XPLA Forms Strategic Partnership with Nefta for Gaming Infrastructure Development

Asian fund acquires majority stake in The BlockIn the wake of certain difficulties experienced following the FTX collapse, prominent crypto publication The Block has secured its future through a strategic sale to Singapore-based venture capital group Foresight Ventures.Taking to the X platform on Monday, The Block’s CEO Larry Cermak announced the acquisition, with Foresight Ventures taking a majority stake in the publication. The deal results in a valuation of the US media group at $70 million. Cermak stated:”This [transaction] gives The Block a fresh start ahead of the bull market and provides us with more capital to build out new exciting products and expand our footprint into Asia and the Middle East.”Cermak also thanked New York-based investment bank Moelis & Company for its help in running the process.Photo by Kelly Sikkema on UnsplashFTX controversyThe sale should allow the firm to move on from a difficult situation which saw it implicated in the activities of convicted fraudster and former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). The fallout from the collapse of the FTX exchange in November of last year included the revelation that The Block had relied on undisclosed loans from SBF to sustain its operations.Michael McCaffrey, the former CEO of The Block, resigned last December after it was disclosed that he had borrowed $43 million from SBF’s Alameda Research, a crypto trading company. This financial arrangement was allegedly aimed at supporting the media company and facilitating property acquisitions.Following the conviction of SBF on charges of fraud and money laundering in New York earlier this month, The Block faced challenges and turned its focus towards building a more robust institutional customer base. The media group has been actively engaged in compiling industry deals and offering subscription-based news services.McCaffrey had taken loans totaling $27 million to buy out shareholders and support the media group, with an additional $16 million used for property acquisition in the Bahamas. The financial arrangement with Alameda was undisclosed to the broader team at The Block, as revealed by Bobby Moran, the company’s chief revenue officer at the time.It’s still unclear if McCaffrey has repaid these loans to the FTX Debtor that is currently managing the FTX business. FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2022 and with that, it is in the process of being restructured.$56 million investmentAs part of the deal, Foresight Ventures will invest $56 million, securing an 80 percent stake in The Block, according to a source cited by the Financial Times (FT). The investment is a strategic move, especially considering the recent slowdown in venture capital investment in the crypto market.While investors injected approximately $30 billion into crypto projects in both 2021 and 2022, the figure plummeted to $7 billion by the end of September of this year, according to PitchBook.Foresight Ventures CEO Forest Bai confirmed to the FT that The Block will continue to operate as an independent business. Bai stated: “We think The Block is one of the crown assets in the crypto media space. Our view is that the media aspect will continue to drive education and adoption in the space.”

In a recent announcement OPNX, the Seychelles-incorporated cryptocurrency bankruptcy claims platform co-founded by the creators of the now-defunct hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), has revealed its decision to cease all operations.Photo by Kelly Sikkema on UnsplashFebruary 14 shutdownIn a message to its users, subsequently shared on social media on Thursday, the OPNX team expressed its commitment to ensuring an orderly closure, urging users to settle all positions by Feb. 7 and withdraw their funds from the platform before Feb. 14, as all withdrawal functionality will be disabled thereafter. The team expressed gratitude to the OPNX community, acknowledging their dedication and trust throughout the platform's existence. Short for "Open Exchange," OPNX served as both a hybrid bankruptcy claims platform and a crypto exchange, enabling users to trade creditor claims of bankrupt crypto companies. The origin of OPNX can be linked to two defunct crypto entities — Coinflex and 3AC. Seychelles-based Coinflex was a crypto yield platform that was forced to suspend withdrawals in June 2022. It subsequently entered into a bankruptcy process. Coinflex co-founder Mark Lamb joined forces with 3AC’s Kyle Davies and Su Zhu to found OPNX. In October, Coinflex creditors sued Lamb, alleging that he had appropriated Coinflex's intellectual property, customer base, employees and technology to establish OPNX. Mired in problemsWithin its short existence, OPNX has been mired in problems. From the very outset, there was little goodwill for the new venture, given that many crypto sector participants took a dim view of Zhu and Davies due to the turmoil the collapse of 3AC caused within the industry. In April of last year, OPNX claimed to have significant venture capital backing, only for many of the VC entities mentioned to quickly deny such claims subsequently. The following month, the local regulator in Dubai, the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, formally reprimanded the OPNX founders for promoting an unregulated business within the Emirate of Dubai. In August, it emerged that VARA had hit OPNX and its founders with a hefty fine. Following the closure announcement, the native OX token of OPNX experienced a significant price decline. Over the course of the past 24 hours, the token unit price has fallen 13.6% to $0.007981. The failure of 3AC led to Teneo, the firm responsible for liquidating 3AC's assets, subpoenaing Zhu and Davies for concealing details of their physical whereabouts through messages on social media platform X. The closure of OPNX adds to the challenges faced by Zhu and Davies, as Teneo is actively seeking to recover $1.3 billion directly from the co-founders. The claim asserts that Zhu and Davies engaged in substantial leverage with investor funds after the insolvency of their hedge fund. In September 2023, Singapore's central bank issued nine-year prohibition orders against Davies and Zhu, citing alleged violations of the country's securities laws at Three Arrows Capital. All the while, crypto community sentiment remains negative where OPNX and its founders are concerned. Taking to social media, Ikigai Asset Management’s Travis Kling didn’t mince his words, stating:”I mean it from the bottom of my heart when I say **** these criminals.” As OPNX concludes its operations, the unfolding events surrounding its co-founders and their association with the failed hedge fund continue to draw attention to the need for the industry to raise its standards.  

Safeheron, a Singapore-based provider of digital asset self-custody solutions for institutions, has released the world’s first open-sourced trusted execution environment (TEE) related to Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX).  The Intel SGX is a hardware-based security technology integrated within some Intel processors. It enables application developers to run application code within a secure isolated environment, while preventing access to that code or modification of it by other applications or by the operating system running on that hardware.Photo by Shubham Dhage on UnsplashAddressing Web3 security & scalability challengesThe Intel SGX enables a TEE, creating a black box for computation. In a blog post published by Safeheron on May 6, the company claimed that its open-source framework “addresses fundamental security and scalability challenges within blockchain and Web3 ecosystems, offering broad potential for deployment across critical scenarios.” The company asserted that the enabling of off-chain TEEs as achieved by its framework, provides for robust blockchain layer-2 scaling, together with privacy-preserving computation. In this way, layer-1 blockchain load can be minimized while enhancing network throughput and verifiability. Safeheron further claimed that this all paves the way for the evolution of a trusted “second execution layer” for decentralized applications. Overcoming Intel SGX complexitySafeheron developed the TEE framework using C++, a high-level object-oriented programming language. The firm open-sourced the SGX framework due to the significant challenges that developing with Intel SGX poses, arising from its complexity and its engineering overhead. On X, the company claimed that the new framework reduces SGX TEE development complexity, enabling developers to build applications securely for blockchain, cloud security and privacy computing. The framework optimizes advanced cryptographic support, enhanced testing capabilities, high-level API design and secure and encrypted file input and output. Moving beyond closed and opaque systemsSafeheron added that it open-sourced the framework as it had seen concern expressed within the Web3 sector regarding the development of closed and opaque systems, with that concern elevated in relation to ongoing security failures related to Web3 platforms. Safeheron CEO Wade Wang told Cointelegraph that in open-sourcing the framework, the firm is “not threatened by competitors,” but that it is concerned about “slow innovation due to closed systems.” The Singaporean firm was established in 2021. It counts HashKey Capital, Bixin Ventures, Antalpha Ventures, M77 Ventures and Kryptos among its investors. Back in 2022, it raised $7 million in a pre-Series A funding round. At the time, the project’s mission was to make private keys, which individuals use to control and self-custody their digital assets, safer. In terms of products offered, the company markets its MPC Node Suite, a white-label solution that allows clients to build out multi-party computation (MPC) wallet-based applications. It also offers Keyless Wallets that facilitate the development of wallets that don’t require traditional keys.  In February crypto exchange platform BYDFi partnered with Safeheron, leveraging its MPC technology and TEE to build out a key management system.