Bitcoin Miners Secure Nuclear Deals, ShapeShifting Airdrop + More News

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
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Mining news

• Oklo, a California-based company developing clean energy plants, announced a 20-year commercial partnership with Compass Mining, a US-based online marketplace for Bitcoin (BTC) mining hardware and hosting, to introduce advanced nuclear fission to supplement fossil fuels and “promote diversity and sustainability in the energy sources used by miners.”
• Independent power producer Energy Harbor said it has entered into a five year partnership with mining company hosting provider Standard Power to provide electricity from its nuclear fleet to Standard Power’s new bitcoin mining center.
• Chinese province Anhui plans to shut down all crypto mining projects within the next three years due to a power supply shortage, Bloomberg reported, citing hf365.com. The province will also curb new projects that require large amounts of energy or power consumption.
• Crypto mining and staking company Foundry Digital has announced they have sold around 2,300 Whatsminer M30S mining machines to bitcoin mining and power generation company Greenidge. All machines were previously used at Greenidge’s carbon-neutral bitcoin mining facility in Upstate New York.
• Mining company BIT Mining Limited said it has entered into securities purchase agreements with unnamed institutional and accredited investors to raise USD 50m in a private placement. The company intends to use the net proceeds of the private placement to acquire additional mining machines, build new data centers overseas, expand its infrastructure, and improve its working capital position.

Exchanges news

• ShapeShift, founded in 2014, said it has begun dissolving its corporate structure, evolving into a community-owned and governed crypto platform. Per the team, their codebase and technology shall be open-sourced in the coming months. Also, the native token of the platform, FOX, “has been airdropped to the largest number of eligible recipients in crypto history.” “There are now more than 1 million potential FOX holders who can choose to claim tokens,” ShapeShift said, adding that they have never sold these tokens and there was no initial coin offering.

Adoption news

• Crypto payments startup CryptoSpend will issue Visa cards that will allow their users to spend their BTC trading profits in shops and bars by tapping on existing payment terminals, the Financial Review reported.
• Blockchain-based travel booking platform Travala said its revenue for Q2 2021 reached USD 9.8m, comprising hotels, flights, activities, and integration fees. This represents 141% growth over the previous quarter and 3,476% growth over the same period in 2020, they added.
• Trezor Suite, a new desktop application from SatoshiLabs, producer of the original hardware wallet Trezor, is now live, said the emailed press release. It offers advanced privacy features, and it helps battle phishing attacks by providing isolation from cloned sites and malicious links, they claim. The suite provides the option to buy, sell, and exchange crypto with Invity.io, as well as anonymous mode via Tor, among other features. CoinJoin, Bitcoin full node, mobile app, and recurring buy crypto savings account are “coming soon.”
• Some of Madrid’s trendiest restaurants now accept crypto pay, reported Voz Populi. The media outlet noted that among the eateries and bars now accepting cryptoassets were upscale venues on the Calle Ponzano, dubbed “Madrid’s hottest street” by Lonely Planet in 2019. The multi-venue project is the brainchild of a local tokenization drive by the Spanish blockchain firm 2gether.

Regulation news

• French regulators proposed that the European Union should oversee stricter rules pertaining to cryptoassets, as part of a comprehensive package of reforms aimed at strengthening financial regulation in Europe by giving greater powers to the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). The French market regulator, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), said that, “If ESMA provides the power of direct oversight of public offerings of crypto-assets in the EU and of crypto-asset service providers, it will create obvious economies of scale for all national supervisors and concentrate expertise effectively, to the common European advantage.”
• South Korean parliamentary committees are set to consider the merits of draft four crypto laws put forward by MPs as private members’ bills. Per Hanguk Kyungjae, the bills will all be on the agenda for committees next month, and could be joined by a new bill from the regulatory Financial Services Commission (FSC). The “strictest” of the bills proposes to apply the same rigid regulations that apply to South Korean crypto exchanges to all crypto-related firms based in the country, including those dealing with crypto custody.

Investments news

• Blockchain security specialist CertiK announced a USD 37m Series B funding round co-led by Coatue Management and Shunwei Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures. “Since closing USD 11m in funding just under a year ago, CertiK has worked with over 600 new clients, resulting in profitable H1 2021 revenues that have more than quadrupled the revenue of the full 2020 year,” the company said without providing numbers.
• Staking solution provider ClayStack has announced it has raised USD 5.2m in seed funding co-led by CoinFund and ParaFi Capital. The funds will be used to build a platform that allows users to make the most of their staked assets irrespective of the ecosystem that they are in, with a public Alpha launch set for Q3 2021.
• Crypto wallet Phantom said it has raised USD 9m in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The team intends to use these funds to continue to build its team, develop new platform features, and expand to other blockchains.
• The number of Chinese provinces that have directly invested in blockchain technology through public spending is on the rise, reported Caijing. A total of 33 regions have thus far unveiled their own detailed plans to incentivize blockchain-related business, develop blockchain resources of their own and attract companies working in the sector to set up shop locally. One province has even promised to award any local startup that moves into China’s equivalent of the Fortune 500 or the FTSE 100 with a cash reward worth around USD 2.7m.