Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
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Investment news
- Binance Labs, the venture capital and incubation arm of Binance, announced the closing of a new USD 500m investment fund. It will invest in projects that can extend the use cases of cryptoassets and drive the adoption of Web 3 and blockchain technologies, they said.
- Digital investment firm CoinShares announced it has booked “an exceptional loss” of GBP 17m (USD 21.33m) on liquidating its TerraUSD (UST) holdings. However, they added that this has not had any impact on any of their additional Capital Markets activities, nor does it in any way impact the hedging and collateralization of any of the company’s exchange-traded products (ETPs).
- Cross-border payments company Ripple and crypto exchange FTX are both on the lookout for acquisitions, according to CNBC. Ripple has “a very strong balance sheet” per its CEO Brad Garlinghouse, which is more likely to see it as the buyer vs the seller, while FTX.US, the company’s US subsidiary, will look for companies that will help them acquire more users or regulatory licenses.
- Media outlet Forbes will no longer pursue its previous plan to go public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), The New York Times reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. The decision could be announced as soon as this week, they added.
- Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Alloy has raised USD 3m in a pre-seed round of funding led by Headline Ventures, per Tech.eu. The startup is building a platform to allow institutional investors to interact with decentralized finance in a safe and compliant manner, they said.
- Blockchain infrastructure provider InfStones announced a new funding round of USD 66m led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and GGV Capital. The funds will be used to grow their team and develop more robust blockchain infrastructure solutions, they added.
- Web 3-native project management tool DeWork announced that it has raised USD 5m in a seed funding round led by Paradigm and Pace Capital. They plan to use the funds for growth purposes, they said.
- Wallet operations infrastructure provider Liminal raised USD 4.7m in its seed funding round led by Elevation Capital. The funds will be used to invest in hiring and product development, they said.
- Web 3 project Utopia Labs has raised USD 23m in a Series A funding round led by Paradigm. The funds will help them grow their team and work on new features, they added.
Exchanges news
- Finance giant Goldman Sachs is in talks with crypto exchange FTX to integrate some aspects of their derivatives businesses, Barron’s reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
- Crypto trading platform KuCoin launched its decentralized KuCoin Wallet, with its website going live for users to access the service starting June 1 and the mobile app to follow later during the month. Open beta app testing is expected to become available in the coming days, they said.
Mining news
- Crypto mining company BIT Mining announced that it has issued more than 16m of its Class A ordinary shares to selling shareholders. The company will also issue up to around 18m of them to the selling shareholders, and up to around 4.5m of those shares to certain research and development team members if it achieves certain milestones, including developing new ASIC miners for bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), and litecoin (LTC).
DeFi news
- Blockchain platform Waves Enterprise announced its intention to move to a decentralized governance model and open-source its entire codebase. Their stack and ecosystem will be managed by an enterprise-grade decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), while the codebase will continue to be developed by the core dev team now based in the UAE.
- Tezsure, the developer team behind DeFi project Plenty, announced today the successful launch of the Plenty bridge, a decentralized bridge between the Ethereum and Tezos (XTZ) blockchains. Users can now transfer several tokens between the blockchains in around 5 minutes, while the process used to take longer than an hour previously, they stated.
Source: Cryptonews
