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Crypto exchange Binance has handpicked 100 artists who will be able to sell their NFT artworks during the launch of the exchange’s upcoming NFT marketplace, it announced today.

After the marketplace launches on June 24, only these creators will be able to sell their artworks for the first week. Anyone with a Binance account will be able to access the marketplace to buy and resell NFTs.

NFTs are collectibles that exist on the blockchain and represent digital items like photos, videos and audio. 

“NFTs are helping artists secure their work and giving them new creative perspectives no matter the medium they were initially working with, in my case – skin. I’m glad to work with Binance NFT for my NFT release,” said tattoo artist Johnny Gloom, who is one of the ‘100 Creators’. “It has been a very interesting experience as a tattoo artist, working essentially in the tangible world and on people’s bodies, to now present my work in a digital way.”

The exchange announced the marketplace in late April, saying the platform will have two main features, namely trading and premium events. The latter will enable creators to showcase and auction off their work. Binance previously said it would take home 10% of the profits made during the events, with the rest going to the creators.

© 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.

China has increased the reach of the digital yuan with its latest giveaway test in Shanghai, the country’s financial hub.

Shanghai airdropped 350,000 “red packets” over the weekend, each containing 55 digital yuan (around $9) and adding up to a total of nearly 20 million yuan ($3 million). This was the highest number of red packets given away by China in a digital yuan test. Previous tests have involved fewer than 200,000 red envelopes.

The Shanghai test suggests that China wants to rope in more citizens to try out the central bank’s digital currency.

China has more than doubled the total amounts of funds it has given away in recent months, as The Block reported previously. The total amount now stands at $39 million across six cities. As of February, that amount was $17 million across three cities.

The six cities now include Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, and Changsha. As for Shanghai, this was the city’s first lottery campaign, although it has previously been involved in digital yuan tests.

China is ahead of other major economies to launch a central bank digital currency. China started researching and developing the digital yuan in 2014 but is yet to announce an official launch date.

© 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 number of daily transactions on the Bitcoin network has fallen to a level not seen since August 2018.

According to The Block’s Data Dashboard, the seven-day moving average of daily bitcoin transactions dropped to 217,000 yesterday. The last time this number was so low was August 31, 2018.

This drop in daily transactions comes as bitcoin’s price hovers around the $36,000 mark, down 44% from its recent high of $64,000. Speculation over the causes of the price drop have ranged from Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweets to a crackdown on bitcoin miners in China.

Other on-chain metrics have been impacted too. The number of daily active addresses on the Bitcoin network — also a seven-day moving average — has fallen to 940,000 as of yesterday, in line with levels last seen in May. The number of new addresses per day has also dropped to 372,000, back to March levels.

As a result of both the price crash and lower volumes, the amount of on-chain volume in dollar terms has fallen from $17.3 billion per day to $7.7 billion — down 55%. 

On the plus side, bitcoin transaction fees are plummeting, making the network cheaper to use. The average fee is down from $53 to just $7, a decline of 87%. 

© 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 team behind the Solana blockchain is in the process of raising a large sum of money in a bid to take on Ethereum, according to a report by Decrypt. 

The project — which is best known for powering FTX’s decentralized exchange Serum — could raise anywhere from $300 million to $450 million from the raise, but the exact figure is unclear from Decrypt’s report. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko did not respond to a message from The Block seeking further clarity about the raise. 

Solana’s blockchain promises more scalability through a new consensus mechanism known as Proof of History. It appears to be favorable among traders. Serum, which FTX announced in July, has seen its trading volumes top $1.6 billion last month, as per The Block’s data dashboard. 

The ecosystem for Solana appears to be growing at a fast clip. A number of projects building on the blockchain have launched recently. Jump Trading — one of the largest high-frequency trading shops — announced Pyth, a Solana-based project that would bring Wall Street’s vast amount of market data on chain.  

Last week, the Solana Foundation announced a $20 million fund to build out the ecosystem in South Korea.

In 2019, Solana announced the completion of a $20 million fundraise led by Multicoin Capital. Other investors include Blocktower Capital, Slow Ventures, and Passport 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.

Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s controversial president, announced Saturday that he planned to submit a legislative approval that, if and when passed, would grant bitcoin the status of legal tender in his home country.

The announcement was made during the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Florida, during which Bukele appeared in a video announcing the move. 

“We hope that this decision will be just the beginning in providing a space where some of the leading innovators can reimagine the future of finance, potentially helping billions around the world,” Bukele said in a Twitter post on Saturday evening. In what is perhaps a sign of the times, Bukele’s profile picture was changed to feature the laser eyes memes, commonly used by proponents of bitcoin.

The El Salvadorean government is working with bitcoin startup Strike on the initiative. 

“This is the shot heard ’round the world for Bitcoin. What’s transformative here is that bitcoin is both the greatest reserve asset ever created and a superior monetary network. Holding bitcoin provides a way to protect developing economies from potential shocks of fiat currency inflation,” said Jack Mallers, Strike’s founder and CEO.

As Bukele’s political party, New Ideas, controls El Salvador’s unicameral legislature following an election earlier this year, it is unlikely that Bukele’s proposal will fail to pass.

Bukele entered office in 2019 pledging to fight corruption and endemic violence in El Salvador. Since that time, he has garnered sky-high approval ratings for actions against El Salvador’s political old guard, and drawn criticism from international observers and governments who say Bukele has taken authoritarian actions as president. 

© 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.

More than a dozen crypto influencers on Weibo suddenly found their accounts suspended by the Chinese social media company in what appeared to be a targeted censorship effort.

Around 10:00 UTC time on Saturday, Chinese users on Weibo started to share that as many as 15 accounts of influencers who had been active in the crypto space became inaccessible.

Clicking into their user IDs now shows the user doesn’t exist, based on accounts verified by The Block. Each of these accounts previously boasted notable numbers of followers and were active in discussing bitcoin, crypto projects as well as decentralized finance.

SuperBTC, one of the most known Weibo influencers in China due to his long-time involvement in the community, also confirmed the unexpected suspension on Twitter:

“Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, has suspended many crypto influencers’ accounts, including my Weibo account. Feel free to follow me here. At least Twitter is more crypto-friendly.”

Weibo has not given any specific reasons as to why these accounts have been targeted since some other notable Weibo accounts that also had hundreds of thousands of followers are still accessible. But the names of most of the suspended accounts today did bear terms such as “bitcoin,” “btc,” “blockchain” and “coin trader.”

It appears that such a targeted effort caused some fear over the crypto market’s sentiment.

Bitcoin’s price dropped by over 3% immediately after the Weibo suspension news began to circulate among the Chinese crypto community. It dipped to as low as $35,300 on Coinbase Pro and is now changing hands around $35,800. 

The suspension follows comments issued by a China State Council meeting that mentioned how a crackdown on bitcoin trading activities will be a priority in maintaining financial stability.

This is not the first time Weibo has suspended accounts of crypto influencers or crypto businesses. It previously censored accounts that belonged to Huobi, OKEx and Binance as well as those belonging to Tron founder Justin Sun and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.

© 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 Group of 7 (G7) has reiterated past comments about stablecoins and its opposition to those that don’t align with “relevant legal, regulatory, and oversight requirements.”

The comments were included in a June 5 communique published after a G7 meeting of finance ministers and central bank officials in London. 

Stablecoins and digital assets more broadly have been in the G7’s sights for several years. In late 2019, the G7 published a report on stablecoins, declaring that stablecoins present both potential benefits as well as regulatory, legal and cybersecurity risks. At a global scale, stablecoins could pose monetary policy and financial stability risks, per the G7.

“These risks, which are of a systemic nature, merit careful monitoring and further study,” the group’s report stated at the time. Observers of the G7’s movements have broadly interpreted them to refer to projects such as Diem, formerly known as Libra, which was bootstrapped by social media giant Facebook and debuted to widespread criticism by the world’s regulatory bodies.

The June 5 communique indicates that the G7’s position on the matter hasn’t shifted much over time. 

As the G7 noted:

“We reiterate that no global stablecoin project should begin operation until it adequately addresses relevant legal, regulatory, and oversight requirements through appropriate design and by adhering to applicable standards. We are committed to international cooperation to ensure common standards, including by supporting international standard setting bodies in reviewing existing regulatory standards, and emphasise the importance of addressing any identified gaps. We support the FSB’s ongoing work in reviewing regulatory, supervisory and oversight challenges to the implementation of its High Level Recommendations for global stablecoin arrangements.”

Similar language was included in the G7’s October 2020 statement. 

CBDC work

The communique also made note of the G7’s collective interest in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which are being explored for potential implementation by a number of the world’s central banks. Foremost of those is China, which has conducted a series of public tests in an array of the country’s cities. While proponents of CBDCs say they can serve as beneficial complements to cash, critics contend that CBDCs open the door to broader financial surveillance. 

Per the communique, the G7 central banks “have been exploring the opportunities, challenges as well as the monetary and financial stability implications of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and we commit to work together, as Finance Ministries and Central Banks, within our respective mandates, on their wider public policy implications.”

Unlike past G7 statements on the matter, the communique notably expresses a series of design preferences for such digital currencies. A more formal expression of these will be released later this year, per the group.

“CBDCs should be resilient and energy-efficient; support innovation, competition, inclusion, and could enhance cross-border payments; they should operate within appropriate privacy frameworks and minimise spillovers. We will work towards common principles and publish conclusions later in the year,” the group 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.

Quick Take

• The most popular DeFi protocols to date have offered the “simplest” financial primitives. E.g. a stable medium-of-exchange, lending, trading.
• Many ideas on Ethereum have been ported over to other chains — arguably improved by higher scalability — but often there’s been little innovation in protocol mechanics.
• New protocols building on existing infrastructure components is where the more interesting innovation in DeFi is happening.

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this Genesis research on The Block.

NortonLifeLock, formerly Symantec Corporation, has released a new crypto product that allows users to mine ether (ETH) from their personal computers.

The product, Norton Crypto, is currently available to select customers who use the company’s antivirus software called Norton 360. The public launch of the product is expected “in the coming weeks.“

How does the product work? A crypto-mining software is installed within Norton 360, which allows users to run it when their computers are idle.

Norton offers this product via its own crypto mining pool, a company spokesperson told The Block. That means Norton pools users together for greater chances of mining an Ethereum block and getting and sharing rewards.

As with every mining pool, Norton charges a fee for sharing those rewards, creating a revenue stream for the company. According to the terms of Norton Crypto, the company charges 15% of rewards transferred to users. Ethermine, one of the biggest ETH mining pools, on the other hand, charges only 1% fees.

While the ability to mine ETH from personal computers seems simple and a good idea, it is not easy to earn rewards given Ethereum’s mining difficulty, which is currently at an all-time high, according to tracker Etherscan.

Norton itself has warned in the terms of the product that rewards are not guaranteed and it is possible that users could spend more money on electricity and computer hardware than ETH reward earnings. To be sure, crypto mining consumes higher electricity, which is why the subject is often discussed within environmental circles.

As for hardware, users of Norton Crypto will have to have a graphics card capable of executing ETH mining calculations. These include Nvidia 1000, 2000, 3000 series cards, AMD 5000 and 6000 series cards, and others, the company spokesperson told The Block.

Earned rewards will be periodically sent to users’ Norton Crypto Wallet, which is stored in the cloud to avoid losses due to hard drive failures, said the spokesperson.

While Norton is currently only supporting ETH mining, the Nasdaq-listed Fortune 500 company is “considering adding reputable cryptocurrencies in the future,” the spokesperson told The Block.

© 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.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey reiterated his commitment to make bitcoin “the native currency for the internet” on Friday.

During Bitcoin 2021 Dorsey touted the Bitcoin network as a means of fairer economic systems for all people during his fireside chat, Banking the Unbanked. Human Rights Foundation chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein led the conversation.

Dorsey is said to be considering whether to add bitcoin to social media giant Twitter’s balance sheet, and his payments firm Square already holds bitcoin on its balance sheet. While other firms like Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy have touted bitcoin as an inflation hedge and a store of value for companies, Dorsey said Square integrated crypto payments and holds crypto itself as part of a larger mission to make bitcoin a widely used means of payment for all.

“The only reason Square got into bitcoin was to that end,” he said.

Dorsey said he doesn’t see central bank digital currency (CBDC) as a viable solution given its centralization and lack of privacy. Bitcoin replaces any need for a CBDC, according to Dorsey.

“The more we and our governments realize that and get in the boat sooner, the better off we all are,” he said.

But regulators aren’t overly concerned with bitcoin’s “bad actor” narrative, according to Dorsey. Though some claim that bitcoin’s privacy-focused nature makes it a breeding ground for crime, such as repeated comments from Sen. Brad Sherman and other lawmakers, Dorsey said Square hasn’t heard that line much from its regulators.

“Square was one of the first companies that was a public company that talked with the [Securities and Exchange Commission] about bitcoin — that never came up,” he said.

At one point during the fireside chat, far-right activist and former Congressional candidate Laura Loomer interrupted Dorsey by shouting from the crowd, calling Dorsey the “king of censorship,” and accusing him of inconsistency in his stance towards decentralization in finance but not in speech. Twitter has moved to suspend the accounts of those it views as spreading misinformation or violating other terms of service on its platform, including Loomer.

“How can you say that this is a currency for everyone in the world when you are the king of censorship?” asked Loomer.

Loomer has been banned for her commentary on Twitter as well as Clubhouse, Facebook and other major platforms.

Dorsey sought to address Loomer’s comments by committing to integrating decentralization into his social media efforts, and pointed to Twitter’s forthcoming decentralized project BlueSky. BlueSky is a team of five open-source architects creating a decentralized standard for social media, according to Dorsey. Though in 2019 Dorsey said the system wouldn’t be ready for “many years,” Dorsey doubled down on his commitment to see it through.

“I know you don’t believe me, I know you’re saying ‘liar,’” said Dorsey. “I’m going to prove it to you and then we can have another conversation later.”

Part of realizing a decentralized world is building noncustodial infrastructure, according to Dorsey. That’s why he announced Square’s interest in building a noncustodial hardware wallet just minutes before he took the stage. The purpose, he said, was to solicit industry feedback on the design.

“We don’t want to compete with the hardware wallets out there, we just want to take it to the next level and get to a hundred more million people who have noncustodial solutions,” he 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.