The Block
Rep. Wiley Nickel, a crypto-friendly lawmaker, seemed optimistic that the measure to overturn SAB 121 would pass the Senate this week, noting that it had previously passed the House with bipartisan support. Earlier in the day, Nickel penned a letter to Gensler, calling on him to withdraw SAB 121.
Quick Take Two brothers were arrested this week after prosecutors say they exploited the Ethereum blockchain to steal $25 million worth of crypto in about 12 seconds. The case involved “maximal extractable value,” or MEV, the maximum amount of value that can be extracted from a given DeFi protocol or smart contract by a user or group of users.
Quick Take Neoclassical Capital aims to act as a conduit between crypto projects and investors in the East and West, leveraging its co-founders’ multicultural experiences and multi-lingual skills. The investment firm specializes in injecting capital into early-stage blockchain-based projects (pre-seed to Series-A).
Quick Take Lawyers for former FTX executive Ryan Salame have asked that their client be granted leniency and serve no more than 18 months in prison.
Quick Take Mastercard has chosen five startups for its digital assets program aimed at developing blockchain use cases.
Quick Take The FTX estate has sold its remaining shares in Anthropic, a valuable AI startup, as the total cost of the bankruptcy surpasses $700 million in legal and administrative costs.
Quick Take Humanity Protocol, a web3 digital identity startup, raised $30 million in funding led by Kingsway Capital at a valuation of $1 billion. Humanity Protocol uses palm scan to verify someone’s online identity, which is stored using decentralized technology and protected by zero-knowledge proofs. The firm intends to launch its own cryptocurrency to pay for verification fees.
Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan said bitcoin allocations revealed in recent 13F filings with the SEC are just a “down payment.”About six months after an initial allocation, Hougan said he’d expect allocations to rise to 1-5% of professional investor portfolios on average.
Bitcoin rallied alongside stocks following cooler U.S. inflation data for April.The largest digital asset by market cap increased 3% in the past 24 hours.
Van Buren Capital General Partner Scott Johnsson unearthed an overlooked detail in a March spot Ethereum ETF filing on Tuesday. Analysts suggested the filing showed the SEC is potentially considering ETH a security in likely spot ETF denials this month.
