The startup offers multi-chain structured financial products with plans for a buy-side altcoin options market.
Thetanuts Finance, a multi-chain structured products protocol, has closed a $17 million funding round led by Polychain Capital, Hyperchain Capital and Magnus Capital.
The new funding will help the company create new partnerships with layer 1 and layer 2 networks, liquidity providers, blockchain foundations, market makers and exchanges.
The fundraise comes as the industry continues to slowly climb out of the crypto winter deep freeze that’s nearly stalled the investment landscape. Infrastructure product shave proven most resilient and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects have taken favor over centralized products after the collapse of centralized exchange FTX last fall.
Thetanuts Finance is a DeFi firm offering a range of crypto structured products that cater to a wide customer base, including option traders, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), market makers and other liquidity providers. Users of the platform can earn yield on major cryptocurrencies and popular altcoins, provide liquidity, and execute short and long options strategies.
Thetanuts Finance will soon launch a buy-side altocin options market powered by decentralized options vaults (DOVs), which the firm says will make options strategies – particularly those involving altcoins – available for a wider range of investors.
“At Thetanuts Finance, we are dedicated to leading the way in building a thriving altcoin options market for both budding and established ecosystems across different chains, including non-EVMs. Our commitment to innovation and decentralization has never been stronger, and we look forward to driving the DOV model to new heights,” said Thetanuts Finance advisor Sherwin Lee in the press release.
Thetanuts Finance last raised an $18 million funding round in March 2022 led by crypto fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), Deribit, QCP Capital and Jump Crypto. 3AC began its public collapse about three months later due in part to the $60 billion implosion of the Terra ecosystem.
Recommended for you:
How to Build Decentralized Twitter
Why Bitcoin Mining Is a Matter of National Security
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer: There’s ‘A Lot to Unpack’ in CFTC’s Filing Against Binance
Join the Most Important Conversation in Crypto and Web3 in Austin, Texas April 26-28
The exchange will be open to professional investors. HashKey plans to welcome retail users in coming months.
Digital asset financial services firm HashKey Group plans to introduce a regulated exchange in the second quarter, the company said in a statement on its website.
The exchange, called HashKey PRO, will offer bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), USD coin (USDC) and fiat trading pairs, according to the statement. HashKey said it is preparing to offer services to retail investors “in the coming months.”
The company is one of only two firms with the licenses from Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) to operate a virtual asset trading platform and provide trading services. While the regulator has indicated it is considering allowing licensed platforms to serve retail investors, the investor protection measures under which these services could be offered are not yet set.
The SFC has indicated that licensed exchanges will be able to offer only very liquid virtual assets for retail trading and its token admission requirements are not yet clear.
Recommended for you:
Tron’s USDD Stablecoin Falls to Under 97 Cents, Lowest Level Since June
NFTs Are Now Collateral for Secured Loans. Are You Legally Protected?
Why NFTs Are So Appealing – And How Anyone Can Start Learning for Free
Join the Most Important Conversation in Crypto and Web3 in Austin, Texas April 26-28
The latest price moves in crypto markets in context for April 14, 2023.
This article originally appeared in First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.
Latest Prices
Top Stories
Ether (ETH) continues to outperform bitcoin (BTC) following the Ethereum network’s Shanghai upgrade, which has proven to be bullish for much of the cryptocurrency market, with many altcoins following suit. Ether is up 6% on the day vs. bitcoin which gained 1%. Bitcoin did briefly cross $31,000 on Friday for the first time since June 2022, marking a 10% gain over the last 7 days. Ether rose 13% over the same time frame. Arbitrum (ARB) an Ethereum scaling solution, led gains this week, rising almost 30%. According to Sheraz Ahmed, STORM’s managing partner, ARB is bouncing back from the overselling caused by its airdrop in March, which saw the Ethereum layer 2 distribute its long-awaited governance token to community members. The airdrop, however, was plagued with bugs and phishing scams. “The crypto markets are heavily emotionally driven, and we often see overbought/sold tokens based on over-reactions,” said Ahmed.
The tokenization of real-world assets gathers pace, Bank of America (BAC) said in a research report Thursday, which noted that the tokenized gold market surpassed $1 billion in value last month. Tokenization is the process of putting ownership of tangible assets – precious metals being one example – on the blockchain, and thus offering the convenience of buying and selling these assets around the clock as the involvement of traditional brokers is not necessary. Bank of America sees this tokenization – which could also include commodities, currencies and equities –as a “key driver of digital asset adoption.”
Solana Labs’ crypto-forward smartphone Saga will go on public sale May 8, the company behind the Solana blockchain said Thursday. Pre-ordered devices are shipping now. The Android smartphone is a gamble on mobile being imperative to the future of crypto, employees at Solana-focused companies told CoinDesk. It was nearly 10 months ago that Solana first teased the radical potential of a cellphone that doubled as a dedicated crypto hardware wallet, and the possibilities such a product could hold for its entire ecosystem. The new device from Solana Mobile costs $1,000 and is built on hardware from Bay Area smartphone company OSOM. Phonemaker names both big and small – HTC and Sirin Labs among them – have previously failed in their efforts to create a crypto-forward smartphone, setting an ominous precedent for Solana, a device built for and marketed to a single crypto ecosystem.
Chart of the Day
Recommended for you:
El Salvador Grants First Digital Asset License to Bitfinex
Calm Before the Storm: Is UK’s Financial Watchdog Gearing Up for Enforcement Action?
Usuario de Uniswap pierde $8M en ether por ataque de phishing
Join the Most Important Conversation in Crypto and Web3 in Austin, Texas April 26-28
The size and price range for the offering has yet to be determined
Blockchain and smart-contract platform Chia Network – founded by Bram Cohen, inventor of BitTorrent – has submitted a confidential draft registration to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering (IPO).
The size and price range for the offering has yet to be determined, Chia said in a press release on Friday.
Chia’s aspirations for a public listing go back to bull run of 2021, when Bloomberg reported the blockchain raised $61 million in a Series D funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Richmond Global Ventures, at $500 million valuation. At the time, then chief operating officer (now CEO) Gene Hoffman was reported to have said that it was on “an accelerated timeline” to an IPO.
Native token XCH has shown little response to the news, currently up around 2.59% on the day, though showing no upward movement since Chia’s announcement at around 13:30 UTC, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Edited by Aoyon Ashraf.
Recommended for you:
Why Venture Capitalists Won’t Be Held Accountable for Investing in FTX
How Ethereum Will Be Transformed in 2022
Dubai Prohibits Privacy Coins Like Monero Under New Crypto Rules
Join the Most Important Conversation in Crypto and Web3 in Austin, Texas April 26-28
APT quickly retraced the entire move after Musk deleted a tweet saying, “AI APT OTT!”
Aptos (APT) rallied by 7.4% in less than a minute on Friday after Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted, “AI APT OTT!”
“APT,” in this context, however, was an acronym for Advanced Persistent Threats, not the Aptos token, and APT retraced the entire move higher after Musk deleted the tweet one hour later.
This is not the first time Elon Musk or companies he’s associated with have moved crypto markets. Only days ago, Twitter changed its logo from the blue bird to the Shina Inu dog that represents dogecoin, sending that memecoin surging as much as 35%. The logo has since been switched back.
Even with the retracement, Aptos, which is the native token of the Aptos blockchain, remains up by 8.2% over the past 24-hours alongside gains for much of the altcoin market following Ethereum’s successful Shanghai upgrade.
Recommended for you:
Bitcoin Soars, Then Retreats. What’s Behind This Week’s Rollercoaster? What’s Ahead?
MakerDAO Favors Holding GUSD Stablecoin as Part of Reserve in Early Voting
Crypto Investors Can Purchase Bankruptcy ‘Put Options’ to Protect Funds on Binance, Coinbase, Kraken
Join the Most Important Conversation in Crypto and Web3 in Austin, Texas April 26-28
APT has now rallied by more than 89% since its debut in October 2022.
The company, based in Austin, Texas, says the new offering is the first bitcoin trust that takes advantage of Bitcoin’s multi-signature capability.
Bitcoin financial services firm Onramp has launched a spot bitcoin (BTC) trust for high net worth investors, that takes advantage of the cryptocurrency’s multi-signature (multisig) capability to enable what Onramp calls multi-party custody – where a group of separate custodians each hold a private key in a multisig arrangement.
Onramp has recruited qualified custodian Kingdom Trust and bitcoin financial services firm Unchained Capital to create a 2-of-3 multisig model, meaning two of those three entities will need to sign a transaction in order to move client funds. The goal is to give clients direct exposure to bitcoin without the hassle of self-custody or the risk of trusting a single custodian.
Each unit of the trust will be equivalent to one BTC and clients will be able to process in-kind redemptions, where they redeem the underlying asset (bitcoin) without triggering a taxable event.
Bitcoin exchange traded funds (ETFs) in the U.S. are currently not allowed to hold bitcoin directly and typically hold bitcoin futures contracts instead. Other investment funds like the $18.7 billion Grayscale bitcoin trust (GBTC) – the world’s largest bitcoin investment fund – do hold BTC but don’t allow in-kind redemptions.
Grayscale ceased redemptions in 2014, citing compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, although some, including Onramp and hedge funds like Fir Tree Capital Management, argue Grayscale’s stopping redemption was self-imposed.
“GBTC did do redemptions,” Michael Tanguma, CEO and co-founder of Onramp told CoinDesk. “They stopped doing them back in 2014/2015 as they wanted to accumulate AUM [assets under management].”
The inability to redeem has been a source of disgruntlement for institutional investors like Fir Tree, which has sued GBTC over the matter. Tanguma says Onramp’s in-kind redemptions (which can be processed after an initial 12-month lockup period) and multi-party custody arrangement sets it apart from Grayscale and offers a new model for bitcoin custody.
Recommended for you:
Bitcoin Soars, Then Retreats. What’s Behind This Week’s Rollercoaster? What’s Ahead?
Mango Markets Exploiter Must Stay Detained Pending Trial, Court Rules
CoinGecko’s Bobby Ong on the Metaverse
Join the Most Important Conversation in Crypto and Web3 in Austin, Texas April 26-28
“It’s essentially the product GBTC should have been,” Michael Tanguma, CEO and co-founder of Onramp told CoinDesk. “And I believe it will be the future of how bitcoin is custodied.”
When asked whether Onramp would need SEC approval to start the redemptions and if so why the regulator would approve the plan, Tanguma responded: “It does not require formal approval because bitcoin is a commodity as per the CFTC, not a security. With that, Onramp does plan to work with securities lawyers to get opinion letters in place to reduce the 12-month lock-up period for redemptions, and will work with all regulators to make sure Onramp stays compliant in all jurisdictions where it offers its services.”
The Singapore firm is one of the largest bitcoin miners in the world with 16.2 EH/s of hashrate.
Bitcoin miner Bitdeer listed today on the Nasdaq after several delays, to lukewarm reception, as the shares of the miner, under the ticker BTDR , lost almost 30% of their value, trading around $6.81 at the time of publication.
The stock was halted shortly after market open, several times, for volatility. Other crypto mining stocks saw single-digit upticks in their share value at the same time frame.
Its merger with a special-purpose acquisition vehicle (SPAC), called Blue Safari Group Acquisition Corp, was approved on Tuesday.
The Singapore-based firm is one of the largest miners in the world, shows a March prospectus filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It has six mining sites across Washington state, Texas, Tennessee and Norway, with a total energy capacity of 775 megawatts (MW) as of the end of 2022, about less than what it had estimated in February 2022. Its hashrate or computing power at the end of January stood at a total of 16.2 exahash per second (EH/s), second only to bankrupt Core Scientific (CORZ) and higher than Riot Platforms (RIOT) and Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA).
About one quarter of that is used for self-mining, meaning it keeps the bitcoin rewards, whereas the rest is given out for cloud mining, meaning customers rents its machines and reap the rewards.
Bitdeer was born out of the world’s largest rig manufacturer, Bitmain, when after a spat between the two co-founders, one of them left and took Bitdeer. Another cloud mining firm also affiliated with Bitmain, BitFuFu, is also in the process of going public via SPAC, but has delayed the listing.
Bitdeer’s, along with other bitcoin miners, financial performance deteriorated in 2022, in part due to worsening market conditions. The firm reported revenues of $330.3 million, and a loss of $62.4 million for 2022, compared with $394.7 million in revenue and a profit of $82.6 million the year before, according to the prospectus filing.
The miner is going public at a better time than last year as market conditions have improved, with bitcoin passing the $30,000 mark and mining equities in many cases outperforming the digital asset in percentage growth. In the future the “market will begin to shift from not only focusing on operators with the biggest scale, but also operators with the best unit economics,” said investment bank Stifel Nicolaus’s analyst Bill Papanastasiou.
Recommended for you:
Mango Markets Exploiter Must Stay Detained Pending Trial, Court Rules
Solana-Based Bonk Inu NFTs Surge Tenfold After Mint but Listing Attracts Criticism
‘I Knew I Was Here to Stay’: Talking the Future of Web3 With David Bianchi
Join the Most Important Conversation in Crypto and Web3 in Austin, Texas April 26-28
The department will explore economic growth, investment and business opportunities in these areas, as well as implications on regulation.
The U.K.’s newly formed Department of Science, Innovation and Technology will advance the country’s metaverse and Web3 strategy, an individual familiar with the matter not authorized to speak publicly told CoinDesk.
The country’s 2023 Spring Budget, released in March, said the government wanted to “lead on the future of web technology, sometimes known as Web3 or the metaverse.” The new tech department, set up in February, will lead the charge in this work. The department’s work will not focus on specific technologies like blockchain and virtual reality but will instead look at potential economic growth opportunities, investment and business models associated with concepts including the Metaverse and Web3, along with implications for regulation, according to the source.
The metaverse, which is a collection of virtual worlds where people can buy and sell things, was described as a $13 trillion dollar opportunity by investment bank Citigroup. Meta – formerly known as Facebook – dove into the sector, shifting much of its operations to focus on building the metaverse, though the recent crypto winter has put a damper on its growth.
The U.K. government has said its science and technology framework will be supported by more than 370 million British pounds ($463 million) in new funding “to boost infrastructure, investment and skills for the U.K.’s most exciting growing technologies, from quantum and supercomputing through to artificial intelligence.”
It’s not clear how much of that money has been dedicated to the tech department and its metaverse work. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who had previously vowed to turn the country into a crypto hub, said the department was put in place to turn scientific and technical innovations into “practical solutions to the challenges we face.”
CoinDesk has reached out to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology for comment.
Recommended for you:
Cory Doctorow’s Web3 Rallying Cry: ‘Seize the Means of Computation’
How Ethereum Will Be Transformed in 2022
Chainlink Unveils Crypto ‘Keepers’ and Anti-Fraud Blockchain Bridges
Join the Most Important Conversation in Crypto and Web3 in Austin, Texas April 26-28
Celsius Network contacted 130 interested parties and signed confidentiality agreements with 40, before choosing NovaWulf.
Digital asset investment firm NovaWulf is poised to take over all assets belonging to bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network and roll them into a new company, once its creditors have been paid out.
NovaWulf will manage the new company for five years, which will have a new name and a new board of directors, and will be traded through a fairly untested method of putting tokenized equity on blockchain. The five-year management term can be renewed. The board of directors will be chosen by NovaWulf and the official committee of creditors, which represents their interests in the bankruptcy. The plan could take effect as soon as June 30.
NovaWulf has committed $45 million in the transaction, but the Celsius assets it will manage could be worth as much as $2 billion, according to Marc D. Puntus, co-head of Centerview Partners, the investment banker working with Celsius during the bankruptcy case. The assets in question include Celsius’s mining unit, its loan portfolio, staked cryptocurrency, and other alternative investments, according to court filings.
However, the team will have a big task ahead of it – turning around one of the most spectacular collapses in crypto history. The leadership sees the bankruptcy process as a way to turn over a new leaf, and then some.
“What I’m really most excited about is the flexibility to be in a position to play offense, when you have an entire industry that’s playing defense,” given that major crypto firms are either in bankruptcy or facing regulatory scrutiny, said NovaWulf co-founder and managing partner Jason New.
Celsius contacted 130 interested parties and signed non-disclosure agreements with 40, before choosing NovaWulf, according to filings.
NovaWulf is related to TeraWulf (WULF), a publicly traded mining company. The two firms share their two co-founders, who don’t have any formal executive roles at NovaWuf, only in the miner – Nazar Khan, who is also the miner’s chief operating officer and chief technology officer, and CEO Paul Prager. NovaWulf’s team has had experience with complicated bankruptcies such as Lehman Brothers.
Tokenized equity
The tokenized equity of the new company will be traded on-chain and outside of stock exchanges. It will however have to follow SEC disclosure rules, which should make its workings more transparent. Just a month before Celsius filed for Chapter 11, industry commentators were disapproving of its opacity.
The equity tokens will be sold on the Provenance Blockchain, according to a presentation filed with the bankruptcy court. Figure Technologies will also provide infrastructure for the tokenized securities.
General earn creditors, with claims below $5,000, will see 70% recovery of their claims in liquidy crypto, the presentation said. Up to 100% of the rest of the assets, minus what is needed to run the new company, will be dispersed to earn creditors with claims over $5,000, who will also receive tokenized securities of the new company.
Total overhaul
Taking on Celsius’ new chapter requires a certain amount of house cleaning: The new firm will have a new name and none of the pre-bankruptcy leaders will be involved, said NovaWulf’s New.
Celsius’s leadership has been slammed for its risky management online and offline, including in a report from a court-appointed examiner after the bankruptcy.
The mining business was, in former CEO and founder Alex Mashinsky’s view, a way to increase yield on customer deposits, according to the report. By June 2022, Celsius had lent out $579 million in Celsius Mining, its wholly owned subsidiary that was established in 2020, and forwarded another $70 million loan shortly before the bankruptcy, the report said.
Celsius was also using stablecoins bought with user funds as collateral to fund “the entire mining asset,” said CEO Chris Ferraro in a Slack message according to the examiners’ report. The company was doing the same to prop up other parts of its business.
By spring of 2022, some of the company’s senior management thought that an initial public offering (IPO) of the mining business could be used to plug a $1.1 billion hole in its balance sheet, along with the sale of other “non-balance sheet assets.”
But the value of the mining unit dropped from $2 billion to $2.9 billion in August of 2021, to $500 to $700 million at the time of the bankruptcy, meaning even if an IPO or sale had gone through, it likely wouldn’t have sufficed to plug in the balance sheet hole.
Risk management and an overreliance on third parties, known as hosting firms, formed Celsius’s mining’s Achilles heel.
Recommended for you:
How to Build Decentralized Twitter
Web3 Music Streaming Platform Audius Integrates TikTok
Join the Most Important Conversation in Crypto and Web3 in Austin, Texas April 26-28
The new management will look to vertically integrate the mining business, which now counts about 120,000 machines. At least initially, they will be looking for hosting agreements, but a focus will be to set up their own hosting capacity down the line to better control risks and costs.
Asked whether the new firm will be working with TeraWulf for hosting, New said it wouldn’t.
A report noted an increase in spot DEXs offering derivatives trading on their platforms.
Crypto derivatives trading volumes across both centralized and decentralized exchanges rose for a third consecutive month in March, the first three-month streak since at least January 2022, according to figures from CCData.
Crypto derivatives are financial contracts such as futures and options that relate to cryptocurrencies. They are popular because they allow market participants to hedge their positions or to speculate on market direction.
Derivatives trading accounted for about 74% of the roughly $4 trillion crypto market volume last month, the data show. While the bulk of derivatives trading took place on centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges accounted for $68.7 billion, with dYdX taking a 62.6% share.
“We expect decentralized derivatives protocols to continue performing well and gain market share in the next quarter,” said CCData in a report.
There has been an increasing trend of spot DEXs adding derivatives trading to their platforms as they notice the potential of derivative DEXs, according to CCData.
Recommended for you:
What Hic et Nunc’s Resurrection Says About Decentralized Infrastructure
‘I Knew I Was Here to Stay’: Talking the Future of Web3 With David Bianchi
UST Stablecoin Veers Wildly From Dollar Peg. Here’s the Latest
Join the Most Important Conversation in Crypto and Web3 in Austin, Texas April 26-28
In March, DEX PancakeSwap announced it was partnering with ApolloX to introduce trading of perpetual swaps. Quickswap, a decentralized exchange built on Polygon, is also launching perpetual products soon, CCData said.