Crypto Exchange CEO Arrested, Ethereum Scaling, Nexo’s Buyback Initiative + More News

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Fredrik Vold

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Fredrik Vold

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June 26, 2023 06:54 EDT

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Legal news

• Albanian police arrested Fatih Ozer, Founder and CEO of crypto exchange Thodex, and the process to extradite him to Turkey has started, the Turkish Interior Ministry said on Tuesday. Ozer has been sought by Turkish authorities over fraud accusations.
• Troubled crypto lender Hodlnaut said its legal representatives on Monday attended the Interim Judicial Management hearing, and that a judge has appointed Ee Meng Yen Angela and Aaron Loh Cheng Lee of EY Corporate Advisors Pte. Ltd. as the Interim Judicial Managers. Hodlnaut froze withdrawals earlier in August, citing challenging market conditions.
• The government of the Central African Republic, a country that adopted bitcoin as legal tender in April this year, will not be allowed to sell land and citizenship in exchange for investments in the country’s cryptocurrency, the Sango Coin. That is per a ruling by the country’s Constitutional Court, Bloomberg reported.

Scalability news

• The Ethereum scaling network Arbitrum said it will undergo a major upgrade on Wednesday that will lead to 2-4 hours of downtime starting from 10:30 ET (14:30 UTC). The upgrade, known as Nitro, is expected to increase transaction throughput, cut transaction fees, and simplify interactions between Arbitrum and Ethereum.

Investments news

• Crypto lender Nexo (NEXO) said that its Board of Directors allocated a further USD 50m to the company’s long-standing Buyback initiative. This approval enables the company “to discretionally and periodically repurchase its native NEXO Token in the open market,” they added. At the time of writing, NEXO trades at USD 0.98 and is up 1% in a day and 9% in a week.
• The major financial derivatives exchange CME Group said it launched euro-denominated bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH) futures.
• The mobile gaming firm Limit Break has raised USD 200m over the course of two funding rounds led by gaming firm Mino Games chairman Josh Buckley and investment firms Paradigm and Standard Crypto, per a tweet from the firm.
• Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings is set to lead a USD 100m funding for crypto gaming and NFT company Animoca Brands via convertible bonds, Bloomberg reported, citing undisclosed “people familiar with the situation.” 
• Web3-focused game publisher Xterio said it raised USD 40m in a round led by FunPlus, Makers Fund, FTX Ventures, and XPLA, among other investors. Multiple games are currently in development, with product announcements coming this fall, per the firm.
• Indonesian tech firm PT GoTo Gojek Tokopedia Tbk, better known as just GoTo, has acquired 100% of the shares in the local crypto exchange PT Kripto Maksima Koin, Reuters reported. The investment marks GoTo’s first step into the crypto space, and the firm said it sees blockchain playing “a mainstream role in the future of finance.”
• RedStone Finance, a provider of oracles for DeFi applications, has raised USD 7m in a seed funding round led by Lemniscap, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Maven11 Capital, Distributed Global, Lattice, and Arweave. RedStone said it plans to use the money to further development of its oracles and modular data-processing smart contracts on Arweave called Warp.

Economics news

• Annual harmonized inflation in Germany is estimated to reach 8.8% in August, per the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), and be in line with the consensus forecast and up from July’s 8.5%. 

Payments news

• The US Federal Reserve has updated the timeline for the launch of its FedNow Service, a new nationwide instant payment system in the US. According to the latest update, the FedNow Service is scheduled to launch mid-year 2023.