FinTech news in digital assets category

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.

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.

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 NFT market was worth $41 billion at the end of last year — nearly as large as the conventional art market by some estimates — and it’s expected to nearly double in size by the end of 2022, according to a report released this week by blockchain analytics firm Nansen.

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.

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.