Author: The Block
Goldman Sachs veteran Roger Bartlett is the latest to exit Wall Street in favor of a move to the crypto space by joining Coinbase. Bartlett’s 15-year tenure at Goldman Sachs saw him rise to the position of managing director and global co-head of operations for global markets. Bartlett joins the crypto exchange as vice president and global head of financial operations. Writing on his LinkedIn page on Friday, Bartlett described “the mission to create economic freedom” as a “once in a lifetime opportunity,” hence his decision to join Coinbase. The US crypto exchange giant has steadily grown its workforce over the last…
Rakuten Group Inc, the firm behind the popular online shopping platform Rakuten, announced Friday that it has launched its own non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. The Rakuten NFT marketplace will offer users digital collectibles of sports and entertainment — such as music and anime — the firm wrote in a release. In addition, Rakuten will offer minting services for intellectual property (IP) holders to create digital assets of their IP. The firm intends to provide peer-to-peer listing and sales in 2021 or later. Rakuten’s first NFT drop will occur on February 25 and will include digital assets from an anime called Ultraman as well as…
Russian President Vladimir Putin deployed what he termed a special military operation against Ukraine early Thursday morning, launching a series of missile attacks. Ukraine is now facing a full-scale invasion from Russia on three fronts. As Ukraine braces itself against further onslaught, blockchain analytics and compliance firm Elliptic noted earlier in the day that $400,000 in bitcoin had been donated to “Come Back Alive,” a Ukrainian non-governmental organization based in Kyiv that distributes supplies to soldiers. That number continues to grow. At current prices, the address has amassed $808,521 in bitcoin, having transacted over 900 times on the Bitcoin blockchain. Most of the transactions have…
Sam Cassatt, former chief strategy officer at ConsenSys, had been working under the radar since 2020 for his web3 infrastructure startup Aligned. The company has now emerged from stealth with $34 million in seed funding. Several investors backed the funding, including GSR, Altium Capital, Cavalry Fund and Ninja4. There was no lead investor. Angel investors, including ConsenSys alum and Darma Capital founder Andrew Keys, Gryphon Digital Mining executive Chris Ensey, entrepreneur Steve Wiggins, and former ConsenSys and PayPal employee Ron Patiro, also joined the funding. This was an equity funding round and will help Aligned expand its web3 infrastructure, Cassatt told The…
An automatic liquidation of $500 million in ether (ETH) could occur on-chain if its price falls below $2,100, causing a Maker vault holder’s position to become under-collateralized and putting further downward pressure on the second-biggest cryptocurrency. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine roils crypto markets, a pseudonymous Maker vault holder called “7-Siblings” could see $500 million in ETH seized and sold if the price drops another 14% from its current level, according to data from Block Analitica. The market drama comes less than a month after the same investor narrowly escaped a $600 million liquidation. Going by Block Analitica’s data, 7-Siblings has multiple debt positions on…
Elwood Technologies, the crypto-focused technology firm owned by hedge fund heavyweight Alan Howard, announced a “strategic integration” on Thursday with Bloomberg. According to details shared with The Block, the integration is geared toward the institutional clients who use the Bloomberg Asset and Management Investment Manager, or AIM, a buy-side order management system used by about 15,000 clients who, collectively, manage more than $17 trillion in assets. The idea is to tie up Bloomberg’s AIM with the capabilities offered by Elwood’s trading platform. “The integration combines Elwood’s institutional cryptocurrency trading capabilities with Bloomberg’s data, analytics, and workflow tools, enabling the financial…
A new study from the investment banking services firm BNY Mellon found that 77% of family offices are interested in or are involved in crypto. What’s more, 40% thought crypto was important to augmenting their investment strategy and over 66% intended to increase their crypto holdings within the next 12 to 24 months. The BNY Mellon’s survey process involved 200 participants, which included 56 single-family offices and 144 multi-family offices, all managing over $150 million in assets. Half of the participants were from the United States, with others from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Italy, Germany, India, Brazil, and…
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) is shutting down its blockchain payment network project, citing slow business growth. According to an announcement on Tuesday, Japan’s largest bank MUFG stated that it had already begun modalities to suspend the Global Open Network Japan (GO-NET Japan) blockchain payment network. MUFG and US-based cloud service company Akamai Technologies established GO-NET Japan as a subsidiary of GO-NET in 2019. At the time, the blockchain payment rail was billed to deliver one million transactions per second with a planned Internet of Things (IoT) integration. After three years, MUFG says the next step will be to coordinate with all stakeholders involved…
Amidst yesterday’s report by crypto journalist Laura Shin that claims to identify who hacked The DAO in 2016, there was a small detail crucial to the findings but with other implications. It was the claim, by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, that it was able to unmask the path of transactions through a popular bitcoin mixing service called CoinJoin — something that would defeat its entire raison d’etre. CoinJoin is a crypto mixing tool by privacy-focused Wasabi Wallet. It helps users obscure their transaction history by mixing their funds with those of other users. It’s much harder to follow the movement of money…
A group of lawmakers in Panama will discuss two crypto-related bills on February 22, The Block has learned. Members of Panama’s Commerce and Economic Affairs Commission, part of the country’s National Assembly, will discuss crypto in addition to other matters at the 2:00 p.m. meeting. The committee members are expected to discuss whether two bills in question, 696 and 697, should be combined and move forward to the wider National Assembly for discussion. The assembly said in October that a subcommittee would be formed to examine unifying the bills. The two bills from different representatives both address crypto, but are different in nature.…