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A DAO set up to provide funds for Julian Assange to fight American espionage charges is helping him take “aggressive” legal action in the US, according to Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton.

Speaking on a podcast produced by the privacy-focused crypto project Orchid on Wednesday, Shipton explained that the $53 million donated to the DAO was sent to a German foundation that has been supporting Assange’s defense for several years. The new funds will allow it to take the fight to the US courts as his extradition to America looks ever more likely.

“Particularly in the US, there’s been a real lack of resources to be able to fight the case where it originates,” said Shipton, who is a core contributor to AssangeDAO. “Now Julian has those resources at hand and he can really fight back now rather than just fighting in the courts in the UK, which has been the focus. He can be aggressive and take aggressive legal action and really take it to where the charges originate.”

Assange is facing US charges of illegally obtaining, receiving and disclosing classified information, related to his operation of the WikiLeaks website. The UK’s supreme court last month refused him permission to appeal against extradition to the US, a decision formally confirmed today. 

Think twice

Shipton said the ability of the crypto community to raise funds for such causes could make authorities think twice about prosecuting individuals. 

“It means ‘well the next time we want to do this, we have to take that into account.’ That the crypto community doesn’t really want to be fucked with. At the end of the day they want their rights and they want to be protected and they can do that through saving Julian,” he said.

AssangeDAO was formed in December 2021, with the goal of raising funds that would be used to support Assange’s legal defense. The DAO — effectively a group of people working with a common goal — issued a token and then used these funds to purchase an NFT that was being sold by Assange in collaboration with digital artist Pak. 

The DAO has had its difficulties, however. According to CoinDesk, there was a lot of disagreement over whether the DAO should bid all of the funds raised on the NFT, or keep some for itself. The publication claims the main leaders have largely stepped back from the project. During this time, the token, which was initially valued at around $0.0015, has slid to its current price of $0.00048, down 68%.

© 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

• As blockchains see increased adoption, there are more and more unique requirements from applications 
• General-purpose blockchains have great utility but they often face trade-offs when it comes to optimizing for a specific application
• Application-specific blockchains can circumvent this by allowing the deployers to have greater control over what a specific blockchain optimizes for
• Numerous solutions have sprung up to target this problem, for example, Polkadot and Kusama parachains, Avalanche subnets, and now, Cosmos’ Sagan
• While these solutions typically trade-off decentralization for customizability, the interest in them indicates that they are likely to be integral for the future of blockchains

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Quick Take

• StepN is a Solana-based move-to-earn (M2E) project that gamifies running activities and allows users to earn in-game currency simply by moving. It holds a 92% market share in fully diluted valuations for all M2E projects.
• Unlike other play-to-earn games, StepN has a relatively higher app stickiness because its core product revolves around running, which is a perpetual activity.
• As we dug deeper into its tokenomics design, we discovered a concern about the sustainability of its in-game currencies, GMT and GST.

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Spruce, a startup that developed a toolkit for decentralized identity, has raised $34 million in a Series A round led by a16z.

Other participants in the round include Robot Ventures, Okta Ventures, OrangeDAO and SCB 10X, the company announced Wednesday.

“With the new funding, Spruce will spearhead research in cutting-edge privacy and usability technology for identity, grow its product teams, and continue to execute on partnerships across the ecosystem,” the company said in a statement.

Spruce’s sign-in with Ethereum function allows users to control their digital identity without the need to rely on a traditional intermediary.

Their product suite includes SpruceID and Kepler, which offer “self-sovereign” storage. It “powers the necessary authentication, credentialing, and storage needed for portable reputation for users, providing decentralized access control to data, and interoperability between Web2 APIs and Web3,” per their website.

Last year, the startup raised $7.5 million in a seed round led by Ethereal Ventures and Electric Capital, according to CoinDesk.

© 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.

Today, the US Treasury took aim at Russia’s cryptocurrency mining industry.

On April 20, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added Russia-based cryptocurrency miner BitRiver as well as 10 subsidiaries to its Specially Designated Nationals list.

According to an announcement shared with The Block, the move is indicative of a broader push against Russia’s crypto mining industry. The Treasury did not mention any particular association between BitRiver and the Putin regime. 

“By operating vast server farms that sell virtual currency mining capacity internationally, these companies help Russia monetize its natural resources,” the Treasury’s announcement said. “The United States is committed to ensuring that no asset, no matter how complex, becomes a mechanism for the Putin regime to offset the impact of sanctions.”

Indeed, in February, BitRiver announced that it was Russia’s first company with a net-zero carbon footprint.

Earlier this year, there was some back and forth over a push to ban crypto mining in Russia, with President Putin ultimately defending the local industry. Per recent estimates, Russia is the third-largest source of Bitcoin mining in the world, after the United States and Kazakhstan.

© 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

• Punk 4156 had dreams of commercializing his CryptoPunk. Then copyright restrictions got in the way. 
• NounsDAO, the project that Punk 4156 started instead, is aimed at freeing NFT owners from the restrictive copyright rules imposed by the creators of CryptoPunks.

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Gnosis Chain has gone through a network upgrade in order to fix the issue that allowed hackers to steal $11 million from two DeFi protocols running on its network last month.

“All application builders on Gnosis Chain can now assume tokens bridged via the native bridge are not prone to the reentrancy attack anymore, which caused the hacks of Agave and Hundred Finance,” Stefan George, co-founder and chief technology officer at Gnosis, told The Block.

Gnosis Chain (previously known as xDai Chain) is a popular sidechain — a term that refers to a blockchain running parallel to Ethereum — that’s run by GnosisDAO. There are more than $287 million of cryptocurrencies locked up in applications running on its network, per DeFiLlama. 

Gnosis Chain said, in an official post, that the hard fork — a significant network change — went live today at block number 21,735,000, which took place around 6:30 AM UTC.

The hard fork activated a proposal (GIP-31) on the Gnosis DAO governance aimed at preventing “reentrancy attacks,” which are a common type of security exploits targeting DeFi protocols.

The proposal came after two DeFi protocols on the Gnosis Chain — Hundred Finance and Agave — suffered from reentrancy attacks and reportedly lost $11 million in various tokens to hackers. These attacks occurred due to a vulnerability within a smart contract that wraps Ethereum-based tokens on the OmniBridge — the official bridge on Gnosis Chain connecting with the Ethereum blockchain. 

A security audit last year found there was an incompatibility between bridged tokens on OmniBridge and the ERC-20 token standard that Ethereum tokens rely on. This mismatch between the two token types was what led to the two major exploits.

Prior to the upgrade, the development team working on Gnosis Chain stated that a hard fork would “harden” the security of tokens that have been bridged to the sidechain, and protect applications on the sidechain.

© 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.

Gauntlet Network — a platform that provides risk modeling and performance optimization solutions for DeFi protocols — recently raised $23.8 million for a valuation of $1 billion.

On June 24, 2020,  when Gauntlet Network’s CEO Tarun Chitra first came on The Scoop, the total value locked across all DeFi verticals was just over $1.5 billion. Today, less than two years later, that number has grown exponentially to over $211 billion.

In this episode, Chitra describes his company’s rise to unicorn status and explains how a project in DeFi can be successful. In his view, it’s not just replicating what exists in centralized finance and putting it on the blockchain:

“The products that do really well in DeFi are not just straight up, ‘take a centralized finance thing, make the closest clone you can, and then try to get people to use it…’ that pretty much never works in DeFi. It’s always something that’s somewhat adapted to the nuances of crypto systems and how people interact with crypto systems in a way that’s very different than traditional finance or even centralized crypto.”

Successful DeFi projects must handle what Chitra describes as the “degen ape,” referring to crypto power users. These market participants erratically move large sums of money into decentralized protocols without researching the protocol’s underlying fundamentals:

“And so what you find in DeFi in particular, is that there’s almost this gladiator like competition between these different protocols and the capital that’s getting allocated to them… If there is some truth to the fact that their mechanism works, you effectively should – whether or not it’s a really informed or perfectly rational investor putting their money into a protocol or whether it’s a degen ape – you should basically get the same outcome.”

DeFi protocols with billions in TVL currently rely on Gauntlet’s risk modeling for their operations, including Aave, a lending protocol whose founder and CEO Stani Kulechov recently shared with The Scoop how the protocol’s V3 upgrade is mitigating risk.

In time, Chitra believes increasingly more forms of contracts will fall under the purview of DeFi:

“I don’t think DeFi really revolutionizes finance per se. I think it revolutionizes lawyers. You just get rid of lawyers for a lot of transactions… Somehow in DeFi, you’re able to make these things like – the tokenization means that you can turn these things that were legal contracts into like exchange tradable assets.”

During this Episode, Chaparro and Chitra also discuss:

• The “Bridge Paradox”
• NFTs and risk modeling
• Crypto and the Scientific Method

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.

Crypto exchange Coinbase’s long-awaited NFT marketplace has launched in beta form for select customers after the exchange first unveiled plans for it in October.

The beta NFT marketplace is accessible to everyone to view from today, but initially only select users will be able to buy or sell. “Coinbase will be onboarding a small number of users into the beta for Coinbase NFT,” Sanchan Saxena, VP of product at Coinbase, told The Block.

Coinbase opened a waitlist for the marketplace in October, winning more than 1.5 million sign-ups. Only some customers will initially be able to use the beta marketplace, based on their position on that waitlist, said Coinbase.

Beta testers will be able to create a profile on the marketplace to buy and sell NFTs. They can use any self-custody wallet, including Coinbase Wallet and MetaMask. Coinbase won’t charge transaction fees for a limited time, the exchange said, adding that it will eventually add fees in line with industry norms.

Coinbase NFT for now only supports Ethereum-based NFTs and payments in ether. Saxena said the marketplace will integrate other blockchains in the future, and “full fiat on-ramps will be coming soon.”

As for gas fees, Coinbase said it has partnered with 0x Protocol to optimize transactions for lower costs.

Coinbase will also allow users to purchase NFTs via credit cards, as it announced earlier this year. At the time, the company partnered with Mastercard to let users buy NFTs by card.

‘More than a marketplace’

Besides enabling buying and selling of NFTs, Coinbase says its NFT marketplace will also allow communities to engage. This community-building function is the heart of how Coinbase NFT plans to position itself against competitors such as OpenSea and LooksRare.

“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 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.”

When asked if the marketplace requires customers to go through a know-your-customer process, Saxena said it does, similar to the main Coinbase platform.

As for its royalty norms, Saxena said there’s flexibility for creators. “Creators with contracts that don’t support any of the common royalty standards can set an on-chain override through the Royalty Registry,” he said.

Coinbase joins other crypto exchanges in launching an NFT marketplace. Binance, FTX and Okcoin have all launched such marketplaces recently.

But according to Saxena, Coinbase NFT will be a preferred destination for users due to its simplicity as its main platform for buying and selling 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.

Connext, a blockchain interoperability protocol that enables developers to build cross-chain applications, has unveiled a native token called NEXT as it plans to convert into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

Sharing the news exclusively with The Block on Wednesday, Connext said NEXT is a utility and governance token that will power the full decentralization of Connext, similar to tokens of other blockchain infrastructure projects like The Graph.

Connext provides infrastructure for blockchain interoperability. Its network’s most basic use case is that of a crypto bridge — allowing activities on multiple blockchains. “You can, for example, borrow money on Ethereum and spend it on Polygon via the Connext network,” Arjun Bhuptani, co-founder of Connext, told The Block.

Validators on the Connext network — known as “routers” — will be able to stake NEXT tokens to participate in the network and earn a proportional fee in return. NEXT will also be used to govern the ecosystem treasury of Connext through a DAO. Connext plans to launch the token in the next one to two months, according to Bhuptani.

The Connext network went live over a year ago and has processed around 700,000 transactions and about $1.4 billion in total volume so far, Bhuptani said.

Airdrop plans

Once NEXT is launched, Connext will also airdrop the tokens. “We expect to retroactively distribute tokens to users and routers of the network in an airdrop,” said Bhuptani. “The snapshots for these have already been completed.”

NEXT will have a total supply of 1 billion tokens. All the tokens have already been minted, but they are not yet publicly available or transferable.

For now, the only way to earn NEXT is through Connext’s contributor program, which is being launched today.

“Our goal with the contributor program is to allow for a secondary mechanism for community members to earn tokens conditional upon a DAO vote when the token goes live,” said Bhuptani.

More information about the token distribution and technical governance will be issued as Connext gets closer to the full launch of the token, Bhuptani explained.

Connext is backed by notable investors, including Coinbase Ventures and ConsenSys Mesh. The project has raised over $15 million in funding to date.

© 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.