This week big news on Crypto Derivatives Exchange and Million dollar investment in the world of DiFi.
Awards
- Chainalysis and Texas firm win a million-dollar IRS contract to crack Monero. The IRS has named the winners of its bounty program to track transactions on privacy tokens and layer-2 protocols.
- Romania set to auction Bitcoin and Ether confiscated in criminal case. The winning bidder will need to provide the auction house with a crypto address hosted on a registered, compliant platform.
Bitcoin
- Tony Veiculos, one of the three largest car stores throughout Brazil, now accepts Bitcoin. As the king of cryptocurrency continues to proceed into the future as the 6th largest currency in the world, now even 40-year established businesses such as Tony Veiculos accept BTC payments.
- The Gibraltar Stock Exchange said Tuesday that it listed a new bitcoin fund belonging to 3iQ Corp, a Canadian investment fund manager that focuses on new technologies and crypto-assets.
- Mauricio Toro, Colombian congressman of the Alianza Verde party, has authored a draft bill meant to regulate the crypto industry within his country. Toro outlined some of the hurdles his proposed legislation may face.
Crypto
- The SEC told Salt, the owner of the lending platform that offers dollar-denominated loans collateralized by cryptocurrencies, to begin the process of offering refunds to investors.
- Atari, a well-known video game legend, seeks public token sale in November. The token sale could take as little as one second, according to the Atari CEO.
DiFi Market
- Aleksandr Lebedev, a Russian businessman, and self-styled “ex-oligarch”, is backing a new decentralized finance project that aims to compete across a broad spectrum of financial products.
- CoinGecko transformed from CoinMarketCap challenger to DeFi investor.
- eToro’s Trading Platform offers staking for Cardano and Tron now. Cardano and TRON investors on eToro will earn 75%-90% of the company’s monthly staking yield.
- Uniswap processed $15.3 billion in monthly volume in September, outpacing Coinbase and signalling that DeFi is here to stay.
Ethereum
- Ethereum DEX Trading Volumes hit $22 billion last month. Uniswap has catalyzed most of this growth and is now on-par with many centralized exchanges in terms of the daily trading volume.
- Ethereum Miners made about $172 million from fees last month and about $150 million from block rewards, taking their total revenue to more than $320 million.
Funding
- ACDX (crypto Derivatives Exchange) Launches Platform and Uniswap, Closes $10M Investment Rounds.
- Bitpanda, Austrian crypto exchange, has raised $52m in a round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures. Venture capital firm Speedinvest also took part alongside other unnamed backers.
- UniLend Finance, which aims to “Welcome Every Token to DeFi,” raises $3.1M amid overwhelming strategic investor support.
- Reef Finance has closed a $3.9 million seed funding round for its Polkadot-based cross-chain suite of DeFi services. Included in the round were NGC Ventures, AU21 Capital, QCP Capital, Kenetic Capital and Woodstock Fund.
- Wootrade raises $10M as it prepares to beat Binance in liquidity.
- APY Finance is the latest DeFi protocol to explode in popularity, locking more than $67 million of stablecoins in the first hour of launching its mining program.
- Reef Finance completed a seed funding round of nearly $4 million. The firm aims to use the funds from its seed funding round to support the mainstreaming of Decentralized Finance.
Governance
- The Central Bank of Bahrain today authorized U.K-based Fintech firm, Fasset, to begin testing the tokenization of hard assets in Bahrain’s regulatory sandbox.
- Singapore government investment firm is developing a blockchain-powered digital health passport.
- Venezuela president Nicolas Maduro says the country is to start using cryptocurrency in both domestic and global trade, as part of efforts to neutralize crippling U.S. economic sanctions.
- The United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Ripple Labs the patent for a smart contract design that collects data from the outside world using oracles.
- The Estonian central bank, Eesti Pank, will conduct digital currency research.
- Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton said the regulatory body’s open to the idea of a tokenized exchange-traded fund.
Loot
- Hacker steals $15 Million from unreleased DeFi Project Eminence.
- KuCoin Thief swapped LTC for Bitcoin on CEX. At least $13 million from last week’s hack has been laundered through decentralized exchanges. But over $9 million has gone to centralized exchanges. Later KuCoin has identified the people behind the September 26 security breach that resulted in the loss of around $280 million in crypto-assets.
Others
- BitMex denies CFTC and DoJ allegations. Despite criminal charges from the DOJ and at least one arrest of its leadership, the operation continues as usual.
