Bitcoin Daily: NFT Art Market SuperRare Raises $9 Million; Frenchman Sues Australian Crypto Advisory 800,000 Over Scam Deal

Non-fungible token (NFT) art marketplace SuperRare has raised $9 million in a Series A funding round, Decrypt reported.

Tokenized, rare digital art authenticated on blockchain has exploded in popularity recently. SuperRare has reportedly traded $25 million a month in 2021 alone, the report stated.

The funding round was led by Velvet Sea Ventures and crypto fund 1confirmation. It also included Salesforce Founder and CEO Marc Benioff, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya, AngelList Co-Founder Naval Ravikant, billionaire investor Mark Cuban, Sound Ventures and Samsung Next, Samsung’s investment fund, according to the report.

The marketplace plans to use the funding to develop a mobile app, explore digital showcase and expand its team. The company also hopes to hold more exhibitions and host events, the report stated.

“We never really had a standard to identify unique digital objects,” said SuperRae CEO John Crain, per the report. “I think it’s as game-changing as the invention of the blockchain itself, and there’s a bunch of really good, strong use cases there.”

In other news, Alexandre Raffin, a native of France, has filed suit against cryptocurrency advisory Modern Assets Australia for allegedly breaching its duty of care, ABC News reported.

Raffin, who runs Paris-based brokerage firm GAINS Associates, is suing the company and its directors, Jonathan Allison and Carlo Sciubba, for $800,000, plus damages, after allegedly failing to perform due diligence when connecting him with a cryptocurrency seller. The $800,000 figure is what the currency would have been worth in August of last year, the report stated.

Modern Assets was supposed to provide Raffin with Klaytn, a South Korean cryptocurrency, in return for cash. When the deal fell through, Modern Assets connected Raffin with its seller, who was to provide 937,500 Klaytn in exchange for $93,000. But after receiving the cash, the seller “disappeared,” ABC reported.

In the end, Raffin had to repay his investors out of his own pocket, about “80 percent” of his assets, according to the report.

Modern Assets has refunded Raffin his commission fees but denied the allegation, per ABC.

Lastly, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) released a statement Monday (March 29), calling out the Financial Crimes Enforcement Networks (FinCEN) for its proposed cryptocurrency regulation.

The rule would require financial institutions (FIs) to track and report personal information for every wire transaction above $3,000 and non-wire transaction above $10,000, including those done on “unhosted wallets,” which act as secret bank accounts.

In the statement, the NCLA called the move an “unconstitutional power grab” that would force out privacy-centric digital assets from the U.S. banking infrastructure.

“The proposed rule represents a radical — and unlawful — extension of FinCEN’s financial surveillance,” the NCLA said in the statement and urged FinCEN to recognize its “constitutional limits.”

“FinCEN’s proposed rule unlawfully attempts to transform the agency’s limited authority to regulate banks into permission to engage in the mass financial surveillance of innocent individuals who merely use digital assets,” the NCLA added in the statement. “FinCEN ought to recognize that its proposal would be grossly unconstitutional and promptly scrap this rule.”