SEC Nearly Doubles Its Crypto & Cyber Unit, The Other Side Of Goldman’s Bitcoin-Backed Loan + More News

Sumejja Muratagić-Tadić
Last updated: | 4 min read
Source: AdobeStock / Andriy Blokhin

 

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Regulation news

  • The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced the allocation of 20 additional positions, for a total of 50, to the unit responsible for protecting investors in crypto markets and from cyber-related threats called the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit (formerly known as the Cyber Unit). “By nearly doubling the size of this key unit, the SEC will be better equipped to police wrongdoing in the crypto markets while continuing to identify disclosure and controls issues with respect to cybersecurity,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler was quoted as saying in the announcement.

Adoption news

DeFi news

  • Wall Street trading firm Jane Street partnered with decentralized capital markets provider Clearpool and crypto and blockchain investment firm BlockTower Capital to enter the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) by borrowing USD 25m worth of USD coin (USDC) from BlockTower via Clearpool. The company is planning to scale up to USD 50m, subject to market conditions, they added.

Blockchains news

  • In their postmortem report, Solana (SOL) said it suffered a 7-hour outage caused by stalled consensus on its Mainnet Beta cluster, due to 6 million inbound transactions per second. They stated that evidence indicates bots tried to programmatically win a new NFT being minted using the popular Candy Machine program, which validators couldn’t handle due to memory issues, necessitating manual intervention. The team behind the popular blockchain also said that three mitigations are in the works to address the stability and resilience of the network.
  • EMURGO Ventures, the investment subsidiary of the commercial arm of the Cardano (ADA) blockchain, announced a partnership with Layer 1 blockchain solution Partisia Blockchain to allow for “the exchange of resources” that will add privacy-specific features to Cardano. Partisia’s development team will develop customized smart contracts for Cardano developers to utilize when applicable to their dapps (decentralized apps) use case, they added.

Security news

  • During the first four months of 2022, a total of USD 1.6bn was lost in the crypto world to exploits, hacks & scams, or more than throughout 2021 (USD 1.3bn) and 2020 (USD 550m), per blockchain security solutions company CertiK.

Legal news

  • Meta, the parent company of social network Facebook, is being sued over its logo by blockchain tech company Dfinity, according to trademark attorney Josh Gerben. They allege that, as color is not claimed as a feature of the mark, their trademark ownership extends to color variations.

Gaming news

  • Video game company Square Enix announced it is selling several of its intellectual properties (IPs) and game studios to video game company Embracer Group in order to focus on blockchain among other things. Though the sale agreement just concluded, the sale itself (worth around USD 300m) is expected to close between July and September.

Investments news

  • US-based movie studio Angel Studios added USD 10.6m in bitcoin (BTC) to its treasury through a stock sale last October, according to filings with the SEC.
  • Privacy startup Nym unveiled a new USD 300m fund to attract developers to its ecosystem. They added that details for applications will follow “soon”.
  • Investing giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has earmarked about USD 500m to back Indian startups, TechCrunch reported, citing a source familiar with the matter. The company is also looking to hire for several investment roles in the country, they added.
  • Asset manager CI Global Asset Management announced the launch of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) focused on investment opportunities in blockchain technology and the metaverse. CI Galaxy Blockchain ETF and CI Galaxy Metaverse ETF have begun trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the tickers CBCX and CMVX, respectively, with an annual management fee of 0.50%.
  • Digital asset investment firm CoinShares announced combined revenue, gains and other income of GBP 27.96m (USD 35m) in the first quarter of 2022, compared to GBP 39.91m (USD 50m) during the same time in 2021. Additionally, the company had exchange-traded product assets under management worth GBP 3.07bn (USD 3.85bn) in this time period, compared to the GBP 3.4bn (USD 4.27bn) in Q1 2021.
  • Web3 investment project Syndicate announced it has raised USD 6m from more than 50 customers, partners, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), bringing their total raised to over USD 28m.

NFTs news

  • Asset manager VanEck announced it is launching a VanEck Community non-fungible token (NFT), which they say is the first-ever NFT offered by a global asset manager. The tokens should be distributed across 1,000 holders this week, while the holders will be able to use them to receive updates and provide feedback.

Career news

  • Roeland Van der Stappen, former European Head of Regulatory Affairs at payments giant Visa, announced he is starting a new position as Vice President, Policy and Engagement for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) at Crypto.com.