Schottz Tech

terça-feira, 8 de agosto de 2023

Crypto Exchange Bitstamp in Discussions for Raising Funds: Bloomberg

Bitstamp is reportedly in talks to raise funds for expansion. (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)

Bitstamp is in the process of raising a round to expand the number of markets it serves around the world, according to a report from Bloomberg.

“Bitstamp is not for sale, and we are not actively looking to sell the company,” Jean-Baptiste Graftieaux, its CEO, said in a statement to Bloomberg. “Our current and exclusive priority is to raise money through strategic investors to accelerate Bitstamp’s growth by providing new products and services to retail and institutional crypto customers.

Galaxy Digital Holdings is said to be an adviser in the round. Bitstamp will use the funds raised to launch a licensed derivatives trading operation in Europe and expand in more markets in Asia.

Bitstamp is based in the U.K and was one of the first crypto exchanges, founded in 2011.

A Bitstamp spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Edited by Parikshit Mishra.

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USDC Issuer Circle Unveils Programmable Web3 Wallet to Make Crypto Payments Easier for Business

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire (left) with Michael Casey, chief content officer of CoinDesk (Shutterstock/CoinDesk)

USDC stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Financial on Tuesday released a new, programmable web3 wallet platform that the company says can help businesses offer digital-asset payments to customers.

According to a press release, developers and merchants can integrate and personalize Circle’s "programmable wallets" into their applications and build services on top, letting consumers send, receive and store cryptocurrencies, including Circle’s USDC stablecoin and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

The service is available in a public beta version on the Ethereum (ETH), Avalanche (AVAX) and Polygon (MATIC) networks for developers, with plans to expand to other blockchains later this year, Circle said.

Circle’s new product comes as crypto firms aim to increase the role of stablecoin payments in the real-world economy.

Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrencies that anchor their price to another asset, predominantly to the U.S. dollar. They are a $128 billion asset class and a key piece of infrastructure that bridges traditional payment systems with the digital-asset economy, facilitating trading, transactions and conversion to crypto from government-issued (fiat) money.

Millions of people, especially in developing countries with fragile banks and currencies, including Argentina and Turkey, seek U.S.-dollar stablecoins as a safe haven to store wealth and send remittances.

“This new platform marks the first step for Circle’s Web3 services as we work to ease common pain points for developers, remove friction from value exchange, deliver more seamless user experiences and help drive blockchain-powered wallet adoption,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said in a statement.

Edited by James Rubin.

DISCLOSURE

Krisztian Sandor is a reporter on the U.S. markets team focusing on stablecoins and institutional investment. He holds BTC and ETH.

Nexus Mutual Links With InShare to Back Cooperative Insurance in UK

Rainy day cover: Nexus Mutual is adding some of its $274 million on-chain capital pool capacity to a U.K.-based mutual organization. (Shutterstock)

Nexus Mutual, a startup that provides decentralized alternatives to traditional insurance, has partnered with InShare, a firm that manages mutual insurance organizations, to bring blockchain-based cover to real world risks.

The partnership sees Nexus adding some of its $274 million on-chain capital pool capacity to The Retail Mutual, a U.K.-based mutual organization comprising more than 5,000 shopkeepers and small retail businesses. The total coverage provided by Nexus is $2.3 million for risks such as fire, theft and accidental damage. InShare manages The Retail Mutual and makes all the key decisions with claims, risk management and excess coverage.

There’s a shortage of capacity in certain areas of traditional insurance markets, particularly for small or niche business such as community-based, discretionary mutuals, which sit outside the U.K.’s regulated framework for insurance companies.

In addition, the niche world of decentralized finance (DeFi) is exploring ways to expand beyond crypto into real world assets and traditional finance models.

“It’s an on-chain discretionary mutual covering an off-chain discretionary mutual, which is interesting,” said Nexus Mutual founder Hugh Karp in an interview. “The insurance industry is starved of capacity and people are looking to the crypto world because they know there's capital there. From a Nexus point of view, we have excess capital that we’re looking to deploy effectively.”

Under the agreement, Nexus will pay out if The Retail Mutual is on the hook for more than 57% of the community’s contributions in any one year as well as single claims above 200,000 British pounds ($255,000). The Retail Mutual rakes in about 2 million pounds a year, so Nexus will pick up the excess if claims top 1.14 million pounds.

The Retail Mutual is made of small corner shops and the like, and the largest individual claim over the community's 20 years of operation is much less than $1 million, Karp pointed out. "Even under their worst year in the last 20, the total cover amount of $2.3 million wouldn't have been fully utilized," he said.

Graeme Thurgood, chief underwriting officer of InShare, said his firm understands the “tremendous potential” of accessing alternative risk transfer capacity. “Being a progressive and forward-looking company, we are committed to continuously exploring innovative approaches that elevate our offerings and the overall customer experience,” he said in a statement.

Edited by Sheldon Reback.

DISCLOSURE

Ian Allison is an award-winning senior reporter at CoinDesk. He holds ETH.

Paxos Has Other 'White Label' Stablecoin Opportunities in the Works in Addition to PayPal USD

Crypto infrastructure provider Paxos Trust is already working on other stablecoin projects similar to PayPal’s new PYUSD, said Paxos’ head of strategy Walter Hessert on CoinDesk TV on Tuesday.

When asked whether Paxos, which issues PYUSD for PayPal, has previously spoken with Elon Musk and X (formerly Twitter) about developing a stablecoin for the platform, Hessert didn’t answer the question directly and simply said that more projects are underway.

“We have other white label stablecoin opportunities in the works,” Hessert said on CoinDesk TV on Tuesday.

Read more: What Is a Stablecoin?

“Paxos has talked with a lot of the largest technology and financial services companies about stablecoins, integrating stablecoins, launching white label stablecoins in some cases, and we think that there’s going to be a lot of really exciting followers here to PayPal,” he said.

The launch of PYUSD signals a seminal moment for the digital asset industry, Hessert said, as it brings a new level of trust to users by being fully regulated and protected from bankruptcy, thus allowing it to be used for cross-border payments or consumer payments and settlements, among other uses.

“Now we can actually see those use cases come to life because it’s being put into products that people are using every day and it’s being presented in a way users can trust,” Hessert said.

Paxos is specifically focused on working with partners that have the ability to “move the needle” on mass adoption of blockchain products, such as PayPal, according to Hessert.

PayPal has been allowing users to buy,sell, and hold crypto assets for several years. The company oversaw $1.36 trillion in total payment volume and conducted over 22 billion payments transactions in 2022, according to its website, making it one of the largest financial services companies in the world.

DISCLOSURE

Helene is a New York-based news reporter at CoinDesk covering U.S. crypto exchanges and Wall Street. She is a recent graduate of New York University's business and economic reporting program and has appeared on CBS News and Nasdaq TradeTalks where she talked about the market. She holds BTC and ETH.

Hedge Fund Brevan Howard Backs Liquid Staking Startup Puffer in $5.5M Seed Funding Round

Brevan Howard Digital was among the backers for Puffer's $5.5 million round. (Pixabay)

Blockchain infrastructure company Puffer Finance raised $5.5 million in a seed funding round co-led by Lemniscap and the joint venture of Lightspeed and Faction. Other investors included Brevan Howard Digital, the digital asset arm of the global asset manager with $30 billion in assets under management.

The new capital will help accelerate the development of Puffer’s open-source Secure-Signer product and go toward the creation of a permissionless staking pool.

Puffer aims to address the challenges faced by solo validators in Etehreum’s proof-of-stake network. Secure-Signer is a remote signing tool that limits access to validator keys to mitigate the risks of being penalized, or slashed, as a result of software bugs or user error. The penalty can be a hefty hit for stakers that don’t have a large amount of ether (ETH). Puffer is also working on a protocol to lower the barriers of entry for at-home stakers as a viable alternative to centralized liquid staking providers.

The funding round also included Bankless Ventures, Animoca Ventures, DACM, LBK, SNZ and Canonical Crypto. Puffer previously received backing from The Ethereum Foundation through a $120,000 grant, and a $650,000 pre-seed round led by Jump Crypto.

“We hope the Puffer Protocol will create a pocket within the validator set where decentralization can thrive,” founders Amir Forouzani and Jason Vranek said in a statement. “By lowering barriers to entry, anyone can run a Puffer Node from their home to operate Web3 infrastructure and play a pivotal role in shaping a Web3 that is resilient and censorship-resistant.”

UPDATE (Aug. 8, 16:24 UTC): Removed KuCoin Ventures from the list of investors.

DISCLOSURE

Brandy covers crypto-related venture capital deals for CoinDesk.

Marathon Digital Misses Q2 Earnings and Revenue Estimates

Marathon Digital CEO Fred Thiel (CoinDesk TV)

Marathon Digital (MARA), one of the largest bitcoin miners in North America, missed on both the top and bottom lines in its second-quarter earnings report on Tuesday. The miner reported an adjusted loss per share of $0.13 on revenues of $81.8 million compared to FactSet analyst estimates for a loss of $0.06 on revenues of $83.4 million.

Shares of Marathon were roughly flat at $15.73 in after-hours trading on Tuesday. Marathon shares are up almost 360% this year as the price of bitcoin has surged.

“After a strong start to the year, we accelerated our progress in the second quarter by significantly growing our hash rate and improving our efficiency,” said Fred Thiel, Marathon’s chairman and CEO, in a press release.

The company gained $23.4 million on the sale of bitcoin in the quarter as it sold 63% of the bitcoin produced in the quarter to fund operating costs. Marathon also benefited from lower impairment charges in the quarter of $8.4 million, down from $131.6 million in the year-ago quarter, as bitcoin prices rose in the quarter.

Marathon also filed an 8-K on Tuesday saying it needed to restate cash flow figures for the first quarter. The company said the restatement came from reclassifying proceeds from the sale of digital assets from operating activities to investing activities. Operating cash flow went from -$28.8 million to -$91.5 million, while investing cash flow went from -$72 million to -$9.4 million.

Marathon recently solidified its position as the world’s largest publicly traded bitcoin miner by self-mining hashrate, reporting 17.7 exahash per second (EH/s) of operational computing power on the bitcoin network in June. It increased its production of bitcoin in May through the use of proprietary software.

UPDATE (Aug. 8 20:44 UTC): Added details throughout.

DISCLOSURE

Nelson Wang is CoinDesk's news editor for the East Coast. He holds BTC and ETH above CoinDesk's disclosure threshold of $1,000.

quarta-feira, 26 de julho de 2023

ChainLink (LINK) Analyst Report: Crypto Long & Short

(Nick Fewings/Unsplash)

Old habits do indeed die hard, it seems. I used to work as an equity analyst, conducting research and initiating coverage of different companies within the small-cap, oil-and-gas industry.

The process was relatively straightforward:

The fifth step may or may not have been “hope for an investment banking relationship shortly thereafter,” but far be it from me to be cynical.

You’re reading Crypto Long & Short, our weekly newsletter featuring insights, news and analysis for the professional investor. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.

At any rate, as part of our ever-expanding efforts to provide value at CoinDesk, I’m resorting to past practices and expanding my crypto coverage universe. What follows is my first attempt to write an equity analyst–style report on a digital asset. Given the often-opaque nature of this space, I think it’s necessary, to a certain extent. Honestly, outside of bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH), the general public may have trouble discerning the use case for one versus another.

Keep in mind that this is not financial advice, and, as such, I will refrain from assigning price targets for tokens. It’s essentially an initiation and declaration of asset coverage, using a combination of fundamental, technical and on-chain analysis.

Over time, and as coverage continues, the goal is to provide periodic updates when something pertinent or impactful to the asset occurs.

The first asset, ChainLink (LINK), is a member of the CoinDesk Indices Computing sector and recently appeared on a moving-average screen whereby its 10-period exponential moving average crossed above its 100-day moving average.

Coverage Date: July 26, 2023

Price: $7.53

Market Cap: $7.5 Billion

Circulating Supply: 538 Million LINK

Max Supply: 1 Billion LINK

Comparable TradFi Market Caps: BJ’s Wholesale Club (BJ), $8.61 Billion; Southwestern Energy (SWN), $6.9 Billion

ChainLink is a “decentralized oracle network” (DON) that seems to serve as a bridge between on-chain and off-chain data, essentially linking smart contract platforms with external data sources. Examples of transmitted data often include – but are not limited to – price feeds, along with payment confirmations.

LINK tries to solve the “oracle problem,” which it defines as a blockchain’s “inability to natively pull data from or push data to an external off-chain system.”

Read more: What Is an Oracle?

ChainLink’s network consists of multiple independent, decentralized oracles that facilitate the retrieval and validation of data between on-chain and off-chain sources. The desired result, and ultimately its value proposition, is that the ChainLink network will help developers build better and more efficient blockchain applications that users will benefit from. Security and reliability of data appear to be core tenets of ChainLink.

Its native token, LINK, serves as the payment mechanism on the network itself. ChainLink users pay LINK to access oracle services. Holders of LINK are also able to stake the asset itself for additional returns on various decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.

The result of ChainLink’s efforts has led to an expanding network of oracles, meant to increase the reliability of data transfer.

One timely feature that ChainLink boasts is its “Proof-of-Reserves” (PoR) offering, meant to bring transparency and verification of third-party reserves. (In other words, proving that firms really have the assets they claim to have.) Paxos, TrueUSD and BitGo are among ChainLink’s PoR customers.

A strategy that some traders may consider is to monitor whether LINK’s price declines toward its 20-day average of $6.92 before increasing and/or decreasing their holdings.

All told, this is the first of a number of assets that we plan to expand coverage on. As we do so, communication with the wider ChainLink community is valued as well, as we attempt to provide our readership with insights about the digital-asset landscape.

From CoinDesk Deputy Editor-in-Chief Nick Baker, here is some news worth reading:

Edited by Nick Baker.

DISCLOSURE

Glenn C Williams Jr, CMT is a Crypto Markets Analyst with an initial background in traditional finance. His experience includes research and analysis of individual cryptocurrencies, defi protocols, and crypto-based funds. He owns BTC, ETH, UNI, DOT, MATIC, and AVAX