Weekly Summary
- FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Back in the U.S. to Face Charges; Top Lieutenants Plead Guilty
- Binance.US Set to Acquire Voyager Digital Assets for $1.02 billion
- Visa Proposes Automatic Payments Using Ethereum Layer 2 System, StarkNet
- Twitter Adds BTC and ETH Price Indexes to Search Function
- Genesis, DCG Creditors Propose Plan to Resolve Liquidity
- Auros discloses $20m loss to FTX, expects to resume operations following a restructuring plan
Industry Stories
Sam Bankman-Fried extradited to the United States on Wednesday: Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), former CEO of failed crypto exchange FTX, arrived in New York from the Bahamas to face fraud charges Wednesday night. Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, and Gary Wang, a co-founder of FTX, had both agreed to plead deals on relevant charges, and are reported to be cooperating in the federal criminal case against SBF.
Binance to buy Voyagere: Binance.US has entered an agreement to acquire bankrupt crypto lender Voyager in a deal worth an estimated $1.02 billion. The news comes in just weeks after the planned FTX buyout failed. Voyager previously filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy days after the fall of the crypto hedge fund, Three Arrows Capital (3AC).
In the same week, Binance has also increased its investment to acquire Tokocrypto, the Indonesian exchange it has been investing in since 2020. The acquisition will enable the company to operate legally in the country after having been banned previously by the authorities.
Visa Explores Auto Payments on Ethereum: Global payment giant Visa is researching ways to introduce recurring, automatic payments using smart contracts for self-custodial Ethereum wallets, according to it’s recent thought leadership paper.The proposed system called “Account Abstraction” (AA), would make user accounts on the blockchain function more like smart contracts, adding programmable features to wallets. In a word, Ethereum auto payments through Visa cards could soon be reality.
Twitter Adds BTC and ETH Price Indexes to Search Function: Twitter has added a new crypto feature on Wednesday that enables users to search the price of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) simply by typing their names or “tickers” into the search tab, as shared by its pro-crypto CEO, Elon Musk.
Earlier this year, the social media platform also announced that it was testing an NFT tweet files function in collaboration with four marketplaces.
Gemini Creditor Committee Proposes Plan to Resolve Liquidity Issue of Genesis, DCG: A creditor committee that includes crypto exchange Gemini has presented a plan to Genesis and Digital Currency Group (DCG) to “provide a path for the recovery of assets”, Gemini co-founder Cameron Winklevoss said in a tweet. The committee expects a response this week. Earlier in the week, DCG was reported to have a $350m loan to financier Todd Boehly if Genesis goes bankrupt.
Auros Files for Provisional Liquidation after FTX Collapse: Auros Global, a Hong-Kong-based crypto trading firm and market maker, disclosed on Tuesday that it was granted a “Provisional Liquidation” request last month from a court in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), as part of its ongoing efforts to restructure outstanding debt to lenders. Bankruptcy protection filing shows this decentralized finance project lost ~$20 million to the now-defunct FTX exchange.
Product Highlight
Matrixport has launched a new ETH2.0 Native Staking product in collaboration with P2P.org, an Ethereum validator operator. Investors’ ETH will be 100% allocated to staking via P2P.org to earn native staking rewards. Please note that a verified operator requires 32 ETH for staking entry.
Redemption will open to the public after the completion of Ethereum’s planned “Shanghai Upgrade.” Investors can submit a request to “unstake” anytime after the Shanghai Upgrade, and the processing time will be subject to the queuing rules set forth by the Beacon Chain, with an estimated waiting period of 21 days.
Matrixport News
Matrixport is pleased to participate in the $14 million Series A financing round of Evertas, the leading crypto insurance company, alongside Polychain Capital, Sino Global Capital, CMT Digital Ventures, Foundation Capital, Morgan Creek Capital Management, LLC, Bloccelerate VC, and HashKey Group.
Through investing in Evertas, we hope we can forge strategic collaborations with the early stage web3 innovator and increase the web3 industry’s mass adoption.
Learn more here.
Anthony DeMartino, CEO of Matrixport U.S., identified challenges of options left for projects with good prospects in the bear market correction, in his latest thought piece. Based on the analysis, Matrixport has crafted a handful of new solutions for clients to raise debt in a sustainable way. These solutions are designed to retain the upside of projects, such that when a project performs better than anticipated, the founders stand to gain while making it attractive for investors to lend.
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