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Blockchain startup Snickerdoodle Labs has raised $2.3 million in a seed funding round

The company, which aims to use non-fungible token (NFT) technology to build a platform that protects user privacy and data, was co-founded by PayPal’s former head of blockchain strategy Jonathan Padilla. 

According to a Friday announcement, the seed round was led by Hong Kong-based blockchain investment firm Kenetic, with participation from venture capital funds Blockchain Capital, Struck Ventures, Zilliqa Capital, FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, Tribe Capital, and Zinal Growth. 

The startup aims to “build a dynamically secure data economy that creates value for all stakeholders,” by building a data economy that enables users to own and monetize their data in a secure way.

Padilla argued that Snickerdoodle is different from other NFT ventures in that it focuses more on commercializing the tokens rather than just have them represent digital items. It plans to do this by using NFTs as the cookies of the Web 3.0 ecosystem, using the tokens to support what the company calls “the development of commercial and industrial NFTs.”

“Snickerdoodle is about reimagining the internet and empowering individuals,” Padilla said in an interview with The Block. “This is a completely novel idea.”

Padilla said while the platform is designed for the creation of commercial and industrial NFTs, NFT creators can benefit too. He said Snickerdoodle is already talking to a number of artists and said this is simply another way for them to generate revenue by having their content plug into multiple mediums. He said the infrastructure Snickerdoodle eventually builds will lend creators more multi-functionality. 

“While the NFT ecosystem has seen a dramatic uptick in engagement over the last year, what’s missing is a dependable way to ensure true data ownership and privacy alongside secure and voluntary data commerce. That’s exactly what we’re building,” he said. 

The startup said it plans to host a token offering this summer to “further capitalize” its development and growth. 

© 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.

Members of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs are set to hold a hearing on central bank digital currencies later this month.

Set for 2:30 p.m. ET on June 9, the hearing is entitled “Building A Stronger Financial System: Opportunities of a Central Bank Digital Currency.” The committee hearing will be virtual and live-streamed to the public.

The witnesses set to appear are MIT Digital Currency Initiative director Neha Narula, Columbia Law School fellow Lev Menand, former CFTC chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo and Stanford professor Darrell Duffie. 

Though a detailed breakdown of the hearing isn’t available, past events in Congress during which the topic of central bank digital currencies arose suggest that the latest hearing will focus in part on China, which is moving closer to the launch of a digital yuan. China’s central bank has been conducting public tests in a range of major cities.

A digitized dollar is likely to be raised, both by committee members as well as, at the very least, Giancarlo, who since leaving office has advocated for the creation of a U.S.-centric CBDC. The Federal Reserve is conducting research in this area and is expected to make its initial findings and prototypes public later 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.

Square is considering the development of a bitcoin hardware wallet, according to Jack Dorsey, CEO of the payments firm.

Such a product launch isn’t a done deal, according to Dorsey, who previewed the concept in a Friday Twitter thread.

“Square is considering making a hardware wallet for bitcoin,” Dorsey wrote. “If we do it, we would build it entirely in the open, from software to hardware design, and in collaboration with the community.”

Dorsey went on to indicate that the wallet might be integrated with Square’s Cash App, which has seen its bitcoin sales offering become a lucrative revenue stream for the company. 

He also highlighted layer-two tech as a potential area for development in the context of the wallet.

“Layer 2 is essential for growth. The orders-of-magnitude growth we imagine requires a mix of custodial, off-chain, and second layer solutions that allow people to ‘get off of 0.’ What tech investments can enable seamless, scalable, L2 native support for a hardware wallet?” Dorsey wrote.

Ultimately, Dorsey left it open whether or in which context Square might move forward on the project — but he indicated that the Square team would be listening to the bitcoin community for input.

“With that, @jessedorogusker , I, and team will listen and continue the conversation. And we’ll set up a dedicated Twitter and github account if we decide to build. We’ll update this thread with that information when we’re ready,” Dorsey concluded.

© 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 U.S.-based commercial space company is set to send 1 BTC contained in a hardware wallet to the surface of the Moon later this year.

Astrobotic Technology, based in Pittsburgh, contracts with NASA via its Commercial Lunar Payload Services and is set to send its Peregrine lander to the Moon in the fourth quarter of 2021. According to an announcement made Friday during the Bitcoin 2021 Conference in Miami, Florida, Peregrine-1’s payload will feature a single bitcoin as a result of a deal between Astrobotic and crypto exchange BitMEX.

Astrobotic’s upcoming moon mission has been several years in the making, according to past reports, and is set to carry more than a dozen commercial payloads and 14 NASA payloads to the lunar surface.

A website dedicated to the initiative says that the launch is set to take place in November. “The coin will be a registered payload on the Peregrine-1 manifest, and will remain in situ on the Moon’s surface until any enterprising soul goes to collect it. It will have a public vanity address allowing anyone interested to witness its redemption or add some Sats if you’re feeling generous.”

Astrobotic CEO John Thornton, who appeared via livestream, said that “yes, literally bitcoin is going to the moon.”

“We’re incredibly excited to by flying this payload to the surface and can’t wait for the mission coming up very, very soon,” said Thornton.

© 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.

Crypto exchange FTX is spending $210 million to rename a professional e-sports team from TSM to TSM FTX, according to the New York Times.

The ten-year deal will set the exchange back $21 million each year, representing one of the biggest naming rights deals in the e-sports industry.

“Taking a huge industry and then reimagining it in a digital age: that’s sort of what e-sports are to sports, and it’s sort of what crypto is to investing and to finance,” FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried told the Times.

According to Forbes, now TSM FTX was the most valuable professional e-sports team of 2020 with a value of $410 million. It outranked Cloud 9, which participates in games such as League of Legends, and 100 Thieves, a company founded by a former Call of Duty champion.

In April, FTX partnered with the Miami Heat basketball team to become its official crypto exchange partner. That deal was made between the NBA team, FTX and county officials. It was valued at $135 million, with around $90 million of that going to Miami-Dade county over a 19-year 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.

Unchained Capital, a bitcoin-focused financial services firm, has raised $25 million in a funding round led by NYDIG and its parent company, Stone Ridge. 

The Series A round was announced Friday and included participation from Ecliptic Capital, Starting Line, Stronghold Resource Partners, TVP Bitcoin Venture Fund, Ten31 and Platform Ventures.

NYDIG is an existing investors in Unchained Capital, per a press statement, and as part of the deal, “has made an incremental lending commitment of $100 million and will continue to be the principal funding partner to Unchained in support of its leading bitcoin-backed multisig lending platform.”

“We are thrilled to deepen and expand our partnership with the Unchained Capital team as we continue on our shared journey of building the bitcoin infrastructure of the future,” said NYDIG co-founder and CEO Robert Gutmann.

NYDIG has raised several hundred million dollars since the start of 2021, and in May struck a deal with FIS to enable banks to offer bitcoin services to their customers. Last month, NYDIG hired a former Bridgewater exec to serve as its CFO.

© 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 Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country’s central bank, continues to have “major concerns” around cryptocurrencies, after giving clarity to banks last week to set aside a 2018 ban on trading.

“There is no change in RBI’s position,” RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said in an online press conference on Friday. “We have major concerns around cryptocurrency, which we have conveyed to the government.”

Das made similar comments in February, saying that the RBI has “major concerns” on crypto from the financial stability angle. The new comments come just three days after the RBI issued a circular asking banks not to refer to its old 2018 ban circular when dealing with crypto clients.

“It came to our surprise that some banks were still referring to and citing that old circular in their correspondence with their customers,” said Das. “We had to set the record straight that that particular circular of RBI has been set aside. So, therefore, it is not at all correct to refer to that circular.”

In 2018, the RBI had passed a rule that restricted banks and other financial institutions from dealing with crypto clients, but the Supreme Court overturned that rule last year. Still, some banks, including HDFC Bank, were citing the old circular, warning customers of restrictions. This week, HDFC Bank reportedly redacted its warning.

As for whether Indians should invest in crypto, Das today said the RBI doesn’t give any investment advice. “It is for each investor to make his own appraisal, to do his own due diligence, and take a very careful call with regard to his own investments,” said Das.

India’s crypto fate depends on the country’s central government, as The Block has reported previously. The government is likely to discuss a bill in the upcoming session of parliament, which seeks to “prohibit all private cryptocurrencies in India.” The definition of private cryptocurrencies and the bill’s other contents, however, are not yet public. 

Meanwhile, Indian crypto exchange operators recently told The Block that they remain optimistic the government will not ban crypto and rather regulate it as an asset class.

© 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 International Olympic Committee (IOC) is partnering with popular blockchain gaming company Animoca Brands to launch a collection of Olympic-themed non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

nWay, a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, developed the collection, which consists of digital versions of past Olympic pins — physical badges that are worn on lapels — as well as cross-play multiplayer video games. For many, the original Olympic pins are meant to be badges of honor which represent different aspects of the games.

Non-fungible tokens are collectibles stored on the blockchain which can represent items like photos, videos, audio and other digital files. The NFT collection is part of a new licensing agreement the San Francisco-based game developer, publisher and tech platform has established with the International Olympic Committee. 

According to a statement, the Olympic Pins, which will be available for sale on June 17, have different properties and levels of scarcity. The collection of pins commemorates the art and design of past Olympic Games, including posters, pictograms, mascots and more from the Olympics’ 125-year history. 

“Olympic pins started as a way to identify athletes, judges and officials, but over the past 125 years it has become an Olympic Games tradition, where everyone from athletes to event staff, journalists and spectators all take part to collect and trade pins in the Olympic Village and beyond,” said Timo Lumme, managing director of the IOC Television and Marketing Services. 

“They can now connect with the excitement of the Games in a whole new way and own a piece of Olympic history,” he added.

Collectors can purchase the pins in three main ways: by buying the pins directly from nWay’s website, by purchasing pins from other collectors on the NWayPlay marketplace, or for free by playing an Olympic-themed video game connected to nWayPlay. 

© 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.

Digital asset bank Anchorage is building out its borrowing and lending tools, and it sees its new ether-backed loans as the path to institutional growth.

The firm rolled out its latest lending product today in partnership with BankProv, which was founded in 1828 (known then as The Provident Bank). The tie-up will allow institutions that custody their ETH with Anchorage to put those assets to work. Anchorage will continue to hold the ETH as collateral while BankProv extends lines of credit denominated in US dollars and backed by the ETH. 

The structure of the lending product isn’t new — Anchorage already offers BTC-backed loans in a partnership with Silvergate digital asset bank. That partnership functions the same way: Anchorage does the collateral administration while Silvergate extends the line of credit in U.S. dollars.

But collateralizing in ETH opens new doors and the partnership with BankProv targets a different client base, according to Anchorage CEO Diogo Monica. In an interview with The Block earlier this year, Monica said borrowing and lending is Anchorage’s fastest-growing business line — and that it is planning to expand with partnerships with other banks.

The collaboration with BankProv is one of those expansions, and it will specifically targeting institutional clients. 

Institutions have started to invest in Bitcoin, but have been slower to adopt ETH and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. According to Monica, the 10th-oldest bank in the U.S. offering ETH-backed loans is a strong indication that the institutionalization of the space is underway.

“Silvergate primarily has crypto clients,” said Monica. “BankProv has a larger set of traditional clients. So you can also see this as another step in crypto becoming mainstream.”

As the dominance of bitcoin decreases, institutions will likely feel a need to offer credit with all types of collateral, he said. 

“Once people become comfortable with Bitcoin, then people become comfortable with Ethereum and then all of a sudden new assets will start to appear and institutions will be able to get comfortable with just a basket of assets,” Monica said. 

It will take time for institutions to get comfortable with newer assets, and those assets will have to meet liquidity and volatility requirements for risk management. Still, Monica said he envisions a future in which people will be able to put all types of crypto assets to work through lending, and borrowers will be able to use their assets in applications that exist outside the crypto world.

“Maybe instead of buying your house with a mortgage, you will be able to possibly get a cheaper loan backing with crypto or partly with crypto or a down payment of crypto, whatever it is,” 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.

In the wake of the economically damaging ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, the US Department of Justice will elevate investigations of ransomware attacks to a similar priority level as terrorism investigations, senior DOJ officials told Reuters. 

According to Reuters, internal guidance sent on Thursday to U.S. attorney’s offices stated that information about ransomware investigations in the field should be centrally coordinated with a recently created task force in Washington.

“We’ve used this model around terrorism before but never with ransomware,” acting deputy attorney general John Carlin told Reuters. 

The members of ransomware group behind the Colonial Pipeline attack, called DarkSide, are believed to be Russian. After seizing control of the Colonial Pipeline’s computer network, DarkSide demanded a ransom payment in BTC. In the stand-off period before Colonial paid the group 75 BTC, the southeast U.S. experienced widespread gasoline shortages and price spikes.

On Tuesday, a White House spokesperson signaled the Biden Administration’s growing concern over ransomware, saying that “expanding cryptocurrency analysis” to trace ransomware-tied transactions would be a priority.

The Justice Department’s decision to push ransomware into the process generally reserved for high-level national security threats illustrates how the issue is being prioritized, U.S. officials told Reuters.

© 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.