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Bitcoin wallet provider Conio has raised $14 million in Series B funding.

The round was led by Italian bank Banca Generali, which invested most of the funds but did not disclose a specific figure. Other smaller investors in the round weren’t made public.

As part of the investment, Banca Generali has also signed a commercial agreement with Conio, which will offer its bitcoin buying and custody services to the bank’s customers from next year.

“This is an important industrial partnership,” said Gian Maria Mossa, CEO and general manager of Banca Generali, a subsidiary of Italy’s largest insurer Assicurazioni Generali. “We know that the future structure of financial markets can certainly be influenced and conditioned by blockchain technology, which continues to make headway, above all in cryptocurrencies, but also in many other areas.”

Earlier this year, Conio announced a similar partnership with Italian challenger bank HYPE to let its customers buy, sell, and store bitcoin. Challengers Revolut and Ziglu also offer similar crypto services.

Today’s Series B brings Conio’s total funding to date to $20.5 million since its launch in 2015. The firm has previously raised $3 million and $3.5 million in seed and Series A funding rounds, respectively.

© 2020 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.

Lido Finance, an Ethereum 2.0 staking service provider, has raised $2 million in fresh funding.

Sharing the news exclusively with The Block on Monday, Lido said the round was backed by Semantic Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Terra, Stakefish, and Staking Facilities, among others. Angel investors, including Rune Christensen of MakerDAO, Stani Kulechov of Aave, and Kain Warwick of Synthetix, also participated in the round.

With fresh capital at hand, Lido looks to launch its mainnet this month. The protocol’s testnet has been available on Ethereum Goerli since late November.

Lido is a “liquid” Eth2 staking protocol, meaning it allows users to unlock staked ether (ETH) and use it in various DeFi applications to earn yield. Lido does so by issuing its native token stETH for every ETH staked via its protocol. stETH is a tokenized version of staked ETH.

The service will come at a cost, of course. Lido will charge a 10% fee on staking rewards, according to information on its website. Top crypto exchanges are also set to provide Eth2 staking services, but Lido said its solution “does not rely on a single party’s private key management.”

© 2020 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.

Pornhub has added privacy coin Monero to its crypto payment options amid reports that Mastercard and Visa have cut ties with the adult content site.

Information of Pornhub’s support for the privacy cryptocurrency initially surfaced on Sunday in the Monero sub-reddit channel. The list of supported crypto payment options verified by The Block now does include Monero, in addition to other coins.

It’s not clear when exactly Pornhub added Monero but the move likely happened over the past weekend. Monero was not supported on Pornhub at least as of September when bitcoin and litecoin were added to the platform as payment options.

Meanwhile, Decrypt first reported on Monday that Pornhub now accepts crypto only as a payment tool for accessing its premium content amid the Mastercard and Visa ban.

But The Block has learnt that the crypto-only acceptance applies to selected user bases, such as in North America, the U.K. or Singapore, among others.

The only payment option available for users with IP addresses in at least some European Union countries, for instance Amsterdam, Germany, Finland, appears to be either Lastschrift, which means direct bank debit, or SEPA, the bank transfer system for the euro zone.

Pornhub Premium’s payment option for German IP addresses

According to data from SimilarWeb, Pornhub’s five largest traffic sources come from the U.S. with 23.76%, which is followed by Japan, Germany, France, and the U.K.

Pornhub’s support for Monero comes at a time when Pornhub is facing payment obstacles posed by Mastercard and Visa, who said last week that they had banned the use of their cards on Pornhub.

The ban followed their investigations stemming from an article of a NYT columnist who said the platform included content of child abuse and rape. Pornhub, for its part, refused such allegations in the NYT article saying they are “irresponsible and flagrantly untrue.”

Pornhub has not responded to The Block’s request for comment.

© 2020 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.

Cynthia Lummis, the only woman to have been elected to the U.S. Senate during the 2020 cycle, plans to make Bitcoin more visible in the upper chamber of Congress. 

Lummis explains how she sees Bitcoin as a way to get out of the U.S. debt and other plans for the cryptocurrency on a recent episode of the podcast What Bitcoin Did. Lummis hails from the crypto-friendly state of Wyoming, where she previously served as the state’s treasurer.

“It should not surprise anyone that Wyoming has become the leader in policy toward Bitcoin and creating state policies that has nurtured our ability to actually charter banks that can transact banking business in Bitcoin,” she told host Peter McCormack.

When libertarian-leaning Republican Lummis is sworn into the Senate on January 3, she said she wants to use her time to educate other senators about Bitcoin and all the ways it can be used alongside the dollar. She believes Bitcoin can not only help reduce the national debt but ameliorate the dollar’s buying power. 

“In the case of U.S. currency, inflation is baked into the Federal Reserve’s plan for the U.S. dollar. So it’s no wonder that our buying power is eroded.” For people entering retirement and hoping to live off their savings, Lummis said it’s “terribly frustrating” for people to have constantly eroding buying power.

“That will not be the case with Bitcoin. Bitcoin provides a more stable value to people who are either saving now to live comfortably in the future but also people who are on fixed income or approaching fixed income now,” she said. 

© 2020 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.