New Bitcoin ETP, Faster BNB Burn, Digital Euro, Enjin in Japan + 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.
Bitcoin news
- CoinShares, Europe’s major digital asset manager, today announced the launch of a new physically-backed ETP, CoinShares Physical Bitcoin (Ticker: BITC). BITC will be the first product released on CoinShares’ new institutional-grade ETP platform and will launch with “significant assets under management,” they said.
Exchanges news
- For their 14th quarterly BNB Burn (October to December 2020), Binance said they burned a total of BNB 3.6m, equivalent to USD 165.8m worth of tokens. Also, the company plans to accelerate the burn that was planned to last for 27 years. “The current accelerated burn would put the trajectory to be around 5-8 years to finish the 100 million BNB,” CEO Changpeng Zhao said, adding that “a number of factors could change the accelerated part in the future, including BNB price fluctuations, overall market conditions, and more.” At the time of writing (16:54 UTC), BNB, the native token of Binance, trades at USD 44 and is down by 1% in a day, trimming its weekly gains to 13%. It rallied by 26% in a month and 155% in a year.
CBDCs news
- In a joint statement today, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission said they’re reviewing at a technical level a broad range of policy, legal and technical questions emerging from a possible introduction of a digital euro, taking into account their respective mandates and independence provided for in the Treaties. The ECB will consider whether to start a digital euro project towards mid-2021.
Gaming news
- Enjin has announced that Enjin Coin (ENJ) has been approved by the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association and will be listed on the Coincheck exchange on January 26, 2021. ENJ is the first gaming token to be authorized in Japan, they claimed. ENJ jumped by 43% in the past 24 hours. It’s up by 106% in a week and 119% in a month. It rallied by 356% in a year.
Crime news
- The criminal share of all cryptocurrency activity fell from 2.1% (USD 21.4bn) in 2019 to 0.34%, or USD 10bn in transaction volume in 2020, Chainalysis said today. One reason the percentage of criminal activity fell is because overall economic activity nearly tripled between 2019 and 2020, they added.
STO news
- Exordium, the publisher of the upcoming sci-fi massively multiplayer online (MMO) strategy game Infinite Fleet, launched its public security token offering (STO). Also, they said they secured a USD 1m investment from Tether International, a member of the Tether group of companies.
Blockchain news
- The Japanese business giant Mitsubishi’s power arm Mitsubishi Electric and the leading Japanese IT university the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have co-developed a peer-to-peer (P2P) power trading solution that makes use of blockchain technology. In a press release, the firm said its new tool would help stakeholders trade surplus electricity from renewable energy and “maximize the amount of surplus electricity available in the market at any given time.” The parties said that they would aim to begin evaluating their platform “beginning in April,” with further improvements to come before aiming at the earliest possible commercialization.”
Mining news
- The current shortfall in video cards could continue until mid-2021, per a new report from Vedomosti. The Russian media outlet stated that “high-performance [cards] have completely disappeared” from the “open” market, with conventional stores sold out, with no idea when stocks will be replenished. Crypto miners typically make use of high-end video cards in mining rigs. Vendors told the publication that inflated prices of over twice the market price are now common on the black market for the most in-demand video cards, and added that miners often purchase in batches of 1,000 or more directly from suppliers, bypassing stores altogether.
Social media news
- A superfan of the Venezuelan state-issued petro (PTR) token has launched an OnlyFans account for the token. In a tweet, Petro Divisia – who regularly posts about major tokens in addition to the Venezuelan coin, wrote that the new account would allow them to “create a space that would allow [them to] interact more dynamically with trading signs in different cryptocurrencies.” The London-based OnlyFans portal has become a repository for pornography and erotica – with the UK media dubbing it “an NSFW social media platform.”
