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The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) gained considerable traction in June, with 10,700 new addresses created during June, according to block explorer Etherscan.

ENS is a decentralized system that lets users associate their Ethereum addresses with human readable names, like example.eth. It’s similar to how we use emails to communicate, or website domain names, rather than IP addresses. Its purpose is to make it easier to transact with ether and other Ethereum-based tokens.

Etherscan’s blog post explains that it only tracks addresses that match certain conditions (that the addresses have both forward & reverse resolution set) so the data doesn’t include all Ethereum names. But it does show the rapid growth of Ethereum names over the last few months, considering there were only 1,000 new addresses in March.

The number of new ENS addresses per month. Source: Etherscan.

According to the post, the increase in Ethereum names coincided with a steep decrease in Ethereum gas fees, as using the blockchain became much cheaper.

Attaching to a greater amount of funds

Ethereum names are a bit of a blessing and a curse. While someone can have a personalized and publicly known Ethereum name that their friends (or anyone) can send money to, the downside is that anyone can see their address and watch their transactions.

Therefore, it’s typically seen as good practice to limit the funds in them because, in theory, they could be used by criminals to make an ordered list of the most wealthy Ethereum users and target them.

And yet, according to Etherscan, the addresses associated with existing Ethereum names contain a significant amount of cryptocurrency. This includes 116,500 ether (ETH), 6,300 wrapped ether (WETH), 23.5 million of the stablecoin USDC and 963,500 uniswap (UNI).

In total, this is worth around $277 million at current market prices.

But ENS users will need to use some of these funds to keep paying for the names, especially the expensive ones with fewer characters.

Etherscan estimates that the current annual cost for all Ethereum names comes to around $2.3 million, and even this could be on the lower end.

© 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.

In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on July 15, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell reiterated his uncertainty as to whether the Fed would proceed with the development of a central bank digital currency or CBDC.

“I’m legitimately undecided about whether the benefits outweigh the costs of a CBDC,” said Powell. 

Senator Pat Toomey (R-PN), meanwhile, seemed to support private stablecoins over a Fed-issued digital dollar. Toomey, the ranking member of the committee, asked Powell about “a change in your tone about the virtues of a central bank digital currency being issued by the Fed.” 

Toomey was referring to a similar hearing before the House Financial Services Committee in which Powell noted that “one of the stronger arguments in [a CBDC’s] favor” is that it would end the need for private stablecoins.

“If you have stablecoins and cryptocurrencies in use then maybe there’s no need for CBDC,” countered Toomey. 

Powell, intriguingly, seemed to agree that existing stablecoins may be doing all the good that could be expected of a CBDC. Rather than the Fed issuing a digital dollar, “the more direct solution would be to appropriately regulate stablecoins,” said Powell.

The Federal Reserve under Powell has been exploring CBDCs and comparing them to existing stablecoins for quite some time, but statements regarding those explorations have been growing in frequency.

Toomey, who will not be seeking reelection in 2022, has emerged as a crypto advocate in recent months. As previously reported, his personal interest has included recently disclosed investments into Grayscale’s Bitcoin and Ethereum Trusts. 

© 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.

JC Flowers & Co, the multibillion-dollar private equity firm, is set to acquire a 30% stake in cryptocurrency and FX exchange operator LMAX Group. 

The deal — first reported by the Financial Times — is still subject to regulatory approval, but it would value LMAX at $1 billion, the announcement said. LMAX will work with the New York private equity firm to “accelerate the company’s next phase of growth and innovation,” a media release said of the deal. Per the FT’s report, LMAX was valued at £100 million in 2018.

“This is a significant milestone in the evolution of LMAX Group that vindicates our industry-leading business model and the role we have to play in the foreign exchange and cryptocurrency markets of the future,” LMAX Group CEO David Mercer said of the deal. 

LMAX has been operating in the FX market since its earliest days and was founded in 2010. The firm moved into cryptocurrency trading with the launch of LMAX Digital in 2018.

LMAX Digital is among the largest exchanges in the cryptocurrency market, clocking in $36 billion worth of volumes last month, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard.

© 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.

Axelar, a decentralized protocol that connects users across multiple blockchains, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round.

The round was led by Polychain Capital, with participants from Dragonfly Capital, Galaxy Digital, North Island Ventures, Robot Ventures, Lemniscap, SCB 10X, Divergence Ventures, and others. Angel investors, including Terra co-founder, Do Kwon, and Catalyst Sports & Media CEO Happy Walters, also joined the round, among others.

Axelar declined to comment whether the funding was secured via an equity round or a token sale when contacted.

With fresh capital at hand, Axelar looks to scale its team of 15 to support more blockchain integrations and accelerate the development, co-founder and CEO Sergey Gorbunov told The Block.

Axelar is hiring for technical, including blockchain engineers, as well as non-technical roles such as community and business development, said Gorbunov.

The Axelar protocol is currently live on testnet and enables developers to build applications on any blockchain platform and leverage cross-chain liquidity. Developers of Polkadot, Terra, and Avalanche blockchains are already utilizing the protocol, said Axelar.

“We’re currently in a testnet mode where ecosystems partners are learning how to setup nodes on the network, send transactions, and they help us to build monitoring tools, dashboards, and wallets integrations,” Gorbunov told The Block. “We’ll continue iterating through the testnet deployments adding more features and integrations until the network is robust and ready to launch.”

Gorbunov declined to comment on Axelar’s mainnet launch timeline. The network is being developed by the founding team members of Algorand: Gorbunov and Georgios Vlachos.

The Series A brings Axelar’s total funding to nearly $29 million. Last November, the project raised $3.75 million in seed funding. Venture capital firm DCVC, Binance X — the crypto exchange’s smart chain accelerator fund — and AngelList CEO and founder Naval Ravikant participated in the seed round at the time.

© 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.

Renewed data compiled by the Cambridge University supports the notion that China’s global bitcoin mining dominance was already fading before the country’s recent crackdown.

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) updated its bitcoin mining map data on Thursday, showing China’s global bitcoin mining dominance had steadily declined between April 2020 until April 2021.

The findings corroborate the Block’s report in April that China’s dominance was fading amid the rising profile of institutional investors in North America.

The CCAF first rolled out the mining map in May 2020 with data available from September 2019 to April 2020 but, until today, it had not made any update to the dataset over the past year.

Rise and fall

As of April 2020, the bitcoin mining map’s data came from three Chinese bitcoin mining pools with international client bases — BTC.com, ViaBTC and Poolin — which collectively made up about 30% of bitcoin’s total hash rate. As of then, CCAF’s data sample estimated China’s hash rate dominance to be 65%, showing it had already declined from 75% in September 2019.

By April 2021, however, the CCAF estimated China’s hash rate percentage to be even less than half, at 46%. Although the percentage could be relatively skewed due to the inclusion of data from a predominantly U.S.-focused mining pool.

While the renewed dataset draws information from the existing three Chinese mining pools over the past 14 months, it added data from the Foundry USA pool for the timeframe between February and April this year, according to CCAF’s methodology. 

The mining map, however, has not included data for May and June, a critical period that witnessed the significant plunge of bitcoin’s hash rate due to China’s crackdown on local bitcoin mining farms.

On-chain data shows that bitcoin’s hash rate had dropped by more than 50% from its peak of 180 EH/s at mid-May to just below 90 EH/s at the end of June.

The Chinese government revealed its crackdown effort on May 21 and the follow-up measures materialized in early June. This suggests China’s bitcoin hash rate dominance prior to the crackdown could have been between 50% to 60%.

With the decline of the hash rate in China, the CCAF’s mining map also shows the growth of overseas regions, with the U.S. taking the second largest percentage of the global hash rate. It now had a 16% share as of April, up from 7% a year ago.

Other regions like Russia, Kazahkstan and Iran also saw steady growth over the past 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.

Italy’s securities regulator Consob is the latest government agency to issue a warning against Binance, saying that the crypto exchange is unauthorized to operate in the country.

“Consob warns savers that the companies of the ‘Binance Group’ are not authorized to provide investment services and activities in Italy, not even through the website www.binance.com,” said the regulator on Thursday.

This is even though certain sections of Binance.com, including derivatives and stock tokens, are in Italian, said Consob. Binance.com has been available in Italian since 2018.

“We are aware of the notice from CONSOB and can confirm that Binance.com does not operate out of Italy. This has no direct impact on the services provided on Binance.com,” a Binance spokesperson told The Block when contacted.

“We take a collaborative approach in working with regulators and we take our compliance obligations very seriously. We are actively keeping abreast of changing policies, rules and laws in this new space.”

Global crackdown 

Consob’s warning is similar to other regulators’ notices and actions against Binance in recent weeks. It all started when the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) banned Binance Markets Limited (BML) — Binance’s U.K. entity — saying that the firm is not authorized to operate in the country.

The notice also said that no other entity in the Binance Group was authorized to operate in the U.K. but since Binance’s main exchange isn’t based in the U.K., it likely falls outside of the cryptoasset regime.

However, the FCA’s warning appears to have already impacted Binance’s business. The exchange is losing fiat onramps as several British banks, including Santander UK and Barclays, have moved to block user payments to Binance.com.

Binance itself had to suspend customer deposits via the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) due to “events beyond our control.” The SEPA network allows customers to send euros across 36 countries.

Besides in Italy and the U.K., regulators of other countries, including the U.S., Japan, Thailand, Poland, and the Cayman Islands, have all either issued warnings or taken action against the exchange recently.

© 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

• The Block Research analyzed a total of 497 blockchain-related investment deals that occurred during Q2′ 21 to identify which crypto funds have been the most active to the start of the year
• Eight of the ten most active investors during the first quarter once again qualified during Q2
• Roughly 75% of the investments made by the most active investors were projects in the DeFi and NFTs/Gaming verticals

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members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.

Nasdaq-listed BIT Digital is migrating 14,500 bitcoin ASIC miners from China to the U.S. after China’s crackdown on the bitcoin mining space.

The firm said in an update on Thursday that following regulatory changes in China, it suspended operations there on June 21 and has accelerated its migration to North America that already begun in October last year.

As of the beginning of May, a majority of BIT Digital’s mining operations was still located in China, which dropped the regulatory hammer early June.

BIT Digital is the latest publicly listed bitcoin mining firm with operations in China that is migrating its equipment overseas, after BIT Mining and The9 City.

BIT Digital still had about 9,500 bitcoin miners inside China as of June 30. But it said it expects to complete the migration of its “remaining China-based fleet during the third quarter of 2021.”

Based on the Thursday update, it appears BIT Digital has also liquidated about one third of its equipment in China during Q2.

Per its May update, BIT Digital had a fleet of “43,606 miners with a total maximum hash rate of 2,423.15 PH/s [petahashes per second]” as of April 30. About 80% of the equipment was in China at the time, with 19,060 miners in Sichuan, 12,830 units in Xinjiang and 3,200 units in Yunnan. 

BIT Digital said over Q2, it sold about 11,000 units of bitcoin miners that it deemed to “have a lower expected return on invested capital … and/or were deemed unsuitable for long-distance migration to North America.”

BIT Digital hosts its U.S. equipment in facilities owned by colocation provider Compute North, which plans to scale up its hosting capacity significantly over the next 12 months.

BIT Digital’s mining fleet breakdown by geography

© 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.

London-based neobank Revolut has raised $800 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tiger Global Management, according to a Sky News report.  

The round gives Revolut a valuation of £24 billion (roughly $33 billion) and makes it the most valuable British fintech firm in history. The valuation is also six times the price tag attached to the startup when it secured $500 million at a $5.5 billion valuation as recently as February 2020.

Revolut was contacted for comment but did not respond by press time. 

Launched in 2015 as an app and card business offering travellers cheap foreign exchange rates, Revolut has since ballooned into a so-called ‘super-app’. The startup now offers its more than 15 million customers a current account, insurance products, stock investments, and a suite of crypto trading tools.

In May, Revolut ramped up its crypto capabilities by allowing certain customers to withdraw crypto from the app and into personal wallets for the first time. The company, which has aspirations to become a licensed banks in many of the markets in which it operates globally, has also been adding a significant number of tokens to its trading platform, including dogecoin and various decentralized finance tokens.

On June 21, Revolut’s latest annual report highlighted a total comprehensive loss for the 12-month period ending December 12, 2020, of £168 million — up from £107 million the previous year. The startup’s adjusted revenue grew 57% to £261 million in the same period.

© 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

• The United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police confiscated another £180 million in crypto on July 13.
• The Block spoke to asset recovery experts about exactly how law enforcement agencies are seizing such vast sums of crypto.

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