Block by Block Weekly Newsletter #35
By: Anthony Sassano
Tags: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum

News of the Week

🤔 Blockchains LLC Finally Reveal What They’re Building

For those unfamiliar with Blockchains LLC, it made news earlier this year when it purchased 60,000+ acres of the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center (TRIC) in northern Nevada, home to the Tesla Gigafactory.

This week, the companies CEO Jeffrey Berns, announced that the land will be used to build a smart city powered by the Ethereum blockchain. He plans for the city to have all the trappings of a functioning community, including homes and apartments, markets, schools, and even banks.

Berns imagines the city to work on four technologies: artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and 3D printing, all integrated with blockchain technology. And he pointed to the company becoming an incubator for pilots in areas such as clean water and energy.

It’s an ambitious project but Jeffrey is funding it entirely out of his own pocket and, best of all, he’s not doing an ICO or introducing an arbitrary token!

🏦 Tether Announces New Banking Relationship

Tether Limited, the company issuing USDT stablecoin, confirmed The Block’s earlier reports that it has established a banking relationship with Deltec Bank & Trust Limited headquartered in The Bahamas.

Tether also uploaded a letter from Deltec Bank dated November 1, 2018, which includes an attestation that on October 31, 2018, Tether’s portfolio cash value was $1,831,322,828. The letter also discloses that it is “provided without any liability” and “is solely based on the information currently in our possession.”

Although this seems like positive news for the controversial cryptocurrency, Lawson Baker wrote a long tweet thread on why the attestation is most likely rubbish.

💰 Coinbase Announces Series E Financing Round

Coinbase announced this week that it will add an additional $300 million of investment at a valuation of over $8 billion to accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies and digital assets. The Series E equity round is led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from Y Combinator Continuity, Wellington Management, Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain and others.

Coinbase plans to use this financing to accelerate their global expansion, offer more crypto assets on the platform, support more crypto-utility apps and focus on bringing institutions into crypto.

☄️ ConsenSys Acquires An Asteroid Mining Company

ConsenSys, a Brooklyn based firm that specialized in all things Ethereum, announced that they have acquired the asteroid mining company Planetary Resources. Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys, promised to offer up more information in the coming months.

In the meantime, Planetary Resources CEO Chris Lewicki (formerly of NASA JPL) and General Counsel Brian Israel will both be joining ConsenSys. Here’s what Lewicki had to say about the matter, “I am proud of our team’s extraordinary accomplishments, grateful to our visionary supporters, and delighted to join ConsenSys in building atop our work to expand humanity’s economic sphere of influence into the Solar System.”

🏛️ Morgan Stanley Report Says Crypto Now An Institutional Asset Class

Institutional investors are increasingly getting involved in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — while the number of retail investors in the space is staying stagnant — according to a new report by Morgan Stanley.

In an update to “Bitcoin Decrypted: A Brief Teach-In and Implications,” the global banking giant’s research division delved into the last six months of bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, and highlighted certain trends it noticed.

Perhaps most notably, the report emphasized its writers’ view of the market’s “rapidly morphing thesis,” which began by defining bitcoin as “digital cash” and noting that investors had full confidence in it, to a solution for issues in the financial system, to a new payment system to ultimately a new institutional investment class.

The report did cite three issues clients had with investing in the cryptocurrency space: regulatory uncertainty, a lack of regulated custodian solutions and a current lack of large financial institutions in the space.

Head to The Block for a complete breakdown of the report.

💸 Dapper Labs Secure $15M in Funding

Dapper Labs, the company behind popular blockchain-based game CryptoKitties, announced this week that they have raised $15 million in funding from the likes of Google Ventures, SamsungNEXT and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

With $27 million in new funding so far this year, all signs point to Dapper Labs being on the cusp of a new release.

The team declined to give any details about what’s to come, but they did say something should come in the next weeks — not months. To that end, the company has put up a teaser page on its website, and one of their engineers shared it in the stream of tweets surrounding Devcon.