Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
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Exchanges news
- Payment giant Square and social media giant Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that Square’s new division focused on creating an open developer platform, TBD, is planning to build a decentralized bitcoin (BTC) exchange. Mike Brock, who was named to lead the initiative, added that this platform will be entirely developed in public, open-source, open-protocol, and any wallet will be able to use.
- Bilaxy announced on August 29 that its hot wallet had been hacked. In an August 30 update, the team described the attack as “serious,” stating that some 295 ERC20 tokens were hacked and transferred. All unaffected tokens have been moved to a cold wallet. “Bilaxy suffered heavy losses in this hack accident,” said their Telegram channel. “The problem has not been determined now, which will take lots of work and time to resume Bilaxy services. it may at least take 2 weeks to investigate the hack thoroughly and rebuild system architecture to secure the system and assets.”
- KuCoin announced that the total number of its new users in Q2 2021 exceeded 2m, with “unprecedented” quarter-over-quarter growth of 1,144%, as well as a year-on-year increase of 709%. To date, KuCoin has executed 810m transactions and the accumulated transaction volume attained a value of USD 400bn. Over the past year, the average daily trading volume has grown by 791% and now stands at USD 4.3bn.
DeFi news
- A consortium of Ethereum decentralized finance (DeFi) projects announced ‘DeFi for the People’, a collaboration of global crypto organizations united by a gaol to bring DeFi to the 6bn smartphone users around the world, as the post says. Built on Celo, the initiative includes Aave, Curve, Sushi, PoolTogether, 0x, UMA, Valora, Ubeswap, and Moola Market among its founding partners. Education and infrastructure partners include Chainlink, RabbitHole, The Graph, and Wrapped.com. This program aims to offer more than USD 100m in educational initiatives, grants, and incentives.
Banking news
- International banking group Standard Chartered and supply chain finance technology solution provider Linklogis have announced a joint venture to establish Olea, which they say will be “a fully-digitized trade finance origination and distribution platform that aims to bring together institutional investors seeking opportunities in an alternative asset class with businesses requiring supply chain financing, subject to regulatory approval.” Headquartered in Singapore, Olea will be headed by Amelia Ng (SC Ventures, the innovation, fintech and ventures unit of Standard Chartered) as CEO and Letitia Chau (Vice Chairperson and Chief Risk Officer of Linklogis) as deputy CEO.
Regulation news
- Blockchain analytics firm AnChain.AI signed a deal with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to help monitor and regulate the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry, per a report in Forbes. The initial value of the contract is USD 125,000, with five separate one-year USD 125,000 option years for a total of USD 625,000.
Investments news
- Miller Opportunity Trust, the flagship fund offered by noted hedge fund manager and bitcoin bull Bill Miller, disclosed in a recent SEC filing a USD 44.7m stake in the Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC). The fund, which had assets of USD 3.1bn as of June 30, said it owned 1.5m shares of GBTC.
- The Norwegian crypto-focused investment and research firm Arcane Crypto said it has raised SEK 61m (EUR 6m) in directed issue. The Board of Directors of Arcane Crypto AB has resolved on and carried out a directed issue of 300.93m units to a group of unspecified qualified investors with a proven interest in Arcane Crypto and the crypto sector. The company expects to be cash-flow positive from year-end 2021.
- Alpaca, a commission-free stock brokerage platform that offers APIs for fintech apps to connect and trade in US stocks, announced it has closed a USD 50m Series B. Since its product launch in 2018, Alpaca has continued to accelerate worldwide growth and adoption of its developer APIs and is now expanding into cryptocurrency.
NFTs news
- Internet company The9 Limited said it has formally entered the non-fungible token (NFT) business. NFTSTAR Singapore Pte. Ltd., a Singapore wholly-owned subsidiary of The9 Limited, will launch a NFT trading and community platform NFTSTAR, which is expected to be launched in Q4 2021, while user pre-registration incentive program is starting now. Gagan Palrecha, the former Dapper Labs Vice President of Operations, will join NFTSTAR as the Chief Operation Officer.
- NBA champion Stephen Curry has joined the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 NFT apes, by purchasing an NFT ape for ETH 55 (USD 175,193). The OpenSea marketplace shows the current highest offer for Curry’s ape to be ETH 39.34 – lower than the price he had paid for it.
- Also, the Bored Ape Yacht Club raised USD 96m in a public sale of 10,000 of its Mutant Apes in a single hour on Saturday night, according to multiple reports. The team behind the NFT project also airdropped additional 10,000 vials of mutant serum that let existing holders of the Ethereum-based NFT mint new apes for free. Holders of Bored Ape tokens were airdropped one of three serums: M1, M2, or Mega Mutant (M3). The Mutant Apes have so far generated ETH 46,388 (USD 147.76m) in all-time trading volume, according to OpenSea.
Career news
- Binance Australia announced the appointment of Leigh Travers, former DigitalX CEO and Director, as Chief Executive Officer. He worked at DigitalX Limited, a publicly listed blockchain technology company, for seven years. Prior to that, he served on the Board of Australia’s blockchain industry body, Blockchain Australia. In Binance, Travers will focus on growing the brand and the company’s working relationships with regulators.
- Bitso, a Latin America-focused major crypto platform, said that Vaughan Smith has been appointed as Bitso’s first-ever Chief Operating Officer. He joins the team with more than a decade of experience as Vice President of Corporate Development at eBay, Move, and, most recently, Facebook, the company said. Bitso claims it has over 2.6m users.
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