| Headquarters | New York, NY, U.S. |
|---|---|
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Owner | Foresight Ventures |
| Founder(s) | Mike Dudas, Jake McGraw |
| Editor | Tim Copeland |
| CEO | Larry Cermak |
| Industry | Digital currency |
| URL | www |
| Launched | March 2018 |
The Block is an American online publication specializing in cryptocurrencies. It is based in New York.
The Block was founded by Mike Dudas at the beginning of 2018. [1] It raised $4 million from venture capital firms including Greycroft, Pantera Capital, BlockTower Capital and Bloomberg Beta. [2]
In 2020, Mike Dudas stepped down and Michael McCaffrey became CEO, having taken an undisclosed loan of $12 million from Alameda Research to buy out other investors and all former employees. [3]
Over the next two years, McCaffrey took two more loans from Alameda Research. One for $15 million to finance the ongoing operations of The Block and another for $16 million to purchase personal real estate in the Bahamas. [4]
After Alameda Research went bankrupt and McCaffrey's undisclosed loans totaling $43 million were revealed in December 2022, McCaffrey resigned and Bobby Moran, then CRO of The Block, became Interim CEO in November 2022. [5] Moran said that no employee, apart from McCaffrey, knew about the loans from Alameda Research. [3]
In March 2023, Larry Cermak [6] became CEO and the company laid off a third of its staff. [7]
In November 2023, The Block sold more than an 80% stake to Singapore-based Foresight Ventures in a $56 million deal at a $70 million valuation. [8]
The Block and Foresight Ventures hosted a conference called Emergence in Prague in December 2024. Former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and former Mayor of Prague Zdeněk Hřib spoke at the event.
In December 2020, The Block released its first Digital Asset Outlook report covering the state of the market, investment trends, decentralized finance (DeFi), and other thematic trends to watch for in 2021. [9] Similar reports were released at the end of each subsequent year. [10] [11] [12]
The Block and crypto market maker Wintermute launched crypto index provider GMCI in February 2024. [13] It provides 12 indices that track aspects of the crypto market, including sectors such as Layer 1 tokens and AI tokens. [14] The GMCI 30 index represents a selection of the top 30 cryptocurrencies and is available on crypto exchanges Bitget and Woo X, as well as decentralized exchange Vertex. [15]
A cryptocurrency exchange, or a digital currency exchange (DCE), is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments, wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency exchange can be a market maker that typically takes the bid–ask spreads as a transaction commission for its service or, as a matching platform, simply charges fees.
Blockchain.com is a cryptocurrency financial services company. The company began as the first Bitcoin blockchain explorer in 2011 and later created a cryptocurrency wallet that accounted for 28% of bitcoin transactions between 2012 and 2020. It also operates a cryptocurrency exchange and provides institutional markets lending business and data, charts, and analytics.
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-source software.
CoinDesk is a news site specializing in bitcoin and digital currencies. Founded by Shakil Khan, the firm also provides guides to bitcoin for those new to digital currencies.
Digital Currency Group Inc. (DCG) is a venture capital company focusing on the digital currency market. It is located in Stamford, Connecticut. The company has the subsidiaries Foundry, Genesis, Grayscale Investments, and Luno. It also formerly owned CoinDesk.
EOS.IO is a blockchain protocol based on the cryptocurrency EOS. The smart contract platform claims to eliminate transaction fees and also conduct millions of transactions per second. It was developed by the private company Block.one and launched in 2017. The platform was later released as open-source software.
Decentralized finance provides financial instruments and services through smart contracts on a programmable, permissionless blockchain. This approach reduces the need for intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks. DeFi platforms enable users to lend or borrow funds, speculate on asset price movements using derivatives, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks, and earn interest in savings-like accounts. The DeFi ecosystem is built on a layered architecture and highly composable building blocks. While some applications offer high interest rates, they carry high risks. Coding errors and hacks are a common challenge in DeFi.
DAI is a stablecoin token on the Ethereum blockchain which uses smart contracts designed to control supply to keep its value as close to one United States dollar as possible. DAI is maintained and regulated by MakerDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization composed of the owners of its governance token, MKR, who may propose and vote on changes to certain parameters in its smart contracts.
Uniswap is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange that uses a set of smart contracts to create liquidity pools for the execution of trades. It is an open source project and falls into the category of a DeFi product because it uses smart contracts to facilitate trades instead of a centralized exchange. The protocol facilitates automated transactions between cryptocurrency tokens on the Ethereum blockchain through the use of smart contracts. As of December 2024, Uniswap is estimated to be the second largest decentralized exchange and the seven-largest cryptocurrency exchange overall by daily trading volume.
Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried, commonly known as SBF, is an American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in November 2023. Bankman-Fried founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and was celebrated as a "poster boy" for crypto, with FTX having a global reach with more than 130 international affiliates. At the peak of his net worth, he was ranked the 41st-richest American in the Forbes 400.
FTX Trading Ltd., commonly known as FTX, is a bankrupt company that formerly operated a cryptocurrency exchange and crypto hedge fund. The exchange was founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang and collapsed in 2022 after massive fraud perpetrated by Bankman-Fried and his partner Caroline Ellison forced the company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Alameda Research was a cryptocurrency trading firm, co-founded in September 2017 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Tara MacAulay. In November 2022, FTX, Alameda's sister cryptocurrency exchange, experienced a solvency crisis, and both FTX and Alameda filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That same month, anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal that FTX had lent more than half of its customers' funds to Alameda, which was explicitly forbidden by FTX's terms-of-service.
Three Arrows Capital was a Singapore-based cryptocurrency hedge fund which was ordered to liquidate on 27 June 2022 by a court in the British Virgin Islands. It was founded in 2012 by Kyle Davies and Su Zhu. The company borrowed billions of dollars to fund its trading, and according to July 2022 bankruptcy filings, faces $3.5 billion in creditors' claims. The fund appears to have lost in excess of $3 billion over 2021 and 2022, making its collapse one of the largest hedge-fund trading losses of all time.
BlockFi was a digital asset lender founded by Zac Prince and Flori Marquez in 2017. It was based in Jersey City, New Jersey. It was once valued at $3 billion.
Caroline Ellison is an American business executive who was convicted of fraud in 2023 in relation to the bankruptcy of FTX. She was the CEO of Alameda Research, a trading firm affiliated with the FTX and founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. Ellison was terminated from her position after FTX and Alameda filed for bankruptcy. In 2022, Ellison pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA), S. 4760, is a proposed United States federal law to regulate the trading of cryptocurrencies and related digital assets. It would place the regulation of crypto assets under the authority of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which already regulates the trading of financial derivatives in the United States.
The bankruptcy of FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, began in November 2022. The collapse of FTX, caused by a spike in customer withdrawals that exposed an $8 billion hole in FTX's accounts, served as the impetus for its bankruptcy. Prior to its collapse, FTX was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume and had over one million users.
United States of America v. Samuel Bankman-Fried was a 2023 federal criminal trial in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Financial entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, commonly known as SBF, was convicted on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy following the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX in November 2022. After the jury's verdict in November 2023, on March 28, 2024, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.
Erik Tristan Voorhees is an American cryptocurrency entrepreneur and founder of the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift. He also co-founded Satoshi Dice and was the Director of Marketing at BitInstant. He has been referred to as a crypto-libertarian and has advocated for "the separation of money and state" and views Bitcoin as a tool for decentralizing financial power and challenging government control over currency.
Arkham Intelligence, branded Arkham, is a global company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform as well as a public data application that enables users to analyze blockchain and cryptocurrency activity. Founded by Miguel Morel in 2020, the company's platform utilizes AI to identify and catalog the owners of blockchain addresses. Its partners include various cryptocurrency and blockchain companies.
