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The Aragon Association has acquired Vocdoni, a decentralized voting project born out of the Catalan independence movement.

Shares of the company traded up 11% on the news of the deal to purchase miners later this year.

Crypto euphoria gets reality check as bitcoin and ether tumble, though XRP is still trading with market value near Ford Motor’s as SEC-inflicted damage proves limited.

The combined company will be called “Bakkt Holdings” and will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange with an expected valuation of $2.1 billion.

Crypto firm Bakkt announced Monday that it is going public on the New York Stock Exchange via a SPAC deal, confirming Bloomberg’s report from last week.

Bakkt is merging with VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings at a valuation of about $2.1 billion. VPC held its initial public offering in September 2020.

In tandem with the announcement, Bakkt said that it has appointed Gavin Michael, a former Citi executive, as its new CEO. Michael replaces former Bakkt interim CEO David Clifton, who will join the combined company’s board of directors.

Bakkt further announced the targeted launch of its retail app, Bakkt Cash, in March of this year. The firm said over 400,000 consumers have signed up for early access to the app.

This is a developing story and will be updated…

© 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’s crash Monday came alongside a bounce in the Dollar Index.

Stablecoin Tether (USDT) is launching on Hermez Network — an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that uses ZK-Rollups.

Sharing the news with The Block on Monday, Hermez said USDT will go live on the network when its mainnet launches in the coming weeks. Hermez is targeting mid-February for the launch, technical lead Jordi Baylina told The Block in an interview.

ZK-Rollups are a Layer 2 solution that help scale Ethereum. They bundle hundreds of transfers into a single transaction, reducing data storage and gas fees for validating transactions. ZK-Rollups use a cryptography technique called zero-knowledge proofs that runs computation off-chain and submits a validity proof to Ethereum.

So when a transaction takes place using ZK-Rollups, it goes through, said Jordi. With Optimistic Rollups, on the other hand, a transaction can be challenged, he said. Optimistic Rollups are another Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, which assumes transactions are valid by default (optimistic approach) and only runs computation in the event of a challenge.

There are pros and cons of both the solutions. Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino told The Block in the interview that the stablecoin issuer chose Hermez because it is a “really good scalability solution” since it helps store the entire data rollup on-chain.

Implementing Layer 2 scaling solutions is necessary, said Ardoino, because Ethereum will be “more and more clogged before Ethereum 2.0 goes live” in the coming years.

Jordi said Hermez will help process 2,000 transactions per second at “one-tenth” of current fees. Ethereum’s current capacity is about 15 transactions per second, and the current average fee is about $11 per transaction.

Tether first revealed its plan to implement ZK-Rollups in September, after integrating with OMG Network, another Layer-2 scaling solution that is designed to reduce congestion on Ethereum.

When asked if Tether is looking to integrate with more Layer-2 solutions, Ardoino said not so in the near future.

As for Hermez, Jordi said it is in “conversation with other projects” for possible integrations. He added that any project offering support for ERC-20 tokens can launch on the network since it is a decentralized solution.

© 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.

Trials of China’s central bank digital currency continue, with ATMs now starting to be used in Shenzhen.

Quick Take

• The total trade volume on decentralized exchanges was $116.7 billion in 2020 — up from $3.0 billion in 2019 or a 3,790% increase.
• To start 2020, we have seen record trade volumes on DEXs. In the first week of January, trade volume has been higher than on any day before.
• The challenge in 2021 is to bring scalability from Layer 2 solutions to DEXs, despite the limitations they place on composability.

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Hermez Network sets out to provide faster and cheaper transactions on Ethereum.