According to Dune data, the total transaction volume of the Ethereum NFT market exceeded 203 million US dollars in the past week, reaching a new high of 29 weeks.
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RBN, Ribbon Finance’s governance token, surged 19% in the past 24 hours ahead of the launch of Aevo, Ribbon’s on-chain options exchange.

The token’s price increased 18.9% to 25 cents, according to data from CoinGecko. While the token’s volume jumped more than 477% to over $4.2 million in the same time period, the number of wallets holding RBN has remained flat around around 4,200, according to blockchain analytics firm Nansen.

Unique RBN addresses (Nansen)

Ribbon Finance, a suite of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols known for providing access to users with several on-chain structured products, will soon be launching Aevo, an on-chain options exchange where Ribbon’s options contracts will settle. Aevo was initially set to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022 but has yet to be open to the public.

RBN token seniority distribution (Nansen)

“The majority of the tokens are held by long-term investors and the spike could be a sign of insiders and true believers doubling down, especially if new wallets are stable, which they largely are,” Andrew Thurman, Nansen’s head of research, told CoinDesk.

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Global asset management firm Brevan Howard is taking over a hedge fund spun off from crypto investment company Dragonfly Capital.

Brevan Howard, which manages more than $30 billion in assets, has entered into an agreement to assume control of Dragonfly’s “Liquid Opportunities” fund, according to unidentified people cited by Bloomberg.

The long-short strategy fund was established in June 2021 and managed by Kevin Hu, Ashwin Ramachandran and Lawrence Diao. Hu’s LinkedIn profile describes his current role as Chief Investment Officer at Nova Digital, a Brevan Howard fund. Liquid Opportunities will operate under Brevan Howard’s crypto and digital assets division, compatible with its active trading approach, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

An internal Dragonfly document reviewed by Bloomberg said: “After extensive discussions, we decided that Brevan Howard, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, was the right long-term home for Kevin and his team.”

Kevin Hu’s move from Dragonfly to Brevan Howard, alongside the rest of its liquid strategies team, was reported by The Block in January, with a focus on investing in listed digital assets based out of the firm’s new Abu Dhabi office.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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Sales for Bored Ape’s Otherdeed metaverse land NFTs — easily the hottest virtual property brand around — have been booming during the first quarter of this year, closing in on $120 million in volume.

The rise in the collection's trading volume means Otherdeed tokens rank as the second-best-selling NFT collection during the first quarter of this year. Bored Ape Yacht Club, also tied to Otherdeeds and the Otherside metaverse platform-in-development, is the top-selling collection. Bored Apes and Otherdeeds are both a creation of the highly-touted NFT shop Yuga Labs.

This month, however, sales volumes for a lesser-known collection, also tied to a nascent metaverse platform called MG Lands, have been holding their own; even outpacing Otherdeeds’ sales at one point. However, it appears MG Lands’ rapid ascendance from relative obscurity might be, instead of a feel-good business story, another case of artificial “wash” trading.

How to spot a possible wash trade

“When we compare the highest sales of MG Land with those of Otherdeeds, there is a significant contrast in the duration between a buyer's first transaction and the sale for MG Land," said The Block researcher Brad Kay, explaining: "Out of the top 20 sales for MG Land, 19 of the buyers had their first transaction on the same day as the sale. In contrast, every single buyer within the top 20 sales for Otherdeeds have wallets created months or years prior to the sale occurring, indicating that the buyers and sales were not bots or wash trades like those found on MG Land.”

Wash trading is when assets are traded between wallets owned by the same individual or company. It can create not only artificial volume but also manipulate the price.

Those top 19 sales all closed between roughly $27,500 and $28,500 per NFT. For the month of March, MG Lands has amassed $27.1 million in trading volume, according to CryptoSlam. After a couple of days of strong trading, Otherdeed NFTs pushed past MG Lands and now have a total volume of nearly $30 million.

MG Land is a metaverse composed of 10,000 pieces of virtual land NFTs. The platform is designed to let people bring their character NFTs from different popular collections — such as Bored Apes, Doodles and Azuki — into its online world. People are then supposed to be able to customize their piece of virtual land and create a space to play games and trade. MG Land is based in Singapore and is part of the Metagame Group, which was founded by a Mr. Chennywong.

The Block contacted MG Land for comment but had not heard back before publishing.

A Blur halo effect?

LandVault CEO Sam Huber said during an interview with The Block that he can’t perceive any particular reason for MG Land to be performing so well, even if it’s trying to affiliate itself with top-tier NFT collections.

Last week, web3 data analytics firm DappRadar published — prematurely, because the end of the fiscal period is later this week — a first-quarter of 2023 report entitled “Virtual Worlds Soar: Record Land Sales Generate $311 million.” The report touted the three months while stating: “land trading reached an all-time high [during the quarter] with 147,000 trades. MG Land emerged as a top performer, making almost $60 million in trading volume and 45,219 in sales.”

DappRadar offered a caveat in its report: “The high level of trading volume is mainly because NFT whales use this NFT collection to collect BLUR tokens for the upcoming airdrop on the Blur NFT marketplace.”

Launched last year, Blur has been offering incentives to people willing to trade using its platform. Blur’s generous bonus plan aimed at wooing traders may have spurred some wash trading.

"While the volume of sales was split between Blur and Opensea, with 32.46% coming from Blur and 67.52% from Opensea in February, things shifted in March," DappRadar blockchain analyst Sara Gherghelas added in an emailed comment.

Over the past month, 70.36% of sales of that collection came from Blur while only 29.57% came from Opensea, DappRadar data shows.

"These trends confirm that MG Land has become a popular choice for NFT whales looking to farm on Blur,” said Gherghelas.

DappRadar’s arguably lackadaisical analysis of how well MG Land sales had performed appeared to earn the ire of at least one famous NFT watcher on Twitter. “Even the crypto media doesn't get NFT wash-trading," @Punk9059 tweeted, adding: "Article about how land sales are popping off, when it's all due to MG Land fake sales."

The Block contacted DappRadar for comment but did not receive a reply before publication.

Regardless of MG Land’s dubious trading volumes, LandVault’s Huber is pleased to see the recent uptick in trading volume, and he’s optimistic virtual land sales have a bright future — creating utility that drives people to major platforms like Bored Apes’ Otherside, The Sandbox and Decentraland is vital, he said.

“There’s been some exciting things happening with the metaverse in the Sandbox and Decentraland but I think the market is still down,” he said. “We’re not back into a gold rush just yet.”

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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Immersion cooling technology firm LiquidStack secured a Series B funding round of undisclosed amount from Trane Technologies (TT), the company said in a Wednesday press release.

The fresh capital will be used primarily to scale up manufacturing – with the startup aiming to announce a U.S. facility in the third quarter – research and development to expand the offerings, and commercial operations, said CEO Joe Capes. Currently the company's manufacturing operations are in Germany.

LiquidStack specializes in two-phase immersion cooling, in which computers are submerged in dielectric heat transfer liquid, as opposed to mineral oils used in other models. This type of liquid is more environmentally friendly to produce and less resource intensive than air cooling, currently the most common practice among bitcoin miners.

LiquidStack's two phase immersion cooling can reduce the energy and water footprint of crypto mines. (LiquidStack)

The two-phase solution can reduce a data center's carbon footprint by over 1,500 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per megawatt (MW). Data centers will also see a 40% reduction in the energy use of mechanical equipment, 33% lower capital expenditure and 32% less land use, the firm said. "A broader adoption of LiquidStack’s technology can also reduce water usage for powering and cooling data centers by over 300 billion liters per year," the press release read.

Spending less on energy is a crucial selling point for bitcoin miners, whose biggest operational cost is electricity. According to Capes, for every MW of energy used for the actual computing, LiquidStack's solution uses 0.02 MW for cooling, whereas other options use 0.1 MW to 0.7 MW.

The Marlborough, Massachusetts startup started out in the early days of bitcoin mining in Hong Kong, before being merged into German miner Bitfury in 2015, and then going off on its own again in 2021. "We were the first company in the world to not only deploy immersion cooling for mining, but to also do it at massive scale," Capes said, referring to two Bitfury sites in Central Asia.

Later, during the crypto bear market of 2019, LiquidStack pivoted away from mining "because we didn't want LiquidStack to be tied directly to the price of bitcoin," Capes said. The company worked with Dell and Microsoft in those years, he added.

Today, however, the company's pipeline of crypto is larger than traditional data centers or edge computing sites, said the CEO. While technically the firm has more clients in the non-mining segments, those are smaller contracts, Capes said.

Still, at $7.2 million per MW of infrastructure, the LiquidStack solution is not cheap.

"What we're finding in our [crypto mining] industry is that you you either pay now, or you pay later," said Capes, making the argument that the miners who don't spend enough to bring their operating expenses down, later find themselves unprofitable.

Trane Technologies is a heating and cooling tech firm that's been around for roughly 150 years. The company had $16 billion in revenues in 2022.

LiquidStack’s technology "is raising the bar for sustainable data center cooling," said Trane's Vice President of Strategic Sales and Marketing, Commercial Heating, Ventilation and Cooling for Americas, Amber Mulligan. The company will help Trane achieve its sustainability commitments, she continued, among them "reducing one billion metric tons of carbon emissions from our customers’ footprint by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050."

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Binance will suspend GBP deposits and withdrawals after its payments partner Paysafe said it would no longer support them.

The move will affect new users starting March 13 and all users on May 22, a company spokesperson said over email.

"Binance will ensure that affected users are still able to access their GBP balances," that spokesperson also said.

The company estimates this will affect less than 1% of Binance users but is "working hard to find an alternative solution for them."

Meanwhile, users will still be able to deposit and withdraw other fiat currencies as well as buy and sell crypto on Binance.com.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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The Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, the bank that supplied $4.3 billion to Silvergate late last year, did not force Silvergate to repay the advances which have been rumored to be the reason why the crypto-friendly bank went into voluntary liquidation, it said.

“FHLBank San Francisco did not request or compel Silvergate Bank to prepay its outstanding advances,” a spokesperson for the bank told CoinDesk. “Silvergate made their determination to prepay their outstanding advances based on their own assessment of their position.”

Silvergate Capital disclosed in a securities filing on March 1 that it had to accelerate sales of securities to raise money to repay advances from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. It fully repaid these loans by the start of this month.

Some people in the crypto industry have speculated that that ultimately triggered the bank run on Silvergate. Silvergate’s stock price tanked a day after making the disclosure, and it announced it would suspend operations and voluntarily liquidate a few days later.

“We can't speculate as to what went into their final decision to prepay, however, the existing tenure of their remaining advances before the prepayment was short term,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said that the FHLBank could require prepayment if the bank it’s loaning to experiences a “material adverse change,” but that did not happen with Silvergate.

“Again, we did not request or compel Silvergate Bank to prepay its outstanding advances. We would assume that any prudent borrower in their position would assess their own position and upcoming disclosures and make their own decisions about what was in their best interest in terms of all of their assets and liabilities,” the statement said.

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The dollar value locked in the number of open bitcoin (BTC) futures contracts is rising, signifying increased speculative interest in the market and potential for price volatility.

Data from CoinGlass shows the nominal value of open interest has reached a yearly high of $12 billion, marking a 7% gain for the month.

In the past month, bitcoin's price has rallied 15%, to $28,439 thanks to an increasing appetite for risk assets and a "flight to quality" within crypto.

An increase in open interest means new money is flowing into the market but doesn't reveal much about whether traders are positioning for price gains or price losses.

In bitcoin's case, the new money seems to be betting on price gains, considering the funding rate or the cost of holding bullish long/bearish short positions has flipped into the green after spending most of the early parts of the Asia trading day in the red.

(CoinGlass)

Positive funding rates usually indicate a bullish trend, as long positions compensate short positions; conversely, negative funding rates indicate bearish sentiment as short positions receive payment from those holding long positions.

A Taipei-based trader at Quantrend Technology, a large market maker on Binance, told CoinDesk in a note that bitcoin has hit the highest level since the collapse of Luna last year, which is also a positive psychological indicator that market sentiment is optimistic.

The all-time record for open interest on bitcoin futures is from April 15 2021, when it hit $23.8 billion across all platforms. This is followed by $23 billion on November 10, 2021, which marked the end of the bull market.

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