Web3 gaming protocol Heroic Story raised $6 million in a seed round led by Upfront Ventures with participation from Multicoin Capital and Polygon Technology, the company announced on Nov. 17. The funds will be used to hire talent, market the live beta and develop on-chain technology for a massively multiplayer role-playing game (RPG) world, the company told Cointelegraph. The round brings Heroic Story’s total financing to $7.4 million. Other investors included strategic angels, such as a16z Games Fund One founding investor Jonathan Lai, Team Liquid CEO Steve Arhancet and Quantstamp CEO Richard Ma, alongside Miramax head of film Wolfgang Hammer and screenwriting duo Ryan and Kaz Firpo, who are cousins and co-writers of Marvel’s Eternals. “We fell in love with the vision for Heroic Sto...
With its partial autonomy, the island city of Hong Kong has traditionally served as “a gate to China” — the local trade center, backed by transparent English-style common law and an openly pro-business government strategy. Could the harbor, home to seven million inhabitants, inherit this role in relation to the crypto industry, becoming a proxy for mainland China’s experiments with crypto? An impulse to such questioning was given by Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of crypto derivatives giant BitMEX in his Oct. 26 blog post. Hayes believes the Hong Kong government’s announcement about introducing a bill to regulate crypto to be a sign that China is trying to ease its way back into the market. The opinion was immediately replicated in a range of industrial and mainstream media. What happe...
The “Bitcoin-is-dead” gang is back and at it again. The fall of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange has resurrected these infamous critics that are once again blaming a robbery on the money that was stolen, and not the robber. “We need regulation! Why did the government allow this to happen?” they scream. For instance, Chetan Bhagat, a renowned author from India, wrote a detailed “crypto” obituary, comparing the cryptocurrency sector to communism that promised decentralization but ended up with authoritarianism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his column conveniently used a melting Bitcoin (BTC) logo as its featured image. Hi all,“Crypto is now dead: FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, collapsed last week, proving a lot of cool guys horribly wrong,” my colum...
Bitcoin (BTC) ranged around $16,500 on Nov. 17 as markets digested the latest events surrounding exchange FTX. BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView FTX CEO tells of “complete failure of corporate controls” Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD seeing only mild volatility at the Wall Street open. The pair showed acclimatization to events around the FTX insolvency, the latest including revelations that Alameda Research had been immune from liquidation while trading on the platform. After the departure of Sam Bankman-Fried, new CEO John Ray III wasted no time in acknowledging the extent of the problems left in his wake. In a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, Ray describes the corporate control of FTX as a “c...
Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 17th November, 2022, Chainwire Candy Club has successfully integrated into the OKC ecosystem and added a use case for the OKC token and community. OKC is an EVM-compatible L1 built on Cosmos with a focus on true interoperability (IBC) and maximized performance. At high scalability, developers can build and scale with low gas fees. The OKC ecosystem and infrastructure, including the all-in-one multi-chain Web3 interface, enables a seamless experience for both developers and users. Since Candy Club’s launch at Token2049 Singapore, the social cypto gaming club has been working with Ethereum layer 1s, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain & Tron projects to increase their token utility and demand despite the bearish sentiments. “Candy Club’s chain agnostic token utility driver...
As the world’s first nation to adopt Bitcoin (BTC) as a legal tender in September 2021, El Salvador is going back to its BTC buying days after a pause for months amid bearish market conditions. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced on Nov.16 that the Central American nation will start purchasing BTC on a daily basis starting from Nov.17. The announcement comes nearly three months after the nation made its last BTC purchase in July 2022. We are buying one #Bitcoin every day starting tomorrow. — Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) November 17, 2022 El Salvador started buying BTC in September 2021, right after making it a legal tender. At the time, BTC was in the mid of a bull market and every purchase made by the nation looked lucrative as the price was hitting a new all-time high every other...
Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology firms continue to feature in the world of Formula 1, with a nonfungible token (NFT) making its mark on Red Bull Racing’s vehicles to close out the 2022 calendar. Red Bull Racing dominated the F1 season, topping the constructors’ standings, while Max Verstappen closed out the drivers’ standings for a second consecutive season. With the curtain closing on 2022’s race schedule in Abu Dhabi on Nov. 20, the team’s cars will feature an NFT on their livery in what is being called a first in F1. Red Bull Racing struck a deal with cryptocurrency exchange ByBit as a Principal Team Partner in February 2022, one of a handful of cryptocurrency firms sponsoring teams in Formula 1. The exchange’s logo will feature alongside Lei the Lightning Azuki, an NFT artwork ...
Bitcoin (BTC) has flooded out of exchanges in the past week as users become wary of security and regulatory scrutiny. Data from on-chain monitoring resource Coinglass shows United States exchanges in particular seeing heavy BTC balance reductions. U.S. exchanges lead BTC exodus In the wake of the FTX scandal, efforts to draw attention to the risk involved in custodial BTC storage stepped up on social media. Users appeared to heed the warning, withdrawing over $3 billion in cryptocurrency in the week immediately following the solvency debacle and ordering record numbers of hardware wallets. The aftermath of FTX is only just beginning, meanwhile, and as regulators plan investigative action and more attention to crypto as a whole, investors angst continues to grow. The data shows the trend is...
Following the collapse of FTX and the bank run on crypto exchanges in general, self-custody Trust Wallet is gaining momentum. In one week, the company launched the long-anticipated browser extension and collaborated with Binance, whose users can now transfer their funds directly to a Trust Wallet account. On Nov. 14, Trust Wallet launched its browser extension, now available in Google Chrome and Opera browsers. The extension lets users store, send and receive crypto across all EVM chains and Solana. A network auto-detect function provides users with a seamless dApp experience without the need to manually add networks. The extension also includes multi-wallet support, NFT support, fiat on-ramp providers, and non-EVM blockchain integrations, as well as hardware wallet support. On Nov. ...
The new CEO and chief restructuring officer for the bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange, John Ray, has icily responded to the erratic series of tweets from former CEO and founder Sam Bankman-Fried. The official Twitter account of FTX on Nov. 16 tweeted a statement from Ray addressing Bankman-Fried’s recent public statements, reiterating he “has no ongoing role at [FTX], FTX US, or Alameda Research Ltd. and does not speak on their behalf.” (3/3) Mr. Bankman-Fried has no ongoing role at @FTX_Official, FTX US, or Alameda Research Ltd. and does not speak on their behalf. — FTX (@FTX_Official) November 16, 2022 On Nov. 14 Bankman-Fried began a strange Twitter thread that — over the course of 40 or so hours — eventually spelled out “What HAPPENED” across nine tweets, he then went on to claim he...
Professional esports organization Team SoloMid (TSM) (previously TSM FTX) has suspended its $210 million sponsorship deal with the now-bankrupt FTX crypto exchange “effective immediately” following the cryptocurrency trading platform’s shock collapse last week. The United-States-based esports organization made the announcement in a Nov. 16 tweet to its 2.2 million followers, adding that the decision was made after “monitoring the evolving situation and discussing internally.” We’ve suspended our partnership with FTX effective immediately. pic.twitter.com/u8vQSWnAbX — TSM (@TSM) November 16, 2022 The $210 million deal was put to paper in Jun. 2021, which resulted in the renaming of TSM to TSM FTX. At the time of the deal, the esports organization said it would allocate its new re...
The former CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried has expressed deep regret over filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, calling it his “biggest single fuckup.” In a wide-ranging interview with VOX which was published on Nov. 16, Bankman-Fried reportedly answered questions on a number of topics such as the Nov. 11 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, his thoughts on regulators, ethics, how FTX and Alameda “gambled with customer money,” and the FTX hack. According to screenshots of the Twitter conversation between VOX reporter Kelsey Piper and Sam Bankman-Fried, the former FTX CEO said that although he has made multiple mistakes, the biggest one was listening to what people told him to do and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. “I fucked up big multiple times,” Bankman-Fried wrote. “you know what wa...