FinTech news in cryptography category

Some major ZK-rollup blockchains that exist today include Polygon, zkSync and StarkWare’s StarkNet platform, which all aim to increase scalability and security for developers off-chain through higher speeds and lower fees before combining and submitting them to Ethereum. Its SDK wants to help Rust (and eventually C++) developers to use ZK technology across any blockchain without having to be experts in cryptography, both the co-founders said. A rollup is a blockchain that gets security from another blockchain, so it’s a way to add functionality to an existing chain without sacrificing security, Evans said. The capital will be used to build its SDK and hire protocol engineers and researchers with expertise in blockchains and their frameworks, Özer said.

Other investors in the round include PrimeBlock Ventures, M77 Ventures, ShataCapital, Kryptos, Antalpha Ventures, Waterdrip Capital, 7 O’Clock Capital, Misa Zhu, founder of AR glasses maker Rokid and Fan Zhang, a former co-founder of Sequoia Capital China. Other startups are also using MPC to enable distributed signing of crypto transactions, but Wang pointed to the fact that Safeheron is open-sourced, which gives its clients more transparency into its source codes. Since its product launch in October, Safeheron has powered over 20 clients, which altogether have more than $100 million in cryptocurrencies under custody and have facilitated more than $4 billion worth of transactions using Safeheron’s wallet as a service, according to Wang. Private keys, critical to decentralized crypto apps, let individuals take control over their digital assets through self-custody wallets rather than leaving control to a centralized institution.

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.

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.

Crypto infrastructure provider Blockdaemon has acquired Danish company Sepior, a digital asset security company providing key management services for institutional clients, for an undisclosed price.

Solomon co-founded Sunscreen last year alongside threshold cryptography veteran MacLane Wilkison of Y Combinator-backed NuCypher.

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.

The crypto hash rate, which measures the computational power used by proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, in China plummeted to zero between last July and August after the country carried out the harshest crackdown on crypto mining.

Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey is teaming up with artist Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) to launch The Bitcoin Academy at Marcy Houses, the public housing complex in Brooklyn, New York where Jay-Z grew up.

Primitives’ ultimate goal is for the digital wallet to become a central location for a user to hold NFTs and cryptocurrencies, interact with friends, store music, play games, and more, Gabeau said.

Babel has evolved from a crypto lending business targeting miners and others into a comprehensive crypto asset manager for institutional investors. The growth of Babel Finance, which offers a suite of institution-facing crypto financial products, could be an indicator of how banks, investment funds, and other traditional investors are embracing the emerging digital asset class. It’s one of the many crypto firms to have recently opened an office in Singapore, which is competing with Hong Kong to be the crypto nexus of Asia.

Bitcoin’s most prominent layer-two, the Lightning network, can execute hundreds of thousands of transactions per second by settling transactions off-chain in a separate ledger, Lightning Labs CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark told journalist.

Terraform Labs, the organization behind UST, cryptocurrency Luna and Luna Foundation Guard, emptied its treasury wallet of all of its bitcoin, about 42,530 bitcoin, or $1.3 billion, on Monday.

The depegging of UST is forcing LFG to liquidate reserves from both LUNA and bitcoin in order to correct the pegging of UST to $1, Franzen said. If Terraform Labs is selling its bitcoin en masse into a market that’s already selling aggressively, it wouldn’t offer peg support, Jack Melnick, a token researcher at The TIE.

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.

Unlike NFTs that are minted on Ethereum or other public chains and traded with crypto on open marketplaces, digital collectibles issued in China are minted on permissioned blockchains managed by local tech giants and often sold on these companies’ own channels.

Amberdata provides data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto exchanges and decentralized finance for some of the largest financial and digital asset institutions, like Citi, Coinbase, Nasdaq and Franklin Templeton, among others.

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.

The verdict that China web3 community has been waiting for months is here: NFTs, or the tokens used to prove the ownership and authenticity of an item, must not be used for securitization or transacted in cryptocurrencies, said China’s banking, securities and internet financial associations in an announcement on Wednesday.

It was helping mid-size startups keep track of equity as they grew, but last summer, as the price of Bitcoin shot to a historic high, the company began getting requests from its clients to help manage employee tokens. The company declined to mention how many customers it’s servicing but said Hong Kong-based microinsurance firm YAS Digital and crypto gaming company Animoca Brands are among its early users. Sprout created Folium in light of this customer demand to help companies trace digital coins and non-fungible tokens across various blockchain platforms.

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.

The press release lays out seven major goals of the executive order with added detail: Protect U.S. Consumers, Investors, and Businesses Protect U.S. and Global Financial Stability and Mitigate Systemic Risk Mitigate the Illicit Finance and National Security Risks Posed by the Illicit Use of Digital Assets Promote U.S. Leadership in Technology and Economic Competitiveness to Reinforce U.S. Leadership in the Global Financial System Promote Equitable Access to Safe and Affordable Financial Services Support Technological Advances and Ensure Responsible Development and Use of Digital Assets Explore a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) For those in the crypto sector concerned about aggressive government intervention, the order language seems to signal that the Biden White House is uninterested in sweeping near-term reforms and is instead merely focused on ensuring that agencies are on the same page in researching and observing the national security implications of the crypto industry.

Beyond the consensus mechanism, Wagstaff says Subspace allows for data to be stored far more cheaply than on other blockchains by incentivizing users to run archival nodes, which store historical data relating to a particular blockchain. Subspace will use the capital to expand its integrations with projects on other blockchains and build a dedicated product team to support its Subspace Meta Services (SMS) segment.

Another wholesale NFT heist happened in April 2021 when artist Qing Han aka Quinni’s work was stolen and reposted on the same platform that York used, OpenSea.

Syndicate’s suite of smart contracts can walk users through the process of formalizing their club with a legal entity and handling things like setting up a bank account and getting tax forms to ensure stuff stays above-board.

To qualify for the program, users must enable multi-factor authentication on all transaction types where it is available, set up an anti-phishing code at least 21 days prior to the reported unauthorized transaction, file a police report and provide it to Crypto.com, complete a questionnaire to support a forensic investigation, and not be using a jailbroken device, according to the company.