BitBoy Dismissed
Crypto influencer Ben "BitBoy" Armstrong received a reprieve when he was dismissed from a case related to the collapse of FTX. At the same time, NFT star Trevor Lawrence and YouTube influencers Kevin Paffrath and Tom Nash settled for undisclosed amounts.
JPEX Freezes Amid Liquidity Issues
Crypto exchange JPEX froze some of its operations and raised fees amid a liquidity crisis and regulatory warnings. Hong Kong regulator warned that JPEX has misled its users regarding its business.
Holesky Fails
A misconfiguration in a genesis file led to the failed launch of Ethereum's new test net, Holesky. Though a manual fix got the network running, the developers have decided to relaunch Holesky in a week.
FTX Sues SBF's Parents
FTX sued Sam Bankman-Fried's (SBF) parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried. The lawsuit alleges SBF's parents misappropriated millions of FTX money, including diverting $10 million for personal gain.
Balancer DNS Attack
The front end sites of the DeFi exchange Balancer suffered a DNS attack earlier this week. Hackers managed to redirect users to malicious sites. Tokens worth over $250,000 are assumed stolen. The Balancer team warned the users not to access the Balancer portal while they worked on a fix.
Bitcoin Adoption Fund
Nomura's digital assets arm, Laser Digital, launched a new fund, Bitcoin Adoption Fund. It offers the institutional investors long exposure to crypto assets. Komainu will hold the custody of client assets.
Citigroup Tokenization Service
Citigroup launched a tokenization service for cash management and trade finance. This service, targeting institutional clients, would use blockchain technology and smart contracts.
Zodia Offers Crypto Yield
Zodia Custody, the crypto unit of Standard Chartered, is partnering with OpenEden. Their joint venture will offer institutional clients yield on their crypto holdings. It will give institutions access to the real world yield opportunities and staking services using a safe, compliant, and regulatory first approach.
Lumerin Hashpower Marketplace
Lumerin is launching a hashpower marketplace on the Arbitrum One network. The hashpower trading platform allows miners to buy or sell Bitcoin mining hashpower. Lumerin aims to democratize Bitcoin mining, as any user, even those without their own mining hardware, can trade here.
dYdX and Axelar
The DeFi financial derivatives platform, dYdX, has integrated with Axelar's cross chain network. As a result, users can onboard and offboard from dYdX in a single click. It will utilize Squid, a cross chain transaction builder, to enhance user efficiency in transitioning to the dYdX v4 platform.
Base Pessimism
Coinbase's layer 2 network, Base, launched Pessimism, an open source monitoring system for Optimism. Pessimism identifies security threats within OP Stack and other EVM compatible chains.
Cryptoverse
Mark Cuban lost $870,000 in a likely phishing scam that saw some of his stablecoins, RARE tokens, and ENS domains drained from his wallet.
While probing the reportedly unlicensed crypto exchange JPEX, Hong Kong authorities arrested six people, including two social media influencers.
Stanford University plans to return at least $5.5 million received in donations from SBF's parents, who allegedly directed those funds from FTX.
Digital asset manager Grayscale Investments has filed for a new ETF -- one that tracks ether futures.
Mt. Gox, the crypto exchange whose decade ago stolen bitcoin is now worth over $23 billion, has delayed recompensating the victims to the end of Oct 2024 instead of Oct 31 of this year.
Optimism is selling 116 million OP tokens in a private sale among seven buyers, for treasury management purposes, with a two year lockup.
Crypto mining rig manufacturer Bitmain plans to invest $53.9 million in bitcoin mining firm Core Scientific. The investment, which is part of a supply contract, comprises both equity and cash.
Synergists
Walmart wants to reinvent retail by enabling customers to buy physical versions of items they purchased in its House Flip and Zepeto virtual worlds.
Peer to peer payment app Venmo will soon offer PayPal's stablecoin PYUSD for purchase and transfer.
Funds and Investments
Blockchain data visualization platform Bubblemaps raised $3.2 million in a seed funding round led by INCE Capital. It plans to direct the funds to improve individuals' and businesses' access to blockchain data.
Alums from Sino Global, Coinbase, and Libra started a $60 million fund called Oak Grove Ventures. The fund would invest in the early stages of web3, AI, and biotechnology startups.
Investment firm Blockchain Capital has secured $580 million for two new funds. $380 million of it would go to early stage companies looking for preseed and Series A funding. The remaining $200 million would be invested in companies seeking Series B money.
Decentralized and verifiable computing pioneer Jiritsu raised $10.2 million in a funding round led by gumi Cryptos Capital.
GRVT, a crypto exchange that wants to bring the best of both CeFi and DeFi into its platform, raised a cumulative of $7.1 million in preseed and seed rounds. Matrix Partners and Delphi Digital led the $5 million seed round, which brought GRVT's valuation to $39 million.
Essential, a startup building intent based infra to minimize value extraction in blockchains raised $5.15 million in a seed funding round led by Maven 11.
Orb Technology, the startup behind web3 social app Orb, raised $2.3 million in a preseed round participated by investors, including Superscrypt and Founders.
Freatic, a project building decentralized protocol combining the power of blockchain, cryptography, and game theory, secured $3.6 million in a funding round led by a16z crypto.