FinTech news in Bitcoin category

Late Tuesday night, TBD, the Bitcoin-focused division of Jack Dorsey payments company Block (formerly Square), announced an ill-thought-out plan to trademark the term, which refers to its vision for a decentralized, privacy-focused iteration of the future web that TBD has been promoting in recent months. For several months, TBD has been promoting the term Web5, explaining how Web5 technologies could bring decentralized identity and data storage to applications while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals. In theory, Web5 would allow users to connect with apps using their decentralized identity, instead of constantly creating new profiles for services they wanted to try. This move, however, did not fly with the TBD community, as many pushed back at the idea that free and open-source technology needed such a gatekeeper.

Law enforcement also recovered $661,900 in cash, 25 Casascius coins of bitcoin (valued at about 174 bitcoin), an additional 11.116 bitcoin, and a handful of silver- and gold-colored bars. The whereabouts of this massive amount of bitcoin was a mystery for almost 10 years, U.S. Attorney Damian WIlliams said in the release. The plea came almost a year after law enforcement seized 50,676.17851897 bitcoin, then valued at over $3.36 billion, from Zhong home, the statement said. Officials found the bitcoin in an underground floor safe and on a single-board computer that was hidden under blankets in a popcorn tin placed in a bathroom closet.

The program will bring four cohorts per year, each consisting of about eight to 12 teams, or about 30 to 50 founders, to New York City from around the world for eight weeks at a time to focus on building on the Bitcoin-centric Lightning Network and Taro protocol, Kelly Brewster, CEO of Wolf, said to journalist. Asset management firm Stone Ridge has launched a startup accelerator, In Wolf Clothing (Wolf), that will be dedicated to growing Bitcoin-focused applications, the team exclusively told journalist. Separately, Taro is a protocol that launched in April of this year to help issue digital assets on Bitcoin’s blockchain that can then be transferred to Lightning Network instantly in low-fee transactions. NYDIG, a subsidiary of Stone Ridge, is also supporting the accelerator, alongside mentorship and investments from Bitcoin-focused venture capital firms and operating companies.

They include Mask Network, MetaWeb Venture, Eniac Venture, Tess Venture, Stratified Capital, Fundamental lab, Incuba Alpha, Zeuth Venture, Cogitent Venture, Atlas Capital; Impossible Finance, RSS3, ShowMe and ETHsign’s co-founders Yan Xin and Potter Li. That’s why Yu, along with his former BTC China colleague Errance Liu, set out to build KNN3, a permissionless (hence decentralized) tool for developers to draw insight from cross-blockchain user data. One of KNN3’s better-known customers is Mask Network, which enables users to send cryptocurrencies on Web 2.0 services and is now building a decentralized identity system using KNN3’s tech. The latest to get VC recognition is KNN3, a Singapore-based startup working to help developers make sense of relational data across blockchains.

While crypto mining, the process that verifies and adds new transactions to the blockchain using the proof-of-work method, is costly to join and prone to regulatory clampdown, crypto staking, enabled by the Merge, offers enhanced censorship resistance thanks to its low barriers to entry both in terms of cost and the computing power required. The Merge, the much-anticipated network update on Ethereum that’s slated to unfold this week, could provide a new way for China’s crypto enthusiasts to participate in the blockchain economy two years after the country began phasing out the lucrative crypto mining industry. Before China banned crypto mining, the country accounted for as much as two-thirds of Bitcoin’s worldwide hash power, the energy consumed to carry out proof-of-work. Big hopes for the upcoming Ethereum Merge Users who are more crypto-savvy could opt for decentralized protocols, which use algorithms to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions rather than relying on a centralized intermediary, allowing for a higher degree of anonymity.

Others include existing and new investors such as Adaverse, Flori Ventures, Tekedia Capital, GreenHouse Capital, ODBA, Five35 Ventures, Chrysalis Capital, Enrich Africa, Thrive Africa, Angellist Ventures and angel investors, including Rene Reinsberg, Marek Olszewski and Honey Ogundeyi. According to the CEO, Bitmama launched Changera at the intersection of blockchain payments and lifestyle, mainly targeting non-crypto-savvy people who are more comfortable using platforms with basic UI interfaces and less crypto jargon to communicate. The blockchain company will use the pre-seed to expand its operational presence, strengthen its team, consolidate its product offerings and plot market penetration across Africa while rapidly scaling new use cases for cryptocurrency within the continent, it said in a statement. Subsequently, they built a crypto exchange platform and allowed these users to access virtual assets formally and explore other use cases, including buying, selling and swapping crypto and peer-to-peer transactions.

Coinbase and Robinhood already dominate the crypto exchange space, but Rush believes Stack stands out from the crowd by offering features like access to the tax and control advantages of a Uniform Transfers to Minors Act (UTMA) account and a trading environment designed specifically for teens. The founding team has an eclectic background that includes teen fintech app Copper and securities for Rush, while Mascarenas helped digitize the cookie ordering system for the Girl Scouts and Young was a T-Mobile engineer. He would also see Reddit posts from teens trying to get into crypto using their parents’ information to create an account on exchanges like Coinbase or Robinhood and having them be frozen — and rightly so — for not being of-age to have an account. How the upcoming Ethereum Merge could change crypto rewards, costs and reputation Edited to change the name of the company to Stack instead of Stack.io.

Los Angeles-based Stacked, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Alex Lin, is making a video streaming platform for gaming content — basically Twitch for web3 users, the founder and CEO told journalist. Lin didn’t set out to develop Stacked for the crypto crowd, but Pantera Capital convinced the founder that blockchain will play a critical role in next-gen mobile games. Having founded two ventures before — YC-backed mobile gaming company LVL6 and social shopping mobile app Hush — Lin has seen enough market ups and downs to not fret too much over the current crypto bear market. The founder remains skeptical of certain P2E games that tend to exploit users, but he’s bullish that high-quality titles will eventually emerge, akin to how free-to-play went from a widely despised monetization strategy to a genre with successful hits.

Four Tencent veterans want their offering .bit, an identity protocol built on the blockchain, to become the universal identification system in web3, like how emails and phone numbers became ubiquitous in Web 2.0, while giving users control over their own data rather than letting it reside in the platforms they use. The strategy won investor support as the company has closed a Series A funding round of $13 million led by CMB International, which is owned by the Chinese conglomerate China Merchants Group, HashKey Capital, known for its early investment in Ethereum, QingSong Fund, GSR Ventures, GGV Capital and crypto-focused investment firm SNZ. On Jike, a social network favored by China’s tech workers, venture capitalists and web3 enthusiasts, people are attaching the .bit suffix to their names even if they haven’t actually registered an account with the platform. The company’s next ambition is to promote the use of .bit for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), said Yeoh.

As to how to restore investor confidence in the crypto sphere, Ge believes regulators are on the right track to bring more oversight over consumer-facing crypto products and protection for retail investors, as is the case in Singapore.

BlackRock’s Aladdin investment management platform will offer connectivity to Coinbase Prime to offer crypto trading, custody, prime brokerage, and reporting capabilities to shared clients.

Unlike most popular multi-sig wallet products on the market today, Taub added, Vault DAO is specifically designed for individual users to secure their own assets rather than for groups that require multiple parties to sign off on a transaction. For example, a user could require three signatories to sign off on any transfer of assets from a specific wallet, and those three signatories could either all be accounts operated by the user or could include accounts delegated by the user to a trusted friend. The Vault DAO, Upstream’s solution, operates as a multi-signature wallet that can be configured to require sign-off from multiple discrete accounts to authorize a transaction on behalf of a user. It’s fundamentally similar to Gnosis Safe, a popular multi-sig wallet tailored toward organizations, but Taub says the Vault DAO is much more user-friendly from a design standpoint.

Besides the founders, Cheri Beth Bowen, Ronald R. Deering, Samuel D. Ellis, Mark F. Hamlin, Carlos L. Martinez, Alisha R. Shepperd and Sarah L. Theissen were all also charged with violating federal securities laws in connection with Forsage, according to the SEC complaint.

Interplay current offerings include a venture capital arm that houses two early-stage funds, a foundry that helps build companies from scratch, an incubator to support existing companies and a family office.

Given two of the primary hardware wallets, Ledger and Trezor, have roughly 5 million users, there would appear to be plenty of room for growth, since that there are at least 295 million crypto holders who may decide to add hardware wallets to their portfolio.

Blockchain ecosystem Topl has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round to help companies track and monetize social impact initiatives.

The new fund will focus on a handful of areas in the crypto ecosystem, including web3 infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized autonomous organization (DAOs) tooling, and new business models to collaborate on intellectual property, to name a few.

MoHash has been working to solve this challenge for a year and has assembled several experienced tech and finance individuals from firms such as Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Oliver Wyman, India Stack and Samsung.

The crypto hash rate, which measures the computational power used by proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, in China plummeted to zero between last July and August after the country carried out the harshest crackdown on crypto mining.

While Binance.US says it’s not a subsidiary or affiliate of Binance itself, the company launched as a legal independent entity in 2019 and is tied to Binance through its founder, Changpeng Zhao, as well as through its licensing agreements with Binance that cover its core technology and naming rights.

While much of the deep, fundamental research and infrastructure development in the blockchain space still takes place in the US, Southeast Asia is ideal for web3 startups offering consumer-facing services, said Amy Zhao, lead at crypto investment firm Ocular.

Celsius allows users to deposit their Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether and receive weekly interest payments. There must be many users who are in a position of leverage and desperately need those funds from Celsius, now locked away.

Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey is teaming up with artist Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) to launch The Bitcoin Academy at Marcy Houses, the public housing complex in Brooklyn, New York where Jay-Z grew up.

Pacific also attributes Entropy’s edge to their own willingness to deviate from the traditional business model for custodians, wherein users pay them a fee to safekeep funds, and to work towards finding a model that can generate revenue not just for the custodian but also for the protocol itself, as well as crypto users.

Despite the rising interest among Asia’s investors, most wealth management firms in the region do not yet offer clients a digital assets proposition — and two-thirds of firms currently have no plans to do so, according to Accenture.

The bill specifically is targeting proof-of-work mining, which is one of the two most popular mechanisms cryptocurrencies use to verify new transactions on the blockchain and make new tokens, but it uses a lot of energy to validate blockchain transactions.

Other major crypto companies have also been slowing hiring in response to a downturn in prices – Coinbase, Gemini close competitor, announced plans last month to reverse its prior headcount growth projections, and Latin American crypto exchange Bitso let go of 80 employees last week.

Wagner also noted that the company recently launched a new product line around CRM data sharing and since the company is seeing a lot of traction around its file-sharing capabilities, it is also investing in that as well.

Primitives’ ultimate goal is for the digital wallet to become a central location for a user to hold NFTs and cryptocurrencies, interact with friends, store music, play games, and more, Gabeau said.

Babel has evolved from a crypto lending business targeting miners and others into a comprehensive crypto asset manager for institutional investors. The growth of Babel Finance, which offers a suite of institution-facing crypto financial products, could be an indicator of how banks, investment funds, and other traditional investors are embracing the emerging digital asset class. It’s one of the many crypto firms to have recently opened an office in Singapore, which is competing with Hong Kong to be the crypto nexus of Asia.

CyberConnect plans to generate revenues through the social data network, which include different participants like data contributors, indexers and recommenders, curators, and users.

With a custodial wallet, Robinhood holds the private key on behalf of a user, meaning that users can invest in crypto by tracking its price movements but they cannot directly transact with their crypto funds. Now that it’s launching a non-custodial wallet, users will be able to access and manage their own digital assets, including cryptocurrencies and decentralized apps (dApps) including NFTs, Kerbrat said.

Even as more traditional financial players enter the crypto world, blockchain investor Fortis Digital Ventures is closing a $100 million crypto fund that aims to bridge the gap between the old and new finance worlds. The firm will focus on investing in web3 companies that are building better user experiences and solving real world issues for people or businesses.

Bitcoin’s most prominent layer-two, the Lightning network, can execute hundreds of thousands of transactions per second by settling transactions off-chain in a separate ledger, Lightning Labs CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark told journalist.

The firm did not disclose funding amounts oddly but is sharing that their first round is co-led by a16z Crypto and Paradigm with participation from Thrive Capital, Coatue, Felix Capital, Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners and Zeev Ventures. Bitcoin’s lightning network allows for cheaper and faster transactions than the base level network allows, making it a more ideal platform to leverage for payments and decentralized apps.

Singapore-based crypto trading and asset management startup Amber Group is reportedly raising a new round at a $10 billion valuation; 11 months ago it had just reached the unicorn status in a $100 million financing round. Chainalysis, a startup that provides crypto investigation and compliance services, has secured $170 million in a Series F funding round led by GIC, a sovereign wealth fund of Singapore.

Earlier today, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pushed for regulation during an annual testimony in front of the Senate Banking Committee, at a time where Terra algorithmic stablecoin UST struggles to retain its peg. Stablecoins by definition are supposed to be stable and hold their value through a 1:1 ratio that is fixed to an external peg like the U.S. dollar or it can be tied to other assets like UST, which is backed by dollars, but also cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Avalanche.

Its open source network allows custom smart contracts to be built on Bitcoin, enabling developers to use the Bitcoin blockchain to create dApps. Laughlin explained that without the Taproot upgrade implemented on the Bitcoin network late last year, which makes it easier and faster to verify transactions, the growth of Bitcoin as an ecosystem would have been much more limited. Bitcoin supporters, including Thiel, ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood and MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, all spoke at Bitcoin 2022 about its ability to act as a store of value when central banks relax their policies and let inflation run hot, as has been the case in the United States throughout the majority of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is building infrastructure for the Bitcoin Lightning Network akin to Visa’s payments network, Lightning Labs CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark told journalist.

Terraform Labs, the organization behind UST, cryptocurrency Luna and Luna Foundation Guard, emptied its treasury wallet of all of its bitcoin, about 42,530 bitcoin, or $1.3 billion, on Monday.

The depegging of UST is forcing LFG to liquidate reserves from both LUNA and bitcoin in order to correct the pegging of UST to $1, Franzen said. If Terraform Labs is selling its bitcoin en masse into a market that’s already selling aggressively, it wouldn’t offer peg support, Jack Melnick, a token researcher at The TIE.

It’s a little less than two weeks since Crypto Bahamas began, but we’re still bringing out content from the conference, because, seriously, there was so much good ideas we couldn’t not share it.

The Bank of Uganda, in a letter, said it had not licensed any payment provider or operator, including banks or fintechs, to sell or facilitate trade using crypto — while also making reference to the government’s stand that crypto is still not legal tender. A country of 5.4 million people according to the World Bank, and one of the poorest countries in the world despite being rich in resources like diamond and gold, the CAR became only the second country in the world to legalize bitcoin, after El Salvador.

The Boston-based asset manager, which administers plans covering more than 20 million participants representing $2.7 trillion in assets, said the launch is expected to take place by midyear, debuting at bitcoin supporter Michael Saylor firm MicroStrategy, which holds billions of dollars of the asset on its balance sheet.

Instead, Bitso is working with Moss.Earth, a São Paulo, Brazil-based carbon offsets company, to indirectly mitigate the emissions associated with transacting bitcoin and Ethereum-based tokens via its platform.

Taro will support developers transferring assets on the Bitcoin Lightning Network by executing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, a much greater volume than what the Bitcoin network could otherwise support, Stark said. Taro is the latest of multiple products Lightning Labs has built specifically for the Lightning Network, which is a layer-two solution that makes the Bitcoin blockchain more efficient.

Starlight’s core customers are companies who need to convert some of their cash into crypto, many of which are digitally native but new to web3, Nguyen said. He added that Starlight has also seen interest in its product from crypto-native entities, including DAOs, which often invest in other companies, creating a need for them to convert cash into crypto and vice versa.

Hayes stepped down from his prior role as CEO of BitMEX in October 2020, though sources told The Block that he played a role in the layoffs, in part through his support of BitMEX pivoting away from its core focus on derivatives.

It was helping mid-size startups keep track of equity as they grew, but last summer, as the price of Bitcoin shot to a historic high, the company began getting requests from its clients to help manage employee tokens. The company declined to mention how many customers it’s servicing but said Hong Kong-based microinsurance firm YAS Digital and crypto gaming company Animoca Brands are among its early users. Sprout created Folium in light of this customer demand to help companies trace digital coins and non-fungible tokens across various blockchain platforms.

Another crypto nonprofit platform, The Giving Block, has also already taken in $1.5 million in crypto donations and announced a campaign yesterday to raise $20 million in cryptocurrency for its Ukraine Emergency Response Fund supporting a variety of accredited nonprofit groups, including United Way Worldwide and Save the Children, according to a webpage for the campaign.

Payments giant Stripe already powers a pretty major swath of the web financial infrastructure, now it’s launching crypto payments support to give customers an easier path to onboard web3 users and interact with cryptocurrencies.

But while that seems to foreshadow that Lunar definitely has ambitions to move beyond its Nordic shores (with a name and stratospheric association to match that), the startup is actually still focused on building out services that ferret out what the incumbents are still not providing, to build those services into the Lunar platform, not least because he points out that Nordic consumers and businesses are some of the most lucrative not just in Europe but the world in terms of the value-added services they take, the money they transact with and so on.

The investors behind virtual hack.summit(), the world’s largest blockchain programmer event, have launched a $200 million crypto seed fund under the Hack VC umbrella, fund partner Alex Pack told TechCrunch in an interview. Ed Roman, formerly a solo GP, invested in early-stage tech and crypto companies for over 10 years through Hack VC before partnering \[…\]

Up top we can see that retail trading activity in volume terms remains a fraction of its institutional volume; bear in mind, however, that retail investors generate not only the vast bulk of Coinbase’s trading revenues, but also the preponderance of its total top line.

Tesla’s decision to buy Bitcoin last year prompted a major bull run for the cryptocurrency, though that surge was famously reversed months later by the company’s announcement that while it did not immediately plan to sell its Bitcoin, it would no longer be accepting Bitcoin as payment for vehicle purchases.

The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) has seized over 94,000 bitcoins that were allegedly stolen in the 2016 hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex and arrested a married couple suspected to have laundered the money, the department announced today. While Morgan and Lichtenstein were not formally accused of perpetrating the hack.

India on Tuesday announced plans to launch a digital currency by next year and tax cryptocurrencies and NFTs as the country moves closer to recognizing cryptocurrencies as legal tender in the world second largest internet market.

Collaboration, not litigation Blockchain technology provides artists a direct way to build a community with their fans by allowing them to identify fans, gift or sell things to fans without intermediaries, and form communities with shared artifacts and signals.

If this becomes a reality, value will be lost for a network’s stakeholders through under-pricing higher-value use-cases, while at the same time losing network revenue potentially derived from lower-value, high-volume use cases

Keep an eye on enterprising companies pushing into these areas – specifically collectibles – as a way to broaden the reach of crypto and blockchain in 2022.

This noticeable shift of influence toward ultra-high-net-worth individuals and firms among bitcoin and other crypto circles goes against the very ethos that the Bitcoin white paper was based upon when it described a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Dedicated crypto platforms like Coinbase or even Paypal, Venmo and Stripe, which recently added abilities to use crypto for payments, could evolve into the U.S. versions of super apps, assuming crypto issuers can work with regulators to find a middle ground between protecting the consumer and creating new financial and investment opportunities.