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Celsius calls out Prime Trust in court, alleging firm didn’t turn over $17M in crypto
Crypto lending platform Celsius Network has filed a lawsuit claiming that custodian Prime Trust failed to turn over roughly $17 million worth of cryptocurrency. In a Tuesday filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, Celsius’ legal team brought a complaint against Prime Trust, alleging the company did not return $17 million worth of crypto assets in June 2021 when it terminated its relationship with the lending firm. According to Celsius, Prime Trust acted as crypto custodian for New York- and Washington-based users from 2020 through mid-2021, returning $119 million in crypto following the end of the business arrangement but holding back some funds: 398 Bitcoin (BTC), 3,740 Ether (ETH), 2,261,448 USD Coin (USDC) and 196,268 Celsius (CEL). “Upon the commence...
Iconic brands including Nike, Gucci have made $260M off NFT sales
The hype surrounding nonfungible tokens (NFTs) has allowed some of the world’s most iconic brands to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue, underscoring the mass consumer appeal of digital collectibles. Leading brands including Nike, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Adidas and Tiffany have amassed a combined $260 million worth of sales from NFTs, according to data from Dune Analytics that was first reported by NFTGators. Nike’s NFT drops have amassed $185.3 million in revenue, with volumes in secondary markets approaching $1.3 billion. Dolce & Gabbana has generated $25.6 million worth of NFT revenue. Tiffany, which only recently launched its NFTiff token allowing CryptoPunk holders to mint customized pendants, has amassed $12.6 million in NFT-related sales. Tot...
A bullish Bitcoin trend reversal is a far-fetched idea, but this metric is screaming ‘buy’
Bitcoin (BTC) price remains pinned below $22,000 as the lingering impact of the Aug. 19 sell-off at $25,200 continues to be felt across the market. According to analysts from on-chain monitoring resource Glassnode, BTC’s tap at the $25,000 level was followed by “distribution” as profit-takers and short-term holders sold as price encountered a trendline resistance following a 23-consecutive-day uptrend that saw BTC trading above it’s realized price ($21,700). Bitcoin total inflows and outflows to all exchanges (USD). Source: glassnode The firm also noted that the “total inflows and outflows to all exchanges” metric shows exchange flows at multi-year lows and back to “late-2020 levels,” which reflects a “general lack of speculative interest.” Stocks and crypto clearly risk off until we...
The X.LA Metaverse Revealed In Detail
Cologne, Germany, 23rd August, 2022, Chainwire X.LA Foundation executive Aleksey Savchenko has revealed details of the eagerly anticipated X.LA Metaverse. Before an expectant crowd at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, Savchenko promised an immersive experience, delineating a vision backed by technology that will shape the way people interact well into the next century. The X.LA Metaverse is built on the promise of a virtual world that mirrors the physical one but is easier to navigate and full of untethered potential. As a visionary in this space, Savchenko brings over 25 years of video game and software development experience and is a major proponent of the metaverse. “It’s not a product – it’s a paradigm shift,” the X.LA Foundation executive told the Gamescom crowd. The X.LA Metaverse will b...
eBay Is Acquiring TCGplayer For Almost $300 Million USD
To further its efforts in expanding its market share in the trading card game industry, eBay has now announced its acquisition of the online marketplace TCGplayer. The latter was founded back in 2008 and has served as a popular online sales platform for some of the world’s most popular trading card games including Pokémon TCG, Magic: The Gathering and Digimon Card Game. eBay’s buyout will come with a $295 million USD price tag, although the website will continue to operate independently following the acquisition, which is now expected to close in Q1 of 2023. Even before absorbing TCGplayer, eBay has already become the largest TCG resale site on the globe, selling a new trading card every two seconds on average in 2021. Despite the figure, the company says the new deal will m...
Chingari launches the first ever video-NFT marketplace
Chingari, the world’s fastest-growing on-chain social app has launched the first-ever video-NFT marketplace called Creator Cuts. The marketplace adds to Chingari’s commitment to fostering and proliferating the creator economy. Speaking at the launch of the NFT marketplace, Mr Sumit Ghosh, who is the Co-founder & CEO of Chingari and GARI token said: “At Chingari, empowering and enabling creators to engage effectively and intrinsically with their community has been the cornerstone of our success since our inception. We believe in the immense potential of the Creator Economy and are wholly committed to its growth and democratisation across the spectrum. Towards this, we are always innovating and creating unique programs and propositions which lie at the cross-section of popular culture, e...
DBS bank reports 4X growth in Bitcoin buys on DDEx exchange in June
A major cryptocurrency selloff in June 2022 has sparked more interest in Bitcoin (BTC) from institutional investors, according to data from one of the biggest banks in Singapore. The total number of trades on DDEx more than doubled in June 2022 as compared to April 2022 amid the growing investor appetite for digital assets like Bitcoin and Ether (ETH). Buy orders on DDEx accounted for 90% of all trades in June as cryptocurrencies traded at notable discounts in mid-2022, DBS said. Compared to April 2022, the amount of Bitcoin purchased on DDEx in June saw a fourfold increase, while the quantity of ETH grew 65%, DBS reported. “With the digital asset industry experiencing unprecedented volatility, investors who believe in the long-term prospects of digital assets are gravitating towards trust...
Warren Buffett pivots to U.S. Treasuries — a bad omen for Bitcoin’s price?
Warren Buffett has put most of Berkshire Hathaway’s cash in short-term U.S. Treasury bills now that they offer as much as 3.27% in yields. But while the news does not concern Bitcoin (BTC) directly, it may still be a clue to the downside potential for BTC price in the near term. Berkshire Hathaway seeks safety in T-bills Treasury bills, or T-Bills, are U.S. government-backed securities that mature in less than a year. Investors prefer them over money-market funds and certificates of deposits (COD) because of their tax benefits. Related: Stablecoin issuers hold more US debt than Berkshire Hathaway: Report Berkshire’s net cash position was $105 billion as of June 30, out of which $75 billion, or 60%, was held in T-bills, up from $58.53 billion at the beginning of 2022 o...
Hacker tries to exploit bridge protocol, fails miserably
Cross-chain bridges have increasingly become targeted by malicious entities. However, not all hackers can run away with millions in their exploit attempts. Some end up losing money from their own wallets. In a Twitter thread, Alex Shevchenko, the CEO of Aurora Labs, told the story of a hacker who attempted to exploit the Rainbow Bridge but ended up losing 5 Ether (ETH), worth around $8,000 at the time of writing. According to Shevchenko, the hacker has presented a falsified NEAR block to the Rainbow Bridge contract and submitted the required 5 ETH safe deposit. Thinking that the team would be slow to react during the weekend, the attacker timed the exploit attempt on a Saturday. Despite the hacker’s plan, the CEO highlighted that there were automated watchdogs in place that fou...
Metaverse promises: Future of Web3 or just a market gimmick?
The Metaverse as a concept is an attempt to fuse physical reality, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) into one seamless and immersive experience. The term “metaverse” was first used in Neil Stephenson’s 1982 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. Stephenson’s metaverse was a virtual place where characters could go to escape a dreary totalitarian reality. Some of the key attributes of the Metaverse include: Even before the Metaverse became a phenomenon amid the nonfungible token (NFT) craze and crypto market boom, the concept was already in focus with the likes of Facebook, now Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and several other leading companies investing heavily in AR technology since the early 2010s. In 2014, Meta acquired Oculus VR in a $2 billion deal with of focus on developing augmen...
Telegram founder suggests ‘NFT-like smart contracts’ to auction usernames
Pavel Durov, the founder of encrypted messaging app Telegram, has floated the idea of a marketplace that could utilize “NFT-like smart contracts” to auction highly-sought after usernames. Durov made the suggestion after the “success” of domain name auctions by The Open Network (TON), a layer-1 blockchain originally designed by the Telegram team. The blockchain project launched the TON DNS service enabling users to assign human-readable names to crypto wallets, smart contracts, and websites in mid-July. In a message to his personal Telegram group named “Durov’s Channel” on Aug. 23, he noted that he was “really impressed by the success of the auction TON recently conducted for their domain/wallet names.” “Imagine how successful Telegram with its 700 million users could be if we put res...
Bitcoin won’t hedge inflation until it hits 1B wallets: Scaramucci
Skybridge Capital CEO Anthony Scaramucci believes that while Bitcoin continues to be an attractive asset, it has not reached the “wallet bandwidth” that is required for it to be considered an inflation hedge. Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Aug 22. the global investment management CEO said Bitcoin was still too much of “an early adopting technical asset” which would need to be held in around a billion wallets before it would begin to act as a hedge against inflation. “Until you get into the billion, billion-plus zone, I don’t think you’re going to see Bitcoin as an inflation [hedge] as it’s still an early adopting technical asset.” While the exact number of Bitcoin wallets in the world is unknown, estimates place this number at approximately 200 million. In its earlier years, some t...
