Author: The Block
The UK’s marketing regulator on Wednesday said it had banned two adverts from Crypto.com following a complaint. The first ad, seen on 1 September 2021 in the Daily Mail app, featured text which stated, “Buy Bitcoin with credit card instantly.” The second ad, seen on 30 July 2021 in the Love Balls app, promised “up to 3.5% p.a”. The number in the text increased to “8.5%.” “We understood that consumers would interpret the claim ‘Earn up to 3.5% p.a.’ which increased to ‘Earn up to 8.5% p.a.’ to mean that any deposit could increase by the highest amount shown,” the Advertising…
J Christopher Giancarlo, the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has an idea for unifying cryptocurrency regulation in the U.S. On January 4, the American Enterprise Institute, a D.C.-based policy think tank, hosted a panel including Giancarlo and representatives from Coinbase, Coin Center and the DeFi Education Fund. Representing Coinbase was Kara Calvert, who joined the crypto exchange as Head of Policy in November. During the panel, Calvert restated Coinbase’s earlier proposal for a single regulator for digital assets. “It’s not crazy to think about a single regulator,” she said, though seemed to back down from the earlier sentiment to make…
Stablecoin issuer Tether froze over $1 million worth of USDT last week, according to on-chain data. The amount is significant, given it belongs to a single blockchain address. Tether called the “AddedBlacklist” function on December 30 to block this address within this transaction. This address now won’t be able to move the frozen funds. When Tether blacklists an address, it freezes the USDT balance of it, as The Block has reported previously. It is unclear who owns this address, which holds many other tokens in the low five-figure ranges that it hasn’t transferred out. When contacted, a Tether spokesperson declined to share those details…
Cion Digital, a crypto infrastructure startup building tools for traditional financial institutions, has raised $12 million in a seed funding round. Green Visor Capital and 645 Ventures co-led the round, with Cota Capital, Epic Ventures, Hourglass Capital Partners, BAT Ventures, Greycroft, and Ulu Ventures also participating. Cion’s founder and CEO Snehal Fulzele told The Block that he plans to use the capital to expand its team and launch its infrastructure platform. The firm’s current headcount is 20, and Fulzele expects to grow the team to 45 by the end of this year. Cion is planning to open a research and…
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), a collection of coveted non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has now generated more than $1 billion in total sales. The cumulative sales figure for the 10,000-piece collection now stands at roughly $1.03 billion, according to data site CryptoSlam. BAYC reached milestone in the first few days of the new year, with roughly $55 million in sales recorded since January 1. Demand for the digital apes was especially strong among celebrities — many of them rappers — in the closing weeks of 2021. Martin Garrix, Post Malone, Diplo and DJ Khaled are just a few of the growing…
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is looking for a new director to lead the development of a central bank digital currency. Per a LinkedIn post from January 1, the director of project management “will forward the Federal Reserve System’s efforts to build, manage, and test software to further its understandings of digital currency.” The Fed is working alongside MIT’s Digital Currency Institute on CBDC research, a partnership that has put the Boston branch of the U.S.’s central bank at the forefront of development. The project will also be keeping its research open-source, according to assistant vice president Robert Bench. The development of a…
The rare Serum #69 for Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club just sold for 1,542.069 ETH ($5.8 million), making it the largest sale of a Bored Ape “serum” thus far. Deepak Thapliyal, CEO of the blockchain tech startup Chain, bought this rare non-fungible token or NFT — though not without competition from the Andreessen Horowitz-backed Meta4 Capital, which had offered to buy Serum #69 for 1,500 ETH ($5.76 million). While perhaps serving as an illumination of the current state of collectibles sales in the NFT space, the development also begs the inevitable question: what is a serum, and why would it sell for so…
A pilot version e-CNY, the mobile wallet for China’s digital yuan, has gone live on iOS and Android app stores in China. Individual users in China may now download a version of the app to try out “personal wallet opening and management” and “e-CNY exchange and circulation services,” according to a tweet from BlockBeats, a local news outlet, which also featured screenshots of the app. The developer of the e-CNY app is listed as the People’s Bank of China’s Digital Currency Research Institute, an offshoot of China’s central bank. To download the trial app and activate the wallet, users must be…
Crypto asset management firm Grayscale announced Tuesday a shake-up in the constituents of its DeFi index as part of its quarterly rebalancing. The firm, which is owned by crypto deca-unicorn DCG, said that it would remove Bancor and UMA from the index and add AMP. Bancor – the token tied to the decentralized exchange — and UMA — a token tied to a protocol for synthetic assets – together accounted for 2% and 2.9% of the index at the time of its launch, respectively. Grayscale launched the fund and its underpinning index in July 2021 to provide institutional investors exposure…
One of the world’s best-known gaming companies intends to grow its footprint in the world of blockchain-based gaming this year. Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda spent much of a January 1st letter discussing what he termed “decentralized gaming,” noting that “I hope this becomes a major trend in gaming going forward.” “If we refer to the one-way relationship where game players and game providers are linked by games that are finished products as “centralized gaming” to contrast it with decentralized gaming, then incorporating decentralized games into our portfolio in addition to centralized games will be a major strategic theme for…