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Just one month after closing its Series B funding round, blockchain security firm CertiK has raised another $24 million in a Series B+ funding round. The new round was co-led by Tiger Global and GL Ventures. There were no other investors in this round, CertiK COO Daryl Hok told The Block.

When asked why CertiK raised funds again so soon, Hok said the firm’s growth continues to accelerate month over month, and when the two investors approached it, it decided to raise more funds to strengthen its position in the market.

“This additional capital will allow us to provide our security benefits to the blockchain space in lockstep with the hyper-growth that the space has been experiencing,” said Hok.

Tiger Global partner Pengfei Wang said for decentralized finance (DeFi) innovations to be fully trusted, security must be the focal point. “We’re proud to support CertiK in raising the standards of security with the rollout of Skynet Premium. The product pioneers a novel and critical sector of the market: antivirus for blockchain,” said Wang.

CertiK’s Skynet Premium is a smart contracts auditing and monitoring platform that provides real-time alerts against vulnerabilities. The tool produces security scores, which indicate the risk potential for hacks and code malfunctions in a DeFi project.

Skynet’s alerts and security scores are publicly available for free, but its paid version provides more detailed information on DeFi projects. CertiK says it has served over 1,300 enterprise clients to date and has detected over 23,000 vulnerabilities in blockchain codes, protecting over $90 billion worth of crypto.

With fresh capital at hand, CertiK plans to further enhance its security infrastructure and expand its global team. Last month, Hok said CertiK will double its current headcount is 100, but now the firm plans to triple its team size. “We have reevaluated our hiring plan to be more aligned with our growth potential, so we’re looking to add even more talent in the upcoming months,” said Hok.

The Series B+ funding round brings CertiK’s total funding to date to $72 million. Hok declined to comment on the firm’s valuation but said CertiK, which achieved profitability last year, could raise more funds in the future if an opportunity arises.

© 2021 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

• Frameworks for on-chain governance are a topic of ongoing experimentation and innovation.
• The limitations of purely on-chain governance present opportunities for exploring novel social coordination mechanisms. 
• Yearn, Maker, and Synthetix have some of the most elaborate social governance mechanisms and will be examined here.

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Vienna-based investment platform Bitpanda has closed a $263 million Series C round, giving the startup a valuation of $4.1 billion.

Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm Valar Ventures led the investment, with hedge fund heavyweight Alan Howard and REDO Ventures participating alongside existing backers LeadBlock Partners and Jump Capital.

The fundraise, announced this morning, comes just five months after Bitpanda’s $170 million Series B investment — a round enlarged by a fresh $12 million from Jump Capital and Wintermute Trading in May. Indeed, Bitpanda only closed its $52 million Series A as recently as September 2020.

Eric Demuth, co-founder and CEO of the Austrian business, has said previously that Bitpanda is profitable and doesn’t need external investment. The motive for fundraising, he said, is to drive the growth of the platform and to boost the brand — both in terms of its media appeal and for attracting top talent.

“We wouldn’t be here today without the efforts of our talented team members who are constantly ‘rolling up their sleeves’ to make things happen,” said Demuth in a statement. “We’re grateful to share our journey with these incredible people — and that’s why a key area of focus for us is to keep strengthening our team by bringing onboard world-class talent.”

Founded in 2014, Bitpanda began as a crypto trading outfit. More recently, it has started offering trading in stocks and precious metals. The platform has amassed 3 million users to date and is on track to boost its revenues sevenfold in 2021.

Howard expands crypto empire

British billionaire Alan Howard, the co-founder of the hedge fund Brevan Howard, has made a flurry of equity investments in crypto infrastructure businesses over the past year.

In addition to Bitpanda, his investments include crypto exchanges Bullish Global and Kikitrade, custodians Komainu and Copper, and an array of other payments and investment firms.

Howard is also the majority shareholder in a business named Elwood, which recently pivoted to focus on helping neobanks, fintech firms and asset manager access crypto liquidity providers.

© 2021 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 the abrupt exit of CEO Brian Brooks, Binance.US has picked one of its longest-tenured employees to helm the crypto exchange, two people familiar with the decision tell The Block. 

Joshua Sroge — who joined Binance.US in January 2020 as its chief financial officer — was picked by the exchange’s board to take over on an interim basis.

Brooks, previously the acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, announced August 6 that he was leaving Binance.US after three and a half months on the job.

Brooks cited “differences over strategic direction” as the catalyst for his exit. Before the announcement, Brooks spent months declaring Binance.US was a separate operating entity from Binance. Both companies are owned by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.

As for Sroge, he was previously a principal at FireStone CFO, a consultancy that provides companies with budgeting, accounting, and financial solutions. Prior to that, he was the chief accounting officer at crypto firm ShapeShift, overseeing the growth of the company from 15 to 115 employees. 

A spokeswoman for Binance.US confirmed the selection. Sroge declined to comment. 

© 2021 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.

President Joe Biden reportedly plans to nominate the acting chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Rostin Behnam, to serve as the derivatives regulator’s official leader, Bloomberg reported. 

Behnam has been serving as the interim leader since January. Citing anonymous sources, Bloomberg reports that Biden will cement Behnam’s place in the CFTC leadership and that an official announcement regarding Behnam’s role at the CFTC will come in the near future.  

The president appoints five commissioners to the CFTC, who must then be approved by the senate. Of the five commissioners, the president and senate elect one to become chairman, who manages the agency’s daily operations and sculpts its regulatory and enforcement framework, according to the CFTC. 

President Trump elected Behnam as a commissioner of the CFTC in July of 2017. CFTC members then promoted Behnam to acting CFTC chairman in January. 

Behnam, with a background in agricultural systems, advocated for increased sustainability in the U.S. financial system. He has also shown openness toward cryptocurrency, stating in 2018 that “Blockchain technology and other aspects of a new virtual world are remaking our economic, social, and political relations. The new virtual world offers tantalizing new possibilities and potentially powerful dangers.”

CFTC oversees cryptocurrencies when employed in derivatives contracts or when used in interstate financial crimes.

© 2021 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

• A months-old partnership between Silvergate and the Diem Association has apparently hit regulatory headwinds.
• Now Novi, Facebook’s crypto wallet subsidiary, is looking for a different stablecoin.

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The price of SOL, the native asset of the Solana network, hit an all-time high on Monday — and market watchers say several catalysts appear to be at play amid the run-up. 

SOL was trading up by more than 39% over the last 24 hours, reaching an all-time high of $68.24 per token. The cryptocurrency saw notable gains in the past week alongside others, including dogecoin and cardano, the latter of which hit its own all-time high on Saturday. 

Traders in the market pointed to heightened institutional interest around the projects being built on Solana as reasons for that particular asset’s market gains. 

Crypto financial services company FalconX told The Block that Solana trading volumes have doubled since last week. That activity has been underpinned by new institutional interest, according to one trading firm executive. 

“I’m long, everyone that matters is probably long,” the executive said. 

Rich Rosenblum of GSR added: “Does seem like substantial size, utilizing algos to enter, indicative of larger players than a broad retail move.”

Solana-based projects have also seen capital inflows, such as Mango Markets. The decentralized exchange raised $70 million in a token sale last week. Degenerate Ape Academy, a non-fungible token project built on Solana, launched this week and saw trading volumes notch nearly $6 million in spite of reported platform issues.

“There’s a lot of capital going into the ecosystem,” said one executive from a trading firm that is incubating a Solana project. The executive added that it’s still early days, noting that the infrastructure for many of these projects is still being determined.

“It’s also really hard to find good rust devs which has been a bit of a bottleneck for projects in the ecosystem,” the executive said. 

In any case, FalconX’s Aya Kantorovich said that capital continues to recycle “into other protocols and projects building on Solana.” Still, it looks like some traders are taking profits, according to FalconX data. While over-the-counter trading desks and proprietary trading outfits are skewed to the buy-side, hedge funds appear to be selling.

© 2021 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.

Bluesky, the decentralized social media initiative unveiled by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at the end of 2019, has a project lead, according to a Monday announcement.

Jay Graber, a former software engineer for Zcash and Skuchain and the founder of social event startup Happening Inc., will spearhead the effort. Graber said in a tweet thread: “I look forward to partnering closely with Twitter and other companies as we embark on this journey. It won’t happen overnight, but we’ll share our progress along the way.”

Dorsey announced in December 2019 that the social media giant was funding a small group of developers to build Bluesky, which he described at the time as “a decentralized standard for social media.” On its official website, the project’s stated aim is “re-building the social web by connecting disconnected silos and returning control of the social experience to users.” 

Graber said in a tweet that “my next step will be hiring for the bluesky team.”

The 2019 announcement of Bluesky capped what was perhaps a controversial year for the company as it turned to account suspensions to fight misinformation — moves that subsequently fueled accusations of censorship. Less than a year after the Bluesky announcement, Dorsey appeared before a Senate committee alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who faced similar criticisms.

© 2021 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 staking services provider Figment has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round.

Senator Investment Group and Liberty City Ventures co-led the round, with participation from Galaxy Digital, Anchorage, Declaration Partner, Bonfire Ventures, GSR, and others.

With fresh capital at hand, Figment plans to scale its team and support more blockchains for staking, co-founder and CEO Lorien Gabel told The Block. Figment’s current headcount is 72, and it is looking to add 30 more people to its team by the end of this year, said Gabel.

Figment currently supports more than 30 proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains, including Ethereum 2.0, Solana, Polkadot, NEAR, and Avalanche. Staking is the process of locking up tokens built on proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains in order to earn yield.

Gabel said Figment has over 100 institutional clients who have staked billions of dollars worth of crypto through its infrastructure. “Our belief is that the majority of value and data will be exchanged, settled, and stored on PoS blockchains,” he said. “We will continue to make this space more accessible and approachable to the next generation of Web 3 investors and developers.”

Figment recently joined The Graph ecosystem as a core protocol developer to grow the decentralized indexing layer for Web3. Gabel said Figment will bring more developer tools like The Graph to market with the fresh funding in place.

The Series B round brings Figment’s total funding to date to around $55 million. Gabel declined to comment on the firm’s valuation, but Figment is now valued at about $500 million, according to a Bloomberg source.

© 2021 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.

Chinese crypto mining pool Poolin has resumed partial payouts for holders of its bitcoin and ethereum hash rate tokens as it gradually deploys equipment overseas following China’s industry crackdown.

Poolin said in an announcement on Monday that 18% of its bitcoin miners that are used to back its pBTC35A hash rate tokens have been shipped out of China and powered up – about 50 days after the firm said it had to suspend the mining payouts for migration due to the disruption caused by the Chinese government.

But the process has brought on comparatively hefty prices and in a broader sense reflects the challenges that Chinese bitcoin miners could encounter amid their exodus from what was once the world’s biggest mining hub. 

For instance, when Poolin initially rolled out the pBTC35A token — backed by miners located inside China — it was able to achieve an electricity rate of $0.058 per kWh. Now, after the relocation, whoever holds and stakes the pBTC35A token would receive a payout after the deduction of an electricity cost of $0.08 per kWh, which represents a nearly 38% markup.

Similarly, for its pETH18C Ethereum hash rate token, the electricity rate now has jumped to $0.15 per kWh, double the previous $0.0750 per kWh when the GPUs were located inside China.

Cost aside, Poolin said the “recurrence outbreaks of COVID-19 impacted on both domestic and international logistics,” thus exacerbating the difficulty in migrating a significant amount of hardware.

“Frequent loading/unloading, multiple stopovers and long-distance transportation caused damage to some mining rigs (more than 20% miners need to be repaired according to the current stats), and the surge of mining rigs overhaul and shelving dramatically intensified the workload on local operation & maintenance staffs,” the firm explained.

Poolin said the mining hardware that backs the hash rate tokens has been dispatched globally while its founder and senior executives have been sourcing electricity deals and capacities in the U.S.

There are a total of 214,601 pBTC35A circulating tokens issued by Poolin, equal to 214,601 TH/s of bitcoin hash rate. So far Poolin has resumed the equivalent of 39,900 TH/s. It has resumed the online rate to 25% for the ETH miners that back its pETH18c token.

Poolin expects those online rates to be doubled in the coming two to three weeks and keep rising as it finishes the relocation. 

As The Block reported last week, China’s crackdown on the crypto mining space has not only disrupted the hash rate dominance in the country but also led to a reshuffle in the market share among mining pools.

© 2021 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.