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Bullish, the cryptocurrency exchange backed by Block.one, revealed Friday its plans to go public via a SPAC deal, making it the latest company in the digital asset market to announce its intentions to list its shares on an equity exchange. 

As part of the deal, Bullish will merge with Far Peak Acquisition Corp (NYSE: FPAC), a SPAC company that has been led by former New York Stock Exchange president Tom Farley. Farley will take the reins as Bullish’s new chief executive. The deal values the firm at a whopping $9 billion, according to a press announcement. 

Proceeds from the capital raise include $300 million of committed private investment in public equity from EFM Asset Management as well as BlackRock and Galaxy Digital. 

The transaction, which is expected to close by the end of 2021, will bring to market the latest public company in the digital asset market, joining Coinbase and Bakkt, the latter of which also announced its own SPAC deal. 

At $9 billion, Bullish’s valuation would represent one-fourth of Coinbase’s $45 billion valuation. Coinbase is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US with over 56 million verified users. Bullish has only just released an invite-only pilot, according to a deck. The company was launched in May. 

The firm is hoping to woo customers with a hybrid style order book that borrows from both the structures of decentralized finance platforms and centralized ones, according to an investor pitch deck. 

“Bullish is well positioned to strategically deliver value to its prospective shareholders as it capitalizes on market trends and places technological innovation at the core of its identity,” Farley said. “We’re only in the first or second inning of the cryptocurrency market and I’m thrilled to be joining the Bullish team as we revolutionize the future of digital assets through cutting edge financial technologies.”

© 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 Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the United Kingdom’s advertising regulator, is stepping up its focus on crypto advertising, planning to introduce further guidance and to prevent misleading ads.

A spokesperson for the watchdog told The Block it plans to “carry out proactive monitoring and enforcement of crypto advertising and will also scope out additional guidance in the coming weeks.”

“We are also considering whether further action is needed in addition to current ongoing investigations of social influencers promoting cryptocurrency,” the spokesperson added.

The news comes a little over a month after the ASA forced Luno, a cryptocurrency exchange, to amend advertisements on the London Underground and London Buses that had encouraged consumers to buy bitcoin.

A red alert priority

The crackdown was first reported by the Financial Times, who quoted Miles Lockwood, director of complaints and investigations at the ASA, as stating that the body had earmarked crypto as a “red alert” priority.

“Cryptocurrency advertising is a key priority for us. We recognise the importance of the role we play currently in regulating ads to ensure they don’t mislead consumers about the risks of this product and are not irresponsible in how they promote them,” said the ASA spokesperson. “Crypto has exploded in recent years but there is a real danger that people may be drawn in to invest life savings that they later lose based on poor understanding.”

The same person added, however, that there is a “clear separation” between advertisements for legitimate crypto investments and those that are considered “scam ads.”

© 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.

Square, the payments company headed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has confirmed it will make a bitcoin hardware wallet. The decision comes a month after Dorsey said Square was considering making one.

“We have decided to build a hardware wallet and service to make bitcoin custody more mainstream,” tweeted Square’s hardware lead Jesse Dorogusker on Thursday. Dorsey confirmed the news in a separate tweet.

A personal hardware wallet is non-custodial, meaning crypto holders stay in control of their own private keys instead of letting third parties like crypto exchanges handle the keys for them.

The wallet will offer multi-sig or multi-signature transactions, which require two or more private keys to sign and send a transaction. Specifically, Dorogusker said that the multi-sig options will be used to enable “assisted-self-custody.” This suggests that Square might play some role in the key process.

Dorogusker added that the wallet will prioritize mobile use, meaning it plans to integrate with smartphones. Square plans for it to be distributed globally.

To that end, Square is building a team and hiring across hardware, software, and security, and business functions. The team will be led by Max Guise, Square’s hardware security lead. Square’s general manager of hardware, Thomas Templeton, will also help build the team out.

Dorsey’s love for bitcoin 

Dorsey’s love for bitcoin is no secret; the billionaire’s Twitter bio says only one thing: “#bitcoin.” Dorsey recently said he would be working on bitcoin if he wasn’t working at Square and Twitter.

Square’s bitcoin hardware wallet won’t be the company’s first crypto product either. Square’s Cash App already allows users to buy and sell bitcoin, and this business line has been a moneymaker for the company. Square generated $3.51 billion in bitcoin revenue during the first quarter of this year and $75 million in bitcoin gross profit during the same period. The firm also holds bitcoin on its balance sheet.

In addition, the company recently formed a crypto council with other notable companies to lobby policymakers. On top of that, Square is building a 100% solar-powered bitcoin mining farm in the U.S. with Blockstream.

Besides Square, its music streaming service unit Tidal also appears to be interested in the crypto space. The firm recently said it might start exploring non-fungible tokens (NFTs), potentially as a new way to compensate artists. Square’s sister company Twitter also recently gave away 140 NFTs to random users. But does that mean Dorsey might start purchasing ether? Apparently not.

© 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.

On Thursday, crypto startup Circle went public with its previously reported plans to go public via a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, valuing the company at more than $4 billion in the process. 

The publicly filed disclosures required as part of the deal provided a new window into the heart of Circle’s operations, including the financial specifics of some of its past headline-driving deals.

Among those big figures: a $156 million loss on the sale of crypto exchange Poloniex, which it acquired in early 2018 and sold in November 2019. The sale was characterized in the filing as “a strategic effort to better align our business with the products we offer to our customers.” 

As part of that deal, Circle received $33.15 million in cash and “contingent consideration” worth $15 million. As noted in the doc:

“Contingent consideration was comprised of future deferred payments of $15.0 million subject to a successful operational transfer and indemnity holdbacks. During 2020, we received $10.0 million of the total $15.0 million and expect to receive future payments on the following schedule; $2.0 million in May 2021, $1.0 million in November 2021, $1.0 million in May 2022 and $1.0 million in November 2024. The remaining deferred payments are recorded as divestment consideration receivable as the Company is confident of receipt based on the progress of the operational transfer subsequent to closing the sale. The net assets sold to the buyer had a book value of $204.9 million and included goodwill of $185.5 million, other intangibles of $19.4 million and cryptocurrency of $1.7 million. This resulted in a loss on disposal of $156.8 million which is reflected in the accompanying Consolidated Statements of Operations.”

Circle’s filing also made note of two previously reported corporate sales, both of which netted modest gains for the firm.

These include Circle Trade, the firm’s long-running trading desk, which it sold to crypto exchange Kraken in December 2019. Per the filing, Circle was paid $1.9 million in cash. Also part of the deal: “Pursuant to the agreement, the Company can receive up to 252,017 and 100,807 shares of the Buyer at a contractual price of $19.84 per share if certain earnout and retention conditions, respectively, are satisfied within one year of the closing date. Additionally, the Company is entitled to receive referral payments from the Buyer based on 0.1% of gross OTC volume from new clients for the first year.”

Finally, the document included the financial details of Circle’s sales of its retail-focused Circle Invest unit to Voyager Digital. Per the doc, Circle was paid $100,000 in cash and approximately $525,000 worth of Voyager Digital Shares. 

“In connection with the transaction the Company agreed to continue to operate the Circle Invest platform on behalf of prospective Voyager customers while Voyager acquires the appropriate licenses in three US states: New York, Alaska and North Carolina,” Circle’s filings noted.

© 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.

Data compiled by The Block shows that Web traffic to cryptocurrency exchanges experienced the second greatest drop in volume since the beginning of this year. 

May had been the record high for web traffic to crypto exchanges, with a huge surge in interest in April. 

But as The Block’s research analyst Lars Hoffman first noted on Twitter, web traffic fell from 638.2 million in May to 369.1 million visits in June — a 42.2% decrease in traffic volume compared to the previous month, according to data gleaned from SimilarWeb.

That’s nearly as big of a decline as between January and February of this year, which saw a 45.3% decrease in web traffic. 

Binance had the largest share of web traffic at 40.7%, followed by Coinbase with 19.2% and Indodax, an Indonesian crypto exchange, held 3.6%. 

© 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 Monese is exploring offering new crypto products through its mobile money app, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The sources said that Monese has held talks with crypto exchanges over potential partnerships to help launch the new tools.

But the exact timeframe for such a move is unclear, and a spokesperson for Monese said the firm has “no immediate plans” to launch a crypto product.

“We’ve been speaking with almost all payment processors and neobanks. They are all at different stages, so you never know who’s serious about adding crypto and who’s just doing research,” said one executive at a crypto firm.

All aboard the crypto train

A spate of fintech firms have shown just how serious they are about crypto in the first half of 2021.

Neobanks such as Curve in the United Kingdom, N26 in Germany and MoneyLion in the United States have all announced plans to offer new crypto trading tools, as have European investment firms Plum, Freetrade and Trade Republic.

“As Covid-19 hit and priorities changed, fintechs started to talk about profit,” said Julian Sawyer, CEO of Bitstamp. “What you’ve seen is across the board companies which have got distribution have started to look at other sources of income. On the other side, consumers have been saying they’d like to do things with crypto.”

Sawyer noted, however, that fintech firms will not invest in expanding into crypto unless they’ve seen strong customer demand. “They’ve got 101 other products to do,” he added.

Launched in 2015, Monese is a rival to the likes of Revolut and N26 in the U.K. and Europe. Its banking app and card offering is aimed at people with a less than pristine credit score or lack of address, who therefore often struggle to open traditional bank accounts. The service is available across 31 countries in Europe, and the company has amassed more than two million sign-ups to date.

Monese secured a $60 million Series B investment from PayPal, Kinnevik, Augmentum Fintech and other investors in September 2018. The startup was rumored to be raising further equity capital earlier 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.

Blockchain data curation “is now an open, competitive market.” That’s according to The Graph, which today released new features aimed at decentralizing the process of creating and organizing its blockchain indexing tools.    

The Graph has become a popular tool among Ethereum developers, who use its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which the company calls “subgraphs,” to fetch and consolidate information that is scattered across many different transactions across the Ethereum blockchain and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). 

Among other things, the new tools the San Francisco-based startup is launching today will make it easier for users — and even profitable — for users to curate subgraphs. The idea is that this will in turn make it easier for developers to discover useful ones, without the need for a centralized aggregator or publisher.

Curating Subgraphs

Users of The Graph have already been curating subgraphs, which are built to retrieve specific kinds of data required for a DApp — for instance, the decentralized video streaming service LivePeer — to run smoothly. 

But curation will begin “in earnest” on Thursday with the launch of the curation market, Yaniv Tal, co-founder of Edge & Node, which created The Graph protocol, said in a recent interview with The Block.

The initiative is part of The Graph’s ongoing efforts to decentralize. The platform has been transitioning from a centrally hosted service to one that is run by a decentralized network.

So far, 20,000 developers have built 16,000 subgraphs hosted on The Graph’s centralized hosting service. Eight DApps — LivePeer, Audius, UMA, mStable, Reflexer, Opyn, PoolTogether, DODO — have migrated to The Graph’s decentralized protocol.

The new curation market is in line with what Tal promised last year after an outage knocked many applications offline. He said that eventually, developers would no longer have to publish their subgraphs directly to The Graph’s hosted service, and that “independent indexers” would “run nodes and process queries in an open marketplace.” He added that “curators” would “organize data and signal which subgraphs are useful and accurate.”

How does it work in practice? Once a curator finds a good subgraph, they signal on it using Subgraph Studios — The Graph’s new hub for subgraph creation, which also launched Thursday. 

Signaling on a subgraph is akin to purchasing shares in a stock, said Baptiste Greve, product manager at Edge & Node. An individual signals that a subgraph contains useful information. If others agree on the utility of the subgraph, they too will signal on it. The more signals the subgraph has, the more likely it is to generate query fees that can then be turned into a reward. 

“You’re incentivized to select good subgraphs that are actually being used, and also the price at which you purchase the share of your subgraph will evolve based on how many people are actually investing in this subgraph,” said Greve. 

While The Graph’s release mentions that anyone with a smartphone can now become a curator, Greve notes that an individual will need a Metamask wallet — usually obtained as a computer web browser extension — to receive payment. 

While curators on The Graph protocol may earn revenue, Tal stresses that revenue is based on a bonding curve — the relationship between a token supply and price, in which the less token supply, the lower the price and vice versa. 

“Curators can make or lose money through curation based on the economics of the bonding curve,” Tal said. “So it’s important that curators understand the sub graphs that they’re signaling on, as well as the dynamics on those bonding curves.”

© 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.

Bank of America—the Wall Street banking giant—has launched a new research team dedicated to covering the cryptocurrency market, according to a report by Bloomberg News. 

The new unit will be led by Alkesh Shah, who joined the bank in 2013, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg. 

“Cryptocurrencies and digital assets constitute one of the fastest growing emerging technology ecosystems,” Candace Browning, head of global research for Bank of America, reportedly wrote in a memo. “We are uniquely positioned to provide thought leadership due to our strong industry research analysis, market-leading global payments platform and our blockchain expertise.”

The launch of a dedicated crypto research division at BofA comes as banks dive deeper into the industry, which was once shunned by the upper echelons of Wall Street. 

Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have both announced in recent months initiatives to open up bitcoin to their wealthy private wealth clients. At the same time, a number of cryptocurrency firms are tapping the public markets, which will ultimately increase the demand for research covering firms in the sector. 

Bank of America isn’t a complete newbie to the cryptocurrency space, having previously tied up with Paxos’ blockchain settlement platform. It also has scored dozens of its own blockchain-related patents. 

© 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. Senator Elizabeth Warren wants the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, to weigh in on crypto exchange regulation — a possible prelude to more tangible action on this front in Congress.

In the letter, Warren — no stranger to criticism of the crypto ecosystem — said that her aim was “to request information regarding the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) authority to properly regulate cryptocurrency exchanges and to determine if Congress needs to act to ensure that the SEC has the proper authority to close existing gaps in regulation that leave investors and consumers vulnerable to dangers in this highly opaque and volatile market.”

Warren, in sum, wants Gensler to clarify, among other areas, whether the SEC needs more authority to regulate crypto exchanges. It’s a notable area of inquiry, given that Gensler himself told Congress in May that he wants to work with Congress on this particular subject. 

“I do think that working with Congress, and I think it’s only Congress that can really address it, it would be good to consider…whether to bring greater investor protection to the crypto exchanges,” he said at the time. “And I think if that were to be the case, because right now, the exchanges trading in these crypto-assets do not have a regulatory framework either at the SEC or at our site agency, the [CFTC], that could instill greater confidence.”

Warren’s letter also honed in on decentralized finance — a topic other federal officials, including SEC commissioner Hester Peirce and CFTC commissioner Dan Berkovitz have spoken publicly about. A month ago, Berkovitz cited DeFi as a challenge for markets regulators like the CFTC, remarking that “federal regulators should become familiar with this new technology and its potential uses and be prepared to protect the public against misuse.”

“Not only do I think that unlicensed DeFi markets for derivative instruments are a bad idea, I also do not see how they are legal under the CEA,” he notably remarked.

Warren asked Gensler in her letter whether he agreed on that latter point, asking: “Do decentralized platforms raise similar investor and consumer protection concerns within the SEC’s jurisdiction? If so, what challenges does the SEC face in addressing these concerns?”

© 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.

Santander UK, the British unit of the Spanish banking giant, is the latest financial institution to block payments to crypto exchange Binance.

“Keeping our customers safe is a top priority, so we have decided to prevent payments to Binance following the FCA’s [Financial Conduct Authority’s] warning to consumers,” Santander UK’s support page tweeted Thursday.

Santander UK added that it has seen “a large increase” in U.K. customers becoming the victims of crypto fraud in recent months. About 2.3 million people, or more than 4% of adults in the U.K., hold cryptocurrencies, according to the FCA.

Late last month, the FCA banned Binance Markets Limited (BML) — Binance’s U.K. entity — saying that the firm is not authorized to operate in the country. The ban, however, did not involve Binance.com, the main crypto exchange platform. So it is unclear why banks have moved to block user payments to Binance.com following the FCA’s warning.

Binance recently tweeted that it is “disappointing” that some partners are taking unilateral action against Binance users based on what appears to be an “inaccurate understanding of events.”

The exchange operator went on to say that it would welcome a dialogue with these partners to discuss the issues and it further reiterated that it takes its compliance obligations “very seriously.”

Continuing blockages

Santander UK follows Barclays, which earlier this week banned debit or credit card payments to Binance until further notice. Lloyds Bank reportedly does not allow crypto payments on credit cards, including to Binance. NatWest too is said to have lowered the daily limit on how much money can be sent to crypto exchanges after a “high level of cryptocurrency investment scams.”

Binance is losing fiat onramps from the U.K. following the FCA crackdown. Earlier this week, the exchange 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 the U.K. regulator, Binance has recently faced crackdowns from regulators around the world, including the U.S., Japan, Thailand, and the Cayman Islands. Yesterday, the Polish Financial Supervision Authority cautioned citizens against using the exchange, citing the FCA’s statement, and highlighted the risks involved in trading cryptocurrencies.

© 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.