Hive Blockchain Technologies Ltd, a Canadian cryptocurrency mining company that recently listed on the Nasdaq, has strengthened its arsenal with a $66 million purchase of graphics processing units (GPUs).
In its newsletter sent Thursday morning, Hive said it has joined the Nvidia Partner Network (NPN) Cloud Service Provider program and entered into purchase agreements for Nvidia GPUs. It did not specify the number of units nor the model.
Following China’s recent crackdown on crypto mining, GPUs have dropped in price. Nvidia will deliver the data center-grade GPUs to Hive over the course of the year, with shipments arriving each month.
Related: Iran’s Ministry of Industry Issues 30 Licenses to Crypto Mining Farms
In 2017, Hive became the first cryptocurrency mining company with a green energy and ESG (environmental, social and governance) strategy to go public. Since then, its data center facilities in Sweden, Canada, and Iceland have been cloud-mining BTC and ETH, both of which the company keeps on its balance sheet.
The “investment in Nvidia GPUs strengthens Hive’s ability to remain nimble and gives us the power to pivot in this ever changing and dynamic industry,” said Frank Holmes, Hive’s executive chairman, in the newsletter.
Joining the Nvidia Partner Network will give Hive access to Nvidia’s ecosystem, partners, customers and industry expertise which the mining firm hopes to use to transition towards a better computing infrastructure that brings more resources from the cloud.
Related StoriesThe Ukrainian parliament considers the European country’s possible central bank digital currency (CBDC) to be functionally similar to cash or other payment tools.
The Verkhovna Rada, the governing body of Ukraine, passed a law regulating payment methods on Wednesday. The new law on payment services contains just a brief mention of the future CBDC, but it officially puts the yet-to-be-launched electronic hryvnia (Ukraine’s national currency) on par with cash, bank accounts and electronic payments.
The law mentions the “digital money of the National Bank of Ukraine – electronic form of a unit of account in Ukraine, emission of which is run by the National Bank of Ukraine.”
Related: China’s CBDC Trials Reach Beijing Subway
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has been looking into potentially launching a CBDC since 2018 and has even built a prototype on the Stellar blockchain. However, the project hasn’t advanced much since, although the NBU has not appeared to give up on it: In 2019, the regulator hosted a conference dedicated to CBDCs with speakers from several other central banks that have also been exploring the potential of a CBDC.
Read also: From Risky to Promising: Ukraine’s Quest to Become a Dream Crypto Jurisdiction
NBU also published a report on the e-hryvnia in September 2019, talking about the 2018 pilot and analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of using decentralized tech for a CBDC.
Related StoriesAs cryptocurrency markets struggle to gather upside traction, new data shows a declining number of bitcoin active addresses on the blockchain network.
Robinhood, the popular trading app for stock, options, gold and cryptocurrencies, filed for a public offering that could be worth up to $100 million, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) document submitted on Thursday.
Along with the company’s financials, the SEC document shows the reach of Robinhood as a popular destination for crypto trading.
“For the three months ended March 31, 2021, 17% of our total revenue was derived from transaction-based revenues earned from cryptocurrency transactions, compared to 4% for the three months year ended December 31, 2020,” the firm wrote.
Related: Dogecoin’s Fee Change Promises to Reduce Costs and Incentivize Nodes, Miners
A big chunk of that growth – 34% of the firm’s crypto transaction revenue in the first quarter – was from DOGE, the memecoin that has surged in popularity this year.
“If demand for transactions in dogecoin declines and is not replaced by new demand for other cryptocurrencies available for trading on our platform, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected,” Robinhood said.
The app currently has seven cryptocurrencies available for trading.
Robinhood has been criticized by regulators who have said the app encourages the game-like nature of trading, particularly among inexperienced retail traders. On Wednesday, the firm was fined approximately $70 million by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which said Robinhood had provided false or misleading information to users and failed to report many customer complaints about its services.
Related: Dogecoin Millionaire Wants to Bring Back Culture of Giving With New Game
The underwriters for the IPO include Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup.
Robinhood’s IPO differs from Coinbase, the crypto exchange that opted to issue shares via a direct public offering, which eliminates intermediaries and only sells shares that already exist. Coinbase’s valuation based on its first-day trading price of April 14 was about $99 billion using a fully diluted share count of 261.3 million.
UPDATE (July 1, 15:43 UTC): Adds information on Robinhood’s IPO underwriters and comparisons to the Coinbase direct listing.
Related StoriesStrike is letting its U.S. customers buy and sell bitcoin for almost zero in fees, sending shots across the bows of Coinbase, Square’s Cash App, PayPal and other incumbents.
The Chicago-based startup, best known for helping El Salvador adopt bitcoin, said Thursday it would charge only around 0.3% for brokering BTC trades in the 48 states and other U.S. jurisdictions where Strike operates. By comparison, Coinbase, which went public on the Nasdaq this year, collects as much as 3.99%, depending on the payment method and transaction size.
Jack Mallers, founder and CEO of Strike and its parent company Zap Technologies, likened the move to throwing “a grenade in Coinbase’s HQ.” In a blog post, he called Coinbase’s fees “asinine.”
Related: Bitcoin Active Addresses at Lowest Number Since April 2020
If widely adopted, Strike’s new service stands to drive down the price of bitcoin trades for retail investors in the U.S. market, a development anticipated by many a Wall Street analyst in the lead-up to Coinbase’s stock listing in April. Traditional stock brokerage apps saw a race to zero on fees; wouldn’t crypto incumbents see the same?
Cash App, offered by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s payments company Square, takes about 2.2% in fees for bitcoin purchases, based on quotes the app gave a CoinDesk staffer Monday. Swan Bitcoin, which caters to long-term bitcoin holders, charges 0.99% to 2.29% depending on the membership plan and amount socked away in BTC weekly. PayPal and its Venmo subsidiary charge a flat fee for bitcoin purchases of less than $25 and 1.5% to 2.3% for amounts above that.
Strike does not expect to make money on the new service, Mallers said. The 0.3% fee will only cover the spread charged by the market-making firms supplying the bitcoin, he said, without identifying those liquidity providers. The service will start with a wait list, and open to the public in the coming weeks, he wrote in the blog.
In the next few months, Strike expects the fee to drop to as low as 0.1% as its volume grows, Mallers said. “The more our volume grows, the less our partners charge,” he wrote.
Related: Bitcoin News Roundup for July 1, 2021
The aim is to drive prices in the market as close to nothing as possible, which Mallers said would be in keeping with Bitcoin’s ethos.
“Acquiring open-source money should be free,” he told CoinDesk. “It is a race to zero.”
Throwing down a challenge to Coinbase’s CEO, Mallers added, with characteristic aplomb: “Your move, Brian Armstrong. Come play basketball in my court.”
Rising starThursday’s bombshell is the second from Mallers in a month.
At the Bitcoin Miami conference on June 5, he brought down the house by introducing a video announcement from El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who revealed his plan to make bitcoin legal tender in the Central American country.
In January, Mallers outlined a plan to offer remittances of dollar value from the U.S. to El Salvador using Bitcoin and its second-layer Lightning Network as rails. Initially, the dollars were to show up in the destination country in the synthetic form of Tether’s USDT stablecoin, but Mallers recently said that the controversial token is being phased out of Strike’s plan.
Since Mallers became acquainted with Bukele, Strike has been charged with rewiring El Salvador’s financial infrastructure, and has integrations in progress with local financial institutions, the 27-year-old entrepreneur said on a podcast.
To be fair, Coinbase defines its market differently than Strike. Armstrong recently said he wants Coinbase to list every crypto asset wherever it legally can, and the company already supports more than 70. Strike, by contrast, is laser-focused, so to speak, on leveraging Bitcoin and Lightning to further financial inclusion.
Also, over the years Coinbase has acquired money transmission or similar licenses in 44 states, whereas a recent report in crypto publication Decrypt raised questions about Strike’s authorizations to do business nationwide.
About that licensing…Strike’s parent Zap is registered as a money services business (MSB) with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department. That is a necessary step to handle money movement anywhere in the country, but not sufficient, and Zap has a money transmission license in only one state, Washington.
The company said it relies on a regulated third party to do the actual money transmitting. That third party, a Nevada-chartered trust company, said it is authorized to act as a money transmitter nationwide.
“In the U.S., Strike works with a state-chartered and regulated trust company called Prime Trust,” a Strike spokesperson told CoinDesk. “This enables Strike to offer its current suite of products to its customers as a technology provider while the financial institution holds the customer funds and effects transfers.”
The Strike spokesperson said the company is “in the process of seeking money transmitter licenses in various states” so that it can achieve its roadmap for the U.S.
In the meantime, according to both parties, Strike is leveraging Prime Trust’s permissions.
“They do not touch the money at all, ever,” Prime Trust CEO Scott Purcell told CoinDesk. “We open the accounts, we touch the money, we do all the AML/KYC” – shorthand for compliance with anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer laws.
In this setup, Strike is “simply a technology layer and we are actually the ones that effect the transactions,” Purcell said. “Thus there’s no need for them to have any type of licensing.” Many other Prime Trust customers use this model, he said.
It’s complicatedSeveral industry lawyers interviewed by CoinDesk said only around 20 states expressly exempt state-chartered trust companies from money transmission licensing requirements. (Banks, by contrast, are exempt across the board.)
In states without explicit exemptions, the analysis would hinge on whether the activities being performed by the trust company fell under the local statute’s definition of money transmission, said one lawyer, a former state regulator.
When asked if Prime Trust can do business across state lines, Purcell answered unequivocally: “Yes – every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”
Some states provide more clarity than others, but Purcell pointed to reciprocity agreements between most states in explaining how Prime Trust is able to operate across different borders within the U.S.
“The interstate regulatory regimes are something we spend a lot of time on and get very detailed and very complex,” he said. The company employs a “deep bench” of former regulators from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Justice and other agencies. “We’re compliant in everything we do.”
Nikhilesh De and Cheyenne Ligon contributed reporting.
UPDATE (July 1, 17:05 UTC): Adds link to Mallers’ blog post.
Related StoriesThe Portland Trail Blazers will sport StormX advertising patches on their jerseys thanks to a sponsorship deal between the crypto cashback provider and Oregon’s National Basketball Association team.
U.S. basketball star Spencer Dinwiddie’s token-based app for creators has raised $7.5 million to accelerate its development and partnerships.
Calaxy, a mashup of “Creator’s Galaxy,” allows creators and celebrities to raise money with tokens and allow fans to interact with them through video messages, online classes, video calls and fan club subscriptions. The raise was completed through a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT) that could be redeemed either for Calaxy’s native token, CLXY, or for equity in Calaxy.
“The most exciting thing about the next step is getting this in fans hands and being able to accept feedback,” Dinwiddie, who plays guard for the Brooklyn Nets, said in an interview with CoinDesk.
Related: Web3 Creators Have a New Platform for Minting Social Tokens
So far, the app has only been tested internally but will go into public beta in a few weeks, said Solo Ceesay, Calaxy COO and co-founder.
“What that means is we’re going to have a Clubhouse-style rollout, where we invite influencers along with their communities, and one-by-one try to drive some FOMO to the platform,” Ceesay said.
The funding will be used to build out Calaxy’s infrastructure but also to add features like the ability for creators to tokenize their contracts, like Dinwiddie attempted to do in 2020.
The round was raised by Animoca Brands, Red Beard Ventures, ArkStream Capital, NGC Ventures and Genesis Block Ventures. National Football League star Ezekiel Elliott, Matt James from “The Bachelor,” National Basketball Association coach Luke Walton, former head of blockchain strategy at PayPal Jonathan Padilla and NFL player Larry Ogunjobi also joined in.
Related: Roll, Repairing From Hack, Enlists Fireblocks for Key Protection
The raise also includes a list of initial creators who will participate in public beta: Elliott, James, singer-songwriter Teyana Taylor, NBA player (and Taylor’s husband) Iman Shumpert, “WAGS Miami” star Claudia Sampedro and social media influencers Eric Struk, Chaz Smith and Chozus.
Several of the creators and investors are new to crypto, Ceesay said.
“Calaxy is the first palatable crypto investment for these people,” Ceesay said, adding:
“This opens the gateways to new technology and allows them to adopt it and use it in a way in which it makes sense to them – similar to NFTs and NBA Top Shot.”
Calaxy runs on Hedera Hashgraph and uses the Hedera Token Service. The hashgraph is a blockchain-like distributed ledger and boasts a high transaction throughput, which is why Calaxy chose to use Hedera’s DLT versus Ethereum, Dinwiddie said.
Calaxy will also pursue future rounds of funding, and the next round will involve a “token of some sort,” Dinwiddie added.
Related StoriesBlockchain platform Enjin said it sold $20 million in EFI tokens through a public sale on CoinList.
The rapid growth of stablecoin issuance could have implications for the functioning of short-term credit markets, the bond-rating service Fitch said Thursday.
Stablecoins, typically digital tokens linked to government-issued currencies such as the U.S. dollar, could pose “contagion risks” over time, the ratings service said in a press release.
Fitch noted that Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, had increased total assets of the dollar-linked stablecoin USDT to $62.8 billion on June 28. According to the release, Tether had announced it held only 26.2% of its reserves in cash, fiduciary deposits, reverse repo notes and government securities, with a 49.6% in commercial paper (CP), a type of short-term corporate debt.
Related: Stablecoins Risk a Rerun of Financial Crises Past
Tether’s CP holdings amounted to $20.3 billion on March 31, according to Fitch.
Some traders, analysts and economists have speculated that financial losses at Tether or even a crisis of confidence might trigger a sell-off that could put downward pressure on prices for other cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin.
The Fitch report suggests the turmoil also could also have implications for traditional markets.
“A sudden mass redemption of USDT could affect the stability of short-term credit markets if it occurred during a period of wider selling pressure in the CP market,” said the report. “These figures suggest its CP holdings may be larger than those of most prime money market funds in the U.S.,” as well as in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Related: Circle Now Supports USDC Stablecoin on Tron
Potential asset contagion risks linked to the liquidation of stablecoin reserve holdings “could increase pressure for tighter regulation of the nascent sector,” according to Fitch.
The report defines contagion risks to be primarily associated with “collateralized stablecoins, varying based on the size, liquidity and riskiness of their asset holdings,” among other things.
There’s less risk associated with coins that are fully backed by “safe, highly liquid assets,” according to the rating service. Stablecoins that use fractional reserves may run a greater risk.
‘Digital debt’David Grider, lead digital asset strategist at the independent research firm Fundstrat, wrote separately in a report Thursday that stablecoins are “becoming a big part of the crypto economy with the total value of stablecoins outstanding now at ~$108 billion.”
He said it’s important to note that “these assets look a lot more like digital debt than digital dollars,” since they’re really just a promise that the money will be paid back the money when the instruments are redeemed.
“The main risk to users is that the issuer does not have the collateral to meet redemptions when requested by the stablecoin holder,” Grider wrote.
He gets frequent questions about Tether, he wrote, since “many in the crypto community have been concerned for years that the value of Tether is not backed by sufficient dollars to cover the outstanding USDT tokens.”
“Tether is essentially a big credit fund with a pool of debt assets of their own that they say cover the value,” Grider wrote. “They say most of their assets are in money market commercial paper, which if true would be relatively low-risk assets.”
He conjectured that his “gut” is that New York State investigators would have discovered if Tether was “lying” about its assets during a recent probe.
“While we don’t know for certain the details about Tether’s reserves, we’re not as concerned about the stablecoin as many others are,” according to the analyst.
“One thing is certain, crypto lenders have been willing to give Tether $60 billion of the best type of financing, with the lowest cost of capital and most unrestrictive covenant-lite borrowing terms, anyone could ever ask for,” Grider wrote.
Related StoriesA new fee structure for Dogecoin has been designed to reduce overall transaction fees as well as incentivize node operators to relay low-fee transactions to miners.
Announced Sunday, the proposal, spearheaded by Dogecoin core developer Patrick Lodder and his team, would be implemented gradually over multiple software releases.
Introduced in 2014 and implemented in 2018, the current “meaningful fee” model was intended to prevent on-chain transaction spamming. These fees charge 1 DOGE per kilobyte of transaction data, which translates to about 2.16 DOGE (US$0.24) per average transaction.
Related: Robinhood IPO Filing Shows Dogecoin Trading Drove Big Gains
With this year’s spike in price for dogecoin, meaningful fees can be costly. Currently, users are keeping their dogecoins on centralized platforms because transferring funds to self-hosted wallets is expensive. On the other hand, transactions with relay fees under 1 DOGE do not provide enough incentive to reach miners and are often left unconfirmed.
Many of the changes proposed cater to a freer system in which miners and nodes drive rates.
“The purpose of Dogecoin transaction fees is spam prevention,” said Dogecoin developer Ross Nicoll. “We provide suggested values so users can have confidence. If they use those values, their transactions will confirm in a reasonable time.”
He noted that while there are minimum default fees in the proposal, “of course anyone can modify their nodes to use alternative values.”
Related: Dogecoin Millionaire Wants to Bring Back Culture of Giving With New Game
Elon Musk, followed by countless others across Twitter, r/dogecoindev, and the Dogecoin Github, have already shown their support, though there are still some questions.
Udi Wertheimer, for example, responded to the proposal on Github, suggesting the development team “should encourage a more robust and dynamic free market, which should have the effect of reducing fees based on current market conditions.”
Also, Wertheimer, a developer, noted the uncertainty concerning free transaction relay and its ability to “open the door for cheap distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on nodes,” to which Lodder responded with “Good point.”
Related StoriesCommunity Gaming wants to bring esports to a blockchain near you.
The platform, which allows users to organize video game tournaments on either the Ethereum mainnet, Binance Smart Chain or Polygon, has raised $2.3 million in a seed funding round led by CoinFund.
Prominent backers such as Dapper Labs, Multicoin Capital, Rally founder Kevin Chou, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s co-founded Thirty Five Ventures and non-fungible token (NFT) collector WhaleShark also invested.
Related: Dogecoin Millionaire Wants to Bring Back Culture of Giving With New Game
The capital injection follows an earlier pre-seed investment by ConsenSys and will be used to hire additional staff and grow the platform’s presence across Latin America and Southeast Asia, according to Community Gaming CEO Chris Gonsalves.
Community Gaming’s blockchain-based platform enables rewards to be paid out instantaneously in the ERC-20 token of the organizer’s choice, and sent directly to users’ crypto wallets.
Is the latest example of the worlds of blockchain and video games colliding. NFTs have emerged as a popular way to buy digital collectibles; investors are betting on games as the next venue for crypto’s mainstream embrace.
Gaming gatewayMuch like Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot, Community Gaming’s platform is designed to be user-friendly even for people with no prior crypto experience. Registering an account with the platform generates a wallet, and fiat-to-crypto onboarding makes Community Gaming beginner-friendly.
Related: DeFi Insurance Upstart Risk Harbor Goes Live With $3.25M in Seed Funding
“I think this is a mainstream avenue for getting more broad consumer adoption of crypto,” CoinFund investor Evan Feng said of the platform, adding:
“There are so many similarities between the crypto and the gaming communities. An open-mindedness, a little bit more risk or adventure seeking, and generally an openness to the idea of self-sovereignty.”
According to Gonsalves, the platform’s number of active users is growing quickly, doubling to 20,000 in June alone.
Gonsalvez also said the platform, which until now has been making the majority of its revenue through sponsorships with companies like Facebook Gaming, MakerDAO and Theta.tv, plans to begin charging a 5% commission on all tournaments.
Related StoriesASX-listed games maker Animoca Brands has finalized its $138.8 million capital raise through a second tranche of $50 million, according to a press release on Thursday.
Notable investors included Blue Pool Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Gobi Partners, Korea Investment Partners, Liberty City Ventures and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation.
Token Bay Capital, zVentures – Razer Inc.’s corporate venture arm – and other prominent investors also participated. To commemorate its “unicorn valuation,” the company will issue non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to its investors and partners, according to the release.
Related: Mark Cuban–Backed NFT Marketplace Mintable Raises $13M
The new capital will be used to fund strategic investments and acquisitions, product development and licenses for popular intellectual properties, the company said.
Animoca’s second and final round of the raise comes on the heels of its first tranche in May having raised some $88.8 million based on a valuation of $1 billion. The latest $50 million came at a subscription price of A$1.10 per share, for a total of 164.8 million new shares.
Being no stranger to the blockchain and crypto arenas, Animoca inked a deal in 2019 with MotoGP rights holder Dorna Sports to develop and publish a race management game leveraging blockchain tech and custom smart contracts.
The company said its focus was to bring about digital property rights to video gamers and the metaverse through the use of blockchain and NFTs in order to establish play-to-earn models and digital asset interoperability.
Related: SBI Holdings Touts XRP Ledger for NFT Use in the Tokenization of a ‘Variety of Assets’
“We are about to experience fundamental change in multiple aspects of our digital lives including the ways in which we enjoy games and purchase and utilize virtual goods,” a spokesperson for Samsung Venture Investment Corporation said in the release.
Related StoriesThe Mark Cuban-backed non-fungible tokens (NFT) marketplace Mintable has raised $13 million in a series A funding round from investors including Ripple.
Read more: Twitter Gives Away 140 NFTs Through Rarible
Related StoriesBitcoin’s put-call open interest ratio has slipped to six-month lows, indicating an ebbing of bearish sentiment.
According to data tracked by options analytics platform Skew, the ratio measuring the number of open positions, or open interest in put options relative to open interest in call options, fell to 0.60 on Wednesday, a level last seen in early January.
“The ratio has come down, indicating growing demand for call options, which could be interpreted as a positive signal, demonstrating a potential decline in overall bearish sentiment,” Luuk Strijers, chief commercial officer at Deribit, the world’s largest crypto-options exchange by open interest and trading volumes, told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat.
Related: Bitcoin Declines from $36K Resistance; Could Find Support at $30K
Call options give the purchaser the right but not the obligation to buy the underlying asset at a predetermined price on or before a specific date. A call buyer is implicitly bullish on the market. A put option gives the right to sell and represents a bearish bet.
The put-call open interest ratio peaked at 0.94 in April and has been falling ever since.
“We perceive the overall slide in the ratio as a bullish indicator,” Nick Mancini, research analyst at Trade the Chain, said. “If the number of puts open relative to calls is decreasing, traders are taking less bearish outlook and are prepping for bullish price action.”
The ratio slipped to a then six-month low of 0.45 in late December and remained mainly in the range of 0.50 to 0.70 in January as flows were concentrated on the call side. Bitcoin topped the long-held $20,000 resistance in December and rallied by 100% to nearly $60,000 in the first quarter of this year.
Related: BlockFi Rate Cut on Bitcoin Deposits Leaves Rivals Scratching Heads
“When the market was bullish in January, we could see a lot of flows buying calls at strikes 50% above bitcoin‘s going market price,” Martin Cheung, an options trader from Pulsar Trading Capital, said in a Telegram chat.
Cheung said the ratio’s slide from highs seen in April and May indicates the market has calmed down and digested most of the negative news flow.
That said, drawing conclusions from the put-call open interest ratio can be problematic, because the measure does not reveal whether the number of positions open is mainly on the bullish or bearish side.
For example, some market participants may have sold call options in recent weeks, adding to the tally of the number of open positions in calls – the ratio’s denominator – and contributing to the downward pressure on the ratio. Savvy traders often sell call options, that is insurance against a bullish move, when they expect the market to consolidate or drop.
“You have to bear in mind that the put-call open interest ratio can give the wrong message,” Deribit’s Strijers said. “For example, users shorting upside calls contribute to open interest and volumes for calls; however, that is a bearish strategy.”
Nevertheless, the recent decline in the put-call open interest ratio may have been fueled at least partly by a pick-up in demand for calls or unwinding of long put positions, that is unwinding of bearish bets.
Bitcoin is currently trading at $33,230, a 5% drop on the day. While the put-call ratio is giving bullish hints, the options smile shows persistent concern of an extended sell-off and greater demand for puts or bearish bets at strikes lower than bitcoin’s current market price.
Also read: Bitcoin Options Open Interest Hits 2021 Low as Frenzy Cools, or Maybe It’s Soccer
Related StoriesBitcoin (BTC) is under pressure after buyers took profits near $36,000 resistance on Tuesday. Lower support is seen around $30,000, which is the bottom of the month-long trading range.
The world’s largest cryptocurrency is entering July on a negative note and is down about 4% over the past 24 hours. Bitcoin was trading around $33,000 at press time.
Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex said it halted trading, citing issues with “platform reduced performances.”
UPDATE (JULY 1 11:44 UTC) Adds Bitfinex identifies cause, says funds are safe.
Related StoriesMercado Bitcoin, the largest bitcoin exchange in Brazil, raised $200 million in a Series B round from the SoftBank Latin America Fund.
The investment signifies the largest B round in Latin America’s history and SoftBank’s largest investment in a Latin America crypto company, said Roberto Dagnoni, CEO and executive chairman of 2TM Group, Mercado Bitcoin’s parent company.
The investment round grants 2TM Group a $2.1 billion valuation, Dagnoni told CoinDesk.
Related: Brazil Stock Exchange Lists First Bitcoin ETF in Latin America
2TM Group is the second Latin American crypto unicorn, after Bitso announced a $250 million Series C in May with a $2.2 billion valuation.
Following the investment, the company plans to expand in Latin America, Dagnoni said, saying he contemplates branches in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. The expansion will take place either organically or through acquisitions, he said.
The company has already been in talks with peers about potential acquisitions, the CEO said.
“We’ve been impressed by 2TM Group’s understanding of the Brazilian ecosystem, as well as their contribution to the evolving regulatory framework in Brazil, all of which have positioned it at the forefront of the Latin American blockchain revolution and as a defining player in the cryptocurrency explosion in Brazil,” said Marcelo Claure, CEO of SoftBank Group International and COO of SoftBank Group in a press release.
Related: Brazil’s Central Bank Pushes Back Target Date on CBDC by Two Years
The company’s press release said it signed about 700,000 new users up between January and May 2021 and now has a client base of 2.8 million overall. Mercado Bitcoin’s trade volume also increased to $5 billion, surpassing the total for its first seven years combined.
Mercado Bitcoin plans to expand its team to up to 700 employees by the end of the year and launch a digital wallet, MeuBank, as well as a a digital custodian, Bitrust. Both projects are currently awaiting regulatory approval from Brazilian authorities, Dagnoni said.
Related StoriesA new law in Germany that could theoretically see up to $415 billion flow into crypto takes effect Thursday.
Binance said it is using crypto intelligence firm CipherTrace’s “Traveler” to aid compliance with global “travel rule” regulations.
