Syz the moment

Crypto-focused Blockchain Capital has raised $580 million across two new funds, one of the biggest raises for the asset class this year and the largest for the venture firm in its 10-year history. Blockchain Capital, which has an existing $2 billion in assets under management, will use the fresh capital to back crypto startups in areas including decentralized finance and gaming as well as infrastructure, general partner Kinjal Shah said in an interview with Bloomberg News.

Source: Bloomberg

An astoundingly lucky solo miner solved block number 803,821 late Friday night and won the entire 6.25 bitcoin block reward, worth approximately $162,000. Con Kolivas, the admin of Solo CKPool, announced the unlikely news on X, formerly Twitter, saying that this particular miner had only 1 petahash of computing power, yet still came out on top. “A miner of this size would only solve a block solo on average once every 7 years at current [difficulty],” Kolivas wrote. The miner kept nearly all the bitcoin (BTC) he won, aside from a 2% fee that went to Solo CKPool for its upkeep.

Source: Blockworks

Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc. announced this Wednesday that it has secured approvals from both the National Futures Association (NFA) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). That means that the firm can now operate as a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM), and will therefore be able to offer investments in crypto futures to eligible customers in the United States.

Coinbase is now poised to be the pioneer in offering U.S. clients both traditional spot crypto trading and regulated crypto futures.

Source: Decrypt

Visa has wrapped up testing a way for users to pay on-chain gas fees directly in fiat with a credit or debit card, the payments giant said on Thursday. The experiment, which was conducted on the Ethereum Goerli testnet, uses a paymaster contract to sponsor gas fees on behalf of users, according to a statement. It means users can send blockchain transactions without having to worry about maintaining a balance of ether. Visa believes the contract could make transactions more accessible to a wider range of users. “Our experiment aims to offer a promising approach to substantially addressing the challenges of blockchain-based transactions,” Visa’s technical team wrote. “By leveraging the innovative concept of a paymaster, in conjunction with account abstraction and the ERC-4337 standard, we explored the potential for a process that could redefine blockchain-based transactions.”

Source: Blockworks

Luxembourg-based Bitstamp is halting trade in the US for seven cryptos classified as securities by the SEC. From Aug. 29 onwards, the platform will discontinue trading for AXS, CHZ, MANA, MATIC, NEAR, SAND and SOL. In legal actions against Binance and Coinbase, the SEC asserted that these tokens, among others, met the standards of a security. Offering alleged securities on a crypto exchange brings about issues such as heightened regulatory oversight, potential legal liabilities, and regulatory complexities.

Bitstamp said in an announcement on Tuesday that new trades won’t be allowed with these assets from later this month, and any current trades will be halted.Users were prompted to complete any buy or sell transactions they wanted with the impacted assets before the deadline.

Source: Blockworks

OpenAI has released a new web crawling bot, GPTBot, to expand its dataset for training its next generation of AI systems—and the next iteration apparently has an official name. The company trademarked the term "GPT-5," hinting at an upcoming release, while giving web publishers a heads up on how to keep their content out of its massive corpus. The web crawler will collect publicly available data from websites, while avoiding paywalled, sensitive, and prohibited content, according to OpenAI. Similar to other search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex, however, the system is opt out—by default, GPTBot will assume accessible information is fair game. In order to prevent the OpenAI web crawler from ingesting a website, its owner must add a "disallow" rule to a standard file on the server.

Source: Decrypt

PayPal is rolling out a new dollar-backed stablecoin. The stablecoin, issued by Paxos Trust Co, was detailed in a statement published Monday morning by the American payments giant. PayPal announced that customers who purchase PayPal USD will be able to transfer the stablecoin between “compatible external wallets” and PayPal. They will also be able to fund purchases with PayPal USD. The stablecoin will be available starting Monday, and PayPal customers will be able to purchase, send, convert and fund purchases in the “coming weeks.” The announcement marks the first time that a major US financial company has created a stablecoin. PayPal’s leadership confirmed the existence of the project in early 2022. PayPal began integrating crypto services in early 2021, allowing users to buy, sell and hold major digital assets like bitcoin and ether.

Source: Blockworks

The SEC reportedly asked Coinbase to temporarily halt trading in all crypto assets, excluding bitcoin, prior to initiating a legal suit alleging violation of securities laws.Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that the SEC told the company it believes all assets, except for bitcoin, were considered securities, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

When Armstrong asserted that Coinbase held a different interpretation of the law, the SEC declined to elaborate on the reasoning behind its conclusion, according to the report. Instead, the regulatory body insisted that “you need to delist every asset other than bitcoin.” The SEC filed a lawsuit against Coinbase on June 6, claiming that the company was operating as an unregistered exchange. In the suit, the agency classified 13 cryptoassets as securities, including SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, SAND, AXS, CHZ, FLOW, ICP, NEAR, VGX, DASH and NEXO.

Source: blocworks