It might seem unlikely that BlockFi founder and CEO Zac Prince would describe a prosecution that resulted in a $100-million fine for his company as “a win not only for BlockFi but for the broader cryptocurrency industry,” but that is indeed what he said. And, he might be right, although it remains to be seen for now. The settlement Founded in 2017, BlockFi is a New Jersey-based crypto financial institution with a team of 850 and one million clients worldwide. Its popular BlockFi Interest Account product, with half a million users, including 407,000 in the United States, was the object …

On Feb. 14, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, announced actions against crypto lending company BlockFi over its failure to register high-yield interest accounts that the agency deems to be securities. New Jersey-based BlockFi will pay $50 million in settlement to the SEC and another $50 million to 32 U.S. states that brought similar charges. This marks some of the heaviest penalties ever imposed by a U.S. federal regulator on a cryptocurrency service provider. The firm also agreed to stop onboarding new customers to the unregistered service, BlockFi Interest Accounts, and attempt to bring it into compliance with the …

In the past year, we’ve seen the crypto economy undergo exponential expansion as heaps of money poured into various cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), nonfungible tokens (NFT), crypto indices, insurance products and decentralized options markets. The total value locked (TVL) in the DeFi sector across all chains has grown from $18 billion at the beginning of 2021 to $240 billion in January 2022. With so much liquidity in the ecosystem, the crypto lending space has also grown a significant amount, from $60 million at the beginning of 2021 to over $400 million by January 2022. Despite the exponential growth and the …

Stablecoin operator TrustToken has launched a new lending marketplace that allows asset managers to create their own decentralized finance products, potentially opening the door to wider mainstream adoption of DeFi solutions. The new lending marketplace, which is offered on unsecured lending protocol TrueFi, gives independent financial institutions the ability to design, launch and fund new investment products. Asset managers also have access to TrueFi’s pool of lenders and borrowers as well as TrustToken’s institutional offerings. Version 1 of the TrueFi protocol was shipped to institutional clients in November 2020 around the same time that the native TRU token launched. The …

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the U.K.’s tax agency, on Wednesday, has released a controversial set of guidance that could affect innovation in Decentralized Finance (DeFi). The updated regulation focuses on the treatment of digital assets specifically for DeFi lending and staking in the UK, and whether returns or rewards from these services are deemed as capital or revenue for taxation purposes. Owing to the cutting edge nature of DeFi these services had fallen into a grey area with tax professionals unsure of how the existing rules apply. “The lending/staking of tokens through decentralized finance (DeFi) is a constantly …

Global climate change continues to challenge the world's productivity and has already badly impacted the overall ability to maintain minimum sustainable goods production in Nigeria, as well as impacting overall food security for much of the population. Today, 100 million people in Africa face multiple crises, emergencies and catastrophic levels of food insecurity - with an increase of more than 60% between 2019 and 2020. As a result, social uplift has become a key goal for Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) impact investing and global interest under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNDP). As concerns around climate change …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) could become the most radical development to come of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies by potentially ushering in a new foundation for global finance. One of the projects that set some early precedents for DeFi was MakerDAO, which pioneered the use of having a distinct token for governance, with MKR, and a stablecoin backed by cryptocurrency as collateral — DAI. Next came Compound (COMP), which let customers borrow and lend select cryptocurrencies using a marginalized system that controlled collateral risk. These early developments have led to the DeFi market we see today, with many yielding products seeming to …

Decentralized lending platform Aave has launched its permissioned lending and liquidity service Aave Arc to help institutions participate in regulation-compliant decentralized finance. As opposed to its permissionless cross-chain counterparts on the platform, Aave Arc is a permissioned liquidity pool specifically designed for institutions to maintain regulatory compliance in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. The first of 30 entities lined up for the whitelist for Aave Arc was Fireblocks, the institutional digital asset custodian. It explained in a Jan. 5 announcement the pool “enables whitelisted institutions to securely participate in DeFi as liquidity suppliers and borrowers.” Users of Aave Arc must …

As 2022 gets underway, the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector of the cryptocurrency ecosystem appears to be gaining momentum in what could be an echo of the bullish market seen in seen in early 2021. Data from crypto market intelligence firm Messari shows that over the past 30 days, 5 out of the top 10 DeFi protocols have seen their tokens post double-digit gains. This is in spite of the struggles that Bitcoin has faced, a dynamic which usually places bearish pressure on the wider crypto market. A deeper dive into the data shows that AAVE, Curve (CRV) and Spell Token …

Genesis Global Capital has completed one of its first purely NFT-backed loans for $6 million to Meta4 Capital, a Miami-based Web3 focused investment management firm. This loan is notable not just for its amount but for solely using nonfungible tokens (NFTs) as collateral instead of including broader liquid collateral. Meta4 operates as an NFT VC backed by Andreessen Horowitz, specializing in acquiring presumed rare and historically significant NFTs. The proceeds of Genesis’ loan were used to finalize Meta4’s purchase of three NFTs part of Sotheby’s Metaverse “Natively Digital” October NFT auction: the $3.4 million record-setting gold Bored Ape Yacht Club …

We‘ve all heard stories of billion-dollar future contracts liquidations being the cause of 25% intraday price crashes in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) but the truth is, the industry has been plagued by 100x leverage instruments since BitMEX launched its perpetual futures contract in May 2016. The derivatives industry goes far beyond these retail-driven instruments, as institutional clients, mutual funds, market makers and professional traders can benefit from using the instrument‘s hedging capabilities. In April 2020, Renaissance Technologies, a $130 billion hedge fund, received the green light to invest in Bitcoin futures markets using instruments listed at the CME. These …

2021 was a breakout year for the cryptocurrency market in many respects and most investors are absolutely thrilled that Bitcoin (BTC) price established a new all-time high of $68,789. In the same timeframe, Ether (ETH) went on a parabolic rally which saw its price gain 565% from Jan. 1 to hit a record high at $4,859 on Nov. 10. While it was a banner year for large cap cryptocurrencies, some of the biggest gains and most impactful developments came from the altcoin market where decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) rallied by thousands of percent and helped to usher …