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AXS price gains over 16% as Axie Infinity closes in on 1M daily active users
The price of Axie Infinity’s native token AXS surged on Wednesday despite a lackluster upward momentum elsewhere in the cryptocurrency market. The AXS/USD pair rose to as much as $44.96 following a 16.44% intraday jump. Nonetheless, the strong upside move came as a part of a sideways trend that saw AXS fluctuating inside the $36.48-$56.57 price range, hinting that traders placed speculative upside bets on the token. AXS trades near its all-time high. Source: TradingView.com Axie ecosystem swells Axie Infinity’s growth as a gaming project provided bullish cues to speculators. Data provided by Axie World showed that Axie Infinity earned $196.89M in July 2021. Meanwhile, so far in August, the project has raked in circa $45M in revenue, with almost 1 million active users. ...
Pantera, Coinbase Ventures and Sony back NFT-focused MakersPlace in $30M Series A
MakersPlace, a nonfungible token market dedicated to digital art, has secured $30 million in Series A financing, highlighting once again that venture funds are keen to back promising NFT plays. The funding round will be used by MakersPlace to scale business operations and acquire additional talent as it continues to attract new users and artists to its platform. The investment was co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Pantera Capital, with additional participation from Coinbase Ventures, Sony Music Entertainment, Uncork Capital, Dragon Digital Assets and 9Yards Capital. Several notable angel investors also participated in the round, including Acquavella Galleries, Sabrina Hahn, Eminem and Paul Rosenberg. Founded in 2018, MakersPlace is said to have played a “central role in sparking the ...
Victory Capital files SEC application for crypto ETF
Investment firm Victory Capital Management has filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a cryptocurrency exchange-traded fund. In a Form S-1 registration filed Tuesday with the regulatory body, Victory said it intended to move forward with listing an exchange-traded fund, or ETF, tracking the Nasdaq Crypto Index. The index consists of eight cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), Chainlink’s LINK, Stellar’s Lumen (XLM), Filecoin (FIL) and Uniswap’s UNI. The Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, has not yet approved any crypto ETF in the United States. Companies including VanEck, Valkyrie Digital Assets, and Fidelity Investments have filed for crypto ETFs with the SEC, but the regulatory body ...
Russia grants $200K to build tool for tracing crypto transactions
Federal authorities in Russia are moving forward with a plan to closely monitor cryptocurrency activity for illicit transactions and deanonymize crypto users’ identities. The Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) has selected a contractor for developing a platform for tracking cryptocurrency activity. According to data from Russia’s state procurement website, the country will allocate 14.7 million rubles ($200,000 USD) from its budget to create a “module for monitoring and analyzing cryptocurrency transactions” using Bitcoin (BTC). According to the official data, the procurement contract was granted to a company referred to as RCO, which is reportedly indirectly backed by the Russian largest bank, Sber, formerly known as Sberbank. Under the contract’s documentatio...
Sylvan Esso Teams With Secretly For Psychic Hotline Label
Though the label has quietly released music since 2018 from artists in and around the group’s North Carolina community, Psychic Hotline now has a distribution partner in Secretly Distribution, part of the Secretly Group, and a vision for expansion that involves artist-centric deals. “We’ve always been really lucky to have a management that has negotiated really aggressive, very artist-centric deals for us, which I think is one of the reasons why our experience with labels has been relatively less painful,” Meath says. Those artist-friendly negotiations involved securing short-term deals with labels, which is why, for example, the band already fully owns its 2014 self-titled debut album. Meath and Sanborn plan on offering similar short-term, flexible deals to artists who sign with them. “We...
China crypto crime: Still ‘top ranked’ for illicit activity but crime is falling
A new report from Chainalysis has found that while China’s share of global criminal crypto flows has been falling since the third quarter of 2019, the country still represents a disproportionate amount of money laundering and scam activity. In its August 3 Cryptocurrency and China report, Chainalysis stated that more than $2.2 billion worth of crypto had been sent from Chinese wallets to addresses associated with illicit activity between April 2019 and June 2021. Chinese addresses also received more than $2 billion worth of digital assets tied to nefarious activity such as scams and darknet marketplaces. Despite this, the report says crime has fallen significantly: “China’s transaction volume with illicit addresses has fallen drastically over the time period studied, both in terms of raw v...
FTX launching NFT sports platform, backs LCS esports league with 7 year deal
FTX is launching an NFT platform centered on sports and entertainment and has also stitched up a new sponsorship with professional esports league, the League Championship Series LCS. According to Variety, FTX U.S. is teaming up with Dolphin Entertainment to create a “large scale” NFT marketplace that will target brands within the sports, entertainment, gaming, esports and charity industries to name a few. We’re beyond excited to team up with Dolphin Entertainment to create an NFT marketplace for major sports and entertainment brands—including film, television, music, gaming, eSports, culinary, lifestyle and charity industries. Dolphin Entertainment FTXhttps://t.co/RgKXuWfViF — FTX (formerly Blockfolio) (@blockfolio) August 2, 2021 “We are excited to build marketplaces with Dolphin, b...
Rothschild’s trust led funding round for Aspen Digital’s London expansion
Prominent British banker Jacob Rothschild’s investment firm Rothschild Investment Trust (RIT) Capital Partners partnered with New York-based Liberty City Ventures to lead pre-A funding for Aspen Digital, a crypto asset investment platform. According to the official announcement, the funding round ended up raising $8.8 million to help the Hong Kong-based company develop an institutional crypto investment platform targeted at asset managers, institutions and professional investors. Aspen Digital CEO and co-founder Yang He said that the funding would also help the company penetrate into the London market. The announcement states other prominent investors include Somerley Capital, Cherubic Ventures, Token Bay Capital, and Thailand’s richest family and owner of Fortune magazine, Chatchava...
Binance to bring Bitcoin payments to Shopify via new partnership
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volumes, continues actively expanding into the crypto payment industry through a new crypto-to-fiat integration. The company announced Tuesday a partnership with crypto-fiat hybrid payment platform Alchemy Pay to enable peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto payments at over 2 million global merchants through its payments application Binance Pay. The new integration will allow users and merchants to pay and accept payments using 40 supported cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) in 18 countries where Alchemy Pay operates. Binance Pay users will be able to pay across merchants of Alchemy Pay’s partners, including e-commerce giant Shopify, software technology company Arcadier, mobile payment provider QFPay and others. Founded i...
Bitcoin price analysis: BTC continues to struggle below $40k
Bitcoin’s consolidation below $40k continues for the third consecutive day this week as the market cools off from last week’s rally The cryptocurrency market has continued its consolidation phase after last week’s rally. Bitcoin failed to reach the $40,000 level again and even dropped below the $39,000 mark. Of the leading cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Dogecoin are the only ones trading in the red in the past 24 hours. BTC’s price dropped below the $39,200 and $39,000 support levels yesterday. Bitcoin even broke the $38,500 level to dip further into a bearish zone. At the moment, BTC is settled well below the 4-hour 100 simple moving average. BTC formed a low near $37,660, and the leading cryptocurrency is now attempting an upside correction. Analysts believe that a slow upward movement is...
Gensler targets broader regulation of the crypto sector
The SEC chair believes that ICOs constitute unregistered security offerings and so the tokens require disclosures and oversight The chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, has stated that the cryptocurrency sector is currently a Wild West and needs more regulation. He said this during an event yesterday, adding that proper regulation would be the task of the regulatory agency. Gensler lamented that at the moment, there is not enough investor protection in the crypto sector. “This asset class is rife with fraud, scams, and abuse in certain applications. There’s a great deal of hype and spin about how crypto assets work. In many cases, investors aren’t able to get rigorous, balanced, and complete information. If we don’t address these issues, I w...
Bakkt is bringing Bitcoin payments to Quiznos restaurants
Quiznos customers can download the Bakkt app and get a reward of $15 in Bitcoin when they pay for their next meal with BTC Digital asset marketplace Bakkt announced yesterday that it was adding toasted sandwiches to the list of things people can buy with Bitcoin thanks to its new partnership with American fast food restaurant franchise Quiznos. Starting in mid-August, the partnership will launch the first physical location Bitcoin payment pilot at certain restaurants throughout Denver, including Denver airport. Mark Lohmann, president of the group that owns Quiznos, commented, “Partnering with an innovative platform such as Bakkt is appealing to us for a number of reasons, primarily because it allows us to accept bitcoin directly at the point of sale as part of a quick and seamless transac...
