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CoinFund — a cryptocurrency investment firm that’s backed the likes of Dapper Labs and Rarible — announced Tuesday the close of its third fund to further pour capital into the DeFi and NFT markets. 

The new venture capital fund, which raised $83 million in fresh capital from investors like Venrock, enters the world as private crypto markets heat up.

Excluding Block.one’s $9.7 billion injections into Bullish Global  —  there was roughly $6.2 billion in private investment, or approximately a 90% increase in venture funding quarter over quarter, as noted by The Block Research. 

Founded in 2015 by Jake Brukhman, CoinFund has invested in dozens of companies and projects, including DeFi projects like Serum and Paraswap and Layer-1 networks such as Near Protocol and Polkadot. The new fund will have a similar mandate:

“We are routinely evaluating where the puck is going, what verticals are next and questioning our assumptions. The process works well and we’ve been positioned early in the most exciting areas of the space, from base layers to DeFi and NFTs. Our core focus areas are DeFi, NFTs, infrastructure services, middleware, asset tokenization and beneficiaries of stablecoin adoption. We also recently added interest in decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) infrastructure to the list.”

Listen to our podcast episode with CoinFund’s head of portfolio growth Vanessa Grellet. 

© 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.

NFT marketplace OpenSea has raised $100 million in a Series B round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The new funding values the company at $1.5 billion, effectively making OpenSea a unicorn, or a startup with an over $1 billion total valuation.

Participants in the round include talent and sports agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Michael Ovitz, Kevin Durant and Ashton Kutcher. The announcement comes just four months after the marketplace closed a $23 million Series A round also led by a16z. 

“With increasing market adoption around crypto economies, NFTs are quickly becoming the new internet,” co-founder and CEO of OpenSea Devin Finzer said in a statement. “As we continue to scale, our focus will remain on our customers, and providing the best user experience and entry point into NFTs.”

The New York-based platform, which launched in 2017, is a popular digital marketplace for crypto collectibles, NFTs and other rare digital items. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique digital items that exist on the blockchain and represent different types of files like audio, art, video and more. 

OpenSea plans to use its new influx of funding to scale its NFT marketplace by hiring more engineers as well as expanding to new markets and audiences on a global scale. 

While NFT activity experienced a slight decline since the boom earlier this year, trading volumes and weekly sales have picked back up. 

OpenSea too has certainly continued to grow. In June 2021 alone, the platform sold $160 million in digital assets on its marketplace and experienced a 45% increase in volume growth in the first half of 2021. 

Just yesterday, 12-year-old crypto artist @ObiWanBenoni made nearly $150,000 via OpenSea selling “Weird Whales,” a collection of 3550 AI-generated whales with unique characteristics and different traits. 

In addition to individual sales, the OpenSea marketplace was also the launchpad for several high-volume collectible avatar projects like Hashmasks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Meebits, all of which launched this year.

© 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

• Ethereum miners have been reordering transactions within blocks to extract value for themselves.
• But now, there’s discussion around how they could start reordering blocks, too.
• Here’s how this would work and what impact it might have.

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British asset manager Ruffer has outlined how the excesses of the crypto bull market triggered the sale of its exposure to bitcoin in April.  

“Bitcoin may yet fulfil its potential, but the market displayed many signs of froth — retail speculation, excessive leverage, the Coinbase IPO, Tom Brady’s laser eyes, Dogecoin, Elon Musk hosting Saturday Night Live, $60m non-fungible tokens (NFTs), etc.,” said Ruffer Investment Company Limited in a year-end review for the 12 months ending June 30, 2021.

Ruffer, which had made an initial investment of roughly $600 million on bitcoin in November of last year, sold its exposure at the top of the market in April — when bitcoin’s price was fluctuating between $50,000 and $65,000.

The trade proved a “significant contributor” to Ruffer’s performance over the past year, the company said, contributing +515 basis points (bps). The asset manager had also gained exposure to bitcoin through proxy firms MicroStrategy and Galaxy digital, which again performed well before being sold in February.

All told, Ruffer made a quick $1.1 billion off its bitcoin bet, according to an article published in the Sunday Times on June 6. But the company now feels there is no place for the cryptocurrency in its portfolio.

“In the short term at least, bitcoin was exhibiting the characteristics of a risky, speculative asset and therefore no longer fulfilled the portfolio role we had intended for it as a protective and diversifying asset,” said the company in its year-end review.

© 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.

Popular crypto trading and lending platform BlockFi has been ordered by the New Jersey Bureau of Securities to suspend accepting new interest account users in the Garden State.

In a Twitter thread on Monday night Eastern time, BlockFi’s CEO and founder Zac Prince said the firm remains operational for its existing clients in New Jersey but “the order calls for BlockFi to stop accepting new BIA [BlockFi interest account] clients residing in New Jersey beginning July 22, 2021.”

Prince’s response came just shortly after a Forbes article that said the New Jersey Attorney General and its Bureau of Securities are preparing to issue a cease and desist order against the firm.

The Forbes report cited a draft press release from the AG’s office, which reportedly indicated that BlockFi’s service is powered “at least partly through the sale of unregistered securities in alleged violation of relevant securities laws.” 

BlockFi’s interest account is popular because of its high-yields relative to its counter-parts in the traditional financial services world, offering double-digital APY while fintechs currently offer sub 1% yields. 

Originally, in a response to the Forbes article, Prince said BlockFi “has no knowledge of any impending actions with the New Jersey Attorney General’s office.”

The AG’s move also came less than a month after BlockFi added the earning product support for Uni, the ERC-20 token of decentralized exchange Uniswap.

© 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.

Per a readout from the U.S. Treasury Department on July 19, Secretary Janet Yellen urged the Presidential Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG) to act on stablecoin regulation.

Yellen “underscored the need to act quickly to ensure there is an appropriate U.S. regulatory framework in place,” the announcement explained.

The PWG formally includes the Treasury, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Leaders from all these offices were part of today’s meeting, as well as colleagues at the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The presence of representatives from so many agencies suggests interest in a major regulatory project focused on stablecoin rules. It also falls in line with other efforts to coordinate crypto regulation across entities. Currently, stablecoin operators in the U.S. answer primarily to state regulators. 

The readout was fairly succinct in its description of today’s event, which Yellen announced last week, but which remained closed to the public. The Treasury reported that participants saw a presentation on a major report on stablecoin regulation that is in the works at the department.

The leaders also “discussed the rapid growth of stablecoins, potential uses of stablecoins as a means of payment, and potential risks to end-users, the financial system, and national security.”

© 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

• Nearly $1 out of every $5 of venture funding globally went into Fintech in 2Q 2021; interestingly, nearly 20% of all Fintech funding (~$6.2B) came from Crypto & Blockchain industry segments, a significant increase in the average share of fintech funding from 2019-2020 of just ~6.5%
• In 1H’21 more than $5 billion was raised through public capital markets activity, largely driven by PIPEs and new debt capital markets issuances
• Coinbase is currently trading at 8.5x the current street consensus 2021 revenue estimate of $6.1B. That’s a meaningful discount to the 14x FY’21 revenue multiples the company commanded the first week of trading, and significantly discounted relative to other pure-play public companies like Silvergate Capital (~17x FY’21 Rev)

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A trio of U.S. senators said Monday that American participants in Beijing Winter Olympics, set for 2022, shouldn’t use China’s digital yuan, which will potentially play a role during that event.

Chinese officials have said that the digital yuan may be rolled out for wider use during the Winter Olympics, building on months of tests that have grown in scope across an array of cities in the country. Plans for the e-CNY continue to be made public amid those tests, including support for smart contracts. China’s move to embrace a digital currency has turned heads in the halls of the U.S. Congress, with the project being cited as a source of competition between the Chinese and American governments. Indeed, the e-CNY project has spurred political calls for a digitized dollar as well.

The negative view of the digital yuan was put in stark relief in Monday’s Senate letter, penned by Sens. Marsha Blackburn, Cynthia Lummis and Roger Wicker.

Addressed to the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, the letter opens:

“We write to express our concerns with the communist Chinese government’s plans to officially launch the Digital Currency Electronic Payment, commonly referred to as the digital yuan, prior to the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022. Specifically, we urge the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) to forbid American athletes from receiving or using digital yuan during the Beijing Olympics.”

“The digital yuan is the People’s Bank of China’s (PBOC) central bank digital currency. The digital yuan is entirely controlled by the PBOC, and can be tracked and traced by the central bank. The digital yuan has been in the works since 2014, but only recently has the Chinese government released key features regarding the digital currency, including the ability of the government to know the exact details of what someone purchased and where,” the senators went on to write.

The group is seeking a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation briefing on the topic, and said its request is aimed at “protect[ing] the privacy of American athletes from the Chinese Communist Government.”

© 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.

The Bitcoin-centered conference “The ₿ Word” has been confirmed for this week, as well as entrepreneur Elon Musk’s attendance. 

Musk, the CEO of Tesla, will participate in a live discussion with Square and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Ark Invest founder and CEO Cathie Wood during the conference, which will commence at 12 p.m. on Wednesday, July 21. 

Other presenters at the conference include Steve Lee and Conor Okus from Square Crypto; Hong Fang from OKCoin; Phillip Gradwell from Chainalysis; Dr. Neha Narula from the MIT Digital Currency Initiative; Adam Back from Blockstream; and Sam Korus from ARK Invest. 

Word that Musk would potentially participate in a live chat with the bitcoin-supporting Dorsey emerged late last month, though subsequent developments indicated that The ₿ Word wasn’t a done deal until Monday’s developments. 

© 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

• LabCFTC is the innovation wing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Alongside the rest of the commission, it recently saw a change in management.
• Highly crypto-informed, the new acting director of LabCFTC sat down with The Block to talk about how the Commodities Exchange Act interacts with CeFi and DeFi exchanges alike.

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