Bahrain’s EazyPay Partners with Binance Pay, Compute North Files for Bankruptcy, Tornado Cash Returns to GitHub + More News

Sead Fadilpašić
Last updated: | 3 min read
Source: AdobeStock / AndriiKoval

 

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Payment news

  • EazyPay, an online payment platform regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB), has partnered with Binance Pay to enable crypto payments in the country, EazyPay CEO and founder Nayef Tawfiq Al Alawi announced on Wednesday. This crypto payment option will be available in more than 5,000 point-of-sale (PoS) terminals and online payment gateways across Bahrain, he said.

Mining news

  • Bitcoin (BTC) mining hosting firm Compute North has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. The firm’s CEO Dave Perrill has also stepped down but will remain on the board.

DeFi news

  • Software development platform GitHub has partly unbanned crypto mixer Tornado Cash organization and contributors on their platform, tweeted Ethereum (ETH) developer Preston Van Loon. The developer suggested that Tornado Cash’s code repositories are now in read-only mode, meaning that GitHub did not restore full functionality.
  • VALK, a company building an ecosystem of decentralized tools for smart trading in decentralized finance (DeFi), announced the launch of DeFi portfolio tracker Merlin. In its dashboard, Merlin provides net worth and transaction history reports for ~1000 protocols across 10 chains, date of entry and exit, yield, etc, to deliver profit and loss (P&L) calculations for DeFi protocols Compound, Uniswap V3, Aave, Lido, and more coming soon, they said.

Regulation news

  • A judge ruled that M.Y. Safra Bank must produce information to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) about customers who may have failed to pay taxes on crypto transactions through prime dealer SFOX Inc., Bloomberg reported. The IRS requested the information to determine if taxpayers are reporting crypto profits and losses on their tax returns, it said, citing a statement from Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York.
  • The Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) issued a license to Striga Technology OÜ, allowing it to provide virtual asset service. Per the press release, the crypto company is the first to be authorized to provide this type of service since the amendments of the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Prevention Act entered into force in March this year.

Legal news

  • The Washington State Department of Financial Institutions wants to join Celsius Network’s bankruptcy case as an interested party. Per a motion filed on Thursday, the state’s Assistant Attorney General Stephen Manning asked the judge overseeing the case to admit him on behalf of Washington’s financial regulator.
  • Growth equity firm WestCap and Quebec’s pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) filed a request on Thursday for a committee to represent their interests in the Celsius bankruptcy proceedings, saying that they “urgently require their own fiduciary,” according to the filing. The reason is that the companies are concerned that the case “will be inappropriately and inequitably skewed in favor of the customers to the detriment of the Equity Holders.”
  • The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has sued a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). It issued a $250,000 penalty and settlement with bZeroX, LLC and its founders, Kyle Kistner and Tom Bean. Simultaneously, the CFTC filed a federal civil enforcement action charging the Ooki DAO, the successor to bZeroX, with violating the same laws as the respondents: illegally offering leveraged and margined retail commodity transactions in digital assets; engaging in activities only registered futures commission merchants (FCM) can perform; and failing to adopt a customer identification program as part of a Bank Secrecy Act compliance program.

Investment news

  • Technology company Valour, a subsidiary of DeFi Technologies, said it will debut its new Carbon Neutral Bitcoin Exchange Traded Product (ETP) on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Trading of the ETP begins on September 23 when investors in Germany will be able to purchase the Bitcoin Carbon Neutral ETP with a management fee of 1.49%. 

Blockchain news

  • Cardano (ADA)’s long-awaited Vasil upgrade has been deployed, the Cardano Foundation confirmed. It is meant to bring significant performance and capability upgrades to Cardano by improving script performance and efficiency and lowering costs. “Full Vasil capability will become available on the 27th September, along with the activation of the Plutus V2 cost model, delivering lower transaction costs for smart contracts,” tweeted Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the research and development company that has developed the Cardano blockchain. 

NFT news

  • Nigerian digital artist Osinachi has established his own accelerator program on the MakersPlace marketplace to onboard African creators. Artists of all levels currently residing in Africa are eligible to be accepted into the program, said the press release, and if selected, their artwork will be featured in an online exhibit on MakersPlace that will be announced on November 3.