Today in Crypto: Hodlnaut Freezes Withdrawals

Crypto lender Hodlnaut has frozen withdrawals, token swaps and deposits as of Monday (Aug. 8), citing the “recent market conditions,” the company website said.

The Singapore company said a “difficult decision was taken for us to focus on stabilising our liquidity and preserving assets, while we work to find the best way to protect our users’ long-term interests.”

The company says it’s also informed the Monetary Authority of Singapore that it withdraw its application for a license, and won’t be providing regulated digital payment token services like its token swap feature.

Hodlnaut says it’s working on a recovery and will be providing updates when they come.

Elsewhere, Nvidia’s preliminary second quarter results show a decline in revenue compared the forecast, a report from the company says.

The company said this came from weaker-than-expected demand for gaming products, saying there were fewer new graphics processors being sold. The GPUs, however, are also used in crypto mining, and the drop in demand there is part of the story.

“Our gaming product sell-through projections declined significantly as the quarter progressed,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “As we expect the macroeconomic conditions affecting sell-through to continue, we took actions with our Gaming partners to adjust channel prices and inventory.”

Meanwhile, the Treasury Department has banned U.S. residents from using Tornado Cash, the decentralized crypto mining service, a report from Coindesk said.

This comes as the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which monitors sanctions violations, has added Tornado Cash to its blacklist of people, entities and crypto addresses.

The Treasury says Tornado Cash has been a key element for the Lazarus Group, based in North Korea, which has been tied to many recent hacking operations, including the $625 million hack of Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network, according to the Treasury Department. Ronin crypto was passed through Tornado Cash, which is designed to hide to source of the crypto.

In other news, the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula One team will introduce cryptocurrency payments for its online store, a company website said Monday.

This makes it the first official F1 merchandise outlet to allow crypto payments.

The company will be working with Crypto.com and eCommerce partner Cube. Cube has worked with Crypto.com to integrate with the latter’s global ecosystem.

Meanwhile, crypto financial services company Galaxy Digital has seen more than double its second quarter loss as digital asset prices fell, Bloomberg wrote.

The company lost $554.7 million, which was a big increase from $182.9 million from a year ago.

That mostly came about because of unrealized losses for digital assets and investments in trading and the principal investments business.

Michael Novogratz, the billionaire founder of the company, said the crypto industry “needs new energy” like the Ethereum “Merge” upgrade, which has led to a rally for the token.

For all PYMNTS crypto coverage, subscribe to the daily Crypto Newsletter.