Weekly Summary
- Credit Suisse’s rumor of possible bank default with credit default swap rising to 14-y high
- Solana Network is experiencing outage issues once again
- Japan pledged to make Web3 one of the core pillars of economic revitalization
- Mastercard launches new crypto security protection tool
- zkSync 2.0 mainnet is expected to launch by the end of October
Industry Stories
Credit Suisse Bank battling rumours of financial trouble in spotlight: Credit Suisse Group’s gauge of credit risk rises to record high as share prices continue to plummet despite the CEO’s efforts to calm the markets in its Memo. Its price-to-book ratio is flashing warning signals with only 24% and the bank’s Credit Default Swap (CDS), which offers protection against a company defaulting, rose up to 14-year high. The bank maintained its stance that they hold sufficient liquidity and it will be coming up with a restructuring plan including asset sales and divestitures.
Solana Network down again: Solana experienced a temporary outage and was not able to process transactions for about 5 hours. It went online again as validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of the Mainnet at 7 AM UTC. The issue appeared to be from a misconfigured node running a duplicate instance and both their instances produced a block. Solana has suffered multiple outages, degraded performance and network instability over the past few months.
Japan to invest in metaverse, NFT to drive Web3 services: Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced plans to expand investments into the metaverse and NFTs realm during a public policy speech on Monday Oct 3. The country has started trialling with NFTs to solve jurisdication issues and the government will continue its focus to support the use of digital technologies and promote initiatives to expand Web3 services powered by blockchain.
Mastercard debuts tool enabling clients to detect crypto frauds on exchanges: Mastercard launched a new tool, Crypto Secure, helping banks to identify cryptocurrencies transactions that are deemed to be suspicious. It uses sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms to detect risks of crime on crypto exchanges via the Mastercard payment network. Late last year in Oct 2021, Mastercard has also partnered up with digital assets firm Bakkt allowing banks, vendors and businesses to integrate cryptocurrencies into their payment structure.
zkSync 2.0 to launch on Ethereum’s mainnet: zkSync 2.0 is already active on testnet and it is estimated to be launched on Ethereum’s mainnet by end October. This will be the first EVM-compatible ZK rollup solution that can handle any general Ethereum smart contracts. Matter Labs CEO mentioned that zkSync 2.0 is on the cutting edge of innovation in the ZK space and they are very confident to hit the subsequent milestones. zkSync 2.0 aims to decrease Ethereum’s high gas fees and increase transaction capacity on the mainnet.
Product Highlight
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Matrixport News
Matrixport has signed a $50 million insurance policy with Lloyd’s Syndicate to provide additional coverage and hedging for its institutional clients. Assets held in cold storage by Matrixport’s institutional custodian, Cactus Custody, will be protected including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ether, etc.
Toby Norfolk-Thompson, CIO of Matrixport U.S., shares with Forkast.News the key takeaways of the changes to the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (#MiCA) regulation:
1) MiCA provides clear guidelines to foster cross-country AML execution and asset recovery.
2) MiCA limits crypto utility: cap will limit transactions using stablecoins to €200 million transacted per day.
3) Institutions are geared up, waiting for clarity on lucid crypto liquidity and capital rules.
4) UK’s stance on crypto is likely to be friendlier than EU’s.
Watch the episode of Forkast.News #MarketMovers to find out what investors can expect.
Benjamin Stani, Matrixport’s Director of Business Development, shares with Coinlive Talk an overview of Matrixport business and how Matrixport navigates through the bear market. Link to the full video can be found here.
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