Author: The Block

Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell has assured Congress that the Fed’s much-anticipated report on cryptocurrencies will be out “within weeks.” Powell’s estimated time of publication came during a hearing on his confirmation before the Senate Banking Committee on January 11. Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) pushed Powell on the report, which the Fed chair had previous said was coming shortly. “The report really is ready to go and I expect we will drop it — I hate to say this again — in coming weeks,” answered Powell. However, that report may not provide interested parties with all the answers…

Stock trading giant Citadel Securities announced Tuesday that it has raised $1.15 billion in a funding round backed by Sequoia Capital and crypto VC firm Paradigm. This is Citadel Securities’ first-ever external funding round. Sequoia invested in the company through its three funds — Sequoia Heritage, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, and the Global Growth Fund. As part of the deal, Alfred Lin, partner at Sequoia Capital, will also join Citadel Securities’ board of directors. Citadel Securities is a global market-making leader, handling nearly 30% of all trading in the U.S., including equities, derivatives, bonds, and other assets. One of its biggest clients…

The Securities and Exchange Commission is fining tZERO, a leading platform for security tokens in the US, for off-market trading. Per a January 10 order, the SEC says that tZERO made a number of errors in its filing of disclosures. tZERO operates as an alternate trading system, which has different filing requirements than a typical securities exchange. According to the settlement, tZERO failed to disclose several changes to its operations within the normal timings. These include the use of non-U.S. trading information from Blue Ocean Financial Technology (a Singapore-based firm that tZERO acquired in 2017), a subscribing broker’s publication of tZERO’s security token…

NFT marketplace aggregator Flip, co-founded by UpOnly podcast host Brian Krogsgard (aka Ledger Status), has raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round. The round was co-led by Distributed Global and Chapter One, with participation from CMS Holdings, NFT artist PplPleasr (aka Emily Yang), Keyboard Monkey, DeeZe, and Larry Cermak, VP of research at The Block, among other investors. This was an equity funding round and will help Flip expand its team and launch its platform, Krogsgard told The Block. The current headcount of Flip is seven people, and it is hiring for several engineering roles. What is Flip?Flip aggregates…

The world’s biggest inter-dealer broker TP ICAP said on Monday it has launched crypto-related exchange-traded products (ETPs) for its European clients. The company facilitates trades between hedge funds, investment banks and large financial institutions. It said it had already executed the first crypto trade with Wall Street heavyweight Goldman Sachs. It traded the ETC Group Physical Bitcoin, a physically backed equity instrument, which is traded on Xetra, against the CME Bitcoin Future. DRW, Flow Traders and Jane Street provided liquidity. These ETPs are a way for firms to gain exposure to crypto assets without directly touching them. TP ICAP has…

NFT marketplace OpenSea has seen very strong trading volumes so far this month. A frenzy that, at this pace, puts it on track to set a new monthly record. According to The Block’s Data Dashboard, NFT trading on OpenSea in January has already exceeded $1.36 billion — just 10 days in. By comparison, the platform’s highest-ever monthly volume, recorded in August 2021 was $3.16 billion. If the first 10 days of January are any indication, then OpenSea could be set for a new all-time high in terms of its monthly trading volume, not long after it raised $300 million from backers like Coatue…

An upstart NFT platform called LooksRare has gone live today, as more marketplaces continue to crop up to try to take on market leader OpenSea. LooksRare claims to be a community-focused marketplace that will develop new features based on what its users want. The marketplace explained in a blog post that it indexes all NFTs that exist on the Ethereum blockchain so that they can be traded straightaway — and offers can already be made on them. It also lets users buy and sell NFTs with ether or wrapped ether (WETH), or a mixture of both, and they can make offers using WETH. LooksRare was…

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program unveiled a raft of proposed research areas this week, including one that proposes investigating the use of crypto tokens to incentivize approaches to what it calls “modality use by consumers.” The information was included in a pre-solicitation notice issued on January 6. Per the document, the research area envisions that, as the US economy emerges from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, parking space for consumers, workers and other drivers will become limited. “This potential scarcity of shared parking resources, as well as the uncertainty of finding an open space without…

Crypto-focused venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has put out its vision for the future of crypto regulation. It’s the latest in a flurry of such proposals from industry players. Also known as a16z, Andreessen Horowitz today released its “10 Principles for World leaders Shaping the Future of Web3,” a brief document that aims to ground ongoing international policy debates around crypto. The principles themselves are not especially bombastic. They emphasize the need “to harmonize standards and regulatory frameworks” among nations and calibrate risk for various web3 activities — sentiments that, on the surface, few would disagree with. But as always with policy,…

Pantera Capital, an American hedge fund that manages over $6.4 billion in blockchain-related assets, has now reached $63.7 million in funding from 153 investors for its Bitcoin Feeder Fund, a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing shows.  Through the Bitcoin Feeder Fund, investors can indirectly partake in Pantera’s Bitcoin Fund — a passive bitcoin tracker that gives investors daily equity without the need to buy and safeguard the cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin Feeder Fund had $18 million and 56 investors this last year, CoinDesk reports. In addition to bitcoin, Pantera has invested in a wide-range of tokens as well as equity in crypto startups. In a recent…