Crypto.com’s Super Bowl, Polygon’s Opera, Prosecutors ‘Clean’ EUR 100M in Crypto + More News
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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Exchanges news
- Crypto.com will run its first Super Bowl commercial in February, per the Wall Street Journal. The exchange will appear alongside marketers including shopping-rewards platform Rakuten Rewards, sports-betting operator DraftKings Inc., Avocados From Mexico, and Intuit Inc.’s TurboTax.
- Kraken announced that they have acquired an infrastructure platform for crypto staking called Staked. They called it “one of the largest deals in the history of crypto”, but they did not disclose the terms of the acquisition.
- Bullish said it is expanding to over 40 jurisdictions in Asia-Pacific, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, giving institutional and retail investors access to its liquidity pools totaling more than USD 2bn. Since it opened in November, the exchange has achieved 24-hour total trading volume of over USD 150m, they added.
Adoption news
- Web browser Opera has announced an upcoming browser integration with the Ethereum (ETH) scaling platform Polygon (MATIC). Set to occur in Q1 2022, the integration will enable Opera users in-browser access to over 3,000 decentralized apps (dapps) on the Polygon network, while the in-built Opera crypto wallet will also allow them to transact with MATIC.
Legal news
- Prosecutors in the German state of Hesse tapped the bank Bankhaus Scheich Wertpapierspezialist AG, a specialist in digital assets, to “clean” cryptocurrencies worth about EUR 100m (USD 113m) they seized in a criminal case against three drug traders, per Bloomberg. The anti-cybercrime unit of the Frankfurt General Prosecutor and the bank said they will cooperate in future criminal cases to put confiscated cryptocurrencies back into the markets.
Investments news
- US-based Manasquan Bank will participate in Bakkt Holdings’ early adopter program, which will enable customers of the financial institution to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies. The project is expected to launch in Q2 2022, and the platform will provide an entry point to adopt cryptocurrencies only to retail clients of Manasquan Bank, to be followed by the bank’s mobile application.
- El Salvador bought BTC 21 (USD 1m) to mark the 21st day of the last month of the 21st year of the 21st century, President Nayib Bukele said. He said he made the purchase at 21:21:21, and pointed out that El Salvador’s land area is 21,000 square kilometers, referring to BTC’s supply which is capped at 21 million.
- Decentralized rendering engine Render Network has raised USD 30m in a funding round led by Multicoin Capital. The company said it will be collaborating with Multicoin to expand the capabilities of the network to power everything from next-generation NFTs and immersive real-time streaming experiences to a marketplace of SDK-based microservices.
DeFi news
- Crypto-focused SEBA Bank is seeking to become whitelisted on Arc, the institutional platform developed by the team behind decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Aave (AAVE). A representative from the bank said that it has sought the whitelisting in order to enable its clientele to more broadly access the Aave platform, stating that “[d]ue to various regulatory restrictions in their jurisdictions, SEBA’s institutional clientele has not been able deploy liquidities at large scale in Aave until now.”
NFTs news
- US National Basketball Association (NBA) team Golden State Warriors star guard Stephen Curry is partnering with sports apparel brand Under Armour on a non-fungible token (NFT) drop to celebrate his new record as the NBA’s all-time top three-point shooter. The collection will feature 2,974 NFTs, each priced USD 333, that are digital replicas of the Under Armour-made ‘Curry Flow 9’ sneakers Curry was wearing when he broke NBA legend Ray Allen’s record on December 14.
