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Mintable, a Singapore-based platform for minting and trading non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has raised $13 million in a Series A funding round.

The round saw participation from an interesting list of backers, including Ripple, Animoca Brands, MetaKovan’s Metapurse and Expedia Group. It also included Doug Band — an American businessman and former advisor to Bill Clinton — and Jon Oringer, founder and executive chairman of Shutterstock.

There was no lead investor in the round, Mintable founder and CEO Zach Burks told The Block, adding that all investors contributed similar amounts.

With the fresh capital influx, Mintable plans to expand its team and boost user acquisition initiatives, said Burks. Mintable’s current headcount is 14, and Burks is looking to increase it to 35 by the end of this year.

As for user acquisition initiatives, Burks said Mintable’s goal is to reach the mass market — beyond just crypto users — by simplifying the purchase experience of NFTs. “We consider ourselves an e-commerce platform first and an NFT platform second,” said Burks.

Mintable is built on Ethereum and also supports the Zilliqa blockchain. The platform offers a “gas-free” minting feature, meaning users can create NFTs on Ethereum without paying transaction fees. Burks called this gasless minting “game-changing technology” because it is not on a Layer 2 blockchain or a side chain, and is not minted at a later date. It works by using blockchain signatures to create the NFT until it is first moved.

Founded in 2018, Mintable says it has helped create around 700,000 NFTs on its platform, to date. These NFTs have fetched an average price in the range of $10,000-$50,000, said Burks. A few NFTs have been sold for $500,000, and one NFT exchanged hands for $2 million.

The Series A brings Mintable’s total funding to date to $15.5 million. The platform has previously raised $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including Mark Cuban, Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, said Burks.

Cuban appears to be betting big on NFTs. The owner of the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks has invested in at least four NFT-related platforms to date, including Lazy, CryptoSlam, and NFT42.

© 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 SoftBank Latin America Fund has invested $200 million in the parent company of Mercado Bitcoin, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the region.

The fundraise values Mercado Bitcoin’s parent company 2TM Group at $2.1 billion, placing it among Latin America’s unicorns – privately held startups with valuations north of $1 billion.

The Series B raise comes just five months after the crypto exchange secured an undisclosed sum through a Series A round, which was co-led by G2D/GP Investments and Parallax Ventures.

The latest capital injection will be used to expand Mercado Bitcoin’s products and infrastructure, as well as to grow the firm’s headcount to 700 people by the end of 2021.

“Millions of people around the world are realizing that digital assets and cryptocurrencies are both innovative technologies and efficient stores of value – Brazil is no exception to that trend,” said Roberto Dagnoni, executive chairman and CEO of 2TM Group, in a statement.

Mercado Bitcoin’s customer base now stands at 2.8 million, after it added an additional 700,000 clients between January and May this year.

Marcelo Claure, CEO of SoftBank Group International and COO of SoftBank Group, said the exchange is positioned “at the forefront of the Latin American blockchain revolution and as a defining player in the cryptocurrency explosion in Brazil.”

2TM Group is a Brazilian holding company focused on digital assets. In addition to operating Mercado Bitcoin, it runs wallet firm Meubank, custodian Bitrust and several other crypto-focused businesses. Meubank is set to launch this year, subject to regulatory approval.

© 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

• EIP-3074 is an improvement proposal designed to improve the UX of Ethereum applications. It is a candidate for the Shanghai hard fork (slated for October 2021).
• User experience is improved in EIP-3074 by enabling smart contracts to perform actions on behalf of users — such as paying gas fees for them.
• As a result, users don’t have to hold ETH in their wallets to interact with Ethereum applications. Another benefit is decreasing transaction costs by batching.

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Quick Take

• Swarm Markets has followed a long and winding road to launching a decentralized exchange under the supervision of BaFin, the German regulator.
• The platform is now finally going live with $15 million in pledged liquidity.

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Pop music star Katy Perry announced Wednesday that she’s dropping a non-fungible token (NFT) collection, as well as her purchase of a minority stake in Theta Labs, a firm focused on decentralizing peer-to-peer video streaming using blockchain technology. 

According to a Theta Labs release, Perry’s collaboration with Theta Network involves the sale of digital collectibles derived from her approaching “Play” residency in Las Vegas this December.

Excited & 👀curious👀 to be launching my FIRST ever #NFTs later this year w/ @Theta_Network. Look out for memorable & creative moments from my 🍄 residency 🍄 that’s both a digital collectible AND an IRL experience 😱TANGIBLE😱 Pre-register for more info! https://t.co/kiEwPLZH4T pic.twitter.com/uYNhpDW8oy

— KATY PERRY (@katyperry) June 30, 2021

The actual sale of the NFTs likely will begin in Q4 of this year, according to Theta Network’s NFT platform ThetaDrop. 

While the carbon footprint of NFTs has been hotly debated due to the energy consumption of the proof-of-work-based Ethereum network, the Theta protocol’s blockchain uses a proof-of-stake model that aims to mitigate energy usage. 

“Look out for memorable & creative moments from my residency that’s both a digital collectible AND an IRL experience,” Perry wrote on Twitter.

Perry’s not the only star to drop an NFT this year. The boxer Floyd Mayweather launched an NFT collection in late May, and the rapper Jay-Z has shown his support too — especially in the acquisition of his music streaming platform Tidal. However, Perry’s financial stake in Theta Labs suggests the music star may be eyeing future projects involving blockchain. 

© 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.

Hong Kong-listed Loto Interactive could see 97% of its revenues hampered by Sichuan’s recent shutdown orders on bitcoin mining operations.

Loto Interactive, a subsidiary of New York-listed BIT Mining, disclosed to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange earlier this month that two of its wholly-owned bitcoin mining facilities in China’s Sichuan province received notices from their respective power suppliers regarding energy cuts. 

Both facilities have hence suspended their operations. Loto said in a further disclosure on June 25 as a warning to shareholders that the two data centers brought in a revenue of HK$392 million ($47.9 million) for 2020 by hosting miners for customers, which accounted for 97% of last year’s total.

Loto added that its third mining facility was originally planned to be operational in June but due to the governmental policy in Sichuan, it is “unable to anticipate the time of resumption of operations.”

Further, Loto said it procured about 4,000 bitcoin miners in February to expand its proprietary cryptocurrency mining business. But the change of the regulatory dynamics has compelled it to “explore the possibility of expanding its operations to other locations” and it is making the best efforts to “accelerate the materialization of such possibilities in order to protect the interests of the Group and its shareholders as a whole.”

It’s the latest evidence of the ripple effect of China’s bitcoin mining crackdown that is affecting not only private businesses but publicly-listed firms as well.

All told, the New York Stock Exchange-listed BIT Mining owns a controlling 60% stake in Loto Interactive, which fully owns three bitcoin mining facilities in Sichuan that have now been forced into an indefinite suspension.

400 megawatts

Loto started as an online lottery business in Hong Kong but pivoted to bitcoin mining as it went through an acquisition by BIT Mining, formerly known as 500.com. BIT Mining also announced the pivot from online sports lottery to bitcoin mining last year.

Loto said the first mining facility that received the power shutdown order on June 19 was called Ganzi Changhe Hydropower Consumption Service. It was the same entity BIT Mining referred to in its last announcement where it said it has deployed some of its bitcoin miners to Kazakhstan following the shutdown of the Changhe facility. The second facility, called Sichuan Lecai Yuntian Network Technology, received a similar order on June 21. 

The suspension comes just about three months after Loto acquired the remaining 49% of the Ganzi Changhe facility’s equity in March in a deal worth HK$88 million ($11.3 million), according to Loto’s Q1 earnings report.

Subsequently, Loto signed an agreement in March with an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of BIT Mining through which Loto will host bitcoin miners owned by the BIT Mining subsidiary in the Changhe facility. 

In its 2020 earnings report, Loto boasted that once its third center is up and running, the three facilities would occupy an area of nearly 18,000 square meters (around 200,000 square feet) that can house 225,000 crypto miners combined. During a December 2020 roadshow, executives of Loto also told potential investors that its operating capacity in Sichuan was at 400 megawatts.

As The Block reported previously, following the bitcoin miner shutdown orders in Xinjiang and Sichuan earlier this month, about 90 exahashes per second of computing power on the bitcoin network has gone offline. That has resulted in a spiking supply of secondhand bitcoin miners on the market.

There have also been instances where hydropower plant owners in Sichuan are trying to sell their assets as a direct result of the recent crackdown, according to a report from the South China Morning Post.

© 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 non-fungible token (NFT) representing the original source code for the World Wide Web has sold for $5.4 million in a sale hosted by luxury auction house Sotheby’s. 

The auction began on June 23, with bids starting at $1,000. All proceeds of the sale will go to initiatives supported by Berner-Lee and his wife. 

NFTs are unique collectibles that represent digital files, like audio and video. This particular NFT is for a code British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed. The files referenced by the NFT contain over 9,000 lines of code, which include parts of the three languages and one protocol Berners-Lee invented: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and URLs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). 

“The process of bringing this NFT to auction has offered me the opportunity to look back in time to the moment I first sat down to write this code thirty years ago, and reflect on how far the web has come since then, and where it could go in the decades to come,” Berners-Lee said in a statement. 

The sale marks Sotheby’s third auction involving NFTs. The auction house sold its first NFT by anonymous digital artist Pak in April, and its second NFT in June, selling a rare CryptoPunk for nearly $12 million.

Most recently, musician and entrepreneur Jay-Z announced he is selling an NFT at Sotheby’s which is based on his debut album. 

Image courtesy: Sotheby’s

© 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 Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has hit trading platform Robinhood with $70 million in penalties for its “supervisory failures” in a variety of its services.

The fine is the highest penalty FINRA has levied against any firm. It’s ordered Robinhood to pay $57 million in fines and $12.6 million in restitution with interest. The self-regulatory body said the fine reflects “the scope and seriousness of the violations,” in its statement published Wednesday.

Robinhood has settled with FINRA over the claims but has neither admitted nor denied the charges but rather “consented to the entry of FINRA’s findings,” according to FINRA. 

The alleged “supervisory failures” are moments in which FINRA contends Robinhood failed to be transparent with its customers, failed to sufficiently vet those who wished to place options trades and failed to “reasonably supervise” the platform’s tech to mitigate outages.

The case reaches further than Robinhood’s decisions during the early 2020 run-up of meme stocks, but it does point to alleged failures during that time. It refers to various outages from 2018 to 2021 as supervisory failures but mentioned the March 2-3 outage 6as the “most serious” of the outages.

FINRA contends that Robinhood failed to be transparent with customers since 2016, saying the firm “negligently communicated false and misleading information to its customers.” 

“The false and misleading information concerned a variety of critical issues, including whether customers could place trades on margin, how much cash was in customers’ accounts, how much buying power or “negative buying power” customers had, the risk of loss customers faced in certain options transactions, and whether customers faced margin calls,” said FINRA in a statement.

But the body also contends Robinhood failed to be transparent with FINRA itself. It did not report “tens of thousands” of written customer complaints that the body says it was required to report. This was due to a firm-wide policy that exempted some categories from reporting despite their mandate to send them to FINRA, according to the statement.

Robinhood has reportedy been eyeing an initial public offering, going so far as to choose NASDAQ for its listing. 

© 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

• Kazakhstan’s vicinity to China, its energy surplus, and its openness to the mining industry have made it a top destination for miners moving out of China.
• But the journey to the old Silk Road may not be any easier than migrating across the Pacific.

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