Weekly News 09/11/2021 : Google invests $1 billion on the CME

Banks and Institutions

Crypto fund takes Australian markets by storm

BetaShares smashed Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) records within the first 15 minutes of listing their Capital Appreciation Portfolio Diversification (CRYP) fund. The fund enables investors to gain exposure to 50 crypto companies from around the world, such as exchanges, mining companies and equipment firms. More than $31 million was reached by the end of opening day, signaling massive demand for crypto exposure on the ASX.

Google invests $1 billion on the CME

Google’s parent company Alphabet has made a $1 billion equity investment in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group, the exchange responsible for many crypto derivatives products targetting institutional investors. The average daily volume in its Bitcoin futures reached 6,243 contracts as of Nov. 3, with 13,417 open interest contracts. On Nov 3, the company’s market capitalization is $79.8 billion.

Banca d’Italia and Deutsche Bundesbank work on blockchain payments

The central banks of Italy and Germany joined forces to work on settlements in central bank money of DLT-based asset exchanges. The proposed system would minimize the counterparty risk for both sides. The new system would complement the digital euro and serve as a technical bridge between existing payment systems used by Eurosystem central banks and the DLT-based settlement of tokenized assets.

Ecosystem

Solana has too many tokens

When Solana has created, the total circulating supply was only 8M tokens, with potential buyers very excited about the token’s low supply and market cap. Unfortunately, the dev team had an additional 13 million coins hidden in a wallet. Once the Solana team was fully exposed they released a medium article admitting to the fraud,

Facing a scandal within the community, the team promised to burn those coins, which had been loaned to a market maker. Instead they minted 8M new SOL tokens, presumably to compensate the planified burn. The total circulating supply is now 16M, double the supply promised in April.

EOS investors revolt against the token creator

EOS investors are voicing their dissatisfaction with former developer Block.one and have formed their own organization and elected new leadership in an effort to revamp the network which they say has seen a disapointing development, especially in the DeFi marketplace. Meanwhile, Block.one is focusing on new ventures, such as a crypto exchange, and does not even mention EOS on their webpage.

A $100 million fund for blockchain gaming

Solana Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and FTX announced Friday a $100 million fund to invest in startups focused on building blockchain gaming studios. Of course, projets will have to work mainly on Solana. The interesting part is the partnershuip with FTX, which until now, had remained quite blockchain-agnostic.

Enjin launches a $100 million fund for its metaverse

Issued on November 4, the fund named the Efinity Metaverse Fund will be used to support gaming and non-fungible token (NFT) developers in the Enjin ecosystem.The $100 million fund will be used to lay the groundwork for integrating the different projects and marketplaces within the Efinity and broader Enjin ecosystems.

The Ethereum Name Service project (ENS) launched its governance token

The token called ENS was lanched on monday. Ethereum wallet users who have created an ENS domain in the past are eligible to claim ENS tokens from the claims site until May 4, 2022. ENS is now ranked as the 313th-largest crypto asset with a market capitalization of $235 million and a whopping fully diluted valuation of $3.16 billion.

Technology

BZx has been hacked (again) and lost 55 million

bZx is a DeFi platform. In february 2020, they had lost 645 000 dollars following an oracle attack. In september 2020, a second attack resulted in $8 million in losses.

In total, the protocol has suffered more than $63 million losses across the three attacks.

The year 2021 was as much the best as it was the worst year for DeFi. Despite an unprecedented boom, hacks were at an all-time high. In total, $680 million was stolen from DeFi protocols in 2021.

Wrapped XRPs are expected to come to Ethereum in December

XRP holders will thus be able to take advantage of the possibilities offered by DeFi such as the execution of smart contracts for lending and borrowing in cryptocurrencies, or swapping. There were plans to implement smart contracts in XRP but they now seem remote. The custody of XRP will be provided by Hex Trust.

Discord may soon integrate Metamask

A pre-release screenshot shared by the platform’s CEO, Jason Citron shows a possible integration with Metamask, which has onboarded millions of users to the crypto space. Possible usages could be the integration of cfrypto payment systems in Discord, or a way to authenticate users through the blockchain.

Figures

• OpenSea has reached a cumulative volume of $10 billion.
• The market cap of Bitcoin has now surpassed Tesla and Facebook, Amazon could be next.
• The total cryptocurrency market capitalization is above $3 trillion for the first time.
• According to a survey, 4% people in the USA have quit their jobs after reaching financial freedom with their crypto investments.