Russia To Give More Rights To Crypto Owners + 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.
Regulation news
- Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said that the country will recognize digital assets as property, enabling their owners to protect their interests in court. Mishustin did not specify when it might happen.
Crypto adoption news
- Sygnum Bank said it launched its regulated end-to-end tokenization solution comprised of Desygnate, a primary market issuance platform, and SygnEx, a secondary market trading venue. Sygnum claims it is now “the world’s first bank with a fully integrated, institutional-grade tokenization offering.”
Blockchain news
- Kazakhstan’s blockchain-powered real estate and land registry platform is up and running, reported Inform.Kz. The platform claims it will allow banks, land owners, land buyers, and tenants to do away with slower, paper-based processes that currently typically take three days to complete – reducing completion time on land and property deals to a single day. The quantity of documents that must be submitted to banks has also been reduced, said the platform’s architects.
- Japan’s Keio University is co-building blockchain-powered digital ID platform in cooperation with domestic blockchain EdMuse, the latter announced in an official release. The company said that the platform was being developed for use in the human resources management industry and would help solve labor shortage problems, which have become more severe in Japan in recent years. The university’s Graduate School of Business Administration Takashi Iwamoto Laboratory will take part in the development, while EdMuse said it has been “conducting demonstration experiments at the technical level” with educational institutions in Vietnam, Indonesia, and India.
- The South Korean government has pledged to spend USD 127m on a new economic revival plan that includes blockchain spending. Per Yeongnam.com, the money will be used to foster innovative small and medium-sized enterprises in the regions surrounding the capital Seoul – traditionally a heartland of up-and-coming tech firms – as well as other parts of the country. The money will be used to support industry 4.0 companies, including blockchain startups, and will help develop a “low-carbon and eco-friendly economy.”
- Following a successful trial, Olsztyn, Poland, started to use blockchain to assist their emergency services, thanks to blockchain connection platform SmartKey, said an emailed press release. It added that the SmartKey team connected an Ethereum (ETH) smart contract to a Teltonika smart key device and app, and this will enable fire, ambulance, and police teams to enter any part of the closed district or any secure building within the city safely and securely, without having to track down a keyholder or wait for permission – resulting in reduced response times. The system will be ready for worldwide rollout from early 2021, said a blog post.
Investments news
- Galaxy Digital’s bitcoin (BTC) funds, which were launched last November, raised USD 58.7m in their first year. Per the filings, Galaxy Institutional Bitcoin Fund LP raised USD 55.1m, and Galaxy Bitcoin Fund LP raised USD 3.6m. The Institutional fund had 33 investors, while the minimum investment was USD 250,000. The Galaxy fund saw 56 investors, with a minimum investment of USD 25,000.
- Major YouTuber Andrei Jikh, whose channel has nearly a million subscribers, said he invested USD 100,000 in bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH), and then used lending platforms to earn interest on his coins. In his video, he said he owned BTC 7.5 (USD 126,667) and ETH 120 (USD 61,080) – or USD 187,747 in total, nearly USD 90,000 more than his original investment.
Exchanges news
- On Thursday, Coinbase said that they are experiencing elevated error rates on some backend systems due to an Amazon AWS outage. ” You may encounter intermittent delays or errors while transacting, as well as accessing other parts of our applications. Customer support inquiries are also delayed,” the exchange added.
