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Quick Take

• Uniswap’s liquidity mining program came to an end Monday night.
• Community members are scrambling to come up with a new proposal, highlighting the challenges of decentralized governance.

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Crypto exchange Bitstamp has submitted documents in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in a bid to subpoena Wall Street behemoths Citibank and Bank of America as part of a discovery process in an ongoing dispute with a payments processor. 

The European crypto exchange claimed in the filing that Danish firm CNG Processing failed to meet the original terms of its business arrangement as a payments process for the firm. Bitstamp hired CNG to facilitate domestic and international banking transfers on behalf of its clients. 

“CNG was significantly delayed in opening the United States bank accounts and, when it did open United States accounts, those accounts were hampered by deposit and withdrawal limits, and other limitations on transfer to, from, and between the relevant Citibank and Bank of America accounts,” the firm said in the court filing. “None of which were contemplated by the parties’ agreements.”

As a result, Bitstamp terminated the relationship between the two firms, demanding a security deposit of more than $1.7 million and customer deposits of around $1 million.

CNG is refusing to hand over those funds, according to Bitstamp’s lawyers. Per the court document, CNG claims it is unable to return the funds because the relevant accounts have been “frozen” by the aforementioned banks.

“CNG has offered no documents from either Bank of America or Citibank to support its claims regarding the status of these accounts,” the filing states, referring to recent testimonies from CNG in a Danish trial, which began in April.

The filing goes on to contend:

“Discovery that sheds light on the accuracy and veracity of CNG’s claims regarding relevant Citibank and Bank of America accounts is crucial to the ongoing controversy between CNG and Bitstamp in Danish Courts.”

The Block reached out to Bitstamp for comment but did not receive one by press time. In a tweet on Tuesday, Bitstamp said that “we’re unable to comment on ongoing legal proceedings, however we can categorically state that we are processing fiat withdrawals,” referring to the contention that the lawsuit had impacted the exchange’s ability to process withdrawals. 

Court documents can be found below:

Bitstamp Application by MichaelPatrickMcSweeney on Scribd

Memorandum by MichaelPatrickMcSweeney on Scribd

© 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.

Digital art marketplace SuperRare is partnering with Instagram model Lilmiquela, but unlike other artists on the platform who take their art digital, Miquela is a true digital native.

Miquela herself is computer generated. She’s a CGI pop singer, social activist, model, but the term influencer acts as a catch-all. Her Instagram following is almost 3 million in total.

Now, she’ll create some artwork exclusively on SuperRare for sale on the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. The collaboration represents more than a new set of artwork for SuperRare, according to John Crain, the platform’s CEO.

“Miquela’s digital artwork is one of the most interesting metaverse experiments in the industry,” said Crain. 

It’ll be the first time one can interact, engage and trade artwork of a CGI influencer, according to the announcement. 

Miquela’s first artwork “The Rebirth of Venus” dropped this afternoon, with all proceeds from the sale going to Black Girls CODE (BGC), a program encouraging involvement in computer science for girls in underrepresented communities. 

The NFT space and SuperRare has experienced considerable growth in recent months, and Trevor McFedries, CEO of Brud, the digital storytelling firm that created Miquela, said he’s planning on diving deeper into the space with Brud’s offerings. He’s already teased that there’s more to come in the NFT space from the CGI influencer.

© 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.

The team behind decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Idle Finance has raised $1.2 million in seed funding.

The round was led by gumi Cryptos Capital, with participation from Quantstamp, BlockRock Capital and Long Hash, among others. With fresh capital at hand, Idle plans to scale its yield optimization protocol with new features.

“We’re looking closely at derivatives and generally all interest-bearing assets, and it might be interesting to create verticals within different markets,” Idle CEO Matteo Pandolfi told The Block. “Other areas we plan to invest in are compliance and ownership experience for our users.”

The Idle protocol has been live since August 2019. It works similar to Yearn Finance, collecting yields from different lending protocols and optimizing for the maximum gain to return it to depositors. Pandolfi told The Block that what makes Idle different from competing protocols is that Idle has multiple features and has been developed with “particular attention to compliance and security, to also reach sophisticated users.”

Idle has been audited by Quantstamp “multiple times,” said Pandolfi, adding: “We developed the Risk-Adjusted strategy, which uses DeFiScore risk assessment framework (developed by ConsenSys) to provide the highest annual percentage yield at the lowest risk level available.”

Idle doesn’t have its own token yet, but the team plans to launch one in the near future, said Pandolfi. “At our token generation event, there will be a form of liquidity mining that will reward initial liquidity providers for the first month,” he said. “We then plan to have other programs based on users’ behavior, with the purpose of incentivizing decentralized ownership and liquidity providing.”

The seed round brings Idle’s total funding to date to $1.3 million. The protocol previously raised $100,000 from ConsenSys Ventures’s accelerator program.

© 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.