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Card giant Visa is set to acquire Tink, the Swedish open banking platform, in a deal worth €1.8 billion (roughly $2.15 billion).

The news comes less than six months after the termination of Visa’s planned $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid, the San Francisco-based fintech firm – a deal that had encountered significant opposition from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Like Plaid, Tink’s platform allows customers to connect with more than 3,400 banks and financial institutions to access aggregated financial data, helping them to build innovative personal finance tools.

“Visa is committed to doing all we can to foster innovation and empower consumers in support of Europe’s open banking goals,” said Al Kelly, CEO and chairman of Visa. “By bringing together Visa’s network of networks and Tink’s open banking capabilities we will deliver increased value to European consumers and businesses with tools to make their financial lives more simple, reliable and secure.”

As part of the Visa deal, Tink will retain its brand and current management team, as well as its headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden.

Tink last raised money in December 2020, when it secured €85 million (roughly $101.5 million) in a round led by Dawn Capital and Eurazeo Growth.

The €1.8 billion transaction, which includes cash and retention incentives, is subject to approval from regulators. Visa will fund the transaction in cash.

© 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 job posting that appeared on June 21, the Department of Justice is looking for an attorney specialized in digital assets to join its criminal division. 

The new hire will serve as the “subject matter expert on digital currency and blockchain technologies for the Criminal Division,” specifically the Digital Currency Initiative.

The DCI itself dates to July 2018, when it came out of a report on the Cyber Digital Task Force. The new posting comes as recent ransomware attacks have captured the public’s attention. The DOJ was responsible for the recovery of the bulk of the bitcoin that hackers received upon freezing the infrastructure of the Capital Pipeline. 

Alongside massive funds going into blockchain analytics platforms, this new position is more evidence that crypto asset recovery has risen as a national priority. 

The DOJ will pay the new crypto expert, a GS 15, between $144,128.00 and $172,500.00. Applications for the current position close on July 19. 

Last year, the DOJ seized over $1 billion in bitcoin, which had in turn been stolen from the operators of the now-defunct Silk Road dark market.

© 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.

Spanish media reports that John McAfee, the controversial founder of the eponymous antivirus software company and cryptocurrency advocate and promoter, has been found dead. 

McAfee was awaiting extradition to the United States on charges of tax evasion after a Spanish court approved the move Wednesday.

Major Spanish newspapers El Pais and El Mundo, citing comments from the Department of Justice of the Generalitat, are reporting that McAfee was found in his cell at Brians 2 Penitentiary Center in Barcelona and that efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. Though the cause of death has not been officially confirmed, multiple reports have cited possible suicide. McAfee was seventy-five.

Reuters previously reported that Spain’s High Court had approved the extradition request. McAfee was arrested last October and has long maintained that the tax evasion charges were motivated by politics. 

Unrelated to the tax charges, McAfee was charged last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission on promotion charges in connection with initial coin offerings (ICOs). Earlier this year, the Commodities Future Trading Commission (CFTC) filed suit against McAfee for allegedly conducting “pump and dump” schemes in the crypto space.

However, the Spanish High Court stipulated that McAfee’s extradition must only be related to tax fraud related to his 2016-2018 tax returns, per Reuters. 

In mid-March, McAfee employed the tax law company Gordon Law Group, which focuses on the intersection between taxation and cryptocurrency,  to fight against his tax evasion charges.

“Mr. McAfee strongly maintains his innocence, and we are prepared to establish that before the federal courts of the United States,” the Gordon Law Group previously said.

© 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.

Bitcoin mining continues to make headlines this week as China ramps up its clampdown on the long-running — and once-dominant — sector.

In the latest episode of The Scoop podcast, Amanda Fabiano — who leads Galaxy Digital’s mining business — explained exactly what is happening in China, noting that authorities there recently ordered bitcoin mining projects to close in the southwest province of Sichuan.

However, this could provide a bull case for North American mining, as miners are pushed out of China in search of areas with cheaper sources of energy like Kazhakstan.

“A lot of people have built lives there on Bitcoin mining. They were the first people who dove into how to set up these large mining facilities. They have been holding the Bitcoin network up and running it forever. So I genuinely feel for the groups that have been working on that… On the other side, I think it’s really bullish for North American mining. And I also think it’s a testament to how the Bitcoin network is so resilient. An entire country just banned Bitcoin mining that is supposedly accounting for the largest cash distribution in the world. And yet the Bitcoin network continues on.”

Rising concerns about curbing the energy consumption in bitcoin mining in China have also lead to ESG initiatives in the hopes of producing sustainable mining solutions.

But the promise of a sustainable coin seems like one too good to be true. Fabiano dispels some of the misconceptions around bitcoin mining and what it really looks like for a coin to be mined with renewable energy.

“So when we think about the amounts of electricity, for example, that’s lost in energy end transmission and distribution it’s 19 times that of the Bitcoin network. And the energy footprint of always-on electrical devices in America is 12.1 times that of the Bitcoin network,” Fabiano said, adding:

“But what we always hear is how Bitcoin is ruining the world. We don’t care about how your toaster being left on is ruining the world because people don’t care that much about it. I think it’s really easy to pick on bitcoin’s energy consumption because it is so transparent.”

© 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 Tuesday night, the Consumer Safety Technology Act passed in the House of Representatives. Two of its three titles were blockchain and crypto-focused bills from Representative Darren Soto (D-Fl), while the third focuses on regulating AI.

Soto’s bills had previously passed in the House, only to be shelved amid the political maelstrom that surrounded the end of the last Congress and the presidential election. Their passage this early in the current Congress will at the very least give the Senate more time to consider them than they had last time around. 

The Blockchain Innovation Act would require the Department of Commerce and the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, to put together a report on blockchain’s use in trade and, especially, to fight fraud. On the House floor last night, Soto described the bill as “a first step towards our long-term goal of setting up a Blockchain Center of Excellence in the Department of Commerce.”

The Digital Taxonomy Act — not to be confused with Warren Davidson’s Token Taxonomy Act — starts with the proposition that “the use of digital tokens and blockchain technology is likely to increase in the future.” It subsequently mandates that the FTC assemble a report on unfair and deceptive practices in crypto markets. 

The legislation’s progress comes on the heels of major public attention on illicit use of cryptocurrencies following high-profile ransomware attacks like Colonial Pipeline and JBS.

The fate of these bills in the Senate remains to be seen. The House has attracted a growing number of crypto advocates over the years, but the Senate, which faces less frequent turnover and hosts far fewer lawmakers, has shown less interest in blockchain regulation. That may also be changing, though not necessarily in a way favorable to the industry. 

© 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.

SEC commissioner Hester Peirce has long been the most outspoken crypto advocate at the U.S. securities regulator.

In a June 23 interview as part of a virtual conference, Peirce noted her support for much of the work of decentralized finance, or DeFi, and argued against the enforcement-based approach that she had identified with the commission’s work on initial coin offerings.

“I don’t want it to be an enforcement-based approach. If we can provide clarity around certain issues within DeFi, that’s something we should do,” Peirce said. “There are certain obvious things: If you’re a decentralized platform that’s actually centralized, then probably the securities laws are going to apply.”

Securities laws have had a complicated relationship with cryptocurrency, as U.S. regulations have long determined that the presence of a third party in control of an asset’s value is part of defining that asset as a security. DeFi hopes to remove third parties in general from exchanges between parties.

Many regulators find this sort of disintermediating concerning, as they depend on the presence of intermediaries who can file reports and, if worse comes to worse, stand trial. In the case of DeFi, a persistent cause for concern is the question of who to prosecute. Peirce sees this as a positive. 

“Disintermediating can be quite helpful for financial stability,” she said. “Also for ensuring easy access to financial services on the same terms — transparent terms. That’s a positive thing.” 

Peirce went on to note the ongoing legal attacks on big tech firms, whose abuse of user data and even involvement in finances have led to antitrust investigations and lawsuits. Such firms are quintessential large counterparties, to which DeFi could provide a safer alternative.

On other issues, Peirce was less transparent. When asked what it would take to greenlight a Bitcoin ETF, she said “simple answer: I don’t know.”

When asked whether she had voted to launch enforcement against Ripple over its sale of XRP, she said “nice try,” citing commission rules that prevent her from answering until the SEC’s case is over. Her general comments, however, were similarly opposed to the regulation by enforcement approach that many accuse the SEC of taking with crypto:

“My complaint has been that too much of the conversation at the commission has flowed from enforcement actions, and it’s been too much around enforcement actions rather than constructive regulation.” 

© 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.

Yield, a project building out a bond market for the DeFi world, has raised $10 million in fresh funding in a round led by Paradigm.

The project, which was incubated by Paradigm, introduced fixed-rate lending to Ethereum, allowing market participants to borrow at fixed rates as well as issue tokenized bonds that resemble Wall Street’s zero-coupon bonds. Such instruments are issue by firms as a way to raise capital and trade at a discount until the point of maturity. 

Other investors in the round, announced Wednesday, include Framework Ventures, Symbolic Capital Partners, and CMS Holdings.

The fresh capital will allow the project to expand its team to finish the development of the second version of the protocol, according to Allan Niemberg, who co-founded Yield with Paradigm’s Dan Robinson. 

“We are growing the team to continue working towards v2 and to address the many opportunities we see in trying to make fixed-rates a fundamental DeFi building block,” said Niemberg, who previously was an analyst at trading shop DRW. 

Ultimately, Niemberg is hoping that Yield becomes a key DeFi building block. Already, the project has worked with Rari to navigate a complicated hack. Rari has issued zero-coupon bonds to users impacted by the hack through Yield, which designed the bonds and built a market for them to trade on. The tokenized bonds are called fyTokens—short for fixed-yield tokens. 

“They are giving out bonds to make their users whole. They really have been making the best of a tough situation,” Niemberg said. “I think that this is something that may be more common in the future, as hacks aren’t going away, but they aren’t always life-ending for protocols.”

Hacks are not the only use-case. Projects could issue bonds as a way to raise capital instead of selling assets out of their treasury. 

Similar to many other projects in the DeFi space, Yield has an end goal of becoming a decentralized autonomous organization. 

“Long term, our goal is to make Yield Protocol owned and managed by its community,” Niemberg added.

© 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.

StakeHound, a firm that enables staking, is suing custody service Fireblocks for allegedly contributing to the loss of private keys that accessed about $75 million worth of crypto. 

StakeHound filed the lawsuit against the Israeli-based Fireblocks in the Tel Aviv District Court. The firm claims Fireblocks’ negligence led to the loss of the keys. According to the court documents reported by Calcalist, a Fireblocks employee failed to backup the keys, which were subsequently “deleted,” leaving StakeHound unable to access 38,178 ETH, or more than $76 million. Those court documents also claim that the employee was working in “an unsuitable work environment,” according to Calcalist.

StakeHound contracted Coincover’s service as well in holding the keys, but in order for the keys to be verified, Fireblocks had to also retain a copy. In a blog post, Stakehound wrote:

“In short, a series of errors by Fireblocks caused the loss of 2 keys that are part of the 3-of-4 threshold signature for the shards that form the withdrawal key. Fireblocks (1) did not generate their private keys in a production environment, (2) did not include the private keys required to decrypt their 2 key shares in the backup, and (3) lost both keys.”

But Fireblocks contends that it was never in charge of the keys. 

In a blog post published Tuesday, Fireblocks said its research team filled a request to create a set of “BLS key shares” related to StakeHound’s ETH 2.0 staking project, which were managed outside the Fireblocks platform and not part of its usual wallet procedures.

This project wasn’t a usual service, it was a one-off request in which Fireblocks lent StakeHound resources to help build its open-source library. 

Fireblocks said those using its wallet structure aren’t at risk for losing their keys because of the firm’s multiple backup procedures — procedures that weren’t included in the services StakeHound contracted, according to Fireblocks.

According to Fireblocks, StakeHound generated its own keys and stored them outside the Fireblocks platform. Fireblocks agreed to temporarily store the BLS keyshares, but because it doesn’t support BLS with its platform, Fireblocks said the same backup procedures that are normally found on Fireblocks didn’t apply. The keys remained in temporary storage, and a few months later temporary storage failed.

In the lead-up to the failure of the temporary storage, Fireblocks alleges that StakeHound also failed to store backups with a third-party service provider despite urging the firm to do so multiple times. It also communicated that StakeHound was required to perform a backup within 14 days of the key generation. StakeHound has not said whether it followed these directions.

Fireblocks is still trying to recover the lost ETH, according to its blog 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.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has postponed a decision on yet another bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), this time from Valkyrie Digital Assets.

The SEC had to decide whether to approve the Valkyrie Bitcoin ETF by June 26, but it has now extended the review period for another 45 days to August 10.

The SEC said it needs “sufficient time” to consider the application. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) filed the Valkyrie bitcoin ETF application in April.

The delay comes a week after the SEC postponed a decision on the VanEck bitcoin ETF last week for a second time this year. The SEC at the time said it is seeking comments from interested parties on how bitcoin is resistant to price manipulation and other fraudulent acts.

Earlier this month, the SEC also delayed a decision of the WisdomTree bitcoin ETF.

Currently, there are a total of eight bitcoin ETF applications under the SEC review. The other five in the queue are applications from Fidelity, Galaxy, NYDIG, Kryptoin, and First Advisors and SkyBridge Capital.

© 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.

Kaiko, a Paris-based crypto market data provider, has secured $24 million in a Series A round led by Anthemis and Underscore VC.

Point Nine, Alven and Hashkey Capital also participated in the round. The money will be used to for product investment and to help Kaiko expand in North America and Asia.

“The immense interest we have received from institutional investors over the past year has bolstered our core mission and we are more motivated than ever to continue building data infrastructure that enables interoperability between digital finance and the traditional financial sector,” said Ambre Soubiran, founder and CEO of Kaiko.

Kaiko wants to become the go-to source for consolidated financial market information in crypto. Customers of its trade and order book data feeds include the likes of CoinShares, Messari, Paxos and Ledger.

In tandem with announcing its Series A raise, the startup has unveiled Kaiko Stream, a new service that connects institutions to consolidated crypto data feeds that are akin to traditional financial data products.

Kaiko closed a $5 million seed raise in September 2019, again led by Anthemis, with Kima Ventures, Point Nine Capital, ConsenSys Ventures, Olymp Capital and CoinShares also participating.

Data startups in the crypto sector are drawing a lot of investor attention at present. CryptoCompare, the London-based data firm, last week secured a strategic investment from VanEck, the asset management giant.

© 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.