Bitcoin detractors and those protesting the policies of El Savador President Nayib Bukele have destroyed a crypto kiosk in the nation’s capital city. News outlet Teleprensa and others posted videos on social media showing a Chivo-supported kiosk in San Salvador burning amid a crowd of journalists and protesters on Wednesday. The Bitcoin (BTC) machine, one of many arranged by the El Salvador government since its acceptance of the cryptocurrency as legal tender in the country, could be seen defaced with anti-BTC logos and a sign saying “democracy is not for sale.” Los manifestantes quemaron el kiosko Chivo como medida de protesta contra el #Bitcoin.Vía @Luis33Tv #Teleprensa33 #Nacionales pic.twitter.com/XlacUWCPNN

Despite the price decline for Bitcoin (BTC) in Q2 2021, mining hardware maker Canaan has recorded significant business gains during the period. According to Canaan’s unaudited Q2 financials published on Tuesday, the company recorded over $1 billion Chinese renminbi (about $167.5 million) in total net revenue for Q2. This figure marks the highest quarterly sales for the Bitcoin miner maker. Indeed, Canaan’s Q2 revenue represents a 168% increase from the figures reported in its first-quarter financials and a 507.3% jump when compared to Q2 2020.

Tyler Hobbs, the artist behind the popular generative NFT series Fidenza has slammed a Solana-based project for utilizing his code to produce knock-off artworks without his approval. The Fidenza series is a curated drop of 999 NFTs on Art Blocks — an Ethereum-based platform that creates and hosts tokenized computer generated artworks. Hobbs wrote code that generates unique art pieces using the randomized transaction hash of the buyer's transaction as input. Hobbs sold the 999 works originally for $400,000 and has since made more than $4 million in commissions as they were sold on.

An OpenSea executive has been outed for hyping nonfungible tokens he purchased and then featuring them on the homepage of the popular NFT marketplace — a move that presumably allowed him to sell the art pieces for a quick profit. Nate Chastain, who serves as OpenSea’s head of product, allegedly used burner wallets to purchase NFTs, which were then featured on the front page of OpenSea — where they’d receive the most attention — before unloading them. A Reddit user documented the whole ordeal by publishing the transaction details. One of the NFTs in question belongs to the Dailydust Collection on OpenSea. The “Spectrum Of A Ramenfication Theory” was purchased by Chastain on Tuesday for 0.25 Ether (ETH) before it was sold for 1.5 ETH a few hours later. Notably, the sale was executed after the NFT was featured on the front page.

Cryptocurrency trading platform Abra has raised $55 million in funding to bootstrap the next phase of its growth strategy, bringing several high-profile investors on board from both inside and outside the blockchain industry.  Abra will use funds from the Series C investment to grow its product offerings in wealth management, trading and payments, as well as expand its in-house capacity, the company announced Wednesday. Amex Ventures, a venture capital arm of American Express, was among the contributors alongside Blockchain Capital, Ignia, Kingsway Capital and Stellar Development Foundation. Abra has now raised over $85 million since its inception.

Alternative investment firm SkyBridge capital hopes to expand its crypto offerings, filing for a crypto-focused exchange-traded fund (ETF) on Tuesday and revealing plans for an Algorand fund at this week’s SALT conference in New York. Speaking to CNBC, SkyBridge founder and former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci said the firm had raised more than $100 million toward the newly announced Algorand fund. He added that the firm currently holds roughly $700 million worth of crypto assets. Scaramucci asserted that “crypto is here to stay,” adding that regulators must act “very quickly” if they intend to stem the snowballing adoption of the technology.

The European Union is reportedly looking to bolster technological development in the region with a planned $177 billion investment war chest. According to Bloomberg, EU officials plan to fund direct investments in areas like blockchain, data infrastructure, 5G, and quantum computing, among others. The planned $177 billion investment fund is about 20% of the 750 billion euros ($887 billion) stimulus package agreed upon by EU leaders back in July 2020 to kickstart economic recovery amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Search engine giant Google is joining forces with Canadian blockchain studio Dapper Labs to help support the development of new Web 3 products and services, including the wildly popular nonfungible token, or NFT, marketplace.  As part of the deal, Google Cloud will serve as a network operator for Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain, the scalable infrastructure that powers an entire ecosystem of NFTs, games and apps, according to Forbes. Janet Kennedy, the vice president of Google Cloud North America, said the multi-year partnership will help Dapper expand its operations through “scalable, secure infrastructure” provided by Google. Google has also made it easier for Flow developers to integrate with its software, which gives them an added incentive to choose Google Cloud over competitors such as Amazon Web Services.

Singapore-based crypto lending platform Hodlnaut will partner with United States crypto exchange Okcoin in an effort to drive adoption and crypto transactions among users. In a Wednesday announcement, Hodlnaut said the partnership would allow its users and those on Okcoin to purchase cryptocurrencies and earn rewards on their holdings. The lending platform said Singapore-based users already use Okcoin as a fiat on-ramp solution to go from the Singapore dollar to Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH). “We are building the next generation of tools to help onboard the investors and traders who have been on the fence about crypto,” said Okcoin's Singapore general manager, Khairi Azmi. “We believe that this partnership will contribute positively to the crypto ecosystem for consumers.”

A new study suggests that Bitcoin has already used more power so far this year than it did in all of 2020.  By the end of the year, the Bitcoin network will have consumed 91 TW/h (terawatt-hours or one trillion watts per hour) and it has already consumed more than the estimated 67 TW/h for all of 2020 according to a Sept. 13 Bloomberg report. The precise energy consumption figures are variable and not easy to calculate accurately, but the trend is clear — they are increasing. The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index currently estimates that BTC is set to consume an even greater 95.68 TW/h by the end of the year. This is about the same as the power consumption of the Philippines.

Digital analytics firm Chainalysis reported that the cryptocurrency market in Africa has grown significantly since last year in addition to the region having a larger share of overall retail transaction volume compared to the global average. In a report released on Tuesday, Chainalysis said Africa’s crypto market increased in value by more than 1,200% between July 2020 and June 2021, with high adoption in Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania. The company added that the popularity of P2P platforms could have been one of the driving factors toward greater crypto adoption in the region, given some countries have restricted or banned residents from sending money to exchanges through local banks. According to Chainalysis, the entire continent received $105.6 billion worth of crypto between July 2020 and June 2021. Yet, it had a share of the market’s overall transaction volume made up of “retail-sized transfers” larger than any other region in the world — roughly 7% as opposed to the 5.5% global average. In addition, P2P platforms — including Paxful and LocalBitcoins — account for 1.2% of all crypto transactions in Africa.

Immutable, a layer-two nonfungible token (NFT) protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain, has announced a $60 million Series B funding raise from a multitude of corporate venture firms, including Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research and Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerFund. The funding round was co-led by gaming investment platform Bitkraft Ventures and venture firm King River Capital. The new capital will be allocated to supporting Immutable’s growing ambitions, including expanding its global engineering and sales departments, fostering industry partnerships and scaling the network’s native NFT gaming projects. Through its scaling solution, Immutable X, the protocol provides a foundational infrastructure for the global business market to distribute and exchange NFT digital assets on the Ethereum ecosystem.

Cathie Wood, the CEO of Ark Investment, has doubled down on her prediction that the price of Bitcoin will grow by tenfold in the next five years, and said the growth of DeFi, NFTs and the Eth2 upgrade has massively increased Ark’s confidence in Ether’s future. Wood’s prediction would value Bitcoin at almost $500,000 by 2026. She said that Ark Investment’s future exposure to crypto was likely to be around 60% Bitcoin and 40% Ethereum. Wood made the comments Monday, during a live stream at the SALT Conference in New York.

President Joe Biden has tapped acting chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Rostin Behnam to assume his position on a permanent basis and two others to fill vacant commissioner seats. In a Monday announcement from the White House, President Biden said he planned to nominate Behnam — who has been serving as lead at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission since former chair Heath Tarbert left in January — in addition to Kristin Johnson and Christy Goldsmith Romero. All must be confirmed by the Democrat-controlled Senate. According to her faculty profile at the Emory University School of Law, Johnson has been examining the implications of “emerging innovative technologies including distributed digital ledger technologies that enable the creation of digital assets and intermediaries.” She has previously hinted at establishing greater governmental oversight of crypto platforms.

Recent data from market analyst firm CryptoCompare reveals that the leading six cryptocurrency exchanges, as per the company's analytical model, were responsible for a three-year high in spot volume throughout the month of August.  The metric grades all cryptocurrency exchanges across a multitude of areas — including legal/regulatory cases, data provision, security and market quality, among others — and ranks them in a list accordingly. Popular exchanges Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, CrossTower, Bitstamp and itBit all received AA grading status within the August period with a score ranging from 86.26 to 75.28, respectively.

In April of this year, an anonymous buyer purchased a copy of Action Comics #1 for $3,250,000 USD — the highest figure on record for a vintage comic book. Published in 1938 and featuring the first-ever appearance of Superman, the comic is one of the last known copies in existence. Prior to the auction, it was graded by the Certified Guaranty Company, or CGC, using a 10-point system, where it received a near-perfect score. Any legitimate copy of Action Comics #1 would have been worth a decent sum of money, but this particular book out-sold all others because its physical quality remained superb.

PrimeDAO, a project seeking to facilitate greater coordination and cooperation between decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in the DeFi sector, has secured $2 million in seed funding. According to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, the round featured participation from notable DeFi investment funds including Signum Capital, LD Capital and Stacker Ventures. The funds will be used to develop the “DAO2DAO” (D2D) product suite for PrimeDAO, with the platform set to feature a ‘Negotiation Interface’ designed to enable coordination between DAOs.

Surging Ethereum rival, Solana (SOL), has shed 15% of its value over the past 24 hours after suffering a denial-of-service disruption. On Sept. 14 at 12:38 pm UTC, Twitter account Solana Status announced that Solana’s mainnet beta had been suffering intermittent instability over a 45-minute period. Six hours after announcing the incident, Solana Status explained that a large increase in transaction load to 400,000 per second had overwhelmed the network to create a denial-of-service and cause the network to start forking.

Decentralized exchange dTrade has raised $22.8 million for a market-making fund designed to provide the ecosystem with higher liquidity, potentially setting the stage for wider DeFi adoption on Polkadot once the DEX launches later this year.  The funds will enable dTrade to launch with “deep liquidity” backed by some of crypto’s largest market makers, the company announced Tuesday. Specifically, the capital will be used to facilitate on-chain loans to market makers that provide order book liquidity on dTrade. Community members will also have the opportunity to participate in the on-chain program once dTrade launches, which is expected soon after Polkadot concludes its parachain auctions later this year. The capital raise had participation from some of blockchain’s biggest companies, including Alameda Research, CMS, Hypersphere, Polychain and DeFiance.

The Apple App Store reportedly blocked a Gnosis Safe crypto wallet app update due to it hosting NFTs that weren’t purchased inside the app. Lukas Schor —a product developer at Ethereum-based crypto wallet provider Gnosis Safe — revealed the firm ran into trouble when it submitted an updated version of its app to the IOS app store earlier this month. Schor noted on Sept. 14 that despite the update having nothing to do with non-fungibles, the App Store flagged a sample image that displayed an NFT in the app’s description section, even though it had been up for “many months.”