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Utah-based crypto tax and accounting startup TaxBit has raised more than $100 million in a Series A round.

First reported by Forbes, the round was led by investment companies Paradigm and Tiger Global, with participants including PayPal Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Winklevoss Capital. The startup offers cryptocurrency tax software for crypto users, exchanges and vendors.

According to TaxBit CEO Austin Woodward, the money raised will be used to invest in software tools to ease operations as well as to expand internationally. He said the funding will ultimately allow the startup to provide corporations with a “traditional enterprise resource planning tool” which will help companies better manage and optimize crypto transactions. 

In a press statement, TaxBit said that investors Bill Ackman, Anthony Pompliano and Valar Ventures, among others, took part in the round.

TaxBit said that it would debut “the industry’s first Big Four & SEC grade accounting ERP solution” later in 2021, per the statement.

© 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.

Asset manager VanEck’s proposed bitcoin ETF is still before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. On Tuesday, State Street announced that it had been appointed to a crucial role should the ETF move forward.

State Street would serve as fund administrator and transfer agent, according to a press statement. In this role, State Street will essentially provide the necessary back-office operations for the fund as well as investors. 

“We are pleased to continue expanding our relationship with VanEck to support their innovative advancements in the ETF market; including the VanEck Bitcoin Trust,” Nadine Chakar, head of State Street Global Markets, said in a statement.

VanEck submitted its most recent bitcoin ETF filing in December, a move that came after a previous withdrawal in 2019. Amidst growing chatter that the SEC might move to approval a bitcoin ETF — buoyed by successful launches in Canada — market operator Cboe submitted paperwork on Monday that formally started the approval process before the SEC. 

“Our filing builds on VanEck’s earlier S-1 filing from December 30 and represents the next steps in bringing what could be the first U.S. bitcoin ETF to market,” a spokeswoman for Cboe 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.

Quick Take

• 500.com’s recently acquired major bitcoin mining pool BTC.com.
• The firm’s pivot to mining appears to have started as early as March 2019, as it struggled to cope with China’s 2015 crackdown on online lotteries.
• The new mining business is also indirectly backed by a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

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TP ICAP, the London-based interdealer broker, is considering the expansion of its activities in crypto after growing interest from its institutional clients.

The origins of the firm’s digital asset unit – which was first unveiled in June 2019 – lie in a working group set up to conduct research on the sector following the crypto boom of 2017.

To date, the unit has focused on facilitating institutional trading by providing clients OTC liquidity on crypto derivative products offered by regulated venues CME Group and Bakkt, a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).

Founded in 1971 and now one of the world’s largest interdealer brokers, TP ICAP is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index with a market capitalization of around £1.9 billion. The company netted £1.8 billion in revenues in 2019, according to a recent presentation.

Duncan Trenholme and Simon Forster have led TP ICAP’s digital assets division since December 2018, and have been focused on it full-time since January of last year.

Forster told The Block the firm could expand into providing access to spot crypto markets after a surge in client demand for familiar market infrastructure, but the firm is still weighing its options. 

“2020 was a flagship year in the maturation of digital assets as an asset class for TP ICAP and we have seen significant interest across our traditional customer base,” he added.

“Over time, we fully expect this asset class to grow and include products similar to those seen in other TP ICAP businesses including OTC derivatives, structured products and infrastructure to support spot access.”

© 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.

Gary Gensler, the former CFTC chairman nominated to lead President Joe Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said Tuesday that cryptocurrencies “have been a catalyst for change.”

His remarks followed a question about what Congress and the SEC can do to create “a more forward-thinking” business environment for the crypto space. Gensler’s confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate is taking place at the time of this report.

Referring to his time teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gensler said that “these innovations have been a catalyst for change. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have brought new thinking to payments and financial inclusion, but also they’ve also raised new issues of investor protection that we still need to attend to.”

Gensler went on to remark that “if confirmed at the SEC, I’d work with fellow commissioners to both promote the new innovation but also at the core ensure for investor protection.”

He went on to pledge to “[p]romote technology but still stay true to our core values of investor protection and capital formation.”

As previously reported by The Block, Gensler’s nomination brought to the fore an engaged yet skeptical voice on the digital asset front. Gensler has previously raised how cryptocurrencies highlight weaknesses in the U.S. payments infrastructure.

Gensler was officially nominated in mid-January after serving as an advisor to the Biden presidential campaign. 

© 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 Kine Protocol has raised $6 million in a funding round to launch a derivatives-focused decentralized exchange on Ethereum.

The startup said Tuesday that leading investors in the round are Alexander Pack, former managing partner at Dragonfly Capital, and Naval Ravikant, co-founder and former CEO of AngelList. Other participating investors include OKEx, CMS Holdings, Spartan Capital and NGC.

Dragonfly and Ravikant also invested in derivatives DEX dYdX, which raised $10 million in a recent Series B round.

“Compared to top centralized solutions, DeFi derivatives protocols are a strictly inferior experience. For one, traders usually suffer much higher slippage,” Kine said in a Tuesday press statement. 

The startup said it aims to feature synthetic funding rates and auto-deleveraging functions used in centralized exchange so that Kine can offer up to 100x leverage and cross-margining.

To encounter the transaction bottleneck on the Ethereum network, Kine said it will initially take a hybrid approach in that its trading engine will be run off-chain.

“Users only need to pay gas for staking and margin transfers, with zero gas consumption on trading activities,” the startup said. “Kine can support 10,000+ simultaneous trading users with 4,000+ transactions per second.” 

Kine’s CEO Wang Lei said that the goal is to launch the exchange in mid-March and anticipate migrating the trading engine on-chain on a Layer-2 rollup during Q2 this year.

“We need to ensure that the Layer-2 is secure and efficient enough,” Wang said. “Because our envisioned target trading volume is incomparable to other DeFi protocols so it needs to handle CeFi-level trading volume.”

© 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.

Evolve Funds, which won approval from regulators in Canada for its bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) last month, filed on Monday for a product based on ether (ETH).

The proposed ETF shares similarities with its bitcoin product, including how Cidel Trust Company and Gemini will serve as custodian and subcustodian, respectively. If greenlit, the ETH ETF would trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange alongside a growing number of crypto-related products and funds.

“As a leader in disruptive innovation, we look forward to providing Canadian investors with access to another leading cryptocurrency through an ETF structure,” Raj Lala, president and CEO for Evolve, said in a press statement.

Evolve won approval for its bitcoin ETF on February 16, as previously reported, becoming the second product of its kind to go live in Canada.

Evolve’s filing comes on the heels of a similar submission from CI Financial and Galaxy, who put forward a filing for an ETH ETF of their own. 

© 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.

Publicly-traded bitcoin mining firm Bitfarms has ordered 48,000 new machines to expand its hashrate.

The Toronto Stock Exchange-listed company announced the news on Tuesday, saying that the new MicroBT machines will help expand its hashrate by over 5 exahash (EH)/ second from the current over 1 EH/s.

The first batch of the new order is expected to be delivered by January 2022, and the rest gradually by December 2022.

Once all the machines are fully deployed, Bitfarms said its hashrate would grow to 3 EH/s by the end of 2021 and 8 EH/s by the end of 2022.

At the current capacity of over 1 EH/s, Bitfarms produces roughly 5.7 bitcoin in 24 hours at the current mining difficulty rate.

Bitfarms CEO Emiliano Grodzki said the new purchase and expansion will be “the cornerstone of our corporate growth strategy through 2022.”

“The supply of miners will be one of the greatest challenges in for the foreseeable future due to a global shortage of wafers used to create semi-conductor chips which is a vital component in mining rigs. Our strategy will be to continue to grow our own infrastructure and professional operations and conduct mining in our own facilities which increases operational efficiency and profitability,” said Grodzki.

As The Block reported last month, bitcoin mining firms in North America continue to purchase new machines to expand their capacity. To date, at least ten firms in the region have announced bulk pre-orders estimated at more than $500 million.

© 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.

At Ontology, we’ve spent the last 3 years realizing our vision for decentralized identity and data. While hard at work, we are developing products and protocols vital to the sustained growth of a decentralized ecosystem which not only prioritizes users, but also their identity and data.

Our efforts in decentralized identity have culminated in the form of ONT ID — a native user identifying system that pulls a bevy of data points both on and off-chain which accumulate into an impermeable assessment of your identity, protected through decentralization. Users can create their ONT ID through the ONTO mobile app, developed by Ontology. With ONT ID, users can prevent unnecessary access of their data from third parties and be assured that access is only granted when they themselves permit it. A case study with Daimler Mobility, recently featured in “Forbes’s 2021 Top 50 Blockchain Things To Watch”, perfectly demonstrates this in real life through our partnership to develop the “Welcome Home App”. 

Decentralized identity is also at the backbone of Ontology’s OScore protocol, a decentralized credit scoring system. With your OScore, users are able to access special features on supported platforms, such as lower collateral rates on Wing.Finance — which ensures higher liquidity, ultimately leading to better market performance.

This latter point, that Ontology is bringing decentralized identity to DeFi, is exactly the type of interoperable infrastructure that Ontology seeks to build upon moving forward. It is also what separates Ontology from many other public blockchains that primarily seek financial margins through introductions of tokens without a value principle driving its core.

Decentralized identity isn’t the only form of data protection that is important. The SAGA protocol is edging for growth as well in the data market industry. Data uploaded to SAGA marketplace is also protected and, more importantly, controlled by the people who create and upload the data. 

In the grand scheme of things, it is beyond exciting to see the industry pick up this much steam in recent months. But an important step towards mass adoption is working with regulators and government bodies. On that front, Ontology has demonstrated an eagerness to not just be a part of regulation discussions such as with the W3C, but also take the lead in helping regulators understand the broader problems and solutions possible with decentralized identity.

About Ontology:
Ontology is a high performance, open source blockchain specializing in decentralized identity and data. Ontology’s unique infrastructure supports robust cross-chain collaboration and Layer 2 scalability, offering businesses the flexibility to design a blockchain that suits their needs. With a suite of decentralized identity and data sharing protocols to enhance speed, security, and trust, Ontology’s features include ONT ID, a mobile digital ID application and DID used throughout the ecosystem, and DDXF, a decentralized data exchange, and collaboration framework. 

© 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.

BCB Group, a London-based startup providing banking services to crypto firms, has raised $4.5 million in new funding.

The strategic funding round was co-led by North Island Ventures and Blockchain.com Ventures, with participation from Pantera Capital, L1 Digital, and Pack Capital.

With fresh funds at hand, BCB Group looks to expand its offerings, including the newly launched BCB Treasury service that helps firms buy bitcoin on their balance sheets. The group also looks to grow its yield account and wealth partner services. The former allows clients to earn a return on their crypto holdings, and the latter serves private wealth clients.

BCB Group provides crypto trading and custody services as well. The firm said it had seen 19x volume growth over the last twelve months. Last month alone, BCB said, it processed over $4 billion in payments and trades.

The strategic funding round brings BCB Group’s total funding to date to $5.5 million. The firm had previously raised $1 million in a seed round in March 2019.

Looking ahead, BCB plans to raise an additional $10 million to $15 million later this year, the firm told The Block.

Just last month, former Coinbase U.K. CEO Zeeshan Feroz joined BCB Group as an advisor.

© 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.