under the Securities and Exchange Commission.

More specifically, that term means: “a stablecoin that distributes all or part of the income made from the investment of the assets backing the stablecoin to the holders of the stablecoin.” It is The Block’s understanding that this definition is in flux within the bill’s draft process. 

The SEC would, per the draft bill’s language, have to assemble and issue new rules for its supervision and examination regime over such stablecoins. Those would include requirements for the types of assets backing those stablecoins and their safekeeping. 

Critically, the version of the bill seen by The Block would not make SEC oversight mandatory for even dividend-producing stablecoins. Given that most yield available to stablecoin holders comes via third-party lending or staking platforms, it’s not entirely clear how many would even fit in such a regime.

As a possible example, TerraUSD (UST) holders can earn 20% returns on Anchor, which is operated by the same team as Terra but the tokens themselves aren’t exactly distributing investments. Meanwhile, Ampleforth (AMPL) is an algorithmic stablecoin that does something similar to a stock split but does not have backing assets. But the proposed regime would not seem to apply to several of the largest stablecoins by market cap ⁠— USDT, USDC or BUSD, for example. 

Members of Emmer’s staff did not respond to The Block’s requests for comment on the status of the draft bill.  

The prospect of stablecoin regulation has been a top priority for crypto-focused legislation recently. The Biden administration’s financial regulators have been pushing to limit asset-backed stablecoin issuance to bank-like institutions.

Republicans like Emmer are generally fond of more open-ended frameworks, including options for registrations with different regulators. Critics say that optional registration leaves regulators no tools to pursue bad actors. 

Read the full draft below: 

   Emmer Stablecoin Combined by MichaelPatrickMcSweeney on Scribd

© 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 President of the Central African Republic (CAR), Faustin Archange Touadera, has signed a law legalizing cryptocurrencies and making bitcoin a legally recognized currency in the country following a unanimous parliamentary vote on the matter, the AFP news agency reported on Wednesday.

Obed Namsio, the President’s chief of staff, said the move marks an important milestone for the country’s economic recovery, according to a post on the CAR government’s official Facebook page. 

“With this historic decision, the economic recovery and peace consolidation plan enter a new era and the Executive demonstrates consistency in applying the agenda of achieving strong and inclusive growth for the benefit of development and economic performance, generating prosperity for our citizens,” the announcement stated.

Apart from legalizing bitcoin as a recognized form of money, the landlocked African nation says it is also moving forward with broad-based crypto adoption plans.

CAR is the first African nation to adopt bitcoin as legal tender and joins El Salvador as only the second in the world to do so.

Like El Salvador, CAR doesn’t issue its own currency. It uses the France-backed CFA franc just as El Salvador uses the US dollar.

The central African nation ranks among the least developed economies in the world with agriculture the largest contributor to its GDP. According to World Bank figures, CAR’s GDP stood at only $2.38 billion as of 2020 and the country ranks near the bottom of the United Nation’s Human Development Index.

© 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.

Digital Currency Group mining subsidiary Foundry has acquired Upstate Interactive, a web3 software development and consulting company.

Upstate Interactive worked on UI/UX development for Foundry’s staking business, which was launched in November of last year, according to a joint announcement issued Wednesday.

The firm’s capabilities will now be integrated into Foundry’s offerings, per the announcement.

Foundry also launched a marketplace to sell bitcoin mining machines last year named Foundry. After opening a bitcoin mining pool, it quickly grew to be one of the largest in the world.

Both companies are based in New York state.

“This acquisition will build on our mission to shape the future of decentralization from right here in Upstate New York,” said Foundry CEO Mike Colyer.

© 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 startup Rain has raised $6 million in seed funding to provide corporate credit cards for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

The round, announced today, was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other investors include Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap Labs and Terraform Labs. 

Founded by Farooq Malik and Charles Naut, the startup aims to tap into the growth of DAOs by providing them with a corporate card and expense management tools. Unlike traditional companies, DAOs work through smart contract tooling and often have flat organizational structures. According to The Block Research, DAOs saw significant growth in the last year, with nearly 1.7 million members and $16 billion in total AUM as of December 2021. 

While DAOs hold much of their wealth in tokens sitting in treasuries, they still exist in a world built on traditional financial rails, Malik explained in an interview. This means that they may still have typical business expenses such as travel bills, web hosting or laptop purchases that require fiat, no matter if they happen to be a five-person DAO or a multibillion-dollar protocol.

“Right now, what we were seeing is a lot of people working at decentralized companies are using either their own AmEx cards, business banking cards or even paying expenses from their personal accounts, which obviously is just a messy way to start to build a company,” Ansaf Kareem, the partner at Lightspeed who led the investment into Rain, told The Block in an interview. 

Bridging crypto to TradFi

According to Naut, even opening up an account on a centralized exchange such as Coinbase or FTX can take months. Needless to say, traditional banks often don’t want to work with web3 startups, leading to funding freezes. 

“We want to be that translation layer from web3 to a traditional financial system,” he says. 

Rain cards work by connecting to an individual or multi-sig wallet — currently only on Ethereum and Solana — that holds USDC. When a user spends with the card, Rain handles the swap from USDC stablecoins to fiat with the merchant accepting the transaction on Visa rails. 

The raise follows recent rounds from Multis and Coinbooks, two other startups creating accounting and banking services for DAOs. 

While still officially in stealth, in January Rain began onboarding customers, some of which are Lightspeed portfolio companies, and currently has over 100 users on its waiting list. 

© 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.

Dragonfly, the crypto investment firm led by Haseeb Qureshi and Tom Schmidt, unveiled on Wednesday a new fund backed by $650 million in commitments. 

Among those invested are Tiger Global and KKR as well as multiple unnamed university endowments. Dragonfly declined to name the universities backing the new fund. 

Dragonfly’s new fund closed amid a flurry of new investment fund launches across the industry. Some of these new initiatives have come from the likes of Bain Capital, Electric Capital, and a16z. The new fund follows the close of Dragonfly’s Ventures II fund last year.

Dragonfly’s Qureshi said that the new fund will target the new wave of crypto entrepreneurs building in web3 and more nascent corners of the market.

“This new generation of entrepreneurs has lots of energy and excitement about the decentralized future,” he said.

These founders, according to Qureshi, need their investors to participate in token economics, go-to-market, product strategy, and hiring.

“That’s why Dragonfly is often the first port of call for these entrepreneurs—unlike many of the generalist VCs, we’ve been doing this for many years now, we’ve backed many of the generational protocols and companies in this space, and we’ve seen the whole journey from seed to multi-billion dollar outcomes,” Qureshi added. 

The approach speaks to the breadth of crypto investors, which are becoming increasingly more hands-on with their portfolio companies and projects. Even newer market participants like Sequoia Capital have recognized the unique needs of crypto firms. 

“Crypto moves so fast, crypto founders want to work with funds that can move incredibly fast,  they want to work with funds that deeply understand their problems, deeply understand the landscape. Those properties are primarily going to live within crypto-specific funds rather than in generalist funds,” Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire noted in a recent episode of The Scoop.

As for Dragonfly, Qureshi said that the firm has a crypto-native team that “understands how these protocols work.”

Dragonfly has invested in a wide range of companies, including blockchains like Terra and Near and financial services like Matrixport and Paradigm. 

The fund was founded in 2018 by Bo Feng, an established venture capitalist with over 20 years of experience, and Alexander Pack, a venture capitalist who managed crypto investments and funding at Bain Capital Ventures.

© 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.

Matthew Chamberlain, the incoming CEO of crypto custodian Komainu, will remain as CEO of the London Metal Exchange (LME) three months after announcing his resignation from the metals trading giant. 

“Both parties have come to the mutual decision for Mr Chamberlain to not move forward in joining Komainu as its CEO in May,” Henson Orser, Komainu’s acting CEO, told The Block in a statement on Wednesday. “We part ways amicably and wish Mr Chamberlain the best as he continues on in his role as the CEO of the London Metal Exchange.”

Chamberlain had announced his resignation from the LME in January, weeks before the 145-year-old exchange was drawn into a crisis. As nickel prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the LME on March 8 decided to frieze futures contracts and cancel trades — drawing fire from investors who lost out, including Clifford Asness of hedge fund AQR Capital Management. 

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, LME’s parent company, said in a statement it was pleased Chamberlain had decided to stay. 

“He leads from the front, exemplified by his handling of the unprecedented developments in the nickel market in the last few weeks.” HKEX CEO Nicolas Aguzin said in the statement. “I know that today’s news will be warmly welcomed by colleagues, customers and the broader market and I look forward to working closely with Matt and the team in the months ahead.”

Adrian Farnham, who had deferred retirement to act as LME’s interim CEO while Chamberlain’s successor was identified, will leave the company in July.

Komainu was launched by investment firm CoinShares, Japanese investment bank Nomura and crypto hardware wallet maker Ledger in June 2020 as a hybrid digital asset custodian . The Jersey, Channel Islands-based company raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by hedge fund veteran Alan Howard in March 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.

After experiencing early success as one of the first VC firms to “go all-in on DeFi,” San-Francisco-based Framework Ventures is looking to expand its footprint in blockchain gaming, which is one of the main focal points of its recently-announced $400 million fund.

In this episode of The Scoop, Framework co-founders Michael Anderson and Vance Spencer sat down with host Frank Chaparro to explain their new fund’s investment thesis which centers around the idea that blockchain gaming is “getting to the point of mass-market appeal.”

As Anderson explained during the interview, the combination of AAA quality game design and in-game ‘play-to-earn’ economies is the key to mass adoption:

“That combinatorial effect is the transition that we predict will move from ‘play-to-earn’ into ‘play-and-earn’ where it’s more that you want to be playing the game because it’s a really fun and engaging game. You get to compete at the highest levels, and you get to play in the economy in the same ways that you get to with Axie.”

Despite surging in popularity in 2021, the ‘play-to-earn’ game Axie Infinity has recently seen declining activity, something exacerbated by a $600 million hack earlier this year.

According to the Framework co-founders, the remedy to the complexities and risks of blockchain gaming is in custodial solutions — another big theme of their new fund which the two co-founders hope will lead to mass adoption.

As Spencer explained:

“All of the game loops, all of the things that are super important to these game developers, break without these custodial experiences. And so this is going to be the kind of paradigm through which all of the people will initially come in.”

Framework Ventures isn’t the only VC firm that sees blockchain gaming as crypto’s next major development: South Korean VC firm Hashed also shared with The Scoop how they are betting big on gaming with their own $200 million fund deployed last December.

During this episode, Chaparro, Anderson, and Spencer also discuss:

• Blockchain game economies
• Growth hacking vs. ‘ponzinomics’
• Earning income in a Web3 world

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.

The New York State Assembly voted to pass a bill that will essentially freeze current levels of crypto mining carbon emissions until the state can act on a comprehensive impact study.

The bill passed with a vote tally of 95 in favor and 52 against. It aims to impose a two-year moratorium, specifically preventing new permits from being issued to carbon-based fueled proof-of-work mining operations that use behind-the-meter energy. Additionally, already established sites planning to increase the amount of energy consumed would not be able to get a permit renewal.

Democratic Assemblymember Anna Kelles, the main sponsor of the bill, said its goal was to ensure that the state meets measures set by New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which was passed in 2019. The Assembly is the lower chamber of the New York State Legislature.

The bill also tasks the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) with conducting a General Environmental Impact Statement on all crypto mining operations in the state. The study is set to be completed within the span of a year, giving lawmakers time to act on the findings before the moratorium expires.

Legislators have been pushing for several months to temporarily halt the growth of crypto mining in the state before a comprehensive study could be conducted. An earlier version of the bill, which called for a three-year moratorium on a broader scope of mining facilities, died in the Assembly in June of last year.

On Tuesday, members of the Assembly debated the bill for well over two hours. In an effort to dispel the idea that the moratorium would generally ban crypto mining, Kelles, the main sponsor of the bill, repeatedly insisted that it would only apply to a select number of fossil-fuel power plants.

“This bill is not retroactive in nature. (…) It is only specifically to power plants, of which we have about 30 in upstate and about 19 in downstate,” said Kelles.

Republican Assemblyman Robert Smullen called the bill an “anti-tech” piece of legislation “disguised as an environmental law.” 

Smullen went on to argue that the legislation would send the wrong signal to the financial services sector in New York and could possibly result in miners simply moving to other states and taking jobs with them.

“We’re going into a more cashless economy. And I think we should be welcoming these industries and figuring out how to reduce emissions elsewise,” he said.

Kelles maintained that the bill would not hinder New York’s ability to be a leader in crypto when it comes to other aspects of the industry, such as buying, trading and selling digital assets.

Following China’s ban on crypto mining last year, the US has seen exponential growth in hashing power, with several miners repurposing previously deactivated power plants.

One such facility, run by Greenidge Generation in the Finger Lakes region, has been in the middle of a controversial permit renewal process in New York. Last month the DEC pushed back the final decision to June while it reviews the company’s proposed mitigation measures and close to 4,000 public comments.

Republican Assemblyman Philip Palmisano said that Greenidge’s plant had made a positive contribution in terms of taxes and job creation.

Kelles claimed that the agro-tourism sector in the Finger Lakes region, which employs 60,000 people in the area, had already reported negative impacts from Greenidge’s plant in terms of sound, air and water pollution. 

“How many jobs are we creating for that pollution. And how many jobs have we lost?” Kelles asked. “We need need to talk about it as net job creation.”

The bill is currently still in committee in the New York State Senate.

© 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.