FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Ethereum miners have seen higher revenues than Bitcoin miners for three months in a row, the longest stretch in history.

According to The Block’s Data Dashboard, Ethereum miners brought in $1.03 billion in revenue during July, a slight decline from the previous month.

In their turn, Bitcoin miners brought in $971.8 million in revenue last month — more than $100 million compared to June.

While transaction fees have remained a significant source of income for Ethereum miners, the same cannot be said for Bitcoin. Transaction fees accounted for just 3.1% of Bitcoin mining revenue last month.

Mining revenue is a dollar value estimate of the proceeds made by blockchain miners. It’s calculated by taking the current mining rewards, plus transaction fees per block and multiplying that by the price of the asset during the month. It does not take into account any costs, such as electricity, other operating costs or taxes paid by miners.

© 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.

A recent token sale for Mila Kunis’ newly launched NFT animated show Stoner Cats sold out its collection of NFTs for 3,647 ETH (about $8.4 million). The sale finished in less than 40 minutes. 

Stoner Cats is one of the first television shows that will be fully funded by non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which are digital collectibles that exist on the blockchain. The show follows a family of cats and the old woman they live with. The cats are voiced by several well-known names in the entertainment world and beyond, including Ashton Kutcher, Jane Fonda, Chris Rock, and even Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. 

The sale, which featured a collection of 10,420 NFTs of digital cats with unique traits, was created to fund and promote the show’s production. By shelling out 0.35 ETH (about $800) for a Stoner Cat NFT, users could unlock access to all episodes of the television show — in addition to owning the NFT itself. 

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. The sale encountered technical issues, which led to many users not receiving their tokens despite paying transaction fees. According to Dune Analytics, such affected users were set back by 344 ETH, worth $700,000.

Stoner Cats co-star Ashton Kutcher has stated that the Stoner Cats team will “personally gift” ETH to cover all failed transaction fees. 

The problem occurred largely because there were so many users trying to quickly buy the NFTs, causing Ethereum transaction fees to skyrocket and clogging up the Ethereum blockchain. And the way that Ethereum works is that, even if the transaction fails, users still end up having to pay for the transaction fees.

“We followed the industry standards and haven’t found any glitches. But, we believe we should hold ourselves to higher standards. We learned a lot and are going to write it all up and share it,” Kutcher tweeted this weekend. 

Since the sale, many of the Stoner Cat tokens have been put up for auction on NFT marketplace OpenSea, with minimum starting bids set as high as 59 ETH (about $153,000). 

Why Stoner Cats is using NFTs

According to Lisa Sterbakov, partner at Orchid Farm Productions and a member of the team behind Stoner Cats, the team wanted to find a way to retain creative control and financial ownership of the show. 

After several weeks of planning and sitting on Zoom calls, what started as a traditional Hollywood-like show turned into an NFT project. 

“Unfortunately, the machine that creates content has all these hurdles in place, especially for a story that people haven’t seen before,” Sterbakov told The Block. “By funding the show through NFTs, we are giving artists the opportunity to get their work out and do it quickly.”

According to Sterbakov, the team also wanted to get immediate feedback from viewers and involve them in the production process somehow. 

“We have our arc and we know the big story we want to tell, but there are lots of smaller parts that we want to include with input from the community,” Sterbakov said. “For instance, in a scene with graffiti, we could put community members’ handles.”

Sterbakov said the team hasn’t yet decided how many seasons of Stoner Cats will be produced, but the first season, which is currently running, will have five six-minute episodes. Users that bought a Stoner Cat NFT will have access to all of the show’s episodes as well any new series the production team releases in the future.

© 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.

U.S-listed bitcoin mining firm Marathon Digital said it has signed a new purchase order to buy 30,000 units of Bitmain’s flagship bitcoin mining hardware the AntMiner S19j Pro.

Announcing the preorder on Monday, Marathon expects the 30,000 units to be shipped in Q1 and Q2 next year. The firm said the preorder is worth $120 million, which will add to Bitmain’s 2022 revenue if they are fully delivered as per the schedule.

The deal is yet another sign of North American institutions increasing their investments into the multi-billion dollar bitcoin mining space at an industrial scale.

Marathon’s latest preorder is in addition to the 100,000 Bitmain’s S19 series machines that it already bought since last year that were estimated to be fully delivered by Q1 2022.

All told, by June next year, Marathon’s expected hashing power would amount to 13.3 exahashes per second (EH/s), accounting for more than 10% of bitcoin’s current total hash rate.

As The Block summarized in the new geography of the bitcoin mining industry following China’s crackdown since May, Marathon has the largest scaling plan for the near future among publicly listed bitcoin mining firms.

Based on its progress update as of June 30, Marathon’s operating mining fleet consisted of about 20,000 units of Bitmain’s S19s with about 2.09 EH/s of computing power that were housed in its own facility in Hardin, Montana. 

At bitcoin’s current mining difficulty, that amount of hash rate is able to generate about 18 BTC in 24 hours theoretically, which are worth around $721,000.

It’s expecting another 12,000 miners by October, which will also be installed at the Hardin site. The remaining units on-order from Bitmain will be hosted in a 300 megawatts facility that bitcoin mining colocation provider Compute North is building in Texas.

Graphic by The Block Research’s John Dantoni

© 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

• Most metrics recorded continued declines in July. Overall volatility seems to have based.
• Total adjusted on-chain volume decreased by 29.3% to $405.1 billion.
• Stablecoin supply grew slightly by 4.5% to a new all-time high of $110.1 billion. Notably, Tether did not issue any more USDT for the second consecutive month.
• Centralized exchange spot trading volumes declined by 32% to $651.2 billion.

This research piece is available to
members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.

Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey’s payments startup Square has made $2.72 billion of bitcoin revenue for the second quarter this year.

In its shareholder letter released on late Sunday Eastern Time, Square said its Cash App generated “$2.72 billion of bitcoin revenue and $55 million of bitcoin gross profit during Q2, each up approximately 3x year over year.”

But the bitcoin revenue has decreased on a quarter-over-quarter basis, Square said, which was “driven primarily by relative stability in the price of bitcoin, which affected trading activity compared to prior quarters.” For Q1 this year, Cash App made $75 million in bitcoin gross profit on $3.51 billion bitcoin revenues.

That said, Cash App is poised to expand its user bases through Square’s $29 billion acquisition deal over an Australia payment firm Afterpay, which is listed on the Australia Stock Exchange.

In a separate announcement released on Sunday, Square said the acquisition will enable both firms to offer their financial products to more clients. The transaction is expected to close in Q1 2022.

Afterpay is a payment platform that allows users to receive products first and pay later over multiple installments with no interest if their payments are on time. It claimed to have 16.2 million users as of June 30.

“Afterpay consumers will receive the benefits of Cash App’s financial tools, including money transfer, stock and Bitcoin purchases, Cash Boost, and more,” Square said in the announcement.

Square said it also recognized a bitcoin impairment loss of $45 million on its bitcoin investment in Q2. But the fair value of its total investment in bitcoin since Q4 last year stood at $281 million as of June 30, which is “$127 million greater than the carry value of the investment.”

Overall, excluding bitcoin revenues, Square brought in $1.96 billion as total net revenue for Q2.

Cash App’s bitcoin revenue represents the total sale amount of bitcoin sold to customers with the cost referring to the total amount of bitcoin it purchased. Cash App made profits by charging a spread.

Earlier last month, Square said it is also committed to making bitcoin hardware wallets in order to “make bitcoin custody more mainstream.”

© 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.

Matrixport—the crypto financial services platform that bills itself as a neo-bank—announced late Sunday evening the close of a Series C fundraise that clinches the firm $100 million at a more than $1 billion pre-money valuation. 

Launched in 2019 as a spin-off of Bitmain, Matrixport is a large crypto player in Asia with around $10 billion in assets under management (AuM). Its platform offers a wide range of services, including trading, lending, and fixed-income-like products. 

“We are not an exchange, we are not a wallet,” John Yuesheng Ge, CEO of Matrixport said in an interview with The Block. “We are a crypto bank.”

As for the round, it was backed by partners at DST Global, C Ventures, and CE Innovation Capital, as per a media release. Other investors include Tiger Global, Polychain, and Dragonfly.

Matrixport’s fundraise announcements follows similar raises by a long list of crypto firms, including Fireblocks, Paxos, and crypto exchange FTX. Matrixport has raised $129 million to date, according to a spokesperson.

Matrixport mobile application

Matrixport’s raise is significant given the firm’s home base in Asia. China has recently cracked down on bitcoin mining, triggering the exodus of several firms operating in the region. Matrixport—which previously targeted Chinese clients—is cooperating with the recent regulatory environment, pivoting away from the country and targeting clients in other Asian jurisdictions. The firm is headquartered in Singapore.

Despite that move, Ge said it has been able to maintain its current AuM. 

“We don’t want to break the rules so right now we moved our folks to other countries in Asia,” Ge said. 

Ge said that interest in the company has been buoyed in its yield offerings, which provide a return that trumps that of the average bank. The firm offers a way to invest in funds that return yields above 4%. Funds parked into those funds are used for “crypto-backed lending, leverage trading (bull or bear), or other lending business of Matrixport platform,” according to a description on its mobile app. 

Matrixport was bootstrapped by crypto mining legend Wu Jihan, former chairman and a co-founder of Bitmain. In 2020, Bloomberg reported it was seeking to raise $40 million at a $300 million valuation. 

© 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.

A senior Democratic Senator took to Twitter on Sunday to criticize draft language related to crypto tax reporting requirements in a still-in-the-making infrastructure package.

The bill has yet to be introduced, though negotiators involved with the ongoing process told CNN that they expect the legislation to be made formally public later Sunday. The bill, according to the draft language made public and statements from the Biden White House, aims to raise tax compliance by crypto companies by widening the definition of a “broker.” Critics of the measure say the provision as written is far too broad and lobby groups based in Washington are pushing for revisions. 

Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, tweeted Sunday that “Americans avoiding paying the taxes they owe through cryptocurrency is a real problem that deserves a real solution.”

That said, he believes what he called the “Republican provision” “isn’t close to being that solution.”

“It’s an attempt to apply brick and mortar rules to the internet and fails to understand how the technology works,” he continued.

Wyden is perhaps referring to indications that the legislative language was added by Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a Republican who has long said he would push for tighter tax compliance requirements for crypto companies. 

© 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.

Monthly data collected by The Block Research shows that during the month of July, bitcoin miners hauled in just over $970 million.

The monthly total was $971.83 million, including transaction fees, per The Block’s Data Dashboard. Transaction fees — or the funds paid by users as they use the bitcoin network — came in at $27.59 million.

The vast majority of the monthly revenue was in the form of subsidy earnings, with each new bitcoin block producing 6.25 BTC. Miners make profits when the cost of running a bitcoin mining operation is lower than the subsidies plus transaction fees they earn.

The monthly revenue figure represented an increase from June’s $839.09 million, but still down from the all-time monthly high of $1.75 billion seen in March.

Bitcoin’s price reached a high of $69,899 in mid-April, according to data from Coinbase. 

© 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.

Somebody just placed a $90.5 million bid for one of the rarest CryptoPunks, an offer that, if accepted, would become the biggest CryptoPunk sale ever.

The offer was placed on CryptoPunk 3100, according to Larva Labs (the creators of CryptoPunks). The Punk is an alien — one of nine — with a headband. The NFT was previously sold for $7.6 million.

One of the earliest NFT collections, CryptoPunks are a collection of 10,000 pixelated faces. They include humans, zombies apes and aliens. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique digital tokens that can represent images, audio or video content.

CryptoPunks fetch some of the highest NFT prices. In July, there were 1,395 sales totalling $135 million (paid in ether), according to NFT tracker CryptoSlam. The average sale was just shy of $100,000 — a much higher average than most NFT projects.

Previous record sales include this CryptoPunk 3100 and another alien for $7.6 million each. Beyond that, an ape was sold for $5.4 million and another ape went for $3.7 million to entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk.

The three next biggest sales were for zombies, ranging from $1 to $2 million.

Buying 88 CryptoPunks at once

Just yesterday, an anonymous investor purchased 88 CryptoPunks in one go for $5.5 million. They’re now one of the top 20 biggest CryptoPunk investors.

What’s interesting is that they used MiningDAO, which works similarly to communication protocol Flashbots — used for extracting MEV — to buy the Punks. This service enabled them to communicate with a miner and have the transaction directly included in a block, without getting broadcast to the network first.

By doing this, they avoided sellers raising prices once they saw the sales coming in. The investor gave the miner a 5 ETH tip, worth around $12,000 at the time, for their help.

Since then, the investor has set up a Twitter account and signed a transaction to prove themselves as the owner of the Ethereum address that purchased the Punks.

He simply tweeted: “Few.“

© 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.

Somebody just put a rare CryptoPunk NFT for sale for $90.5 million that, if accepted, would become the biggest CryptoPunk sale ever.

The offer for sale was for CryptoPunk 3100, according to Larva Labs (the creators of CryptoPunks). The Punk is an alien — one of nine — with a headband. The NFT was previously sold for $7.6 million.

One of the earliest NFT collections, CryptoPunks are a collection of 10,000 pixelated faces. They include humans, zombies apes and aliens. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique digital tokens that can represent images, audio or video content.

CryptoPunks fetch some of the highest NFT prices. In July, there were 1,395 sales totaling $135 million (paid in ether), according to NFT tracker CryptoSlam. The average sale was just shy of $100,000 — a much higher average than most NFT projects.

Indeed, the listing is perhaps indicative of the eye-popping prices some Punks and other NFTs have gone for to date. Zombie punks are on the rare side, with only two being listed for sale at this time and the most recent sale taking place four months ago.

Previous record sales include this CryptoPunk 3100 and another alien for $7.6 million each. Beyond that, an ape was sold for $5.4 million and another ape went for $3.7 million to entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk.

The three next biggest sales were for zombies, ranging from $1 to $2 million.

Buying 88 CryptoPunks at once

Just yesterday, an anonymous investor purchased 88 CryptoPunks in one go for $5.5 million. They’re now one of the top 20 biggest CryptoPunk investors.

What’s interesting is that they used MiningDAO, which works similarly to communication protocol Flashbots — used for extracting MEV — to buy the Punks. This service enabled them to communicate with a miner and have the transaction directly included in a block, without getting broadcast to the network first.

By doing this, they avoided sellers raising prices once they saw the sales coming in. The investor gave the miner a 5 ETH tip, worth around $12,000 at the time, for their help.

Since then, the investor has set up a Twitter account and signed a transaction to prove themselves as the owner of the Ethereum address that purchased the Punks.

He simply tweeted: “Few.“

Correction: This report has been updated to reflect that the $90.5 million represented an offer to sell, not an offer to purchase. Lede and context have been updated as well.

© 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.