Author: Tech Crunch

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 with Pack, who previously co-founded global crypto fund Dragonfly Capital and led Bain Capital Ventures’ foray into digital assets. Pack and Roman have each invested in several early-stage crypto companies prior to launching this fund, including DeFi platforms Compound Finance and Terra, Pack said. Hack VC wrapped up fundraising last…

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When news broke earlier this week that the Department of Justice had seized $3.6 billion of allegedly stolen bitcoin, we had some questions. What do these revelations mean about government intervention in crypto? Will this scandal impact the decentralized finance sphere in the long term? Most importantly, which streaming service will order a documentary about the Bonnie and Clyde of bitcoin? At least one of our questions has been answered: Today, Netflix announced that it will tell the story of what it calls “the biggest criminal financial crime case in history” with the help of director Chris Smith, who brought “FYRE: The Greatest Party…

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India on Tuesday proposed launching a digital rupee by next year and a 30% tax on income from transfer of virtual digital assets such as cryptocurrencies and NFTs in one of the most remarkable tech and business-focused federal budgets presented by New Delhi. To capture details of all crypto transactions, India also proposed a 1% tax deduction at source on payments made related to purchase of virtual assets, the nation’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Tuesday. “No deduction in respect of any expenditure or allowance shall be allowed while computing such income except cost of acquisition. Further, loss from transfer of…

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Reddit is testing a feature that would allow its users to set any NFT they own as their profile picture — not only its own Ethereum-based NFTs, called “CryptoSnoos,” released in limited quantities last year. A similar feature allowing users to set their NFTs as profile pictures recently launched on Twitter, where the photos themselves provide information about the NFT when clicked, and appear as hexagon-shaped images to differentiate them from the standard Twitter profile pic. Details about how Reddit’s support for NFTs would work, however, aren’t yet decided. In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Reddit explained this particular NFT test is in very…

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The pay-for-processing business model has always been a largely unquestioned mainstay within the cryptocurrency landscape. Since the inception of digital assets, investors, developers and enthusiasts have been subjected to paying a processing or “miner” fee on top of the cost of the actual token purchased. In April 2021, the average cost of sending bitcoin reached an all-time high of $59, surpassing its peak in December 2017, when the average transaction fees skyrocketed to $52. Then there’s Ethereum and its notoriously high gas fees. In 2021, the blockchain saw a number of crypto networks leaving Ethereum in search of more sustainable options such as…

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Companies use invoices to pay for many of their major costs, ranging from materials to contract work. Most still rely on solutions built on top of bank transfers or credit cards to complete cross-border payments, which typically take 2-5 days to complete and represent a $130 trillion global market.  Enterprise payments startup Paysail just raised seed funding to build a tool that shortens the cross-border payment process to less than five seconds, the company says. Its solution leverages stablecoins, which it describes as “cryptocurrencies designed to have a stable price because they are pegged to a commodity or currency.” Using stablecoins to pay invoices also…

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Financial institutions continue to search for ways to pile into the crypto market, and decentralized finance (DeFi) products are one mechanism that could help them capture share. Investors in DeFi products can earn yield on their capital by lending out their cryptocurrency in exchange for interest. But DeFi lending is far riskier than traditional lending, in part because of the volatility of the asset class. Just as “high-yield” bonds compensate investors with more cash for betting on riskier-than-average companies, DeFi lending can offer far higher interest rates than the traditional savings account wherein customers essentially lend their money to a bank.…

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Web3 is seen as the future of the internet because it allows people to control their own data and digital assets, but crypto developers have been learning from the past when it comes to onboarding new users. The current state of crypto onboarding is unwieldy and unnecessarily prolonged due to the seed phrase, a series of words created by the crypto wallet to regain access. On a technical level, seed phrases have contributed to the loss of nearly 20% of all bitcoins in circulation, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Hungary, according to Singapore-based crypto infra startup Web3Auth, formerly known as Torus.…

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As a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gary Gensler argued in 2018 that the creators of the cryptocurrency ether violated federal law when they issued $18 million in tokens without registering them as securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today, as chairman of the SEC, Gensler won’t say whether he’s revised those beliefs, or whether he thinks that the second-most valuable cryptocurrency after bitcoin is still a security — a question whose answer could have wide ranging implications for the entire crypto economy, including massive exchanges like Coinbase and FTX. “I’m not going to speak to any one matter,” Gensler said in…

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The popular cryptocurrency sold off sharply this morning, while rival tokens like ether also lost value. Currently worth $39,831 per coin, bitcoin is off 4.3% and ether 5.1%, according to Coinbase data. While it is always risky to cover price changes in the crypto world, the fall in the value of bitcoin has crossed the threshold from notable to material.  Yahoo Finance indicates that bitcoin’s recent all-time high saw the cryptocurrency trade as high as $68,789.62 per coin. Today’s price puts bitcoin’s current drawdown at just over 42%. That’s twice the swing required for bitcoin to have entered a technical bear market,…

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