As the summer season officially concludes this Saturday, the outlook for crypto fundraising appears promising heading into the fall.



Eleven crypto startups raised a combined total of $115.5 million across a variety of disciplines this week. Gaming, though, took the cake. 



Proof of Play, which describes itself as an on-chain game studio, raised $33 million in seed funding on Thursday. 



Numerous angel investors participated in the round, including Balaji Srinivasan, Justin Kan and many others. 



A16z’s crypto arm led the round, giving high praise to Proof of Play founder Amitt Mahajan. Mahajan is no stranger to gaming, having co-created Farmville, the farming simulator that took Facebook by storm in 2009. 



“Amitt and the entire Proof of Play team are committed to a gaming future where composability, interoperability and permanence are at the core of gameplay: you own your assets, and anyone can create their own game on top of another,” a16z wrote in a blog post announcing the fresh funding. 



Proof of Play’s first game, Pirate Nation, is a role playing title that has NFT functionality and allows for developers to build on top of it thanks to “on-chain game contracts.” The game, which was released back in December, was built on Ethereum and Arbitrum Nova.



Custody and digital assets infrastructure put up big numbers



A16z crypto also had its hand in raising $25 million for a startup called Bastion this week. 



The firm, which emerged from stealth on Monday, is aiming to offer crypto custody, wallet management and digital asset trading mostly to corporations, Bloomberg reported.



Nomura’s Laser Digital Ventures, Robot Ventures, Not Boring Capital and others kicked in capital to support the seed round. 



Bastion was co-founded by two former a16z crypto executives. Riyaz Faizullabhoy and Nassim Eddequiouaq used to serve as the venture capital firm’s chief technology officer and chief security officer,

Crypto funding: Startups raise $115M across gaming, custody, and institutional services

There’s a lot to catch up on from this week when it comes to professional moves across the industry. 



Galaxy Digital appointed Leon Marshall CEO of Europe about five months after the crypto investment firm announced a plan to bring ETPs to Europe. 



In addition to his new role as a regional chief executive, Marshall will continue serving as global head of sales, a position he was hired for in June, according to a company release.



Galaxy CEO Mike Novogratz called Europe “a region that is critically important to our growth strategy.”



Before making the jump over to Galaxy in June, Marshall was global head of sales at Genesis for over four years. Prior to his stint at the bankrupt crypto lender, he was in strategy and business development at Gnosis.



Read more: Galaxy links up With $821B asset manager as part of Europe ETP push



Elsewhere, ex-Signature Bank chief information officer John Trainor found a new gig at Abelian Partners where he’ll lead the financial services firm's technology consulting practices. 



Trainor was at Signature when it joined Silicon Valley bank in failure during March 2023. Silvergate was the first major American bank to falter among the three, and First Republic closed its doors on May 1, 2023.



While at Signature, Trainor led the bank’s blockchain payments initiative.



Notable departures



Another crypto banking firm, BCB Group, is losing a key executive. 



Chief banking officer Ian Moore will exit by the end of the month, leaving the firm after just over a year. 



Moore’s CV lists him at four different companies throughout his career, with crypto experience from BCB Group and Paysafe. 



But for most of his time in the workforce, Moore was firmly rooted in traditional finance. He started out at Citi in 1998, staying there for over eight years before moving to Deutsche Bank for over 13 years. 



Separately, Jack Dorsey’s Block announced that Square CEO Alyssa Henry will step down on Oct. 2, per an

Crypto hiring: Galaxy Digital doubles down on Europe with new C-suite hire

If you can’t beat them, join them. Like, all of them.



In the fierce battle for the scalability trilemma crown, Solana, Ethereum and their accompanying ecosystems are often pitted against each other as mutually exclusive solutions. 



Apparently, it doesn’t have to be this way. On the Bell Curve podcast (Spotify/Apple), Blockworks co-founder Michael Ippolito details the recently revealed architecture of Eclipse. The rollup tech harnesses Solana’s speedy execution, Ethereum’s secure settlement, Risc Zero proofs and Celestia data availability in a “best of all worlds” team approach to scaling.



Ippolito says the Solana Virtual Machine or SVM holds some key advantages over Ethereum — outside of network effects — particularly in its ability to perform parallel executions. “The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) has a single thread processor, which just limits its scale,” he says.



“You have very fast execution, really cheap [data availability], and it still settles down to [Ethereum],” he says. “I think they're going to use ETH as the gas token as well. So, it's kind of a very interesting blend of a whole bunch of different ecosystems.”



Read more: Risc Zero introduces ‘Type 0’ zkEVM to make zero-knowledge tech more accessible



In addition, Neon — an EVM operating on Solana — will provide compatibility between Ethereum and Solana, Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz explains. “If you want to easily deploy EVM smart contracts on Eclipse, you can do it through Neon.”



Yanowitz says it’s the first time he has seen a fully modular setup that brings “all these different providers together.” 



Ippolito details some of the limitations of Ethereum’s main chain, noting its relatively low throughput and gas costs, in particular. Because of the base fee and computational resources that every transaction requires, “if there's like a really hot NFT mint, it can multiply the base fee,” he says. 



“That base fee gets

Eclipse takes a ‘best of all worlds’ approach to solve scalability trilemma

Peter Marton, the head of the virtual currency division at the New York State Department of Financial Services, will leave his position at the end of the month. 



Marton, who started in the role in December 2021, is moving to the private sector, a spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. Prior to joining the NYSDFS, Marton worked in digital asset strategy at IBM. 



The NYSDFS spent several months looking to fill the deputy superintendent for virtual currency position prior to hiring Marton. 



The virtual currency division is responsible for regulating crypto financial services and products, most notably the state’s BitLicense program, launched in 2015. The BitLicense is a required certification for businesses looking to engage in crypto business activities, including storing, selling and issuing digital assets in New York. 



The NYSDFS is currently looking for Marton’s replacement, according to a job posting from the agency. 



The candidate should expect to be “responsible for overall management of Bitlicense applications process, examinations, and ongoing supervision of Bitlicense,” per the posting. 



The news comes shortly after the NYSDFS announced it was seeking public feedback on a new proposed rule that would change its listing guidelines for digital assets. 



“This coin-delisting policy must include robust procedures that comprehensively address all steps involved in removing support for a coin” and requires the company to tailor the policy to its “specific business model, operations, customers and counterparties, geographies of operations, and service providers; and to the use, purpose, and specific features of coins being considered,” the agency said.







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NY’s top crypto regulator is leaving office this month

A Swiss non-profit working on the world’s first zero-knowledge light client for Bitcoin, has reached a major milestone towards bringing zero-knowledge proofs to the most valuable crypto network.



ZeroSync’s verifier for the Bitcoin network’s block headers makes it possible to build a zk proof-based light client for the network, the first step in a roadmap of permissionless innovation, according project lead Robin Linus.



In the near term, a light client might let you run a Bitcoin full node on, say, a mobile phone. But that roadmap includes a second-layer protocol on top of Bitcoin, that can bring tokens — such as stablecoins — to the Bitcoin network, along with a 20 to 50 times throughput increase, without requiring any sort of fork.



“What is cool about that solution is that, first of all, you can process about 100 transactions on the base layer,” Linus told Blockworks. “And in addition to that, we also get perfect privacy — you can encrypt both the transaction amounts and the transaction graphs, and then you basically get best-in-class privacy, comparable to Zcash.”



The privacy benefit is essentially a byproduct of the protocol’s use of STARKs, the proving system invented by StarkWare, not a deliberate design choice.



ZeroSync received a grant from Geometry Research in 2022, one from StarkWare earlier this year, and has since formed the foundation. The group’s work is the first effort to use StarkWare’s Cairo programming language outside of the Ethereum ecosystem.



A soft fork would be required to enable trustless bitcoin bridging on the layer-2 network that ZeroSync envisions. Yet even without that, the network can permissionlessly support useful features, such as token transfers where the fees are paid in a stablecoins, removing the need for bitcoin (BTC) to pay for transactions.



Bitcoin is resistant to change by design, requiring consensus from Core developers, and near-consensus from full node operators, including

Bitcoin’s first zero-knowledge light client seeks to drive innovation

Former FTX US president Brett Harrison, now the founder and CEO of crypto infrastructure firm Architect, says there is “hope” US lawmakers and regulators will come to an agreement on fair and effective digital asset policy — but it’s going to take a lot of work. 



“Regulators are in a difficult position that we have to empathize with,” Harrison said during a panel discussion at the Mainnet conference in New York Thursday. 



Agencies are not only responsible for creating and enforcing policy, they also have to answer to the public when things go wrong, like the implosion of FTX last year, Harrison said. 



“It’s not presently really the time for pushing for innovation,” he added. “It’s about making sure this doesn’t happen again.” 



Architect, which Harrison founded this year, has had its own regulatory boxes to check.



Just this week the company received its introducing broker license for regulated derivatives, issued under the National Futures Association and independent from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Architect is now cleared to accept futures contract trading orders but cannot accept fiat currency or other assets to complete these orders. 



“Derivatives markets require modern and secure technological entry points built for the disparate range of products they have come to encompass, physical and digital, in order to enhance and expand institutional participation,” Harrison wrote on X, formerly Twitter, after the announcement. 



Harrison, who left FTX.US in September 2022, just ahead of its parent company’s collapse in November, added during the panel discussion that the future of crypto policy in the US does not solely depend on one agency. 



“It’s wrong,” to say either the CFTC or the SEC should be the main agency in charge, Harrison said, especially given that there are many assets and areas of the industry that could likely fall under joint jurisdiction. 



In terms of when the industry

Former FTX US president sees the glass half full on crypto regulation

While some consider Tether's decision to resume lending as questionable, one industry executive believes it won't meaningfully disrupt what is currently the most liquid stablecoin.



Tether (USDT), a stablecoin with a market capitalization of roughly $83 billion, is intended to maintain a value of $1 and can be redeemed for US dollars at any time. 



Its issuer began accommodating short-term loan requests during the second quarter, a Tether spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal Thursday. These loans — to be eliminated by 2024 — were made to clients with which the company has “long-standing relationships,” the representative added.



It remains unclear who exactly these borrowers are.



The company’s fulfilling of loan requests comes after Tether said in a December 2022 blog post that it would “reduce secured loans in Tether’s reserves to zero” throughout 2023.



James Butterfill, head of research at CoinShares, said Tether had improved transparency via quarterly independent audits and saying in October 2022 that it was replacing commercial paper in its reserves with US Treasury bills.



“It is a little disappointing to see them take a step backwards like this,” he told Blockworks in an email. “That said…we don't think it will materially impact their robustness as a stablecoin, as investors still have a much clearer idea as to their holdings.”



Tether’s total assets amounted to roughly $86.5 billion, while total liabilities were about $83.2 billion, as of June 30, according to a July auditor report. Roughly $55.8 billion of its assets — or nearly 65% — were in US Treasury bills, it notes.  



Tether’s secured loans — amounting to $5.5 billion, as of June 30, are “fully collateralized by liquid assets…and are measured at [amortized] cost,” the report adds. 



“You would have to assume a very high default rate to consume all of their cushion,” Butterfill said.



Read more: Stablecoin issuers like tether may

Tether’s return to lending a ‘step backwards’ but unlikely to hurt USDT: Research exec

While DAOs toy with novel systems to fix sclerotic DAO governance, a16z’s Miles Jennings suggests looking backwards — to Niccolo Machiavelli. 



Likening today’s clamoring Discord channels to 15th century Italian city-states, the a16z general counsel and head of decentralization penned two essays using Machiavelli as a jumping off point to propose a series of reforms for DAO governance. 



Jennings believes DAO leaders should be held accountable to members, and he thinks governance can be fixed by people doing less of it. 



Perhaps the most unique aspect of Jennings’ argument is the notion that DAOs should reduce subjective human decisions in governance wherever possible. Instead, decisions could be made by third-party clients of DAOs, and users can govern by choosing where to do business while protocols remain neutral — if DEX A’s fees are too high, users are free to switch to DEX B without the protocol’s governance ever getting involved.



Machiavelli was famously pessimistic on human nature, and Jennings believes DAOs should be, too. Starting from the premise that a leadership class will arise in any governing body, Jennings outlines a wonkish bicameral governance structure for DAOs that would see proposals introduced by one council and approved by the other. 



Jennings advocates direct elections and term limits for some of the “stakeholders” in the legislative councils.



Ultimately, in Jennings’ view, DAOs need to get real about greed.



“Machiavelli’s philosophy was developed with a pragmatic understanding of the struggle for social power,” Jennings wrote, and such realpolitik is needed when decentralization can tend to be for show while insiders profit. 



For Jennings, Machiavellian DAOs present a chance at the sort of stakeholder capitalism that seems beyond reach in traditional finance. Jennings’ proposed reforms would wrest some power away from whales and ruffle feathers in the process — but perhaps it’s better

DAOs should learn from Machiavelli, says a16z crypto’s Jennings

The fraud trial for former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is set to begin on Oct. 3 with a jury selection. The six-week trial will take place less than a year after the FTX collapse.



Bankman-Fried is accused of fraud and conspiracy in connection to the now-bankrupt FTX.



A judge revoked Bankman-Fried’s bond back in August following a petition from the prosecutors. As part of the petition, prosecutors cited Bankman-Fried’s contact with a New York Times journalist as a tipping point. 



Bankman-Fried was accused of leaking former colleague — and ex-girlfriend — Caroline Ellison’s diary entries to the reporter. The government argued at the time that Bankman-Fried had shown a history of witness tampering, including attempting to contact an unnamed witness — the “current General Counsel of FTX US who may be a witness at trial” — via Signal.



Judge Lewis Kaplan, who will oversee the trial, said there was probable cause to believe that Bankman-Fried violated the terms of his bail in his attempts to allegedly tamper with the witnesses. 



Since then, Bankman-Fried has been held at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center. He will remain there for the duration of his trial, as a panel from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his appeal for release on Thursday, Sept. 21.



The judges wrote that they agreed with Judge Kaplan’s findings that Bankman-Fried had probably attempted to tamper with witnesses.



Bankman-Fried’s lawyers claimed that he was denied a vegan diet.



Read more: Drowning in Sam Bankman-Fried: A survival guide



In addition to the appeal denial, Bankman-Fried’s legal team suffered a second setback on Thursday after Judge Kaplan barred seven of Bankman-Fried’s expert witnesses from testifying in October. The government had previously moved to toss the testimonies.



However, some may be able to take the stand to rebut the prosecution’s witnesses if Bankman-Fried files an additional disclosure, though the

Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial starts Oct. 3: What you need to know

Eclipse will use Solana’s tech stack for its upcoming mainnet launch, the Ethereum layer-2 network project announced. Eclipse’s mainnet is expected to go live before the end of the year.



By design, a blockchain stack contains four different layers: execution, settlement, consensus and data availability.



Blockchains, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, carry out all these tasks in a single layer. This means that when a transaction is made, the blockchain executes, settles, reaches consensus, and ensures data availability all within the same layer. 



Modular blockchains, on the other hand, are designed to focus on specific tasks. 



Neel Somani, founder of Eclipse, notes that he believes all layer-2s — validiums, optimiums and zk-rollups — should be considered “modular blockchains.” 



“At a minimum, they've all separated execution from settlement,” he said. 



Notably, Eclipse will use Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) for execution on its upcoming mainnet. The execution layer is the blockchain layer that holds the code and rules of a transaction; it enables transaction signing and smart contract execution. 



On Ethereum, for example, transactions are executed sequentially. On Solana, however, there is a parallel execution environment. This means that more transactions can be processed at a lower cost. 



“That's probably the biggest difference,” Somani said. “Another benefit is the ‘local fee markets,’ meaning if one application gets a ton of activity, it doesn't impact fees for other apps. It is a smaller set of ‘opcodes,’ and it's register-based which makes [zero-knowledge] proving easier.”



Elsewhere, Eclipse will use Risc Zero for proving. Settlement, like most rollups today, will take place on Ethereum — meaning that it will utilize Ethereum’s security properties to validate transactions. Data availability (DA) will be derived from Celestia. 



Read More: Why data availability sampling matters for blockchain

Eclipse is using Solana’s virtual machine to launch an Ethereum L2

Europe-based CoinShares has launched a hedge fund division as part of its expansion into the US.



It’s a notable move, given that other industry firms are departing the US as regulatory uncertainties around crypto persist.



The expansion marks the first time the crypto investment firm will make its products available to qualified American investors, though CoinShares itself isn’t new to the hedge fund space.



The Jersey-based firm began as a commodity hedge fund called Global Advisors that founded the regulated Global Advisors Bitcoin Investment Fund in 2014. That fund operated until 2017.



CoinShares is perhaps better known today for its crypto ETPs, as well as its research and venture arms. 



Lewis Fellas is set to lead the new unit, called CoinShares Hedge Fund Solutions. Fellas joined CoinShares in March after founding and working as chief investment officer of Larks Leaf Asset Management, according to his LinkedIn profile. 



CoinShares CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti said in a statement that the demand for actively managed exposure to digital assets is a “natural progression” amid a macro environment marked by inflation. 



The Federal Reserve has raised the federal funds rate repeatedly over the last 18 or so months to tackle inflation. Though the US central bank chose this week to keep rates steady, it signaled the possibility of another rate increase by the end of the year.



“The long-awaited return of interest rate-driven volatility is a great opportunity that we plan to capture with our novel fund products,” Fellas said in a statement. “Each product that will be offered is designed to mitigate counterparty risk whilst providing investors with clearly defined asset class and strategy exposures.”



Funds being made available to US investors include vehicles based on Bitcoin and Ethereum, a spokesperson told Blockworks. 



The bitcoin fund, called Bitcoin Integrated Strategies, “deploys multiple strategies such as call overwrite,

As others depart the US, CoinShares expands via new hedge fund unit

Google Cloud has added 11 more blockchains to public data sets on BigQuery, the tech giant’s data analytics service originally launched in 2010.



Users can now query data from Avalanche, Arbitrum, Cronos, Ethereum Goerli, Fantom, Near, Optimism, Polkadot, Polygon, Polygon Mumbai and Tron, according to a Thursday blog post. 



Google called these blockchains “in-demand” and says that users can now retrieve information about “the flow of assets from one wallet to another, which tokens are most popular, and how users are interacting with smart contracts.”



It also said that customers are often asking things like how many NFTs were minted on specific chains or how transaction fees compare across chains. 



Read more: Google loosens ad guidelines for NFT game providers



Google added that having more access to a wider array of networks can help curious individuals answer questions like those “without the overhead of operating nodes or maintaining an indexer.”



Back in 2018, Google’s cloud segment added support for Bitcoin and Ethereum on BigQuery. And with the advent of ordinals, essentially Bitcoin NFTs, coming to the network in January 2023, Google is also now allowing developers to query satoshis and/or ordinals from the Bitcoin dataset on BigQuery.



Previously, in 2019, six other chains were added to BigQuery beyond the big two, including Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Dogecoin, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, and Zcash.



Google’s commitment to advancing blockchain isn’t limited to maintaining large blockchain datasets. Blockworks previously reported that Google Cloud has become an oracle operator for LayerZero, a cross-chain messaging protocol.







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