Crypto news
Ledger reportedly seeking additional $100 million in funding
Having raised a mammoth $380 million funding at a $1.5 billion valuation in June, French cryptocurrency hardware wallet maker Ledger is looking to raise an extra $100 million, according to a Monday report from Bloomberg. In June, Ledger raised $380 million in a funding round led by 10T Holdings. Now, according to reports, the company is seeking an additional $100 million to help it continue its rapid expansion. Business is said to be thriving as investors seek cold storage for their cryptocurrency, according to sources quoted by Bloomberg. Hardware storage wallets from Ledger are a type of offline storage that isn’t connected to the internet, making them more secure against hacking than online wallets. This allows users to manage their own cryptocurrency without worrying about their ...
Wirex partners with 1inch to enable wallet-based token swaps
Non-custodial wallet platform Wirex has partnered with 1inch Network to use its aggregation API to power token swaps. Through the partnership, users of the Wirex wallet will be able to exchange tokens within the wallet. In an announcement, 1inch Network co-founder Sergej Kunz said that the partnership will allow Wirex community members to swap their tokens on multiple blockchains. Using a search algorithm that finds swapping routes, 1inch will let Wirex users find optimal trading rates for their swaps. Kunz also noted that the partnership is a move that lets the 1inch platform pursue adoption for its solutions. According to Pavel Matveev, the co-founder of Wirex, the 1inch integration is a way for their project to give their users access to decentralized finance (DeFi). Matveev belie...
Waves community back DeFi revival plan for Vires.Finance
The Waves (WAVES) community has supported a governance proposal to revive the decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Vires.Finance after its liquidity crisis. The vote aims to stabilize the project and compensate the users who were affected. In April, Neutrino (USDN), a stablecoin running on the Waves platform, depegged from the dollar. This led to a series of user withdrawals within the platform, eventually ending in a liquidity shortage where users became unable to withdraw their funds from the platform. During the event, Waves founder Sasha Ivanov stepped in, accumulating $500 million in debt into his wallet with the intent to gradually pay it out. To fix the situation, the Vires team submitted a proposal that gives two options to users with a balance of above $250,000 on t...
SEC charges 11 individuals over $300M crypto ‘pyramid scheme’
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged 11 individuals for their alleged role in the creation of a “fraudulent crypto pyramid scheme” platform Forsage. The charges were laid in a United States District Court in Illinois on August 1, with the SEC alleging that the founders and promoters of the platform used the “fraudulent crypto pyramid and Ponzi scheme” to raise more than $300 million from “millions of retail investors worldwide.” The SEC complaint states that Forsage was modeled such that investors would be financially rewarded by recruiting new investors to the platform in a “typical Ponzi structure,” which spanned multiple countries including the United States and Russia. According to the SEC, a Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud th...
Tether supply starts to increase after three-month decline
The world’s largest stablecoin, Tether (USDT) has expanded its circulating supply following almost three months of reductions, in what could be a sign the crypto markets are slowly recovering. The first mint in almost three months occurred on July 29, and there have been three more, with the latest on August 2, according to CoinMarketCap. The USDT injections have been small, however, lifting Tether’s market cap by just 0.7% or just under $500 million. USDT market cap 7D – Coinmarketcap.com According to the Tether transparency report, there is now 66.3 billion USDT in circulation. This gives the stablecoin a total market share of around 43%. Tether supply reached an all-time high in early May when it topped 83 billion USDT. The collapse of the Terra ecosystem, resultant crypto c...
Nifty News: Dr Disrespect unveils NFT game to mixed reaction, FC Barcelona’s first NFT sells for $700K and more…
Gaming YouTube streamer “Dr Disrespect” unveiled the first sneak peek of his upcoming NFT shooter game dubbed Deadrop on July 30. The initial reaction has been mixed, however, with some underwhelmed by the game’s lack of polish given that Dr Disrepect boasted in a now-deleted Tweet from June that it “already blows out anything” from the Call of Duty game engine. User @Jonesy_Actual stated the game currently looks “like an arcade shooter at Chuck E Cheese” while @MemeCyptum sarcastically chimed in with: “Dr Disrespect tried making an NFT shooter and it looks like a**? I’m shocked I tell you, absolutely shocked.” This is Dr. Disrespect’s new NFT shooter called “DEADROP”. This is the game he said if he took a screenshot, it blows anything from the CoD engine...
ETH may consolidate as Merge excitement wears off, says expert
After a surge in Ethereum (ETH) prices last week, the cryptocurrency may now be treading in a consolidation phase, says asset management firm IDEG’s chief investment officer. In a report shared with Cointelegraph on Monday, the author of the report, Markus Thielen said he while he has been bullish on ETH prices six weeks ago, he has now turned “cautious.” The thesis has been based on macro factors and price analysis of the cryptocurrency, noting that the Fed still continues to “ramp up its Quantitative Tightening (QT) program which drains liquidity,” while noting that ETH’s prices had reached technical resistance at around $1,800. The asset management firm also noted that this has come as Ethereum has seen a 47% drop in network revenue, a decrease in total volume locked (TVL) and the...
BinaryX Releases RhinoX Whitepaper Detailing New Key Features of its Ecosystem
Singapore, Singapore, 2nd August, 2022, Chainwire BinaryX, a leading P2E game development company, has released the official whitepaper for Rh!noX, a collection of 10,000 NFTs enabling holders to use their assets as avatars on various GameFi and DeFi applications on the BNB Chain. The Rh!noX NFT series gets its inspiration from Soulbound items in the World of Warcraft game and aims to be the first-ever Soulbound Token on the BNB chain. Moreover, the collection links the holders’ NFTs to their interactions, thus developing them into unique assets. Above all, it provides them with numerous perks, such as access to beta tests for games, NFT whitelists, projects, new tokens on BNB Chain, and more. The team spent several months improving the project’s vision and roadmap, now available in a new ...
Polygon gains 83% in a month, but data show project has been losing traction
Polygon (MATIC) had a promising July, gaining an impressive 83% in 30 days. The smart contract platform uses layer-2 scaling and aims to become an essential Web3 infrastructure solution. However, investors question whether the recovery is sustainable, considering lackluster deposits and active addresses data. MATIC/USD on FTX. Source: TradingView According to Cointelegraph, Polygon rallied after being selected for the Walt Disney Company’s accelerator program to build augmented reality, nonfungible token (NFT) and artificial intelligence solutions. Polygon announced on July 20 plans to implement a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM), which bundles multiple transactions before relaying them to the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain. In a recent interview with Cointelegraph, Polygon...
CBOE’s operating expenses spiked 312% due to underperformance of acquired crypto firm
On Friday, Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the largest options exchange in the United States, announced its second-quarter earnings results. Of particular interest was its total operating expenses, which soared 685% year-over-year from $160.6 million. CBOE explained: “This was primarily due to the $460 million impairment of goodwill recognized in the Digital reporting unit, driven by negative events and trends in the broader digital asset environment. The said environment has changed dramatically since we closed the ErisX transaction on May 2, which resulted in the accounting adjustment.” ErisX enables self-directed individual retirement accounts, or IRAs, for U.S. residents to invest in crypto assets. This was CBOE’s first venture into the digital assets sector; t...
Binance US will delist AMP following SEC claim token is a security
United States-based crypto exchange Binance.US said it will be delisting the AMP token “out of an abundance of caution” of possible enforcement by federal regulators. In a Monday blog post, Binance.US said it will be closing deposits of Amp (AMP) and removing the AMP/USD trading pair on Aug. 15 following the token’s mention in a legal action from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. The federal regulator filed a complaint against a former Coinbase product manager and two individuals in July that claimed that AMP and eight other cryptocurrencies were “crypto asset securities” that fell under the SEC’s purview. “We believe that, in some circumstances, delisting an asset best protects our community from undue risk,” said Binance.US. “We operate in a rapidly evolvin...
Coinbase, Binance and Kraken under scrutiny: Law Decoded, July 25-August 1
Despite some good signs of the crypto prices recovery, last week could hardly be called bright for the market, as the major news came from the enforcers and not the regulators. According to a report from the New York Times, the United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has been investigating crypto exchange Kraken for allegedly allowing users based in Iran and other countries to buy and sell crypto in a potential violation of U.S. sanctions. In the other hemisphere, the Philippines’ think tank Infrawatch PH filed a twelve-page complaint calling on the local Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to crack down on Binance’s activities in the country. The news comes shortly after the Philippines’ Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) waved off a Bina...
