Date: 09/10/2021
“Right now we’re dealing with a centralized, manipulated marketplace. This puts it into the open crypto and NFT marketplaces.” — Josh Katz, YellowHeart CEO
Weekly News Report:
1. Blockchain cybersecurity company GK8 announces custody partnership with Stellar, a move that could spark institutional interest in the Stellar Lumen (XLM) token. By integrating with Stellar, customers of GK8 can access XLM investments in a custodial setting, opening the door to offline transactions of digital currency.
2. Similar to Tom Brady’s, the celebrated Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry seals the FTX crypto pact. Football superstar Tom Brady and model Gisele Bündchen also signed their own deal with FTX earlier this year.
3. Digital blockchain firm DigitalBits has become the official global crypto of the Italian football club Inter Milan. Meanwhile, Zytara Labs becomes the team’s official global digital banking partner.
4. Visa, the multinational payments giant, has announced it is planning to bring cryptocurrency services to traditional banking platforms in Brazil. Visa also announced it is working with several national companies to issue cryptocurrency cards. Among these are Zro Bank, Alterbank, and Rippio, which will allow users to connect these to bank accounts.
5. The Spanish league is joining the blockchain world by launching officially licensed digital cards of players to be sold and traded online. The league on Thursday announced a deal with fantasy soccer platform Sorare to launch the cards based on non-fungible tokens, known as NFTs.
6. Ukraine is the latest country to legalize bitcoin as the cryptocurrency slowly goes global. In a nearly unanimous vote, the Ukrainian Parliament adopted a law that legalizes and regulates cryptocurrency.
7. Payments giant Mastercard has agreed to buy CipherTrace, a firm that scans blockchains for illicit transactions. The surprise acquisition announced Thursday by the companies in a press release gives Mastercard the ability to track over 900 cryptocurrencies. Details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
8. European soccer giant Paris Saint-Germain named crypto exchange Crypto.com as its first official cryptocurrency platform partner. The exchange will pay a large part of its sponsorship fee with its CRO token.
9. Crypto assets and distributed ledger technology (DLT) topped the European Securities and Markets Authority’s (ESMA) 2021 financial innovation scoreboard, according to a new report published by the institution. European Finance regulator calls crypto “volatile,” but Innovative.
10. Continuing to lend full support to cryptocurrencies, Mastercard (MA) has announced that it will acquire CipherTrace, a blockchain analytics startup. It provides tools and solutions aimed at preventing illicit cryptocurrency transactions.
11. The latest sensation in the digital token universe, Solana, has raced past XRP (Ripple) to become the sixth-largest cryptocurrency in market capitalization. After a strong 32 percent rally in the last week, Solana, with a market capitalization of $55 billion, is a few steps behind the fifth largest and dollar-pegged cryptocurrency Tether. Binance Coin is pinned at the fourth spot.
12. Miami’s SCOPE Art Show is working with YellowHeart, a blockchain-based live event ticketing platform, to sell VIP tickets in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). “This unique set of minted tickets will feature exclusive editioned artwork by emerging and celebrated artists,” SCOPE founder Alexis Hubshman said. It claims to be the first art fair to offer tickets in NFT form.
13. Pantera capital’s latest crypto fund has raised $369M since July. The crypto investments firm had $4.7 billion in assets under management in August, new filings show.
14. Nasdaq, alongside Finnhub and Tiingo, will be providing its price feeds to DeFiChain, a DeFi platform built on the Bitcoin network. DeFiChain offers to trade in tokenized stocks that correspond to the underlying price of major listed firms such as Tesla, Amazon and Apple.
