US Sullivan Bank Partners with Bakkt to Enable BTC, ETH Support, SCB Scraps Bitkub Acquisition Plans, LiquidX Takes 70% Stake in Anime Metaverse + More News

Fredrik Vold
Last updated: | 3 min read
Source: AdobeStock / Ascannio

 

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news. 
__________

Banking news

  • US-based Sullivan Bank has partnered with the digital asset platform Bakkt to enable buying and selling of bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH) for its customers, according to an announcement.
  • Siam Commercial Bank, known as the oldest bank in Thailand, has scrapped a plan to acquire the local crypto exchange Bitkub Online, citing unresolved regulatory issues, a statement from the bank said.

DeFi news

  • A proposal by two former executives at Uniswap Labs, the development firm behind the decentralized exchange Uniswap (UNI), to form the Uniswap Foundation has passed a vote by the Uniswap community. The Uniswap Foundation aims to “support the decentralized growth and sustainability of the Uniswap Protocol and its supporting ecosystem and community,” per the proposal.
  • Cronos ID on Thursday launched its identity and communication protocol on Cronos, a blockchain built on Cosmos (ATOM), an announcement said.
  • Web3 identity and domain platform Decentraweb has announced the launch of DecentraDNS, a service that enables permissionless purchase of top-level domains (TLDs), as well as minting and selling of subdomains as NFTs on Ethereum.

Legal news

  • More than 30 employees at the bankrupt crypto lender Voyager will get a USD 1.6 million bonus payment after a New York bankruptcy court earlier this week approved a request from the company to award key staff members, Law360 reported.

Tax news

  • Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) and Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) will review taxation rules for crypto companies from 2023, per local news outlet Yomiuri.
  • The crypto tax calculator Koinly will from now on support the ERC-1155 standard for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and so-called semi-fungible token (SFT) transactions, per an announcement. SFTs are mostly used in blockchain-based games and are a type of token that acts like fungible tokens until they are used.

Regulation news

  • The major crypto platform Crypto.com announced on Tuesday it has passed a Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type II Compliance audit. The audit was conducted by auditing and consulting firm Deloitte, Crypto.com wrote in the announcement.
  • Crypto is not beneficial for India and other emerging economies, the Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das has said in an interview. “Countries like India are differently placed from advanced economies when there is a talk of dollarization of economy […] It is not a good thing for our economy to happen. […] Since all cryptos are denominated in the hard currencies by and large [the] dollar, [they] will not work in favor of countries like India. It may work in favor of the advanced economies,” Das said, per the Economic Times.

Investment news

  • LiquidX, a Web3 venture capital studio for the metaverse, has taken a 70% stake for an undisclosed amount in Anime Metaverse, a publishing and licensing company focused on building anime, manga, and dorama in Web3, according to an announcement.
  • Koop, a protocol powering community-governed networks, today announced its public launch. Per a press release, it leverages NFT collector passes to fund projects, gain ownership, and generate wealth together, with USD 850m in membership volume two months in beta. It also announced USD 5m in funding from lead investors 1confirmation and Variant Fund, with participation from Palm Tree CrewDay One VenturesEthereal VenturesDeFi AllianceVolt CapitalPearVCDCF God0xmons, Cooper Turley, Balaji Srinivasan, and Liu Jiang.
  • Web3 Developer Platform thirdweb has raised USD 24m in a Series A funding round, bringing its valuation to USD 160m. The round was led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Shopify, Protocol Labs, Polygon, Shrug VC, Joseph Lacob, and others, per an announcement.

Sport news

  • French Web3 game developer UNAGI has formed a partnership with English football clubs Birmingham and Sheffield that will see the clubs join UNAGI’s next-generation fantasy football game, Ultimate Champions, per an announcement.

Career news

  • Sam Trabucco has announced that he is stepping down from his role as Co-CEO of crypto trading and private equity firm Alameda Research, the parent company of the FTX crypto exchange. Co-CEO Caroline Ellison will instead take over as Alameda’s sole CEO, Trabucco said in a tweet.