FinTech news in cryptocurrency category

Over a 10-year horizon, the idea for a total market for crypto assets will look very different, Diamond said. The biggest difference between this index product and traditional equity indices is the exposure to crypto assets, Diamond noted. Last month, the startup launched its first product, the Alongside Crypto Market Index ($AMKT), which gives people broad exposure to the entire crypto asset market through a single token. In the future, Alongside will consider launching different products centered around DeFi as a category or layer-2 blockchains as a category, Diamond said.

Deal Box has taken strategic institutional funds from family offices and high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, Carter shared. Deal Box, a capital markets advisory and token offering packaging platform, has launched its venture arm with plans to invest $125 million in startups using web3 technology, the company shared Wednesday. There has also been interest from institutional investors, other family offices and sovereign wealth funds, Carter added. The firm has closed initial strategic investments in three startups — Total Network Services, Rypplzz and Forward-Edge AI — as part of its web3 investment thesis.

Delphia, a mobile investment platform, is facing a lawsuit and allegations that its co-founder and CTO Cameron Agius-Westland sexually assaulted and harassed a former employee, according to a complaint filed on Monday and shared exclusively with journalist. Andrew Peek, CEO and co-founder of Delphia, shared a statement with journalist in response to the lawsuit allegations: Delphia takes the allegations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Westland very seriously. The following day, Westland is said in the complaint to have at least partly acknowledged his behavior by sending the Plaintiff and two other colleagues the following message, as shared in a screenshot in the document: In December 2022, Delphia announced its acquisition of Fathom Privacy, a data rights company that aims to provide individuals the ability to own personal application data.

And now, without further ado, here are the final four startups ready to impress investors: Meet Candy Shop, a one-stop solution provider designed to make NFT deployment and brand-management problems a thing of the past. It The Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day, a showcase of 12 boundary-pushing early-stage startups building projects across web3, DeFi, NFT and gaming. Founded by Gabrielle Patrick, the company builds clearing infrastructure designed to let firms leverage distributed ledger technology, become payment institutions or become electronic money institutions. Join us tomorrow — January 11 —  for the Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day and see for yourself what the brilliant minds behind 12 up-and-coming projects are building.

But the filing deems account holders with the Earn program as unsecured creditors of Celsius, which means their recovery depends on the distributions to unsecured creditors under a Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan. The verdict gives Celsius ownership of the $4.2 billion in cryptocurrency that users deposited into its high-interest Earn program, according to a 45-page filing from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of New York on Wednesday. A federal bankruptcy judge ruled cryptocurrencies deposited into interest-bearing accounts at Celsius Network, a now-bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform, actually belong to the firm – thanks to the fine print. Last month, Celsius fought with customers in court over ownership of deposited funds as it wanted to sell about $18 million worth of stablecoins from Earn accounts to fund its organization.

Coinbase, the second-largest crypto exchange globally, has launched a new tool to help its customers recover more than 4,000 unsupported ERC-20 tokens sent to its ledger, the company exclusively told journalist. The ERC-20 self-service asset recovery tool allows customers to recover different kinds of tokens sent to a Coinbase address. In the past, if you sent assets not supported by Coinbase to a users’ address on the exchange, you’d get a message saying the assets were successfully delivered on-chain, but they didn’t actually go to the receiver’s wallets. Many tokens that are ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum mainnet that have pricing information on a decentralized exchange or other venue can be recovered, Robinson said.

A Seoul court rejected a request from prosecutors for warrants to detain eight people related to Terraform Labs, including the co-founder of Terraform Labs, Daniel Shin, early investors and former engineers. The Seoul Southern District Prosecutors Office told journalist that it is hard to understand that conclusion as the court knows the seriousness of the allegation and the fact that some of the suspects allegedly made money by selling Luna tokens before the collapse. South Korean prosecutors seek arrest warrants for Terraform Labs co-founder, investors and engineers Prosecutors also suspect Shin used customer data from his separate fintech startup called Chai to promote Luna, violating the Electric Financial Transaction Act.

Notably, former SoftBank COO Marcelo Claure, who stepped down in late January after a reported battle over pay, had this to say about the FTX fiasco: journalist has reached out to SoftBank for comment on its investment in FTX. Also among FTX’s long roster of investors are: NEA, IVP, Iconiq Capital, Third Point Ventures, Tiger Global, Altimeter Capital Management, Lux Capital, Mayfield, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ribbit Capital, Temasek Holdings, BlackRock and Thoma Bravo. The notorious Japanese investment conglomerate SoftBank, for example, is just one of many such firms that backed FTX after the startup raised a $400 million funding round in January, valuing the company at a staggering $32 billion. FTX files for bankruptcy, CEO Sam Bankman-Fried steps down

Withdrawal transactions for customers using FTX, the third largest crypto exchange by volume, have seemingly been limited to a nominal amount or none at all, according to multiple on-chain data sources. On Monday, Bankman-Fried tried to calm the waters in regard to FTX’s liquidity via a series of tweets indirectly responding to Zhao and Binance’s liquidations. Stablecoin withdrawals from FTX dropped to zero around 6 a.m. ET on Tuesday, according to data on CryptoQuant. FTX’s stablecoin reserve also decreased 93% over the past two weeks, and it has injected USDC liquidity from Alameda Research wallets, Ju said.

Law enforcement also recovered $661,900 in cash, 25 Casascius coins of bitcoin (valued at about 174 bitcoin), an additional 11.116 bitcoin, and a handful of silver- and gold-colored bars. The whereabouts of this massive amount of bitcoin was a mystery for almost 10 years, U.S. Attorney Damian WIlliams said in the release. The plea came almost a year after law enforcement seized 50,676.17851897 bitcoin, then valued at over $3.36 billion, from Zhong home, the statement said. Officials found the bitcoin in an underground floor safe and on a single-board computer that was hidden under blankets in a popcorn tin placed in a bathroom closet.

Singapore may soon require retail investors to take a test and not use credit card payments and other forms of borrowing for trading cryptocurrencies, the central bank proposed on Wednesday in a series of stringent measures as the island nation looks to make citizens aware of the risks surrounding volatile assets. The central bank acknowledged [PDF] that a number of industry players are supportive of some form of assessment on the retail customer’s knowledge of risks, but said they should also disclose whenever they have a financial interest in the tokens they offer to customers. The central bank also proposed that crypto firms licensed under the nation’s Payments Services Act should not be allowed to lend to retail investors in a move that could topple many firms’ businesses. Once a preferred global crypto hub for its policies, Singapore authorities have toughen their views of digital assets following the collapse of a series of firms including Terraform Labs’ stablecoin UST and native token LUNA, and hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

Pillow’s founders says it differentiates with its goal of becoming a holistic home for digital asset-driven financial services that allows even first time crypto users users to earn, save, spend and invest from the same platform. For Bitcoin, yields are generated by wrapping Bitcoin to Ethereum-compatible assets such as $WBTC and $renBTC and deploying wrapped assets as liquidity to DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, with an effective rate of 1.52%. In some countries where Pillow has partnered with local, compliant on-ramp service providers, users can also buy crypto with their local fiat currency. Pillow aspires to be an all-in-one platform that says it helps even newbie users save, spend and invest in crypto currency.

OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace, will operate on the blockchain alongside existing platforms like NFTrade and other Avalanche-focused NFT marketplaces, including Joepegs and Kalao. Even though the NFT market has slowed down in recent months, over the past 30 days, Avalanche’s NFT sales volume rose 38.52% to $2.1 million in sales, per CryptoSlam data. With Avalanche, OpenSea users will be able to settle NFT transactions in under a second with low transaction fees, the company said. With about $404.6 million in sales, Avalanche is the seventh-largest blockchain by NFT sales volume, CryptoSlam data shows.

U.S. senators Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, and Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, exclusively shared with journalist the reformed legislation, the Cryptocurrency Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which would amend the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 to include cryptocurrency firms. As regulators around the world try to provide frameworks for the digital asset industry, two U.S. senators have introduced a bill to help crypto companies report cybersecurity threats. In general, Lummis has been a vocal supporter of the crypto industry and has sponsored and proposed new bills focused on the crypto industry in recent months. In June, Lummis proposed a bipartisan crypto bill alongside Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, with a goal of installing guide rails around the digital asset sector.

According to a press release from New York Attorney General Letitia James, Nexo and Nexo Capital failed to register with the state securities and commodities brokers or dealers and lied to investors about their registration status. Crypto platform Nexo is being sued by eight U.S. state securities regulators representing New York, California, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Washington and Vermont. Separately, California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation issued a cease-and-desist order against Nexo’s crypto-interest-bearing accounts, according to a document released by the state. Nexo isn’t the first crypto company to land in hot water with U.S regulators over interest-bearing accounts, which have been viewed as securities in select cases in the past.

Shingal, the startup’s CEO, said crypto hedges and investment funds often run with a small number of staff, and the process of calculating tax and performing compliance is time consuming because they have to pull data from multiple sources, merge it and then adhere to different compliance and reporting regulations for each type of transaction. Founded in May 2022 by Tonmoy Shingal and Pankaj Garg and based in Bangalore, Binocs currently has over 1,000 users, including retail and institutional investors who need to perform forensic accounting and risk management. He added that regulations are one of the biggest obstacles to more adoption of crypto, with about 15 to 20 countries that currently tax crypto investments, and 60 to 70 that will in the future. Binocs’ founders point to figures from the Coin Market Cap that say the total market cap of the crypto industry rose from about $325 billion in September 2020 to $1 trillion in September 2022.

Banks and card issuers typically use fraud detection algorithms for crypto that aren’t nearly granular enough, Ranjan said, meaning around half of the customers who attempt to transact using fiat-to-crypto onramps through traditional platforms are declined as fraudulent.

The transition occurred at block 15537393 on September 15 at 1:42:42 a.m. EST. There were no big hiccups, with one exception. A single block was missing, leading some investors to describe the merge event as the best-case scenario.

Crypto exchange and marketplace Reku has been riding the wave with what it says are the lowest fees on the market, and a platform that is aimed at both newcomers and experienced traders. Its founders say that Reku’s five years of operation mean that they know how to scale and endure fluctuations in the market, including the pandemic and this year’s recession. It is compliant with Indonesia’s commodities future trading agency (BAPPEBTI) and emphasizes user safety by offering only well-established cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Today, the startup, founded in 2017, announced it has raised $11 million in Series A funding, led by AC Ventures (ACV) with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Skystar Capital.

Mural, a crypto firm focused on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) infrastructure, has raised $5.6 million in seed funding, the company co-founders Sinclair Toffa and Kevin Alvarez-Fung exclusively told journalist. The company is rolling out a beta for its fintech-focused platform to help brands deploy DAO treasury funds ranging from $50 to $100 million in size, Alvarez-Fung shared. The funds will be used to bring on new talent and work with brands globally that want to create and use DAOs, Alvarez-Fung said. Toffa and Alvarez-Fung said one of the biggest disconnects they saw in the DAO space was between treasuries and communities.

Outside of Miami, Quinn said, RealOpen’s crypto focus has attracted a strong pipeline of listings from sellers all over the world. By using RealScore, buyers can defer converting their crypto into cash until the very instant the transaction closes without having to explain to a seller what the value of their offer is beforehand, according to Dumontet.

As to how to restore investor confidence in the crypto sphere, Ge believes regulators are on the right track to bring more oversight over consumer-facing crypto products and protection for retail investors, as is the case in Singapore.

Binance announced the acquisition of WazirX in late 2019 in a blog post. The clarification follows India’s Enforcement Directorate freezing WazirX’s assets worth over $8 million, citing suspected violation of foreign exchange rule.

BlackRock’s Aladdin investment management platform will offer connectivity to Coinbase Prime to offer crypto trading, custody, prime brokerage, and reporting capabilities to shared clients.

Given two of the primary hardware wallets, Ledger and Trezor, have roughly 5 million users, there would appear to be plenty of room for growth, since that there are at least 295 million crypto holders who may decide to add hardware wallets to their portfolio.

Specifically, the SEC framed the following assets as securities: Power Ledger’s POWR token, Flexa’s AMP token, Rally’s RLY token, DerivaDEX’s DDX token, XY Labs’ XYO token, Rari Capital’s RGT token, Liechtenstein Cryptoassets Exchange’s LCX token, DFX Finance’s DFX token and Kromatika Finance’s KROM token.

The fund is strategic for Valkyrie in that it is focused on nascent infrastructure the firm might use in its digital asset management operations, including: security, authentication, compliance, data management, storage, networking, communication, governance, payments and transactions companies.

UnCaged Studios, a web3-focused gaming studio, has raised $24 million in a Series A equity funding round to continue growing the crypto gaming industry.

Plaid, the company building data transfer technologies to power fintech and digital finance products like smartphone-based wallets, today announced that it adding support for thousands of crypto exchanges to its data network.

The firm was founded by Colton Sakamoto and long-time crypto entrepreneur and investor Anthony Pompliano in an effort to help connect crypto companies looking for talent with people who wanted to enter the space.

With a fresh $42 million in its coffer, the firm plans to invest in the “social ecosystem” of web3, a version of the internet built largely on blockchain that promises to be more decentralized.

OP Crypto is raising $100 million for its new investment, dubbed ‘Fund of Funds’, to deploy capital into emerging fund managers focused on early-stage crypto investments.

Crypto exchange FTX is open to partnering with Robinhood Markets, its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said in a statement.

In addition to the announcement of Saga, Yakovenko shared the launch of the Solana Mobile Stack, or SMS, which is a web3 layer for Solana built on the phone. The co-founder and CEO of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, had a Steve Jobs moment when he stood in front of an auditorium in New York City and announced the launch of Saga, an Android web3-focused smartphone.

A Ukrainian deeptech startup is launching a charity NFT project to sell AI-generated artworks with the twin goal of raising money to support people affected by Russia war of aggression and also — it hopes — keep attention locked on the conflict as it approaches its fourth month, with many in the country concerned that the world’s focus is flagging.

While Binance.US says it’s not a subsidiary or affiliate of Binance itself, the company launched as a legal independent entity in 2019 and is tied to Binance through its founder, Changpeng Zhao, as well as through its licensing agreements with Binance that cover its core technology and naming rights.

Celsius allows users to deposit their Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether and receive weekly interest payments. There must be many users who are in a position of leverage and desperately need those funds from Celsius, now locked away.

Amex users have been waiting for an announcement like this for some time, as its competitors Visa and Mastercard have already launched their own crypto rewards credit cards through partnerships with digital asset companies, such as Visa’s crypto rewards card offered in conjunction with BlockFi and the Mastercard-powered card issued by crypto exchange Gemini.

Delphia’s data token model will function as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), votes for which are tied to its ERC-20 token that data-providing users receive for sharing their information.

Iyer, a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits, spent the majority of last year honing in on his interest in web3 as a visiting partner at Pear VC and an instructor teaching a DeFi masterclass to over 2,000 students.

Zhang said she has noticed a growing interest of funds coming into the crypto space or new funds launching to invest in crypto after they saw the potentials of blockchain technology and crypto ecosystem.

The fund will be financed by the $450 million Polygon had raised previously, its treasury, and a $100 million ecosystem fund, Wyatt said, adding the company will deploy more capital as needed.

Doppel indexes NFT data across various blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Flow, and others, and uses models that incorporate keywords and metadata to spot fraud, Tian said.

Mossy’s solution for the calamitous sector, a stablecoin called USDTea, is backed by what they claim is America’s most stable asset: cans of AriZona Iced Tea.

Choi noted that headcount growth is a key input in the company’s financial model, and that slowing the rate of hiring is important in ensuring Coinbase can reach the profitability guidance it has set for investors.

Terraform Labs, the company behind the UST and Terra (LUNA) cryptocurrencies, halted the Terra blockchain Thursday following the Terra ecosystem meltdown this week, which caused its TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin token to crash, taking with it the rest of the cryptocurrency market. The halt means no new blocks are being generated on the blockchain network after its block height of 7603700, and holders can’t move their Terra assets until the blockchain is unfrozen.

BVNK offers banking services and payments for crypto-native businesses. For instance, many crypto wallets embed MoonPay in their apps so that users can buy crypto assets with a debit card.

US Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler made his concerns clear in an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, calling out crypto exchanges for offering multiple services that are often in conflict with one another, such as custody, market-making, and trading. Gensler specifically took aim at the top three largest stablecoins — Binance USD, USD Coin and Tether — saying that it is not a coincidence that they are all closely tied to crypto exchanges.

Nnadi says his company will engage more African governments — including those who have an anti-crypto stance like Nigeria and Kenya– to see the benefits of blockchain and assist in drafting licensing regimes for crypto companies to operate in their countries. In a statement, the company revealed that it struck a partnership with the Central African Republic — the first country to legalize bitcoin as a legal tender in Africa and second globally only to El Salvador –to become its official crypto partner and an advisor to the president on crypto strategy and planning.

Its open source network allows custom smart contracts to be built on Bitcoin, enabling developers to use the Bitcoin blockchain to create dApps. Laughlin explained that without the Taproot upgrade implemented on the Bitcoin network late last year, which makes it easier and faster to verify transactions, the growth of Bitcoin as an ecosystem would have been much more limited. Bitcoin supporters, including Thiel, ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood and MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, all spoke at Bitcoin 2022 about its ability to act as a store of value when central banks relax their policies and let inflation run hot, as has been the case in the United States throughout the majority of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is building infrastructure for the Bitcoin Lightning Network akin to Visa’s payments network, Lightning Labs CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark told journalist.

It’s been fairly active in the crypto space specifically — it led an investment in blockchain company Flipside, a data analytics tool for protocols that rewards users for completing queries, last month, and participated in Indian web3 startup CoinDCX’s recent $135 million fundraise. In February, Republic spun out its metaverse and NFT-focused investment division, Republic Realm, as a standalone company called Everyrealm run by Janine Yorio.

Alberto Simon, co-founder of art investing platform Masterworks, is leaving his current role at Gemini’s Nifty Gateway NFT platform to join Co:Create as a co-founder and chief product officer, Fung said. Co:Create will be chain-agnostic, meaning it will support the blockchains on which its customers have built their NFT projects, Fung said.

Binance, the world largest crypto exchange by volume, has gained regulatory approval to provide digital asset services in France, the first European country where it has acquired such permission, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. Binance has been busy trying to show European regulators its commitment to practice compliance and promote the region’s blockchain ecosystem. Many Chinese-founded crypto firms have moved their core management to Singapore, which is quickly emerging as a regional hub for blockchain startups. Originally founded in China, Binance has largely pulled out of the country following Beijing’s sweeping crypto ban.

Tactic's software, Jaskiw said, helps companies automatically categorize transactions and apply accounting logic such as calculating $USD gain/loss and taxable events. Tactic, she said, has partnered with accounting firms to help interpret accounting guidelines for DeFi-specific activities such as staking, NFT minting and airdrops.

Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firm’s commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty of crypto investors still don’t understand.

The Boston-based asset manager, which administers plans covering more than 20 million participants representing $2.7 trillion in assets, said the launch is expected to take place by midyear, debuting at bitcoin supporter Michael Saylor firm MicroStrategy, which holds billions of dollars of the asset on its balance sheet.

OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, acquired NFT aggregator Gem.xyz (Gem) to “better serve” its more experienced users, the company said in a blog post. The deal, which comes a few months after OpenSea bought DeFi wallet startup Dharma Labs, will allow OpenSea to “learn from Gem’s expertise and intuition about the advanced NFT community,” the \[…\]

CertiK, a web3 and blockchain security company, has raised $88 million in its latest round, bringing its valuation to $2 billion. To date, CertiK has protected over $300 billion worth of crypto assets for 2,500 enterprise clients through its auditing and fraud investigation services, among other offerings, the company stated.

Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis announced that it has raised $150 million in funding led by crypto exchange Binance to help reimburse users who lost funds during a ~$625 million hack of its play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, which was the largest crypto heist to date.

Hayes stepped down from his prior role as CEO of BitMEX in October 2020, though sources told The Block that he played a role in the layoffs, in part through his support of BitMEX pivoting away from its core focus on derivatives.

The $1.5 billion in capital puts Haun Ventures in the company of other crypto native funds like Paradigm and Electric Capital, which have debuted large funds in recent months.

Payments giant Stripe already powers a pretty major swath of the web financial infrastructure, now it’s launching crypto payments support to give customers an easier path to onboard web3 users and interact with cryptocurrencies.

Tesla’s decision to buy Bitcoin last year prompted a major bull run for the cryptocurrency, though that surge was famously reversed months later by the company’s announcement that while it did not immediately plan to sell its Bitcoin, it would no longer be accepting Bitcoin as payment for vehicle purchases.

If companies are operating primarily in crypto, Deel says, they don’t have to worry about paying any of the exchange fees to convert it into, say USD, before they pay their employees.

The company has built on top of many of its virtual properties — for example, it launched a retail store concept in Decentraland two weeks ago, which it plans to expand into other metaverse platforms, Yorio said.

As for where the donations go to ostensibly grow, Daffy currently provides its customers access to nine funds but Nash said to expect many more to appear on the platform over time.

The peer-to-peer open source wireless network called Pollen Mobile will incentivize its users with cryptocurrency to run their own mini cell towers and build out the network coverage in the Bay Area where the service is initially launching

India on Tuesday announced plans to launch a digital currency by next year and tax cryptocurrencies and NFTs as the country moves closer to recognizing cryptocurrencies as legal tender in the world second largest internet market.

Two of Fireblocks’ biggest competitors in the crypto custody infrastructure space were acquired last year, Shaulov said. In terms of crypto products, decentralized finance (DeFi) has been an especially hot growth area for the startup, accounting for 10% of Fireblocks’ transaction volume in the past month, according to Shaulov.

Consider that late last summer, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) invested in an outfit, Yield Guild Games (YGG), that invests in NFTs from blockchain-based games, then loans them out to people who use them and generate revenue as they play. To ensure that their games offer enough liquidity to keep users engaged, game makers have already proven open to working with third-party outfits like YGG and other so-called play-to-earn guilds that similarly buy NFT gaming assets and lease them to players under revenue-sharing arrangements.

If this becomes a reality, value will be lost for a network’s stakeholders through under-pricing higher-value use-cases, while at the same time losing network revenue potentially derived from lower-value, high-volume use cases

Keep an eye on enterprising companies pushing into these areas – specifically collectibles – as a way to broaden the reach of crypto and blockchain in 2022.