Business

The $17.5 million deal will see the Berkeley campus football field renamed the FTX Field at California Memorial Stadium Cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX announced yesterday it was launching a 10-year relationship with Cal Athletics, the sport department of the University of California at the Berkeley campus. The $17.5 million deal will see FTX receive the naming rights to the campus football field, which shall henceforth be known as the FTX Field at California Memorial Stadium. This marks the first collegiate crypto naming rights sponsorship and the Cal Athletics rightsholder will accept the payment in cryptocurrency. The university’s director of athletics, Jim Knowlton, commented, “FTX is a growing company at the forefront of innovation in an emerging technology, one that fits well...

The non-fungible token (NFT) space has experienced tremendous growth over the past few months Leading payment company Visa has acquired a non-fungible token (NFT) for $150,000, making it one of the first corporate entities to do so. The company said it believes NFTs will play a huge role in the future. Visa bought the CryptoPunk 7610 for $150,000, with the company making its first entry into the NFT world. In a blog post yesterday, Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s crypto head, stated that “We think NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment, and commerce.” Sheffield said for Visa to enable its clients and partners to enter the NFT space, the company needed to have a firsthand understanding of the infrastructure requirements for a global brand to buy, store a...

Despite Bitcoin’s (BTC) price growing 45% over the past 30 days, cryptocurrency investors are not moving their holdings, according to new data. Blockchain analytics provider Glassnode released its new “The Week On Chain” report on Monday, noting that Bitcoin has continued rallying to new multi-month highs despite divergence in on-chain activity during the week ending on Monday. The report discovered that Bitcoin on-chain activity, such as the amount of entity-adjusted transactions, has still not responded to the ongoing bullish action, remaining at historically low levels of between 175,000 and 200,000 daily transactions. Bitcoin on-chain activity dropped this low after May 2021’s crypto market crash and hasn’t risen above this level since. The number of Bitcoin transactions was this ...

Investment scams in Australia cost investors more than 70 million Australian dollars ($50.5 million) in the first six months of 2021, with crypto scams contributing to more than 50% of the losses, according to Scamwatch data.  As reported by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Scamwatch data shows a 53.4% increase in investment scam-related reports, which is set to exceed $101 million by the end of this year. Based on the 4,763 reports received in 2021 alone, ACCC deputy chair Delia Rickard stated that 2,240 of the complaints were related to cryptocurrency scams and mainly attributed to Bitcoin (BTC). Rickard said that scammers lure investors into using fake trading platforms with celebrity endorsements that promise high profitability. While the trading platform...

The latest rally in the Cardano (ADA) market has activated a classic bearish pattern that threatens to lower its prices by as much as 15%. Dubbed as Rising Wedge, the textbook pattern forms when the price consolidates between upward sloping resistance and support trendlines. Its occurrence typically prompts a bearish reversal, confirmed by a voluminous break below the lower trendline. The profit target during such a negative move comes to be as below as the maximum Wedge height. ADA/USD currently ticks all the boxes for forming a Falling Wedge pattern, as shown in the chart below. The pair now awaits a negative breakdown below its Wedge support trendline, which may prompt a correction towards the 50-4H exponential moving average (50-4H EMA; the velvet wave) around $2.45. Cardano 4H price c...

Canada-based Bitcoin (BTC) infrastructure firm Blockstream, co-founded by cryptographer and cypherpunk Adam Back, has hit unicorn status with its latest valuation at $3.2 billion. The company, which focuses on various Bitcoin-related areas — including operating as a mining service provider and developing renewables-based infrastructure intended to “green” the veteran cryptocurrency — has raised $210 million in its latest financing round, according to the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. Blockstream’s new backers, which join existing investors like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, are the United Kingdom-based private equity firm Baillie Gifford and Hong Kong-based iFinex, the operator of crypto exchange Bitfinex.  In a statement about the grounds for Blockstream’s $3.2 billion valua...

Filecoin (FIL) accumulated 65% gains over the past 30 days to reach its highest price since June 8. The recent strength was accelerated after an Aug.6 partnership with Chainlink’s oracle protocol on Aug. 6 allowed the projects to join their grant initiatives to speed up the development of hybrid smart contracts to leverage code running on the blockchain while the managing data computation process off-chain. Filecoin (FIL) price in USD at Coinbase. Source: TradingView Numerous events triggered the $235 all-time-high on April 1, but that movement is clearly long gone because the cryptocurrency is 67% below that level. Let’s take a moment to understand what triggered the rally and whether these drivers still exist. China-based mining activity boosted investors’ expectations ...

Economics Professor Jason Potts is co-director of the Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT University. He sees blockchain technology as a fundamental institutional technology revolution comparable to the emergence of companies and the internet — perhaps even as world-changing as the invention of electricity. What’s the last big technological change that had the same sort of impact that you believe blockchain will have? I think the obvious one is the internet, which was a profound revolution stringing together digital communication networks and computers to basically send the cost of communication and coordination to zero. But, it fundamentally didn’t change any of the economic infrastructures. You still had to use money in the real world, you still had to use companies in the real world to in...

Institutional investors are loading up on Solana (SOL), with one-third of inflows to crypto investment products being invested in instruments tracking Solana this past week. According to CoinShares’ Aug. 23 Digital Asset Fund Flows Weekly report, $7.1 million flowed into Solana investment products between Aug. 15 and Aug. 20. While the price of SOL gained a megre 1.4% on the spot markets over the same period, SOL has gained 110% from $35.58 since the start of August to trade for $75 as of this writing. CoinShares’ report notes that institutional crypto investment products bucked a six-week trend of outflows, with roughly $21 million flowing into the sector this past week. Products tracking Cardano (ADA) were the second-most popular for the week with inflows totaling $6.4 million. Instituti...

Crypto derivatives exchange, FTX, has purchased the naming rights to California University’s Cal Memorial Stadium with a view to introducing its own branding. The Sam Bankman-Fried owned derivatives exchange is delving deeper into sports after signing a 10-year, $17.5 million naming rights deal with the university.  The stadium’s home team, the Cal Golden Bears, will now play their games on newly rebranded FTX Field this football season, according to Bloomberg. The $17.5 million will also be paid to the university in the form of crypto assets. The deal is FTX’s latest foray into sponsoring sports to drum up awareness of crypto. In March, the North American division of the exchange, FTX.US, entered into a naming rights deal with the Miami Heat basketball team. The partnersh...