Here's your Thursday edition of Cryptonews Crunch, featuring the latest stories with the European Central Bank raising interest rates for the first time in 11 years, Tesla sells off 75% of its BTC holding, and episode 145 of the Cryptonews Podcast.
|
|
|
|
Source: CoinMarketCap.com
|
|
|
|
- Today, the European Central Bank (ECB) raised interest rates in the eurozone for the first time in 11 years, as high and rising inflation becomes central bankers’ primary concern. The 50 basis points rate hike is higher than analysts had expected, and marks a departure from the zero-interest rate environment the EU has been in since 2016.
- FTX and FTX US are reportedly targeting a round at "essentially the same valuation" as their January fundraising. As reported at the time, FTX Trading Ltd., the owner and operator of FTX, said that they closed a USD 400m fundraise and increased the valuation of the company to USD 32bn. Also in January, FTX US raised USD 400m at a USD 8bn valuation.
- Tron founder Justin Sun says that TronDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that governs the Tron network’s development, wants to “acquire” Huanhe, an NFT arm of the Chinese tech powerhouse Tencent.
- Tesla sold off 75% of its Bitcoin holding for “a realized gain” in the second quarter, prompting speculations on how this investment went for the company. The sale is believed to have been made at a price of around USD 29,000, higher than the lows seen during the quarter. In an earnings report released on Wednesday, Tesla revealed that it had offloaded Bitcoin worth some USD 936m during the second quarter. The selling leaves the company with digital assets worth USD 218m, with the bulk of that likely to be Bitcoin.
- The pseudonymous NFT whale Franklin, minted the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) name stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth and put it up for sale using his secondary Ethereum wallet on Tuesday, but also placed a bid of ETH 100 using his main wallet. Today, he sold that ENS domain to someone else for ETH 1.9 (USD 2,825). The new owner of the ENS domain accepted the 100 ETH bid Franklin had previously placed -- and sold the domain back to the pseudonymous NFT collector. Franklin rejected suspicions that he was “botted,” meaning an automatic bot accepted the ETH 100 bid before he could cancel it, saying that it was entirely his own mistake.
- Mojang Studios, the Microsoft-owned developer behind Minecraft, announced Wednesday that the studio would not support NFTs and other blockchain innovations, citing fraud and digital exclusion. Meanwhile, in contrast to Mojang's harsh stance, Japanese entertainment conglomerate and video game company Square Enix has partnered with NFT platform Enjin to launch its digital collection of cards celebrating the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy 7, a 1997 role-playing video game.
|
|
|
|
Promotion
Instant Deposits/Withdrawals in BTC, ETH, USDT, BNB, BUSD, Matic, CHP - and no KYC checks. Cash Games, Tournaments. Regular High Roller games. Transparent - Decentralized - Verifiably fair. All countries allowed. Windows, Mac, IOS, Android.
Developed by an ambitious team of poker lovers (and long time friends of Cryptonews!), with the philosophy that poker should be fun.
Play Smart - Win Big.
|
|
|
|
|
|
David Shin is the Head of Global Adoption for Klaytn, the blockchain arm of Kakao - Korea’s Internet technology giant. He is a dynamic Entrepreneur and a successful Investment Banker (IB) turned Blockchain Evangelist.
He has helped establish numerous nonprofits across Asia - facilitating conversations between local entities and governments around the cryptocurrency/blockchain topic. David is also an advisor to various organizations, including Interstellar, Bantu Blockchain Foundation, and Stanford University. He has also consulted numerous Financial Institutions on blockchain implementation projects and Central Banks on the viability and impact of CBDCs.
In this conversation, we discuss:
- Creating horizontal verticals between gaming - High food prices in 2023, potentially bring worse than oil - OpenSea partnership to expand the Asian NFT ecosystem - Growth of super app e-commerce in Asia - Use cases of CBDCs - David’s book, coming out in 2023 - Interoperability in NFTs - Future of blockchain gaming
Tune In!
|
|
|
|
- Crypto lender Vauld has filed an application in the Singapore Courts to seek a moratorium order for their subsidiary Defi Payments for a period of 6 months, which would prohibit any proceedings against the company. They stated that this is due to “financial challenges” and is intended to give them “breathing time” for restructuring purposes.
- Finland's Customs have sold their confiscated Bitcoin, raising EUR 46.5m (USD 47.5m) via two brokers for a total of BTC 1,889.1, per Bloomberg. The stake, which was confiscated in raids before 2018, was valued at almost USD 130m at the height of the crypto boom last year.
- Blockchain.com is cutting 25% of its workforce (around 150 people) due to the harsh bear market conditions and the need to absorb financial losses. The news was first reported by Coindesk.
- Bitcoin applications ecosystem project Trust Machines announced that Dan Held has joined the company as an advisor. Held was previously the Director of Growth Marketing at crypto exchange Kraken, as well as the Director of Product for Blockchain.com.
- KuCoin secured a strategic investment of USD 10m from quantitative trading firm Susquehanna International Group (SIG). The two parties will also collaborate in blockchain startup incubation.
- Gemini has registered as a Virtual Asset Service Provider by the Central Bank of Ireland.
- Representatives from the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) met to swap crypto policy insights on stablecoins and other issues during the EU–US Joint Financial Regulatory Forum in Brussels. Participants “took stock of discussions around the development of potential central bank digital currencies,” they said.
- Leaders of the US House Financial Services Committee are eyeing July 27 to advance a bipartisan bill focused on stablecoins, Bloomberg reported, citing three undisclosed people familiar with the matter. The current draft of the bill would mandate that stablecoin issuers maintain 100% reserves and would bar them from lending stablecoins to customers.
- NFT platform PREMINT, which was recently the victim of a hack, announced that it would be compensating victims of the incident, having taken a snapshot of the floor price of the stolen NFTs in order to transfer Ethereum to the affected wallets in the next 7 days. They clarified, however, that this is a one-time action for this specific event and only for the wallets on their list.
- The Tether (USDT) stablecoin is now live on the blockchain network Tezos, and the newly integrated token is available for trading on the crypto platform Bitfinex.
- Blockchain company Matter Labs plans to launch its privacy and scaling solution, the zero-knowledge rollup zkSync 2.0, to Ethereum’s mainnet in 100 days. The solution aims to decrease Ethereum’s high fees and increase the network’s transaction capacity.
- Dogecoin announced the launch of its newest version, Dogecoin Core 1.14.6, which includes a “good number of improvements under the hood and some nice new features in the UI [user interface]”, per the announcement.
- Compass Mining announced its hosting partnership with digital infrastructure provider Compute North at its Granbury, Texas, USA, data center for 75 MW. The development will start in August, and Compass expects to deploy 25,000 ASICs there, they added.
- US President Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19 and will isolate at the White House, while continuing to carry out all of his duties fully during that time, said in a statement the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
- Crypto.com App has launched Google Pay in-app crypto purchase feature, the announcement said. Users need to first add their credit/debit card to their Google Pay, after which they can purchase 250+ coins in the Crypto.com App. The exchange also announced today that Apple Pay top-ups are now available to users with an Australia-issued Crypto.com Visa Card.
|
|
|
|
Promotion
To show our appreciation for KuCoin users’ support of Solcial (SLCL), we will be launching a campaign to give away a reward pool of 230,000 SLCL (approximately USD $30,000) to KuCoin users who trade SLCL or are well aware of Solcial.
Campaign period: 10:00:00 on July 19, 2022 to 10:00:00 on July 26, 2022 (UTC)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|