Today in Crypto: Digital Yuan Used to Buy Securities, Monex Group Interested in FTX Japan, Bitget Launches Copy Trading in Spot Market

Sead Fadilpašić
Last updated: | 3 min read
Source: AdobeStock / Sielan

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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CBDC news

  • The People’s Bank of China‘s digital yuan has been used to buy securities for the first time, according to a local media outlet. Investors can use the central bank digital currency (CBDC) to buy securities using the Soochow Securities mobile application, said China Securities Journal, citing the securities firm.

Investment news

  • Tokyo brokerage company Monex Group is interested in FTX Japan, the Japanese subsidiary of the fallen FTX crypto exchange, that’s up for sale, Bloomberg reported, citing the online brokerage’s chief executive officer Oki Matsumoto. The CEO said that less competition within the local market would make the investment a good thing for the firm.

Exchange news

  • Bitget said that it is the first exchange to launch copy trading in the spot market. The Copy Trading feature gives users the option to copy trading strategies, as well as use view trader profiles provided by the platform to choose their preferred trader to follow, based on their P&L, trader ranking, and portfolio as recorded in the system.

Legal news

  • The troubled crypto lender Vauld was given another extension by a court in Singapore and now has until February 28 to present a plan for its restructuring, Bloomberg reported. The company has yet to come up with a revival plan, it said, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Regulation news

  • The Thai Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)  issued regulations requiring virtual asset service providers (VASP) to establish a digital wallet management system to guarantee efficient and safe custody. The regulations include the provision of policies and guidelines for overseeing the risk management of digital wallets and private keys; policies and procedures for designing, developing, and managing digital wallets as well as creating, maintaining, and accessing keys; and a contingency plan in case of occurrence of any event that may affect the management system of digital wallets and keys.

NFT news

  • Web3 network peaq announced an upcoming integration with Nexera Protocol, a standard for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and interoperable metadata developed by AllianceBlock. As part of the integration, peaq will become the first layer-1 blockchain in the wider Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem to support its MetaNFT (mNFT) standard, currently only available for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible networks, said a press release. The technology will unlock a variety of use cases, such as privacy-first user and machine identification, it added.
  • Creative duo Concept2048 – Ekaterina Perekopskaya and Rostyslav Brenych – announced the release of 2,048 unique NFTs to raise awareness of global problems, said a press release. The Metamorphoses collection, which will be on sale from January 24, is a polyptych of hand-made photographs, part of which was exhibited in the sixth edition of the contemporary art exhibition “Personal Structures” in Palazzo Mora at the 59th Venice Art Biennale 2022.

DeFi news

  • Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Oasis.app said that it is expanding its multi-protocol offering, starting with Multiply functionality through AAVE for ethereum (ETH), stETH, and wBTC. The new offering adds to the platform’s existing support of Maker collateral types and stETH yield optimizing strategies on AAVE, said a press release.
  • THORChain, a non-custodial decentralized liquidity protocol, announced that “in the depths of a crypto winter, the total amount of the native THORChain asset, RUNE, locked on the network has reached an all-time high,” with over $240 million in total value locked. Among the highlighted achievements, the protocol noted that it completed 8 million cross-chain swaps since the mainnet launch in June.
  • The Hashgraph Association, the Swiss-based non-profit association supporting the Hedera network, and the Fraunhofer Center for International Management and Knowledge Economy IMW, have announced a distributed ledger technology (DLT) innovation contest open to researchers across the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft’s 76 institutes and research units throughout Germany. Three winning project ideas will be selected based on the criteria of utility, uniqueness, and economic efficiency, and will be granted end-to-end training, guidance, support, and a grant of up to $250,000 to develop their research initiatives into enterprise-grade solutions or decentralized applications (dapps) on the Hedera Network, they said.

Mining news

  • Holding company Ault Alliance announced that its wholly owned subsidiary BitNile received 20,645 Antminers, fulfilling the first five of seven contracts with the mining hardware maker Bitmain, including 4,628 S19 XP Antminers that feature a processing power of 140 terahashes per second (TH/s) and 16,017 S19j Pro Antminers that feature a processing power of 100 TH/s. Per the announcement, once installed and energized, the machines will generate a combined processing power of approximately 2.25 exahashes per second (EH/s) and will generate an expected annualized revenue run rate of approximately $60 million.