CoinDesk Crypto

Oracles from Chainlink, a provider of data feeds to smart contracts, have been integrated into Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum One.

• Chainlink’s U.S. dollar-denominated price feeds are available now, with support for new price pairs to follow, according to an announcement shared with CoinDesk Thursday.
• Arbitrum says it is addressing a common request from smart-contract developers, who require high-quality data from financial markets to power decentralized exchanges, futures and options platforms and algorithmic stablecoins.
• The Chainlink feeds provide Arbitrum with high-frequency price updates allowing assets to be valued on-chain and in real time.
• Arbitrum says developers will be able to receive the same data quality and reliability as on the Ethereum base layer, but at lower cost and with more frequent updates.
• Arbitrum One is the network’s beta mainnet.

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Tally, a platform that builds governance infrastructure for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), announced Thursday it raised $6 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital and Placeholder.

But the round wasn’t entirely funded by venture capital.

Tally’s co-founder and CEO, Dennison Bertram, told CoinDesk that approximately 25% of the funding came from DAOs themselves including The LAO, MetaCartel Ventures and Fire Eyes DAO, as well as DAO-affiliated angel investors, including Ryan Sean Adams, the founder of Bankless. 

Related: Leading Latin American Venture Firm Kaszek Makes First DeFi Investment

DAOs – which Tally CTO and co-founder Rafael Solari describes as essentially a “group chat with a bank account” – are exploding in popularity as decentralized finance (DeFi) continues to gain momentum. 

DAO members band together, share assets and make decisions as a group, which can look like anything from a decentralized company with revenue and payroll and products, to a group of people pooling money together to buy a CryptoPunk. 

Up until this point, the governance infrastructure for DAOs has been relatively bootstrapped, but Tally’s co-founders believe that for DAOs to go mainstream they need a way to overcome the structural growing pains that many DAOs have experienced. 

Tally’s platform offers DAOs voting structure and analytics, member transparency and governance tools. The software is already used by protocols including Gitcoin, FEI and Ampleforth as the primary DAO interface. 

Related: The Node: DeFi Needs Hackers to Become Unhackable

“We believe that DAOs have the potential to be more scalable and more equitable than corporations,” Aleks Larsen, partner at Blockchain Capital, said in a press statement. “The Tally team has helped the oldest and largest DAOs solve critical governance and operational problems and is the partner of choice for new DAOs.”

Bertram told CoinDesk the money will be used to hire additional engineers and advertise Tally’s platform.

The new funding follows a $1.5 million seed round announced in March.

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Australian crypto mining company Mawson Infrastructure has purchased 17,352 ASIC bitcoin miners from Chinese manufacturer and Nasdaq-listed Canaan Creative, the company said Thursday.

• Mawson Infrastructure said the purchase of the new miners would add over 1.5EH to its existing operations. Mawson has now purchased over 3EH of ASIC bitcoin mining hardware.
• The mining company, which is based in Sydney, has operations in the U.S. and Australia.
• Mawson purchased 17,352 latest generation Avalon A1166 and A1246 bitcoin miners which it expects to deploy across Mawson’s flagship facility in Georgia, US and its Australian site from Q4 2021 through 2022.
• “We again reiterate our end of CY21 goal of 2000 PH and end of CY22 goal of 5000 PH, and look forward to updating shareholders further on hardware purchases in due course,” James Manning, CEO Mawson Infrastructure, said in a statement.
• In July, the firm said it had taken delivery of 250 Bitmain Antminer S19 Pro machines from Canaan, and was expecting a further 570 Avalon A1246 units by month’s end.

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Investors looking to buy cryptocurrency have a variety of options. Here are five of the largest exchanges on the market.

Life as a bitcoin (BTC) investor can be a bumpy ride. The world's most famous cryptocurrency has confounded commentators since its inception in 2009 to climb to mind-bogglingly high values, but bitcoin prices have nonetheless still been punctuated by a high level of volatility.

Crypto tax software firm TaxBit restocked its war chest Thursday with a $130 million Series B that valued the startup at $1.33 billion. 

IVP and Insight Partners led the round just five months after TaxBit’s Utah-based team raised its first $100 million from Tiger Global, Paradigm and other VCs, most of whom joined in the Series B.

Since then, the startup, which provides reporting software to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and a bevy of institutional clients, has grown headcount to 120 and added a second homebase in Seattle. It also announced Thursday that Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.US will team up with the service.

Related: There’s Still Time to Fix Congress’s Crypto-Tax Mess

“Dozens of financial institutions are coming to TaxBit platform,” CEO Austin Woodward told CoinDesk. “So we’re staying busy.”

The fresh funding comes as the crypto industry faces a clouded regulatory future. Even so, one thing seems clear: More taxes, and with it more reporting requirements, are almost certainly on the way.

“We’ve been anticipating regulation on the information reporting front for years,” Woodward said. He said TaxBit has been building its tech platforms accordingly. “We’re at the forefront here, proactively getting ahead of this.”

TaxBit intends to continue investing in a global product line with a special focus on the U.K., EU and Canadian markets, Woodward said. The firm is also eyeing tax reporting opportunities beyond just crypto; Woodward said the platform now supports commodities and equities too.

Related: Crypto Trading Startup FalconX Achieves Unicorn Status With Latest Raise

“This is an opportunity that expands well beyond cryptocurrency,” he said.

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Efforts of enormous proportions are being spent on futuristic products and protocols to mitigate the extreme volatility of the crypto market. But there's something that's been around for decades that we can use.

Dune Analytics raised $8 million to fund its do-it-yourself dashboard for tracking everything from million-dollar CryptoPunk trades to the piddling daily volume of projects like Boring Bananas.

The three-year-old project’s Series A was led by Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures with participation from Redpoint Ventures, CEO Fredrik Haga told CoinDesk. Previous investors Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly also joined in. The round closed a few months ago, he said.

Haga, who lives in Norway, helms a Eurocentric team of developers working to make Dune’s crypto analytics toolkit über-accessible. Anyone with enough on-chain know-how can piece together real-time data dashboards – then share those creations with the world.

Related: DAOs, VCs Put $6M Behind Governance Startup Tally

That makes Dune something of a black sheep in crypto’s fast-growing stats industry. More established competitors roll out carefully tailored analytics, research and data products that lately garner multimillion-dollar raises from Wall Street types.

At press time, Dune hosted at least 6,817 user-built “recipes” (not all of the dashboards function) tracking EIP 1559 burn rates, Pudgy Penguin sales floors, crypto lending activity, Uniswap trading pairs and many other decentralized finance (DeFi) data streams.

“There’s like 40,000 analyses and unique pieces of analysis on Dune,” Haga said, and 4,000 analysts building them. He said Dune’s audience is “way broader than that.”

Haga said Dune’s strength is as an open platform where anyone can tool around. It’s made possible by a core facet of blockchain tech: everything is transparent, traceable and (with a little software savvy) accessible for anyone with the time to dive in.

Related: Crypto Fundraising DAO Loses Over $7M in Latest Crypto Exploit

“No developer skills are needed,” Haga said. “You can just go to our website, do a query, produce results and share it directly. And that has proven to be extremely powerful.”

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DAO Maker, a fundraising platform for upcoming crypto projects that has no relation to the more widely known MakerDAO, was exploited Thursday, resulting in a loss of more than $7 million, according to China-based blockchain security analysis firm PeckShield.

• A total amount of 7,376,245 USDC was transferred from an Ethereum address associated with the DAO Maker attacker to decentralized exchange Uniswap in exchange for 2,261 ether, according to PeckShield.
• The attacker was able to access DAO Maker’s balance by taking advantage of a bug on DAO Maker’s contract, said a spokesperson from PeckShield.

• The exploit came just a day after cross-chain DeFi site Poly Network was hacked for losses of over $600 million, the largest hack in decentralized finance (DeFi) to date.

In a Twitter thread, the DAO Maker team said 5,521 users were affected, with the average user losing $1,250.

“Blockchain forensics company CipherBlade is already investigating, and exchanges blocked the hackers’ wallet,” DAO Maker tweeted.

Related: DAOs, VCs Put $6M Behind Governance Startup Tally

A compensation plan is in the works, the project said.

UPDATE (Aug. 12, 14:04 UTC): Adds comments from DAO Maker’s Twitter feed.

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Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital has hired its first head of Europe, tapping Tim Grant – the now-former CEO of Switzerland’s SIX Digital Exchange – to chart the crypto conglomerate’s continental expansion. 

Grant, who has worked in crypto since 2015, told CoinDesk he’ll attempt to help Galaxy’s nearly $2 billion wealth management business crack through Europe’s patchwork economies, with a sharp focus on Germany and Switzerland.

“Those are two jurisdictions where you can do real solid institutional business, because the government supports crypto,” Grant said.

Related: Fitch Says Germany’s ‘Spezialfonds’ Investing in Crypto Face Liquidity Risk

That effort could be buoyed by a new German law that allows the financial institutions of Europe’s largest economy to park up to 20% of their assets in crypto. These so-called “spezialfonds” could collectively pour $415 billion into the industry, though that capital flow has been slow so far.

Europe’s other, smaller economies haven’t all “developed” their crypto regulation to the point where Galaxy could comfortably play, according Grant. He will direct the conglomerate’s influence campaign to help those policymakers and regulators catch up with Switzerland, Germany and the U.K., where the firm already has an outpost.

“We want to get everything to the point where the wall of money that we know exists – that institutional wall – can really get access to this asset class in the right way,” Grant said.

He cited Spain, France and Italy as regions where regulators are starting to wake up to crypto and predicted the real momentum will crack within 18 months.

Related: Ghana to Test CBDC With German Banknote Printer Giesecke+Devrient

“We are going to position ourselves to: a.) help that happen and b.) be there when that happens,” said Grant.

Galaxy, already publicly listed in Canada, is preparing for a U.S. listing later this year. In May, it splashed $1.2 billion on BitGo, bringing crypto custody in-house in one of the largest acquisitions in crypto history. That mega-deal has yet to close, but when it does, Galaxy will inherit BitGo’s German footprint.

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Powerbridge Technologies, a Nasdaq-listed technology company, plans to expand into bitcoin and ether mining.

• The Zhuhai, China-based technology firm offers software-as-a-service products and blockchain applications.
• It now intends to expand into bitcoin and ether mining, with plans to build a clean energy-based global network, the company announced Thursday.
• Powerbridge’s stock climbed about 40% in premarket trading in the wake of today’s announcement.

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More than half of the $600 million+ drained from the Poly Network earlier this week has now been returned.

• About $342 million had been returned as of 08:18 a.m. UTC (4:18 a.m. ET) Thursday, according to a tweet by Poly Network.
• The decentralized finance (DeFi) platform which operates on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Ethereum and Polygon was hit by a hack that drained over $600 million in crypto earlier this week.
• The hacker began returning the funds on Tuesday to wallet addresses across the three chains.
• The $342 million now returned is made up of $4.6 million on Ethereum, $252 million to BSC and $85 million to Polygon.
• The $268 million still outstanding is on Ethereum.

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Canadian crypto-mining company Hut 8 Mining said second-quarter revenue almost quadrupled to C$33.5 million (US$27 million) from the year before.

• Operating profit tripled to C$8.1 million ($6.5 million), the company said in a release.
• The company predicted it will mine as many as 22 bitcoins a day in the fourth quarter as new machines are deployed, and forecast daily production of 14-16 bitcoins a day in the third quarter, according to a presentation on its website.
• By the end the year, it estimated it will have 144 MW of power available for mining. That will grow 45% to 209 MW by the end of 2022.
  

UPDATE (AUG. 12, 11:40 UTC) Rewrites headline to reflect earnings release, adds revenue, operating profit.

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ETC Group, which in June launched the first bitcoin exchange-traded product (ETP) in the U.K., said the cryptocurrency generated an annualized $3 billion of revenue for miners in April.

• ETC’s first report on the industry also shows transaction volumes on Ethereum increased more than 2,000% in the second quarter to $777.1 billion, up from $36.1 billion a year before, the company said.
• Volumes on the decentralized exchange surged to $283.8 billion from $3.4 billion.
• The bitcoin revenue figure is calculated from transaction fees on the network.

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Lionel Messi’s transfer to Paris St. Germain (PSG) from FC Barcelona included a payment in crypto fan tokens.

• The Argentinian soccer legend’s signing-on fee for the French club included an undisclosed number of fan tokens provided by blockchain-based fan-token provider Socios.com.
• This week Messi left Barcelona, the club of which he had been part since the age of 13, to join PSG on a two-year deal worth nearly $75 million per season.
• PSG did not say how much of that the tokens represented, referring to it as a “large number.”
• The French club is one of a large number of major soccer teams to have launched fan tokens through Socios.com, along with Barcelona, Juventus, Atletico Madrid and Manchester City.
• The tokens are designed to spur fan engagement by offering them voting rights on minor decisions in their clubs’ operations.

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Investment in blockchain and crypto in the first half of 2021 exceeded the total for each of the previous three years, according to a new report by KPMG.

• The “Pulse of Fintech H1’21” report published Thursday by the “Big Four” accounting firm found that investment activity in blockchain and crypto climbed to $8.7 billion through June 30.
• This figure compares with whole-year totals of $7.2 billion, $5 billion and $4.3 billion for 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively.
• Furthermore, the total was reached from a smaller number of deals, pointing to a greater average value for individual transactions.
• That’s a sign of the evolving nature of investors, with more institutional money flowing as awareness and knowledge of the space proliferates.
• KPMG’s report singles out the mammoth funding rounds into BlockFi ($350 million), Paxos ($300 million), Blockchain.com ($300 million) and Bitso ($250 million) as examples.
• One of fintech’s big winners so far in 2021 has been crypto-focused regulation technology. With greater focus on crypto trading buoyed by soaring values of currencies, there is increased demand for “safe and secure access to investments,” according to the report.

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Ether (ETH), the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is holding above the 40-week moving average. The long-term uptrend remains intact despite the sell-off from extreme overbought levels earlier this year.

The digital asset is on track to return near the all-time high around $4,300 as buyers remain active at support levels. 

The chart below shows ether’s long-term breakout above $1,400 in January and subsequent re-test of that level in February. Similar to bitcoin (BTC), ether avoided a breakdown below the 40-week moving average, which suggests the uptrend is strengthening. 

Related: Bitcoin Revenue in April Represents $3B a Year, ETC Group Says

The relative strength index (RSI) on the weekly chart is neutral, similar to the situation in mid-2020, which preceded a strong price rally. For now, pullbacks appear limited around $2,500 to $3,000 support.

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Samsung Electronics is reportedly going to be a part of South Korea’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot project.

• According to a report on Thursday by The Korea Times, Samsung will participate in the Bank of Korea’s (BOK) pilot with a focus on remittances.
• The electronics giant plans to test the functionality of BOK’s CBDC pilot with its Galaxy smartphone.
• Specifically, Samsung wants to know whether it is possible to “conduct payments via mobile phones using the digital currency with no internet availability,” according to an unnamed source, cited in the report.
• CBDC remittances to other mobile phones or other connected bank accounts will also be tested.
• The pilot consists of “issuing and distributing the CBDC and monitoring how that eventually works in virtual environments,” the executive said.
• BOK’s CBDC pilot will be tested in two phases with the first phase to run from this month until December and will determine the specific technology required. The second phase, to run from January-June 2022, will focus on real-life transactions and settlements
• BOK began calling for firms to compete for a shot at developing its CBDC in July. That was eventually granted to GroundX, a blockchain subsidiary of South Korea-based internet giant Kakao.

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Cryptocurrency derivatives platform Delta Exchange has introduced a feature it says will help generate passive income for its users through the use of automated call options.

According to a press release shared with CoinDesk on Thursday, Delta’s “Enhanced Yield Product” claims to simplify the process of bitcoin and ether options trading.

Options can be defined as financial derivatives that are based on the value of the underlying security such as a stock. Options allow traders to buy or sell the security at a specified strike price before or on a given date.

Related: Market Wrap: Bitcoin Rallies Despite Cooler Inflation Data

The strike price in derivatives market terms is a set price at which the owner of the option can buy or sell the underlying asset, in this case, bitcoin or ether.

The Singapore-based firm said in the same way exchange-traded funds simplify crypto exposure, people won’t need to learn or experiment with complex options strategies as they can select from a menu as they see fit.

“This product is focused on helping investors participate in more complex options strategies without having to execute them,” said Delta’s CEO, Pankaj Balani. “It is focused on generating high yields with passive management.”

If the price of an asset is greater than the strike of the option being shorted then a user’s bitcoin is sold automatically at the strike price, allowing the user to pocket the difference.

Related: Inversores institucionales regresan a bitcoin a pesar de posibles impuestos para las criptomonedas en Estados Unidos

Conversely, when a user’s option contract expires and the price of bitcoin is less than the strike price, the automated strategy doesn’t sell the asset and the client retains their bitcoin.

This allows its users to avoid high-risk situations and results in earnings, the exchange said.

“As the options markets continue to mature, we believe structured products will become a viable option for all traders,” said Balani.

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Tokenization in real estate is an “inevitable next chapter in blockchain’s disruption of capital markets,” and could make major progress in the next five years, according to a report published by Moore Intelligence on Wednesday.

• The emergence of new secondary markets for digital property assets might mean more liquidity, efficiency and lower costs for investors, the report noted.
• “Tokenization has potential to drive down transactional costs and improve efficiency via the use of ‘smart contracts’ which can replace copious paperwork and laborious administration,” according to the report.
• Institutional investors still largely remain on the sidelines waiting for more regulatory clarity, the report said. 
• Moore Global is the parent company of Moore Cayman, an auditing firm that published attestation reports for Tether, issuer of the largest stablecoin, USDT.
• “From an audit perspective, adding digital assets to a portfolio can be advantageous as blockchain technology can make transactions more transparent and trackable,” David Walker, managing partner of Moore Cayman, wrote in the report. 
• “Tokenization has potential to drive down transactional costs and improve efficiency via the use of ‘smart contracts’ which can replace copious paperwork and laborious administration,” the report said. 
• Texas-based commercial real estate marketplace Red Swan has tokenized $2.2 billion in real estate through security token platform Polymath, while it has another $4 billion in properties in the tokenization pipeline, CoinDesk reported in February 2020. 

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