marketplace

Line messenger’s NFT arm raises $140M for Web3 services

Line Next will use a part of the $140 million fund to introduce new Web3-focused services, which include a social app that uses AI-generated characters and Web3 games.

Line Next, a venture dedicated to the growth of the nonfungible token (NFT) ecosystem, has raised $140 million as it prepares to launch a global NFT marketplace in January 2024.

The Line Next venture branched out of the popular WhatsApp-like messaging app from South Korea, Line, which is dedicated to exploring Web3 initiatives. Peter Thiel-backed private equity firm Crescendo Equity Partners led the $140 million funding round.

According to the announcement, Line Next’s global NFT marketplace, DOSI, is scheduled to launch in early 2024 after integrating with Line’s existing Japan-based NFT marketplace, known as Line NFT. The new NFT marketplace will launch as a mobile app and be available globally.

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Crypto platform WOO X partners with market maker Wintermute for liquidity boost

Aside from Wintermute, other leading liquidity providers, including Selini Capital and Black Code Group, also support WOO X.

Crypto exchange platform Woo X has partnered with Wintermute, a crypto market maker and liquidity provider with over $3.6 trillion in cumulative trading volume. Wintermute will act as the designated liquidity provider for the crypto exchange.

The latest partnership between the two crypto-focused platforms is part of a proactive and transparent effort to onboard top-tier liquidity providers. The London and Singapore-based liquidity provider Wintermute is one of several market makers collaborating with the crypto platform.

Other liquidity providers, such as Selini Capital and Black Code Group, also support WOO X. Selini Capital, for example, has consistently contributed 15–25% of all maker volume on Perpetual Protocol.

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NFT marketplace LooksRare launches v2, reducing fees from 2% to 0.5%

The previous version of the nonfungible token marketplace will be sunsetted by April 13, 2023.

Nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace LooksRare has upgraded to version 2, reducing fees by 75% and implementing several other features, according to an April 6 announcement from the company.

The LooksRare version 1 platform charged 2% per trade. This has been reduced to 0.5% in version 2. In addition, v2 has more gas-efficient contracts, allowing users to save approximately 30% on gas fees versus the previous version of the app.

The company explained that in version 2, sellers receive Ether (ETH) instead of Wrapped Ether (WETH) for most sales, and the smart contracts allow for bulk buying and selling orders if a user wants to place multiple trades simultaneously. In addition, aggregators can now implement custom recipients, allowing users to buy an NFT with one wallet but send it to another.

Sellers can also list their NFTs for sale in token prices instead of ETH, including for a fixed U.S. dollar price to be paid in equivalent ETH.

The team said in a separate April 7 post that LooksRare v1 will be sunsetted. On April 12, the app’s front end will no longer allow users to post version 1 auctions through the public API. All current v1 auctions will be removed from the website at 10:00 am UTC on April 13, and the smart contracts themselves will be disabled through an admin function at 11:00 am UTC.

Related: NFT aggregator Blur eyes 30% price pump by March amid airdrop euphoria

Reaction to the announcement was mostly positive, as many LooksRare users believed the new features would provide a strong challenge to competitors such as OpenSea and Blur.

But not everyone was convinced that LooksRare v2 would be enough of a change to woo users from other platforms. Some users expressed that v2 still fails to provide good token incentives or allow enough collections to be listed.

LooksRare faced some controversy in October when it decided to eliminate creator royalties. However, it has also benefited from the recent boom in NFT prices.

Paxful co-founders’ litigation cites misappropriation of funds, money laundering, U.S. sanctions evasion

A bitter dispute between Paxful’s co-founders in Delaware courts may have led to the crypto marketplace’s sudden closure.

A bitter dispute between Paxful’s co-founders, Artur Schaback and Mohamad (Ray) Youssef, in Delaware’s courts may have been the real reason behind the Bitcoin marketplace’s sudden closure on April 4. 

Schaback and Youssef, who started Paxful in 2015 with a shared passion for Bitcoin (BTC), are now litigating the company’s control, with several accusations against each other, according to court documents. The allegations include misappropriation of company funds, money laundering and evasion of United States sanctions against Russia, among others.

Founders disagree

Schaback was the chief operating officer of Paxful until February 2022, when he was allegedly blocked from participating in the company’s operations over disagreements with Youssef — Paxful’s CEO — about the marketplace’s future and operations, including conflicts about “the legitimacy of ever-increasing expenditures to undisclosed entities.”

Court documents filed in Delaware on March 21, 2023. Source: U.S. Court of Chancery of Delaware.

According to Schaback’s claims in the lawsuit, a large quantity of Paxful’s Bitcoin has been transferred to a Turkish entity called “EMiR,” which he claims is not a legitimate software company. “It does not have a website publicizing software or web development services and its physical address […] appears to belong to a clothing company.”

Dekslektika, a St. Petersburg, Russia-based company owned by former Paxful directors, is a subcontractor allegedly receiving payments from EMiR. As per the court filings, those entities were accused of being behind “massive non-ordinary-course transactions” that began after Schaback was frozen out of the company’s operations. “There is no legitimate business purpose for these transfers,” says the lawsuit.

In comments to Cointelegraph, Youssef classified the claims as “ridiculous.” According to him, the accusations center around salary payments to a Turkish engineering company working for Paxful. “He [Schaback] blocked these salary payments to our engineers with these accusations, claiming they were fake and even that they were performing no such services. He played an insane game of chicken until the entire team of 80 engineers stopped working. […] Mr. Schaback himself was forced to admit that this was a critical mistake and authorized these engineers to be given their back pay at a board meeting,” noted Youssef.

Court documents filed on March 3, 2023. Source: U.S. Court of Chancery of Delaware.

Youssef’s point of view

Youssef claimed his co-founder’s legal tactics “bordered on terrorism” and cost Paxful many employees and directors. “His accusations were so slanderous that we lost our GC, CTO, CISO, VP of finance and VP of HR. He even went after our law firm, McDermott Will and Emery, one of the most respected law firms in the United States, demanding they be removed from representing us in Delaware,” he told Cointelegraph.

Under the imminent resignation of his team, Youssef said it was impossible to keep Schaback at Paxful.

“Artur and I were homeless for a time in NYC while we built Paxful. He came from a working-class family like me, and we bonded over many things. He worked hard in the beginning and added value. I respected that he took care of his family. Sometime around 2018, he began to change. I covered for him, but when the entire ELT threatened to resign, I had to accept the ugly truth that he had changed and was not who I thought he was.”

Schaback’s point of view

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Schaback said Youssef took unilateral action to shut down Paxful on April 4. “Mr. Youssef’s actions were meant to consolidate power in a jurisdiction outside that of the United States and to remove me and other shareholders from his plans.”

Schaback said he has limited access to information in the company and hasn’t been involved in day-to-day operations for 18 months.

“Mr. Youssef and I had fundamental differences in Paxful’s product direction and corporate governance, and you can see by his current actions that his goal all along was to remove Paxful from U.S. jurisdiction due to regulatory pressure.”

Magazine: Bitcoin in Senegal: Why is this African country using BTC?

Paxful closing, CEO blames staff departures, regulatory challenges

Paxful CEO Ray Youssef said that United States regulators “don’t get it,” but infighting in the C-suite may have played a role in the company’s closure as well.

Peer-to-peer cryptocurrency marketplace Paxful announced on April 4 that it was suspending operations. Paxful founder and CEO Ray Youssef said in a blog that “key staff departures” and the regulation environment were behind the decision.

“We are not sure if it [the marketplace] will come back,” Youssef wrote. He added that all customer funds are accounted for and asked customers to withdraw their funds. The blog post provided links to other platforms that Paxful suggested for non-U.S. users to migrate to.

Youssef said in a Twitter Spaces meetup that Paxful is an American company that serves a global audience with a concentration on the global south. He said:

“A quarter of the company was compliance people […] Even that was not enough to please Uncle Sam.”

“American regulators have done a great job catching up […] for their pace” in the last five years, Youssef added, but “the regulators still don’t get it. They grow more suspicious every day.”

Related: Paxful CEO preaches Bitcoin self-custody, advises against crypto exchange

Youssef pointed to practices such as using gift cards to onboard people in Africa without bank accounts as an example of the company’s activities that drew regulatory attention in the United States.

Blocking U.S. customers and continuing operations “would have been an option if we had the staff. […] Business-wise it doesn’t make sense,” Youssef said.

In addition to its problems with staff departures, the company is in a legal dispute with co-founder and former chief operating officer Artur Schaback, who sued the company in January, naming Youssef and Jude Chidi Ogene as defendants. Ogene was Paxful’s chief legal officer until March, according to his LinkedIn profile. The complaint in that case has been sealed.

Paxful announced on March 29 that the company was refunding its Earn program users the funds that had been locked up in Celsius after its bankruptcy “in the coming days.”

Magazine: Bitcoin in Senegal: Why is this African country using BTC?

MetaMask Institutional unlocks solo ETH staking marketplace

MetaMask Institutional has introduced a new staking marketplace to give institutional users access to solo Ether staking.

MetaMask Institutional is set to be an avenue for the creation of new Ethereum validators after announcing a new staking marketplace for its institutional clients.

Institutions that make use of MetaMask’s institutional-grade wallet and custody service will be able to manage Ether (ETH) staking through four vendors — ConsenSys Staking, Allnodes, Blockdaemon and Kiln. The marketplace aims to simplify access and management of solo staking, allowing institutions to become Ethereum network validators.

MetaMask Institutional (MMI) has been live since October 2021, providing a platform that offers a wider set of controls and functionality more suited to organizations and businesses. As Cointelegraph previously explored, MetaMask’s retail wallet was no longer suited for users or institutions that were managing millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies.

The service’s new staking marketplace will look to simplify the complexity of institutional staking, which features varying fees, terms and conditions, rebates and reporting standards.

Johann Bornman, MMI product lead at ConsenSys, told Cointelegraph that the firm had seen a shift from liquid staking to 32-ETH staking, which he believes is not only driven by Ethereum’s Merge upgrade in 2022 but the looming Shanghai/Capella upgrade.

Shanghai will unlock deposit withdrawals for Ethereum validators, allowing solo stakers who have staked the required 32 ETH to withdraw their tokens and have access to accrued staking rewards. Up until this point, only liquidity provider pools allowed users to deposit and withdraw smaller amounts of ETH.

Related: ‘Multichain future is very clear’ — MetaMask to support all tokens via Snaps

Bornman said the upgrade has the potential to prove the “rewards profile and time horizon” for staking ETH, which influences confidence in Ethereum staking:

“We believe this staking rate has the potential to increase rapidly in the ensuing years. Over the near term, we have seen a marked increase in Eth2 staking by institutions over the last several months, and this trend will only continue, given the recent upgrade.”

As a result, MetaMask Institutional rolled out its staking marketplace to provide institutions with a direct avenue to becoming Ethereum validators by staking 32 ETH.

“Our focus is to solve for Eth2 staking, given how important we believe data validation of Ethereum is today and will be in the future. We have designed the service to be able to simply and seamlessly expand onto on-chain ETH staking solutions.”

The launch of the staking marketplace will coincide with the roll-out of an advanced MMI dashboard, including institutional controls, portfolio management, digital asset monitoring with built-in profit-and-loss and performance analytics as well as transaction reporting.

MetaMask Institutional rolled out access to ETH LP pool staking through the popular Lido and Rocket Pool protocols in January 2023, giving institutions initial access to decentralized finance (DeFi) pool staking.

Magazine: ‘Account abstraction’ supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide

Magic Eden launches marketplace for Bitcoin Ordinals

It’s one of the first major NFT marketplaces to join the Bitcoin Ordinals fray, which as of March 21 boasted 567,087 inscriptions.

Nonfungible token marketplace Magic Eden has launched its own “fully audited” marketplace for Bitcoin Ordinals, leveraging the surging interest in “Bitcoin NFTs.” 

The newly launched marketplace allows Bitcoin (BTC) NFT traders to buy and sell Bitcoin Ordinal collections, giving users a similar experience to the one that Magic Eden offers for Polygon, Ethereum and Solana-based NFTs.

“Just as we have expanded into other chains, we now aim to bring our expertise in building marketplaces to the nascent, yet flourishing Ordinals ecosystem,” the firm said in a March 21 statement. 

The new Ordinals protocol was introduced in January by former Bitcoin core contributor Casey Rodarmor. Since then, the popularity of Bitcoin Ordinals has surged.

According to data from Dune analytics, between Feb. 1 and March 1, the total number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions surged from 679 to 240,000. As of March 21, a total of 567,087 have been inscribed.

“We paid close attention to the release of Ordinal Theory and the lightning pace of adoption that soon followed,” said Magic Eden, adding:

“Our marketplace was built within a month, culminating in a hackathon in California with over a dozen devs.”

Currently, the marketplace only supports secondary sales of Bitcoin Ordinals. The marketplace said it is also looking into future tools that would allow creators to more easily mint or inscribe Bitcoin NFTs, such as its launchpad, which it offers for other chains.

In order to enable permissionless swaps, it uses partially signed Bitcoin transactions — a Bitcoin standard that allows multiple parties to sign the same transaction — rather than smart contracts.

The marketplace launched with over 70 collections. Source: Magic Eden

Meanwhile, Magic Eden says while there will be no royalty support for the marketplace, it is “actively looking” into this, adding there is “very little tooling and no secure and trustless enforcement solutions.” 

“With no royalty standard today, we have decided to launch on Bitcoin without royalty support for now,” said Magic Eden.

“We believe that this is most in-line with the ethos of the ecosystem, and despite this, we are actively looking into the development of an on-chain, permissionless royalty standard and are committed to working with creators and the greater community,” it added.

Related: Bitcoin thought leaders weigh the pros and cons of Ordinals

Other Bitcoin Ordinals marketplaces have already launched, including ORDX and Generative XYZ, which launched in February. Earlier this week, NFT platform Gamma.io unveiled its own Bitcoin Ordinals marketplace, allowing users to create and trade ordinal inscriptions in a manner similar to Ethereum NFT marketplaces.

Cointelegraph contacted Magic Eden for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Related: Become a hot new NFT artist via the ‘soft shell taco method’ — NFT creator Terrell Jones

Formfunction to shutter marketplace amid Solana NFT slump

The platform didn’t disclose the reason for its closure, but Solana NFTs haven’t been having the best run lately.

Formfunction, a Solana (SOL)-based, nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace, has announced it is closing up shop after only 13 months of operation amid a slump in Solana NFT prices and trading volumes.

On March 15, Formfunction announced it was “shutting down” on March 29, saying it “cannot continue to operate.” The decision was reached after “much discussion and careful consideration, it said.

The exact reason for closing the platform was not disclosed in the announcement.

Formfunction’s head of community and marketing, known by their pseudonym “Magellan,” tweeted on March 15 that the cofounders and the team will “pivot to a new direction, likely outside of the crypto [and the] SOL space,” but did not provide further details.

Cointelegraph contacted Formfunction’s cofounders — Matt Lim and Katherine Liu — for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

The marketplace’s shutdown comes after its launch just over a year ago, on Feb. 3, 2022. According to Magellan, over that time it conducted $5 million in sales despite a “brutal bear market.”

Shortly after its launch the platform also raised a $4.7 million seed round in March 2022 led by venture capital (VC) firm Variant Fund and contributions from other VC firms Solana Ventures, Canonical Crypto, Pear VC, Palm Tree Crew Crypto and OpenSea Ventures.

Since Formfunctions launch, the wider Solana NFT space has plummeted in terms of volume and floor prices alongside a drawdown in the price of SOL.

Figures from Solana NFT data aggregator SolanaFloor show its index of the “blue chip” NFTs on the blockchain saw a 75% price drawdown in dollar terms since early February 2022.

The USD price of an index of blue-chip NFT prices on Solana since Jan. 1, 2022. Source: SolanaFloor

The daily number of buyers of Solana NFTs has also seen a slowdown over the past 12 months. According to data from CryptoSlam, daily unique buyers currently hover around 7,000, almost half the amount seen on average at the start of 2022.

Solana has seen a slide in daily unique NFT buyers (blue) since March 2022 and daily sales volumes have also halved to under $4 million. Source: CryptoSlam

SOL’s price has also tanked since Formfunction’s launch. At the start of 2022, SOL traded at around $100; it has now fallen over 80%, at time of writing trading around $19.

The price of SOL took a significant hit in the November 2022 collapse of FTX and has struggled to regain traction since. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was an early investor in the Solana blockchain.

Related: Do ‘Ethereum killers’ have a future? Here’s what the crypto community says

Notable NFT collections first native to Solana are seemingly abandoning the platform also.

In December last year, DeGods and y00ts — two top-performing Solana NFT projects — announced they were bridging to Ethereum and Polygon to “explore new opportunities” and to allow for the continued growth of the collections.

OpenSea implements 0% fees to win over NFT user base lost to Blur

NFT marketplace Blur surpassed OpenSea in daily ETH trading volume as users — anticipating greater returns on their NFT investments — are looking for a trading arena that works in their favor.

Major nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea announced a massive structuring around lower platform fees and greater creator earnings as competing marketplaces continue to drain away its once dominant user base.

According to data from Nansen, on Feb. 18, NFT marketplace Blur surpassed OpenSea in daily Ether (ETH) trading volume as users — anticipating greater returns on their NFT investments — are looking for a trading arena that works in their favor.

Daily trading volume of major NFT marketplaces. Source: Nansen

As a reactionary measure, OpenSea announced three major changes to win back its migrating customers. The measures include a 0% fee for a limited time, introducing optional creator earnings and leniency on other operators.

OpenSea admitted losing users to other “NFT marketplaces that don’t fully enforce creator earnings,” and the new measures are an attempt to revitalize its dominance in the space, adding:

“Recent events – including Blur’s decision to roll back creator earnings (even on filtered collections) and the false choice they’re forcing creators to make between liquidity on Blur or OpenSea – prove that our attempts are not working.”

OpenSea believes that it defended creator earnings on all collections while reiterating its support for Operator Filter — a function aimed at helping creators secure their revenue for the resale of their work. However, this filter proactively blocked recommendations of marketplaces that sported the same policies.

OpenSea’s plan of action to counter falling market dominance. Source: OpenSea (via Twitter)

Blur’s daily trading volume supremacy can be attributed to its new royalty policy showcasing differences in royalty payment options between its platform and OpenSea. It read:

“OpenSea’s current royalty policy prevents collections from being able to earn royalties everywhere. They have cited various reasons for this (see FAQ), but the end result is that creators are limited to earning royalties on only one platform at a time.”

Amid the royalty war between the two marketplaces, community members highlighted the importance of competition in the industry. If it weren’t for zero royalty marketplaces, more prominent players like OpenSea would eventually increase fee structure, which would hurt creators and collectors.

Moreover, OpenSea plans to continue testing the model and identify what works best for the community and the organization. Community members speculate that OpenSea would probably increase its platform fees in the future if it successfully manages to amass its lost customers — a predatory move often noticed in industries with less competition.

Related: eBay NFT platform KnownOrigin launches creator smart contract

YouTube’s appointment of new CEO Neal Mohan was perceived as a win for the crypto community considering Mohan’s inclination to use NFTs and Web3 as revenue streams for creators.

As Cointelegraph reported, while serving as YouTube’s chief product officer, Mohan outlined tentative plans in February 2022 to integrate features such as metaverse-based content experiences and content tokenization via NFTs.

OpenSea blocks Cuban artists from the platform due to US sanctions

OpenSea’s terms of service explicitly prohibit individuals and organizations from sanctioned regions from using its platform.

Nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea has been banning artists and collectors from Cuba, citing United States sanctions as the key reason behind its action.

According to a report published by Artnet, 30 artists and collectors have been banned from the popular NFT marketplace until now. The most noted artist to face the axe includes well-known Havana-based artists Gabriel Guerra Bianchini and Fábrica de Arte Cubano.

OpenSea marketplace has mentioned in its terms of service that it explicitly prohibits sanctioned individuals and individuals in sanctioned jurisdictions. The NFT marketplace’s adhesion to United States sanctions was widely known and included countries such as Venezuela, Iran and Syria. However, the recent blocking of Cuban artists adds the country to that list as well.

“We continue to holistically evaluate what other measures need to be taken to serve our community and comply with applicable law,” an OpenSea Spokesperson told Cointelegraph.

A Twitter profile called NFT Cuba Art revealed earlier in December that OpenSea had blocked them from viewing or listing their art while they still had access to their wallets. Erich García Cruz, the founder of Bit Remasa, responded that their NFT collections were banned too. Cryptocuban founder Gabriel Bianchini added that the future of Web3 doesn’t look decentralized.

Apart from OpenSea, several crypto platforms had to shut down their services for Russian customers in the wake of the new European Union sanctions issued after the war in Ukraine began earlier this year.

Related: Proactive sanctions can help spare the ecosystem: Chainalysis exec

While the cryptocurrency ecosystem is built on the ethos of decentralization, the majority of the intermediaries and firms facilitating various services still very much work like most centralized Web2 companies. 

The crypto community was not very pleased with the auctions of the NFT marketplace and called for an end to intermediaries. Another user said that there is a need for real decentralized platforms that don’t care about nationalities