FinTech news in crypto category

In a tweet announcing the feature, eToro said that users will be able to see the real-time prices for a “much wider range of stocks, crypto, and other assets.”

"Our mission is to build the best infrastructure for exchanges," Jog said, adding that the blockchain also has projects building games, NFT marketplaces and rollups. "It’s not just DeFi, but other applications that derive demand from trading."

LayerZero Labs, a web3 messaging protocol, has closed a $120 million Series B round, raising its valuation to $3 billion from $1 billion, the company said on Tuesday.

This is an extension round as the valuation of the company isn’t changing — €1.3 billion ($1.41 billion at today’s exchange rate). In the current funding environment, raising at the same valuation is already quite impressive.

“The biggest challenge in the global supply chain is the lack of transparency. The manual processes, the paperwork; you would be surprised if you submit a document in a bank in India, they still ask you to sign the document with an ink-based signature, it’s a lot of manual labor.”

It has 63 members, including crypto venture capital firms like Multicoin Capital, Delphi Digital and Dragonfly Capital, as well as family offices, traditional VCs and corporations.

OP3N’s chat-based product, Superapp, aims to bridge the gap between Web 2.0 and web3 through implementing blockchain and decentralized technologies into Web 2.0-friendly interfaces. So going forward, Ma realized OP3N has to bridge the traditional market into web3 in a way that’s more understandable.

We realized very quickly the scaling limitations of Ethereum, but we never wanted to compete with it. Polygon could help Immutable avoid Ethereum congestion and costs without having to build its own alternative.

All in all, the market madness has seemingly created a bullish sentiment in the crypto economy; as traders responded positively to the news, the overall market cap rose on the week and crypto app downloads increased.

The Ledger Extension is compatible with Ethereum- and Polygon-based dApps and platforms and plans to support more EVM-compatible chains and Solana in the future, the company shared.

Ethereum is promoting smart contract wallets as the future of Ethereum, so dApp developers will feel incentivized to make the switch, reckoned Zeng, an active member of the Ethereum community.

As a 1:1 fully collateralized stablecoin backed by offshore Chinese yuan, CNHC needs approval from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and is obliged to submit audit reports at the local government’s request, the company told journalist. Circle Ventures, the venture arm of the USDC issuer Circle, has invested in an offshore Chinese yuan-backed stablecoin project, CNHC.

The distressing loss prompted Le Nguyen to develop security solutions for crypto transactions with the help of his co-founder Jake Harwood, an effort that eventually became Staging Labs.

In light of the downfall of centralized crypto services like FTX, Gemini and Babel itself, Yang is touting Hope, which blends centralized finance (CeFi), decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi), to deliver the kind of transparency and security that come with DeFi but provide the easy access offered by CeFi.

According to Circle’s January attestation report, the firm had about $9.88 billion in cash deposited at regulated banks to back its stablecoin’s value, among other assets. If Circle did have more than a smattering of cash at SVB, concerns could mount that the backing of USDC may no longer be complete and instead be more fractional than is needed for a stablecoin to remain steady.

One company that is demonstrating how blockchain can come in handy in real life is Kansas-based Redeem, which allows users to claim non-fungible tokens using phone numbers rather than having to set up crypto wallets.

Coinbase wallet as a service (WaaS) is a scalable set of wallet infrastructure APIs that allow companies to create and deploy customizable on-chain wallets to their users.

Tensor, a Solana-centric NFT trading platform, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Placeholder, the team exclusively shared with journalist. Solana is the third largest blockchain for NFTs by sales volume with over $3.7 billion in sales all-time, according to data on NFT aggregator CryptoSlam.

The new platform, Chainlink Functions, also lets builders run customizable computations on Web 2.0 APIs within minutes through its network, Kemal El Moujahid, chief product officer at Chainlink Labs

The tool will be compatible with Alchemy-supported blockchains like Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism and more, Rivabella noted. It also plans to include other protocols and software development kits in the future, he added.

Sealevel Virtual Machine will be powered by Eclipse and will be able to run smart contracts and tooling compatible with Solana, which will ultimately increase throughput speed and interoperability for crypto subsectors like gaming, DeFi and more, Neel Somani, founder of Eclipse

Coinbase, the second largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has launched Base, an Ethereum-focused layer-2 (L2) blockchain, Jesse Pollak, lead for Base and head of protocols at Coinbase.

The announcement of the NFT-gated playlists pilot comes just before Spotify is set to hold its Stream On event on March 8

The partnership plans to make it easier for all Google Cloud customers to become Tezos “bakers,” or network validators

Wall Street expected Coinbase to report $581.2 million in revenue and earnings per share of -$2.44 with adjusted EBITDA of -$201.8 million driven by 8.4 million monthly transaction users

The crypto industry doesn’t have a cohesive way for people to search for information across channels in a way that traditional search engines like Google do for mainstream information.

The regulatory requirements are open for consultation through March 31 and the new licensing regime will take effect on June 1.

While there are a number of web3 security companies out there, Stelo Labs focuses on helping prevent malicious transactions, phishing and social engineering for Ethereum-based users, Dhesi said.

Thred platform combines automated machine learning and algorithms to rank NFT collections on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains and then ranks the desirability of every NFT collection and combines it with collector, consumer and community content, Straley said.

Over a 10-year horizon, the idea for a total market for crypto assets will look very different, Diamond said. The biggest difference between this index product and traditional equity indices is the exposure to crypto assets, Diamond noted. Last month, the startup launched its first product, the Alongside Crypto Market Index ($AMKT), which gives people broad exposure to the entire crypto asset market through a single token. In the future, Alongside will consider launching different products centered around DeFi as a category or layer-2 blockchains as a category, Diamond said.

The round included 70 participants, including Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital and Finality Capital, as well as angel investors like AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant.

The startup was founded in March 2022 by Katz and Parker Jou, CTO of Caldera, in an effort to simplify the process of creating app-specific blockchains so builders can create layer-2 blockchains in the span of hours, opposed to months or years, the team said.

Sesame Labs, a web3 marketing platform, raised a $4.5 million seed round co-led by Wing Venture Capital and Patron, co-founders Vinay Jain and Aman Jain exclusively told journalist. Additional investors include Samsung, DoubleJump, Forte, Moonfire, Twin Ventures and angel investors like Balaji Srinivasan, chief technology officer at Coinbase and founder of Earn; Robin Chan, co-founder of Fractal; and Ryan Spoon, chief marketing officer at Sorare. A lot of classic Web 2.0 tools like Facebook ads or Twitter ads aren’t successful in web3 because they don’t fully understand on-chain behavior, Vinay noted. In the long term, the co-founders plan to focus on defining what web3 ads look like and build the product that powers it so applications can connect with users in a more innovative way.

The growth in January marked a stark difference from the trend of the past few months, — October saw trading volumes dip to a low of $662 million — but in November, the market halted the downward trend to stay at $662 million, per the report. While Ethereum accounts for the lion share of trading volumes, with more than 78% of all trades on the blockchain, Polygon had the biggest influx of traders in January, the report showed. Trading volumes rose for two months straight, with January scoring the highest volumes since June last year, according to the Dapp Industry Report: January 2023. A number of blockchains allow traders to buy and sell NFTs, but Ethereum has held the leading position with over $36 billion in all-time sales, data from NFT aggregator CryptoSlam showed.

Some major ZK-rollup blockchains that exist today include Polygon, zkSync and StarkWare’s StarkNet platform, which all aim to increase scalability and security for developers off-chain through higher speeds and lower fees before combining and submitting them to Ethereum. Its SDK wants to help Rust (and eventually C++) developers to use ZK technology across any blockchain without having to be experts in cryptography, both the co-founders said. A rollup is a blockchain that gets security from another blockchain, so it’s a way to add functionality to an existing chain without sacrificing security, Evans said. The capital will be used to build its SDK and hire protocol engineers and researchers with expertise in blockchains and their frameworks, Özer said.

Hypernative, a crypto security-focused startup, has raised $9 million in seed funding as it emerges from stealth, co-founder and CEO Gal Sagie exclusively told journalist. The fourth quarter in 2022 saw the most, with $1.62 billion in total losses across 55 incidents, accounting for almost half of the total losses in the year, the report showed. Its ideal client base ranges from asset managers, hedge funds, traders and market makers interacting with crypto to blockchains and protocols, he added. Even though crypto markets may be down, there’s still billions of dollars invested in the space, which makes it a target for attacks by those looking to make (and take) money quickly.

Spatial Labs company made a splash in the industry last year by selling clothes designed by Sandu called Gen One Hardwear, which were embedded with a microchip called LNQ (pronounced link) that provided consumers with the item’s provenance and ownership history, seen, naturally, on the blockchain. Per Crunchbase data, only 1% of all VC funds were allocated to Black founders last year; out of the $21.5 billion raised by web3 startups globally last year, $60 million of that went to U.S.-based Black web3 founders, one of whom was Sandu. Spatial Labs, a web3 infrastructure and hardware company, announced today the closing of a $10 million seed round led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Marcy Venture Partners, the firm co-founded by Jay-Z. Iddris Sandu founded Spatial Labs in 2021, seeking to create products and shopping experiences using augmented reality.

QuickNode, a blockchain deployment platform, has raised $60 million in a Series B round for an $800 million valuation, the company CEO and co-founder, Alex Nabutovsky, told journalist. While the capital will focus on expansion, the company also wants to use the funding for growing blockchain adoption, Nabutovsky said. QuickNode was founded in 2017 and aimed to bring Web 2.0 infrastructure to web3, but snowballed over time, Nabutovsky said. In total, the firm has raised more than $105 million, Nabutovsky said.

The startup has raised capital in a pre-product financing round from Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, SV Angel, SALT Fund, P2P, Third King Venture Capital and Motivate Venture Capital. Now, he has raised $5 million for his own startup, Architect, which aims to make trading infrastructure for large crypto investors. A startup like this could meet current market demand from big players for more unified and accessible platforms to connect their crypto services, instead of having a handful of tabs and servers open. The startup is launching pre-product, so its flagship service will have to be seamless and provide an easier user experience to trump other crypto services out there.

Genesis Global Holdco and two of its lending business subsidiaries Genesis Global Capital and Genesis Asia Pacific filed voluntary petitions under the bankruptcy code for SDNY, its press release stated. On January 12, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Genesis and cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian Gemini for the unregistered offer and sale of securities to retail investors through Gemini Earn crypto asset lending program. The firm struggled to raise capital for its lending unit, cut 30% of its staff in early January and took a financial hit from major catastrophic crypto events last year like the collapse of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and the decline of crypto exchange FTX. Aside from Genesis, DCG is the parent company of digital currency asset manager Grayscale, media company CoinDesk, mining and staking company Foundry, digital asset exchange and wallet Luno and API-centric platform TradeBlock.

It seems like a lot of moolah in a volatile market, even coming as it does from two separate a16z funds: the firm’s $600 million debut games vehicle and its $4.5 billion crypto fund, both of which were announced last May. The latter remains privately held, but after scrapping plans to go public through a special purpose acquisition company, it managed to snag $350 million in funding in 2021 from Netmarble, Kabam, and affiliates of funds managed by Fortress Investment Group, which suggests it’s doing just fine. The pair previously co-founded the once-hot social media platform MySpace (which originally sold to MySpace for $580 million in 2005) and the mobile game studio Jam City. (Indeed, Jam City, which claims to have 30 million monthly active users, announced this morning that a third cofounder, Josh Yguado, is now running the show after serving as the company’s COO and president previously.)

Deal Box has taken strategic institutional funds from family offices and high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, Carter shared. Deal Box, a capital markets advisory and token offering packaging platform, has launched its venture arm with plans to invest $125 million in startups using web3 technology, the company shared Wednesday. There has also been interest from institutional investors, other family offices and sovereign wealth funds, Carter added. The firm has closed initial strategic investments in three startups — Total Network Services, Rypplzz and Forward-Edge AI — as part of its web3 investment thesis.

Delphia, a mobile investment platform, is facing a lawsuit and allegations that its co-founder and CTO Cameron Agius-Westland sexually assaulted and harassed a former employee, according to a complaint filed on Monday and shared exclusively with journalist. Andrew Peek, CEO and co-founder of Delphia, shared a statement with journalist in response to the lawsuit allegations: Delphia takes the allegations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Westland very seriously. The following day, Westland is said in the complaint to have at least partly acknowledged his behavior by sending the Plaintiff and two other colleagues the following message, as shared in a screenshot in the document: In December 2022, Delphia announced its acquisition of Fathom Privacy, a data rights company that aims to provide individuals the ability to own personal application data.

The firm received a vote of confidence from auditing firm Mazars, which said Crypto.com users’ crypto assets were fully backed one-to-one. The firm received some criticism for its cringey/overly enthusiastic Matt Damon ad; accidentally sent an Australian customer more than $10 million in a snafu, and grappled with industry concerns over its financial health performance. This is the second major layoff at the Singapore-headquartered Crypto.com, which cut 250 jobs in mid-last year — though a report suggested that more than 2,000 people were either let go or left at their own will. As with firms in other industries, crypto companies are aggressively undertaking major decisions to survive the downturn in the broader market, which has reversed much of the gains from the 13-year bull run.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with Ava Labs, the company building out layer-1 blockchain Avalanche, to help scale blockchain adoption across enterprises, institutions and governments, the two firms exclusively told journalist. Ava Labs has also become a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), giving the firm access to deploy offerings on AWS with more than 100,000 partners in over 150 countries, Wright said. The two companies are also collaborating on events for entrepreneurs and developers through Avalanche Summit, Avalanche Creates and hackathons to help builders build on the blockchain. Ava Labs plans to add its Subnet deployment as a managed service to the AWS marketplace, so both individuals and institutions can launch their own custom Subnets easily.

The $1 billion vehicle, Venom Ventures Fund (VVF), is a blockchain-agnostic fund that will invest in pre-seed to Series A rounds for web3 protocols and decentralized applications (dApps) that focus on trends like payments, asset management, DeFi, banking services and GameFi. The fund leadership team includes Peter Knez, ex-CIO of BlackRock and former global CIO for fixed income at Barclays Global Investors, and Mustafa Kheriba, a board member for multiple family offices and long-term investment professional in the Middle East and North African regions. Venom Foundation, a layer-1 blockchain licensed and regulated by the Abu Dhabi Global Market, and investment manager Iceberg Capital have partnered to launch a $1 billion venture fund, the two firms announced on Wednesday. In general, the VVF team has experience growing both web3 funds and traditional funds as well as experience in providing growth capital for both startups and scaleups.

And now, without further ado, here are the final four startups ready to impress investors: Meet Candy Shop, a one-stop solution provider designed to make NFT deployment and brand-management problems a thing of the past. It The Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day, a showcase of 12 boundary-pushing early-stage startups building projects across web3, DeFi, NFT and gaming. Founded by Gabrielle Patrick, the company builds clearing infrastructure designed to let firms leverage distributed ledger technology, become payment institutions or become electronic money institutions. Join us tomorrow — January 11 —  for the Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day and see for yourself what the brilliant minds behind 12 up-and-coming projects are building.

As with firms in other industries, crypto firms are aggressively undertaking major decisions to survive the downturn in the broader market, which has reversed much of the gains from the 13-year long bull run. The company estimates that it will incur approximately $149 million to $163 million in total restructuring expenses, consisting of approximately $58 million to $68 million in cash charges related to employee severance and other termination benefits, it disclosed (PDF) in a 8K filing with SEC Tuesday. The moves are part of the company efforts to cut its operating expenses by about 25% quarter over quarter, he said. But those of us who believe in crypto will keep building great products and increasing economic freedom in the world.

But the filing deems account holders with the Earn program as unsecured creditors of Celsius, which means their recovery depends on the distributions to unsecured creditors under a Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan. The verdict gives Celsius ownership of the $4.2 billion in cryptocurrency that users deposited into its high-interest Earn program, according to a 45-page filing from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of New York on Wednesday. A federal bankruptcy judge ruled cryptocurrencies deposited into interest-bearing accounts at Celsius Network, a now-bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform, actually belong to the firm – thanks to the fine print. Last month, Celsius fought with customers in court over ownership of deposited funds as it wanted to sell about $18 million worth of stablecoins from Earn accounts to fund its organization.

Watch as we livestream more than 12 up-and-coming founders — spanning web3 infrastructure, DeFi, NFT and gaming — as they pitch to an audience (that’s where you come in), including influential execs, founders and investors. She served as the global head of the firm’s digital sustainability business, chief operating officer of its digital wealth business, and leader of strategic fintech investments and blockchain activities. The Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day, which takes place on January 11, 2023, is a joint production between the CCC and journalist. Tune in — for free — to the Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day on January 11, 2023.

Some marketplaces aren’t very social, like OpenSea or Magic Eden, and collectible platforms like Sorare and NBA Top Shot aren’t social media-focused, Sideman said. Revel’s marketplace allows users to create NFTs for their followers, friends or community and also allows people to own editions of the media they like and follow, Sideman said. The capital will be used to expand Revel’s web3 interoperability, generative and collaborative AI functionality, and social features, Sideman said. Instagram is known as a social media platform while Robinhood is known as an investing and trading platform.

Previous investors include a number of high-profile celebrities or executives like actor Owen Wilson, Virgin Unite chair Holly Branson, and Rotten Tomatoes co-founders Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang, as well as crypto investments from Dapper Labs co-founder Roham Gharegozlou, Axie Infinity co-founder Jeffrey Zirlin and The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget, among others. Metagood believes that web3 can be a positive force in creating an economy of good karma, where people are rewarded for doing good things, Tai said. It also aims to give members the chance to promote and fund social good projects through its DAO, which raised 2,000 ETH in just one year, he added. Investors in the recent funding round include Animoca Brands, Morgan Creek Capital founder and CEO Mark Yusko, and Virgin Group investment manager Freddie Andrewes, to name a few.

The company new fiat-to-crypto widget can be embedded in any crypto product so that users can enter their card information and acquire crypto that can be used in another web3 product. The payment company handles KYC, payments, fraud and compliance so that crypto companies can focus on crypto instead of competing with Stripe. When a user wants to buy crypto, Stripe’s widget asks you how much you want to spend in your fiat currency — the company adds fees on top of that. After the FTX debacle, products like Ramp, MoonPay and Stripe’s fiat-to-crypto widget are going to be essential.

The world’s largest crypto trading platform has acquired 100% of Sakura Exchange BitCoin for an undisclosed amount, a registered crypto exchange in Japan, the company said Wednesday. Binance gets regulatory nod in France, paving the way for Europe push Japan’s gaming blockchain builder Oasys raises $20M in private token sale Aside from France and Japan, Binance has also obtained regulatory approvals or authorizations in Italy, Spain, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, New Zealand, Kazakhstan, Poland, Lithuania, and Cyprus. Buying an exchange regulated by the Japan Financial Services Agency has certainly smoothed Binance’s legal path into the country.

The Seoul Southern District Prosecutors Office confirmed to journalist that it is seeking arrest warrants for eight people including Terraform Labs co-founder Daniel Shin, three Terraform investors, and four engineers of the cryptocurrencies TerraUSD (UST) and Luna, but did not disclose the identities of most individuals. South Korean prosecutors said Wednesday they have requested arrest warrants for eight people related to Terraform Labs for the alleged fraud as the local authorities widen their investigation into the collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna tokens that wiped tens of billions of dollars from the crypto market earlier this year. The prosecutors suspect Shin of taking illegal profits worth approximately $105 million (140 billion won) by selling Luna at the peak without disclosing properly to investors ahead of the Terra-Luna collapse, according to a local media report Yonhap. Shin’s lawyer said Shin left Terraform two years ago before the Terra-Luna collapse, and that he has no ties with the failure, according to local media.

NFT marketplace Magic Eden is integrating with the Ethereum scaling layer-2 blockchain Polygon to dive deeper into the blockchain gaming and NFT ecosystems, the companies announced on Tuesday. In Magic Eden’s case, its NFT marketplace launchpad is a cross-chain on Solana, Ethereum, or both and is responsible for 90% of all Solana-based NFT volume, according to its website. Long term, the partnership between Magic Eden and Polygon aims to bring more gaming developers and NFT games to market, Yin said. However, in the past 30 days, Ethereum NFT sales volume increased about 26%, while Solana NFT sales volume fell almost 20%, the data showed.

The DID system is compatible with more than 20 Layer 1 networks including Ethereum and Solana, which Yu says will allow Carv to cover 95% of the blockchain games on the market. Blockchain-based identity systems, they argue, are the portal to user-facing applications in the decentralized land, whether the piece of identity is used to send tokens or showcase a gamer achievement. On the enterprise front, Carv provides white-label data service to game operators which can then query cross-platform data about new users, such as their reputation and achievements on established ecosystems like Steam. Carv starts with games because it’s where much of the consumer-facing development in web3 is happening, Yu reckons, but the startup eventually wants to expand to other user scenarios when they are more mature.

One of the most common attacks Yakoa sees is people making copies of NFTs and claiming them as their own work, Andrew Dworschak, co-founder of the startup, said. The funding round was led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital, and Brevan Howard Digital with participation from Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs Ventures, Orange DAO, Time Zero Capital, gmjp, Sunset Ventures and FAST by GETTYLAB, as well as angel investors. Yakoa provides tools and an indexer that detects copies or infringement probabilities on original NFTs, ranging from direct forgery to partial or stylistic forgery, which will then notify platforms, brands or creators of these fraudulent activities. Yakoa, an NFT fraud detection startup, has raised $4.8 million to build tools to fight intellectual property fraud in web3, the company exclusively told journalist.

Joepegs, an NFT marketplace on the Avalanche blockchain, raised $5 million in a seed round led by now-defunct FTX Ventures and the Avalanche Foundation, its co-founders who go by the pseudonyms Cryptofish and 0xMurloc, exclusively told journalist. The marketplace launched in May and has grown rapidly to the largest NFT marketplace on Avalanche with over $3.4 million in secondary NFT sales and 12,000 users. Earlier this year, Avalanche dove further into the NFT space after partnering with the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, which now operates on the blockchain alongside other platforms like Joepegs and Kalao. It also has an in-house production unit, Joe Studios, as well as an NFT Launchpad, which has on boarded over 50 projects to the Avalanche ecosystem, the company said.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is often associated with trusting blockchain technology to execute services through smart contracts, while centralized finance (CeFi) usually refers to more traditional business models and involves having people manage funds and manually execute services. As the crypto market digests the past few days of chaos, venture capitalists see the moment as a warning, but also an opportunity for the growth of decentralization and maturation of the larger blockchain space. When there are massive crashes and burns, it speaks to what we’ve been seeing over the past decade: It the Wild West out there, Samantha Lewis, principal at Mercury, said to journalist.

Mentors include Colleen Sullivan, co-head of ventures at Brevan Howard Digital; Mike Dudas, founder of LinksDAO, The Block and an investor for 6th Man Ventures; Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana; Ryan Selkis, founder and CEO of Messari; Mounir Benchemled, founder of ParaSwap; Amir Bandeali, co-CEO of 0x Labs; and Ryan Wyatt, CEO of Polygon Studios. The pitch: Slide is a web3 digital advertising-focused platform that aims to analyze on-chain activity to provide tailored ads across the web3 ecosystem. Many of the teams are looking at improving crypto themes like proof-of-physical-work, wallet experience for everyday users, product-driven protocols, crypto B2B products, on-chain data and verticalization, Wang said. The current marketing technology doesn’t cater to web3 tools or on-chain and off-chain data, so it needs to be revamped to consider new technologies, co-founder Nathan Snell said.

Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm run by FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried, was caught in the eye of the storm this week when its leaked balance sheet financials revealed unusually close ties with FTX through the exchange’s native FTT token. In addition to the liquidity crisis itself, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are investigating FTX’s relationship with its sister entity Alameda Research as well as with FTX US. Crypto trading behemoth FTX fell from grace this week after the exchange experienced a liquidity crunch and agreed to give its rival, Binance, the option to purchase the company non-U.S. operations in what appears to be a bailout. Binance and FTX both revealed yesterday that the former had signed a non-binding letter of intent that gives it the option to purchase FTX pending due diligence.

Microsoft has backed Wemade, a popular video game developer that has made aggressive bets on blockchain in recent years, the latest sign of tech giants’ showing growing interest in web3. South Korea Wemade said in a press release that it has raised $46 million in a funding round from Microsoft, Shinhan Asset Management and Kiwoom Securities. Microsoft is also an investor in ConsenSys, the firm behind MetaMask wallet and enterprise solutions such as Infura, as well as decentralized data warehouse Space and Time and NFT studio Palm, according to Web3 Signals. Scores of tech giants including Microsoft and Google and storied banks have made a series of investments in the web3 space in recent years.

Some games, like Delysium and Ember Sword, were initially developed for the layer-2 blockchain Polygon but switched to Immutable X, the company’s NFT platform and layer-2 scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain. Today, Immutable X launched GameStop’s NFT marketplace out of beta, which will provide GameStop players and customers across the U.S. access to NFTs tied to games on its layer-2 chain. Earlier this year, Immutable, a web3 gaming firm with its own layer-2 chain, Immutable X, launched a whopping $500 million fund to boost gaming on its platform. This announcement follows GameStop and Immutable X’s partnership and $100 million joint grant fund from February.

Singapore may soon require retail investors to take a test and not use credit card payments and other forms of borrowing for trading cryptocurrencies, the central bank proposed on Wednesday in a series of stringent measures as the island nation looks to make citizens aware of the risks surrounding volatile assets. The central bank acknowledged [PDF] that a number of industry players are supportive of some form of assessment on the retail customer’s knowledge of risks, but said they should also disclose whenever they have a financial interest in the tokens they offer to customers. The central bank also proposed that crypto firms licensed under the nation’s Payments Services Act should not be allowed to lend to retail investors in a move that could topple many firms’ businesses. Once a preferred global crypto hub for its policies, Singapore authorities have toughen their views of digital assets following the collapse of a series of firms including Terraform Labs’ stablecoin UST and native token LUNA, and hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

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.

As N26 and Bitpanda have likely agreed to share revenue coming from N26 Crypto, the new feature should contribute to the company’s bottom line. Similarly, when you cash out with N26 Crypto, you will get EUR in your main N26 account — no need to transfer money back to your bank account. Challenger bank N26 is launching a new trading feature in its app — N26 Crypto. N26 is going to slowly roll out N26 Crypto across Europe.

Separately, the web3-focused phone will allow content creators and platforms to enable digital ownership rights to both organizations and users – opposed to handing over the 30% tax Apple and Google have for in app sales. If there’s a web3 distribution channel for mobile crypto developers, it can open up opportunities for them to build experiences outside of the laptop-centric digital asset ecosystem, Yakovenko said. So neither Google nor Apple want to really take on web3 because true digital asset ownership disrupts their business models, Yakovenko said. The idea of true digital ownership means the digital items have to be treated like physical ones, and this isn’t something Apple or Google are built around, Yakovenko said.

Uniswap Labs has raised $165 million in a new funding round as the parent firm of the world largest decentralized exchange looks to broaden its offerings. The funding — one of the largest Series B for a crypto firm this year — comes at a time when the market downturn has eroded investors’ appetite for writing new checks. One of the new offerings will allow customers to trade NFTs on Uniswap from a number of marketplaces and another is a wallet, according to people familiar with the matter. VC investment in crypto startups declined 37% year-on-year in the quarter that ended in September to $4.44 billion, the industry’s lowest level in more than a year, according to PitchBook.

Betterment, a roboadvisory platform that manages more than $30 billion in assets, has finally launched its crypto offering after completing a private beta phase. The fintech acquired Makara, a crypto asset management startup, back in February and has been working toward transforming Makara into its own in-house crypto product since the deal closed. Crypto Investing \[…\]

Pillow’s founders says it differentiates with its goal of becoming a holistic home for digital asset-driven financial services that allows even first time crypto users users to earn, save, spend and invest from the same platform. For Bitcoin, yields are generated by wrapping Bitcoin to Ethereum-compatible assets such as $WBTC and $renBTC and deploying wrapped assets as liquidity to DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, with an effective rate of 1.52%. In some countries where Pillow has partnered with local, compliant on-ramp service providers, users can also buy crypto with their local fiat currency. Pillow aspires to be an all-in-one platform that says it helps even newbie users save, spend and invest in crypto currency.

The shifting sentiment is what drove SettleMint’s most recent fundraising close, an oversubscribed €16 million Series A round co-led by London-based venture capital firm Molten Ventures, an investor in UiPath and Revolut, as well as Europe-focused OTB Ventures. SettleMint is still working with Fujitsu on its go-to-market strategy, but there’s some indication of how its low-code solution can appeal to Japan. That a gap that SettleMint is trying to close with its low-code platform for blockchain engineers. One of SettleMint’s customers is a university in Indonesia that created a parallel blockchain-based voting system for the country’s 2019 election to ensure fair results.

The company chose to launch its crypto offering before a stock investing feature, the latter of which MacDonald said is currently in the works for Step customers and will likely launch before the end of the year. The offering will also launch in conjunction with a financial literacy platform providing educational content for the kids and parents on Step’s app, MacDonald said. The company just launched a crypto investing feature to the nearly 4 million users on its platform, CEO and founder CJ MacDonald told journalist in an interview. The new funding represents a substantial portion of the $500 million total Step has raised to date, most recently in a 2021 Series C equity round from investors including Coatue, Stripe and angels such as Charli D’Amelio and Jared Leto.

Whether their app ends up passing the test, developers need to pay validators in Magic Square’s tokens to audit their apps. Validators are the ones who eventually decide what gets to be on Magic Square, and they do so by vetting projects by three criteria — content, security and user experience — not unlike traditional app store inspection. Crypto.com Capital, the VC arm of the namesake crypto exchange, has joined as a strategic investor and will leverage the large pool of projects listed on the exchange to help Magic Square onboard more developers. Founded last year, Magic Square is building an app store that lets developers list projects that are vetted by the community.

The parent firm Huobi Group now operates an umbrella of crypto-related entities, including its flagship exchange Huobi Global, its venture capital arm Huobi Ventures and a crypto cloud service. Huobi Global announced today that its controlling shareholder has completed the transaction to sell its entire stake to About Capital, a Hong Kong-based fund management firm started by Ted Chen, who founded China’s hedge fund giant Greenwoods Asset Management. Huobi Global, once China top crypto exchange, has been retooling itself since exiting from the home market following Beijing’s crypto ban. Founded in 2013, Huobi Global rode China’s crypto boom before Beijing declared all crypto transactions illegal in 2021.

With Stash’s new crypto offering, customers won’t be able to store their own crypto in a wallet but will be able to buy and sell the assets 24/7, much like on an app like Coinbase, though chief investment officer Doug Feldman told journalist that a crypto wallet launch is not necessarily out of the question in the future. The startup sees itself as different from competitors because of its focus on cultivating customers who are long-term investors rather than encouraging more frequent, riskier trading for short-term profits, Ed Robinson, Stash co-founder and president, told journalist in an exclusive interview. Having a small amount of crypto exposure, he added, will help Stash customers capture some of the asset class’s potential upside in the long term. Feldman said that even for the most risk-tolerant investor on Stash, the maximum exposure to crypto the platform recommends is 6% of an investor’s overall portfolio.

Juno – which also counts Sequoia India’s Surge, Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Capital, Consensys Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Surojit Chatterjee, Sandeep Nailwal and Ryan Selkis among its backers – has reached $1 billion in annualized transaction volume processing, Varun Deshpande, co-founder and chief executive of Juno, said in an interview. Juno, a startup that provides checking accounts to crypto enthusiasts and allows them to take their paychecks in digital tokens, has raised a new funding round as it expands its offerings to include a tokenized loyalty program. The eponymous platform integrates with all popular payroll platforms in the U.S., making it easier for customers who are long term believers in crypto to keep doubling down on their bets without having to worry about manually moving funds to different exchanges. Tokenized loyalty program Juno, which raised a $3 million seed funding last year, is now ready for a new offering: an optional loyalty program.

Uniswap Labs is in early stages of putting together a new round, according to four sources familiar with the matter, as the parent firm of the world largest decentralized exchange gears up to broaden its offerings. One of the new offerings will allow customers to trade NFTs on Uniswap from a number of marketplaces, Uniswap Labs COO Mary-Catherine Lader told news outlet Decrypt. Uniswap Labs, which counts a16z and Paradigm among its existing backers, raised its last funding round — a Series A — in August 2020, according to Web3 Signals. The startup is engaging with a number of investors, including Polychain and one of Singapore’s sovereign funds, to raise an equity round of $100 million to $200 million at a valuation of about $1 billion, two of the sources said, who, like others, requested anonymity sharing private information.

While there are other NFT marketplaces both in Latin America and around the world, Minteo plans to differentiate itself through its infrastructure and focus on working with local artists and brands, among other things, Santiago Rodríguez, CEO of Minteo, said to journalist. With that said, Rodríguez said he is already seeing a lot of interest for NFTs in Latin America. Investors in the round include Fabric Ventures, Dune Ventures, CMT Digital, Impatient VC, Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, SevenX Ventures, FJ Labs, Big Brain Holdings, G20 Ventures, Alliance DAO, Zero Knowledge and several angel investors. The capital will be used to build up the platform, get artists on board from Colombia and Mexico then over time expand into other Latin American countries, Rodríguez said.

Solvo is meeting a clear need for investors today, offering products that are focused on high quality assets, that provide diverse exposure and reduced risk as well as an attractive yield.

While many layer-1 blockchains out there were built for a pretty general purpose, other networks were designed around very specific use cases. Sei, a layer-1 blockchain designed for trading, has launched a $50 million ecosystem and liquidity fund to support new decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on its platform, its co-founders Jeff Feng and Jay Jog \[…\]

The platform is a part of the Startup with Chainlink program and will be working closely with the oracle network to extend the capabilities of smart contracts so blockchain developers can build multi-chain decentralized applications (dApps) alongside analytical insights in a low-cost, decentralized way. Space and Time, a decentralized data platform, has raised $20 million in strategic funding to help businesses grow through smart contract technology. The capital raise was led by Microsoft venture fund M12 and included investors like Framework Ventures, HashKey, SevenX Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Polygon and Avalanche’s ecosystem fund Blizzard, among others. In the near term, Space and Time wants to help web3 dApp developers simplify their data ecosystems and architectures, Holiday said.

Jaskiw attributes Tactic’s success in closing the round this summer to a few different factors — investors who have a long-term belief in the crypto ecosystem as well as the company’s focus on catering to larger clients who are processing thousands of transactions each month. CEO and founder Ann Jaskiw launched Tactic in 2021 while she was working on a different crypto project and realized from her conversations with founders in the space that they were struggling to close their books each month and stay compliant with accounting principles. Perhaps that part of the reason why less than five months after journalist covered Tactic’s $2.6 million seed round, the crypto accounting software startup has managed to bag $11 million despite a painful market downturn for the sector in what it says was an oversubscribed raise. Looking ahead, Jaskiw said Tactic hopes to become a one-stop shop for companies to manage their crypto accounting processes.

Notably, Robinhood says it won’t charge Robinhood Wallet users network or gas fees for transactions, differentiating its non-custodial offering from other popular non-custodial wallets such as Metamask and Coinbase Wallet. Robinhood rolled out a custodial crypto wallet to its users earlier this year and says it plans to complete a full rollout of the non-custodial wallet to 1 million+ users on the waitlist after the beta is complete, sometime before the end of 2022. Over time, the Robinhood team plans to build out multichain support for the wallet beyond the Polygon ecosystem, Robinhood crypto product manager Seong Seog Lee told journalist. Robinhood is finally rolling out a beta version of its non-custodial crypto wallet to 10,000 customers on its waitlist after announcing the product in May, its CTO and general manager of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, told journalist.

Nibiru, a new crypto derivatives protocol co-founded by Tribe Capital GP Arjun Sethi, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding at a valuation of $100 million, two sources familiar with the matter told journalist. Sethi co-founded the startups with four industry veterans — including Sankha Banerjee, formerly with Credence Capital and Binance; and Boris Revsin, who co-founded Republic Capital. Currently in private testnet, Nibiru decentralized protocol unifies derivatives trading, spot trading, staking and bonded liquidity, and aims to serve users across over 40 blockchains, it says on the website. Nibiru has attracted nearly two dozen contributors from firms including Meta, Reddit, JP Morgan and Yahoo, an investor deck obtained by journalist showed.

The announcement comes two months after the country’s financial watchdog said it is proving $3.4 billion in abnormal money transfers, possibly related to crypto activities after South Korea’s two largest commercial banks — Shinhan Bank and Woori Bank — internally inspected and found some dubious foreign currency transfer in June. The FSS also said the probe found that 82 corporations, including travel-related and cosmetic firms, have been involved in the abnormal money transfers so far. The authorities confirmed that most dubious foreign money remittances involved crypto-related activities because the transactions were transferred from cryptocurrency exchanges to local companies, then sent abroad. U.S. dollars accounted for 81.8% of the abnormal money transfer, while Japanese Yen and Hong Kong dollars were 15.3% and 3.1%, respectively.

Shingal, the startup’s CEO, said crypto hedges and investment funds often run with a small number of staff, and the process of calculating tax and performing compliance is time consuming because they have to pull data from multiple sources, merge it and then adhere to different compliance and reporting regulations for each type of transaction. Founded in May 2022 by Tonmoy Shingal and Pankaj Garg and based in Bangalore, Binocs currently has over 1,000 users, including retail and institutional investors who need to perform forensic accounting and risk management. He added that regulations are one of the biggest obstacles to more adoption of crypto, with about 15 to 20 countries that currently tax crypto investments, and 60 to 70 that will in the future. Binocs’ founders point to figures from the Coin Market Cap that say the total market cap of the crypto industry rose from about $325 billion in September 2020 to $1 trillion in September 2022.

Nilos also helps you manage your crypto transactions as you can orchestrate crypto-to-crypto payments as well as crypto-to-fiat payments. The startup currently takes a fees on crypto-to-fiat transactions, but the company plans to move to a more traditional software-as-a-service subscription model as it’s more transparent for the end users. Meet Nilos, a startup that wants to bridge the gap between crypto wallets and traditional business bank accounts. The company provides a dashboard that displays all your transactions — whether those are fiat transactions or crypto payments.

Crypto exchange and marketplace Reku has been riding the wave with what it says are the lowest fees on the market, and a platform that is aimed at both newcomers and experienced traders. Its founders say that Reku’s five years of operation mean that they know how to scale and endure fluctuations in the market, including the pandemic and this year’s recession. It is compliant with Indonesia’s commodities future trading agency (BAPPEBTI) and emphasizes user safety by offering only well-established cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Today, the startup, founded in 2017, announced it has raised $11 million in Series A funding, led by AC Ventures (ACV) with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Skystar Capital.

The company’s co-founder and CEO Kevin Li said that while Goldsky closed the seed round before this summer’s dropoff in crypto prices, the company’s focus on infrastructure has given it an edge to weather bear market conditions. By automating the creation of data pipelines, Goldsky enables its customers to spend more time working on building their core products rather than parsing the data feeding into those products, Li explained. While there are other startups such as The Graph working to solve similar problems, Li said Goldsky’s differentiation lies, in part, in its focus on providing accurate real-time data to companies. Goldsky, a data infrastructure company for crypto startups, has raised $20 million in a seed round led by Felicis and Dragonfly Capital.

CoinDCX on Friday launched Okto, a mobile platform that will host other decentralized apps and won’t require users to remember the long string of words as their passwords. Okto is aimed at helping the masses get exposure to web3, said Neeraj Khandelwal, co-founder of CoinDCX, in an interview. The startup has started to engage with developers around the world to onboard their apps onto Okto, he said. The new platform will support over 20 chains and more than 100 protocols and absolve all transaction fee across chains, he said.

A major motivation behind launching Symbolic for Nailwal was the opportunity to more formally support companies that are already in his orbit, he said, adding that he doesn’t feel he will have to spend much extra time managing the fund because it will help him realize synergies from relationships he’s already building, in part through Polygon’s own venture fund. Symbolic plans to primarily back companies building consumer-facing decentralized apps (dApps), Nailwal said, a move that seems aligned with Polygon’s own goal to speed up web3 app development. Now, the protocol co-founder Sandeep Nailwal is launching another project, he told journalist exclusively — this time, in the form of Symbolic Capital, a venture capital fund built by and for web3 founders. One key differentiator for Symbolic will be its internal data platform the firm has built to support its portfolio companies as well as to bolster its own diligence process, Nailwal said.

The company purchased education startup ChainShot, which runs coding bootcamps for aspiring web3 developers, Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan told journalist exclusively. Once rolled up into Alchemy, ChainShot will join the crypto infrastructure company’s two other education-related properties, self-paced coding programs Web3 U and Road to Web3. McCabe, who was inspired to found ChainShot after going through a coding bootcamp himself, said the company was bootstrapped before Alchemy bought it. In addition to the founders’ personal capital, which McCabe said included funds formerly in his 401(k), ChainShot covered its costs largely through grants available through its connection to the Ethereum ecosystem as well as through web3 crowdfunding platform Gitcoin.

While an investment DAO typically can only have up to 100 members in order to stay compliant with SEC rules, Orange DAO has found a way to bring over over 1,000 Y Combinator alumni together to back web3 startups through an associated venture fund. The DAO itself is structured as a Cayman Islands foundation company, Huh said, while the fund is run as a separate legal entity by Huh and a few other general partners. That way, the fund doesn’t have anywhere near the SEC’s cap of 100 investors for a venture group, though Huh and the other GPs leverage the DAO’s hundreds of members to source investment ideas and conduct diligence. Huh said members can capture upside by becoming members of the DAO and voting on what it does with its treasury without needing to be accredited investors in a venture capital firm themselves.

The startup eponymous blockchain, which is currently in testnet, aims to be EVM-compatible and use proof-of-stake and proof-of-quorum consensus mechanisms to reduce the cost of running the network and rely on three types of nodes — validator, archival and standby — in its network, it said in the investor deck. Shetty is raising $20 million to $30 million in a seed financing round for his blockchain startup Shardeum, sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private. Indian crypto exchange WazirX‘s co-founder Nischal Shetty is in advanced stages of talks to raise a maiden funding round for his new venture, sources familiar with the matter told journalist. Shardeum is employing a technique called sharding that partitions the network into shards, resulting in more transactions being processed, verified and validated in parallel, the startup explained in an investor deck, reviewed by journalist.

Mural, a crypto firm focused on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) infrastructure, has raised $5.6 million in seed funding, the company co-founders Sinclair Toffa and Kevin Alvarez-Fung exclusively told journalist. The company is rolling out a beta for its fintech-focused platform to help brands deploy DAO treasury funds ranging from $50 to $100 million in size, Alvarez-Fung shared. The funds will be used to bring on new talent and work with brands globally that want to create and use DAOs, Alvarez-Fung said. Toffa and Alvarez-Fung said one of the biggest disconnects they saw in the DAO space was between treasuries and communities.

Launchpad Capital led Rocketplace seed round, which also included participation from TTV, Accomplice, Menlo Ventures and Soma Capital. But Beryl maintains that the startup’s biggest differentiator lies in the fund distribution model. Meanwhile, points out CEO Louis Beryl, customers will need appropriate disclosures and compliance, especially as regulation increases in the industry. Beryl was also a partner at both a16z and Y Combinator, and also founded Solid Energy Systems, which went public via a SPAC merger on the NYSE earlier this year.

a16z wrote its largest individual check ever, at $350 million, to Flow, Neumann new residential real estate company focused on rentals, the New York Times reported today.

A group of Voyager Digital customers filed a class-action suit in Florida federal court against Cuban as well as the basketball team he owns, the Dallas Mavericks, alleging their promotion of the crypto platform resulted in over 3.5 million investors losing $5 billion collectively.

LongHash Ventures, a web3-focused investment firm and accelerator, has launched its second fund for $100 million and its new accelerator LongHashX

Coinbase’s Q2 results Coinbase’s quarter included a large gain in costs compared to the year-ago period — around $500 million — and a sharp revenue decline.

Outside of Miami, Quinn said, RealOpen’s crypto focus has attracted a strong pipeline of listings from sellers all over the world. By using RealScore, buyers can defer converting their crypto into cash until the very instant the transaction closes without having to explain to a seller what the value of their offer is beforehand, according to Dumontet.

The platform provides infrastructure for both emerging creators and enterprises to store, manage and build more functionality into their NFTs, Mike Duboe, partner at Greylock.

Singapore-based cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com has acquired two startups in South Korea — payment service provider PnLink and virtual asset provider OK-BIT — for an undisclosed amount, Crypto.com said. South Korea is an important market for Crypto.com in terms of blockchain technology advancement and high-level crypto interests, said Crypto.com’s South Korea general manager Patrick Yoon. Crypto.com had received several approvals to offer crypto exchange products and services, including in-principle approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and provisional approval of its virtual asset license from the Dubai Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority in June, as well as regulatory approval from the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission in July. The company also said Monday it has secured registrations under South Korea electronic financial transaction act and as a virtual asset service provider.

Though Halliday plans to charge an initial fee to customers using the product to cover the startup’s costs, Malhotra hopes to eliminate the fee over time as his goal is to keep the product as low-cost as possible for gamers.

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.

An unknown actor had drained funds from 7,767 wallets on the Solana network as of 5am UTC on Wednesday, Solana’s Status Twitter account said. Solana spokesperson Chris Kraeuter declined to answer our questions, but referred us to Solana’s Status Twitter account.

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.

Pantera Capital led the four year-old startup new financing round with participation from Mayfield, Gaingels, Alchemy Ventures, Redbeard Ventures, Spartan Group, OKG Investments, Polygon, CoinDCX, CoinGecko, We3 syndicate, Rainfall Capital, Broadhaven, EI Ventures, Hardyaka, Alt Tab Capital, Boost VC and Draper Associates. Unstoppable Domains, a popular blockchain naming system provider and identity platform, is the latest crypto startup to become a unicorn. Unstoppable Domains allows people to create their username for crypto and build decentralized digital identities. The platform, which includes members who worked at companies such as Amazon’s AWS, Uber and Slack, mints each decentralized domain name as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain to give the owner broader control and ownership.

A new web3-focused production hub, Trustless Media, has launched out of stealth mode as it aims to build an NFT community-owned media company. Trustless Media plans to grow its community beyond the initial 1,000 NFT community members by expanding the network.

Crypto infrastructure provider Blockdaemon has acquired Danish company Sepior, a digital asset security company providing key management services for institutional clients, for an undisclosed price.

In addition to the patent for the ENIAC, Arkive has also acquired Seduction (1985), a vintage print by Lynn Hershman Leeson, which, like the ENIAC patent, will be a part of Arkive’s traveling exhibition in late 2022.

The fund is strategic for Valkyrie in that it is focused on nascent infrastructure the firm might use in its digital asset management operations, including: security, authentication, compliance, data management, storage, networking, communication, governance, payments and transactions companies.

A source close to the company noted that there was a reduction of 7%, or 68 members, in Gemini’s company-wide Slack channel Monday morning. The company had not widely communicated the extent of Monday layoffs internally, leaving employees to speculate on the exact number of co-workers laid off in this most recent downsizing.

Today, 70% of trading volume on Binance.US, the American offshoot of the global exchange, comes from institutional customers, its CEO Brian Shroder told us in an interview.

UnCaged Studios, a web3-focused gaming studio, has raised $24 million in a Series A equity funding round to continue growing the crypto gaming industry.

Plaid, the company building data transfer technologies to power fintech and digital finance products like smartphone-based wallets, today announced that it adding support for thousands of crypto exchanges to its data network.

The firm was founded by Colton Sakamoto and long-time crypto entrepreneur and investor Anthony Pompliano in an effort to help connect crypto companies looking for talent with people who wanted to enter the space.

The donor-advised fund makes the process of launching a giving campaign much simpler for companies and charities because they can just search for a nonprofit from the list to be a beneficiary of their initiative rather than having to coordinate individually with those charities, get their crypto wallet addresses and process those donations manually, according to Nigam.

The company just closed a $6.6 million seed round and plans to launch its first web3 gaming world, Project Nightshade, in the fall, Mark Warrick, founder and CEO of the company, exclusively told journalist.

In recent months, the company has also been testing support for digital collectables (aka NFTs) — so having its own digital wallet infrastructure could support a wider push into non-fungible token trading if Meta decides there’s enough money to be made (but, again, NFT trading volumes are steeply down vs last year as digital collectables catch crypto’s chill).

OP Crypto is raising $100 million for its new investment, dubbed ‘Fund of Funds’, to deploy capital into emerging fund managers focused on early-stage crypto investments.

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.

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.

Amex users have been waiting for an announcement like this for some time, as its competitors Visa and Mastercard have already launched their own crypto rewards credit cards through partnerships with digital asset companies, such as Visa’s crypto rewards card offered in conjunction with BlockFi and the Mastercard-powered card issued by crypto exchange Gemini.

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.

Who knows whether it FOMO or actual customer demand for such a thing, but Salesforce announced today that it’s launching a pilot of NFT Cloud, a new platform for buying and selling these crypto assets.

Delphia’s data token model will function as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), votes for which are tied to its ERC-20 token that data-providing users receive for sharing their information.

The $1.5 billion venture capital firm is entering the crypto market with a new $110 million fund dedicated to the sector that it will operate jointly with Ledger, a French startup focused on digital asset security, said Cathay co-founder Dennis Barrier.

The new functionality is only available to users in the U.S., and for security reasons, PayPal says it has implemented an additional identity verification process for users before they can transfer any crypto.

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.

Iyer, a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits, spent the majority of last year honing in on his interest in web3 as a visiting partner at Pear VC and an instructor teaching a DeFi masterclass to over 2,000 students.

Using the funds raised from the investors, among them Founders Factory Africa, Texas-based Kon Ventures, Europe-based venture capital collective Crypto League, Ghana-based R9C Ventures and Maximus Ventures, Ayoken plans to sign a number of exclusive deals with artists and partnerships with telcos, besides growing its team and secondary marketplaces.

Stokley will serve as co-CEO of the company alongside RJ Phillips, another former OnlyFans exec joining Zoop this summer. Zoop plans to release 500 cards per influencer for its initial drops and has long-term plans to launch its own token, Phillips told The Block.

The fund will be financed by the $450 million Polygon had raised previously, its treasury, and a $100 million ecosystem fund, Wyatt said, adding the company will deploy more capital as needed.

Doppel indexes NFT data across various blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Flow, and others, and uses models that incorporate keywords and metadata to spot fraud, Tian said.

Pebble’s 5% cash back is higher than what traditional credit cards tend to offer because traditional credit card providers rely on middlemen like Visa and Mastercard as well as fraud protection services and other third parties to process their transactions, leaving less in reward cash for the customer, Bai explained.

Mossy’s solution for the calamitous sector, a stablecoin called USDTea, is backed by what they claim is America’s most stable asset: cans of AriZona Iced Tea.

Choi noted that headcount growth is a key input in the company’s financial model, and that slowing the rate of hiring is important in ensuring Coinbase can reach the profitability guidance it has set for investors.

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.

London, United Kingdom-based startup Encode Club, founded in 2020, trained 15,000 developers last year alone through its programming, CEO and co-founder Anthony Beaumont told journalist in an interview.

BVNK offers banking services and payments for crypto-native businesses. For instance, many crypto wallets embed MoonPay in their apps so that users can buy crypto assets with a debit card.

US Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler made his concerns clear in an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, calling out crypto exchanges for offering multiple services that are often in conflict with one another, such as custody, market-making, and trading. Gensler specifically took aim at the top three largest stablecoins — Binance USD, USD Coin and Tether — saying that it is not a coincidence that they are all closely tied to crypto exchanges.

Nnadi says his company will engage more African governments — including those who have an anti-crypto stance like Nigeria and Kenya– to see the benefits of blockchain and assist in drafting licensing regimes for crypto companies to operate in their countries. In a statement, the company revealed that it struck a partnership with the Central African Republic — the first country to legalize bitcoin as a legal tender in Africa and second globally only to El Salvador –to become its official crypto partner and an advisor to the president on crypto strategy and planning.

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.

It’s been fairly active in the crypto space specifically — it led an investment in blockchain company Flipside, a data analytics tool for protocols that rewards users for completing queries, last month, and participated in Indian web3 startup CoinDCX’s recent $135 million fundraise. In February, Republic spun out its metaverse and NFT-focused investment division, Republic Realm, as a standalone company called Everyrealm run by Janine Yorio.

Alberto Simon, co-founder of art investing platform Masterworks, is leaving his current role at Gemini’s Nifty Gateway NFT platform to join Co:Create as a co-founder and chief product officer, Fung said. Co:Create will be chain-agnostic, meaning it will support the blockchains on which its customers have built their NFT projects, Fung said.

The raise includes strategic investors such as Carta, Circle Ventures, OpenSea and Uniswap Labs’ new venture arm, as well as institutional funds-of-funds, nonprofits and web3 talent networks.

This means that GD1 Crypto Fund 1 will not only serve to give New Zealand startups a boost, but also to allow local investors to get involved in overseas startups in the hopes that some of those returns will make it back to the startup ecosystem in New Zealand.

The crypto market is showing no signs of slowing down as funds and investors alike continue to deploy massive amounts of capital into the ecosystem. Today’s evidence of the trend: Dragonfly Capital, a crypto-centered investment firm, closed its third venture fund for $650 million, the firm’s managing partner, Haseeb Qureshi, told TechCrunch. The fund was \[…\]

Ondo is primarily focused on building many of the functions typically associated with the middle and back office of an investment bank on-chain, Allman explained, noting that it does not currently have plans to directly offer advisory services to DAOs or crypto companies as a traditional investment bank might.

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.

Now, Cogni has raised a $23 million funding round led by Hanwha Asset Management and CaplinFO with a new mandate — bringing web2 and web3 services together on one platform, Ravishankar said.

OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, acquired NFT aggregator Gem.xyz (Gem) to “better serve” its more experienced users, the company said in a blog post. The deal, which comes a few months after OpenSea bought DeFi wallet startup Dharma Labs, will allow OpenSea to “learn from Gem’s expertise and intuition about the advanced NFT community,” the \[…\]

LiquiFi, part of Y Combinator’s winter 2022 batch, helps startups automate their token vesting, manage their token cap table, and issue token grants in compliance with regulations.

Wayne Chang, co-founder and CEO of Spruce, told journalist that web2 platforms that offer sign-in capabilities have been able to access this data in the past because they offer trust and verification to users of the network. That’s the question Spruce is trying to answer by building a public utility of sorts for internet users, but doing so requires individual users to build trust with one another by voluntarily sharing data through the network when they can’t rely on a centralized intermediary to make assurances.

The NFT market was worth $41 billion at the end of last year — nearly as large as the conventional art market by some estimates — and it’s expected to nearly double in size by the end of 2022, according to a report released this week by blockchain analytics firm Nansen.

Uniswap joins a growing segment of crypto-native companies now formally dedicating resources to investing in other companies in the space, including crypto exchange FTX and DeFi protocol Cake, which both recently launched venture funds. Before launching this dedicated venture arm, Uniswap invested in 11 companies and protocols across the web3 ecosystem, including Tenderly, LayerZero, MakerDAO, Aave, Compound Protocol and PartyDAO, the company says. Uniswap Labs, the company behind the popular decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, has launched a venture capital arm to invest in web3 projects

CertiK, a web3 and blockchain security company, has raised $88 million in its latest round, bringing its valuation to $2 billion. To date, CertiK has protected over $300 billion worth of crypto assets for 2,500 enterprise clients through its auditing and fraud investigation services, among other offerings, the company stated.

Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis announced that it has raised $150 million in funding led by crypto exchange Binance to help reimburse users who lost funds during a ~$625 million hack of its play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, which was the largest crypto heist to date.

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.

The one-year immersion program, the Visa Creator Program, will bring together a global cohort of creators including artists, musicians, fashion designers and filmmakers the ability to build their businesses with NFTs It previously made headlines for buying a popular CryptoPunk NFT in August 2021.

The list of 26 companies unsurprisingly spans NFTs, DeFi, web3 services and crypto investing.

Since that 2015 tweet, compensation for open source developers has remained a hot-button issue, and popular developer platform GitHub launched a feature in 2019 that allows users to send tips to their favorite open source coders.

The startup is in talks with a number of new and existing investors including Draper Associates, Coinbase Ventures, Protocol Labs and Naval Ravikant to raise about $60 million in a new financing round, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private.

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.

It settled on its current structure in 2020 through a transaction that sold certain assets from ConsenSys Mesh, the company’s venture arm, to ConsenSys Software Incorporated (CSI), a newly formed company that, post-transaction, now functions as the parent entity to some of the company’s key products, including MetaMask and developer platform Infura. The funding round comes amid allegations by a group of ConsenSys shareholders that the company’s founder, Joseph Lubin, illegally shifted assets from ConsenSys Mesh into CSI as part of this transaction.

Toyosaki, who also headed up marketing at Bitcoin.com, told journalist in an interview that many of the strategies available to crypto derivatives traders today are fairly risky, a motivating factor behind why she founded Cega, which she says is the first-ever DeFi exotic derivatives protocol. Now, Cega, a new protocol founded by former UBS derivatives trader Arisa Toyosaki, is setting out to create a new category within DeFi — exotic derivatives.

This validity proof is then posted to the main Ethereum blockchain, and Layer 2 transactions can’t be altered because they won’t comply with the validity proof. In order to bring transaction fees down, transactions could be handled off the main Ethereum blockchain (the Layer 1).

Espresso Systems, the company behind the blockchain project, is led by Fisch, chief operating officer Charles Lu and chief scientist Benedikt Bünz, collaborators at Stanford who have each worked on other high-profile web3 projects, including the anonymity-focused Monero blockchain and BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen’s Chia.

Lido aims to solve both of these issues through its decentralized staking platform that allows users to stake their coins with no minimum investment required. Andreessen Horowitz made the investment in Lido partially using ETH, buying up some of Lido’s governance tokens from other holders, Lomashuk said. Assets staked on Lido are worth over $10 billion USD at today’s prices, and are split across 76,000 individual crypto wallets.

While CTC pulls in all the data needed to build a transaction history and performs tax calculations for its users, Brunette still advises advanced crypto users to consult a tax professional to help them interpret regulatory grey areas to determine what they actually need to pay, and what rules apply to their activity.

Beyond the consensus mechanism, Wagstaff says Subspace allows for data to be stored far more cheaply than on other blockchains by incentivizing users to run archival nodes, which store historical data relating to a particular blockchain. Subspace will use the capital to expand its integrations with projects on other blockchains and build a dedicated product team to support its Subspace Meta Services (SMS) segment.

Coinbase Ventures investor Katherine Wu is leaving the company for early-stage crypto venture capital firm Archetype, less than a year after joining Coinbase as a senior deal lead in September.

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 \[…\]

The new VC arm, called Stronghold Capital, has already invested in companies including Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research and funds including Precursor Ventures and Backstage Capital, both of which have a track record of backing underrepresented founders.

Rainbow, a crypto startup building a mobile wallet app that allows users to interact with decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain, wants to be the app users download to tap into that future.

It also announced today its intent to register a new, compliant lending product, called BlockFi Yield, which it says would be the first SEC-registered crypto interest-bearing security.

The company has built on top of many of its virtual properties — for example, it launched a retail store concept in Decentraland two weeks ago, which it plans to expand into other metaverse platforms, Yorio said.

When customers move money to their wallet via credit card, debit card, or ACH transfer, Sardine assigns a risk score to the card or bank account being used through an algorithm and assumes fraud liability for the transaction.

The grant sparked a closely collaborative relationship between Nomic and the Ethereum Foundation that resulted in the latter becoming Nomic’s single funding source before Nomic’s pivot to nonprofit status, Zeoli said.

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.

Wormhole released ETH to an Ethereum wallet based on those wETH, so the exploiter essentially stole some ETH from Wormhole’s reserves. It’s unclear what’s going to happen next with the assets and if wETH in Wormhole’s reserves are still backed by ETH.

Two of Fireblocks’ biggest competitors in the crypto custody infrastructure space were acquired last year, Shaulov said. In terms of crypto products, decentralized finance (DeFi) has been an especially hot growth area for the startup, accounting for 10% of Fireblocks’ transaction volume in the past month, according to Shaulov.

Coinbase, one of the world largest crypto exchanges, announced an exclusive partnership earlier this week with crypto tax and portfolio tracking provider CoinTracker, meaning Coinbase users will get access to CoinTracker’s software at a discounted price.

It uses integrations to link to different investment platforms for stocks, crypto, and other illiquid assets, though Gonen declined to share how many platforms are partnered with Compound in this manner.

To qualify for the program, users must enable multi-factor authentication on all transaction types where it is available, set up an anti-phishing code at least 21 days prior to the reported unauthorized transaction, file a police report and provide it to Crypto.com, complete a questionnaire to support a forensic investigation, and not be using a jailbroken device, according to the company.

While Crypto.com is the world’s fourth-largest crypto exchange, it has been pushing hard into U.S. markets in recent months, with stunts including viral advertisements featuring actor Matt Damon and a $700 million purchase of the naming rights to the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers Arena.

Conduit aims to be a one-stop shop for neobanks and financial institutions to plug their own products into the DeFi ecosystem, which Gertman said is made easier because Conduit itself is regulated and compliant, taking the compliance burden off of companies using its tools.