Futures contracts arrive on Ethereum

The 3D artist Beeple sold NFTs (non-fungible tokens) for $3.5 million.
The sales were conducted at the Nifty Gateway marketplace.
This is an all-time record over a 72-hour period.
This shows a growing appetite for digital art.
The NFT market is growing and can be monitored at https://nonfungible.com/.

In the same vein, Canadian DJ Deadmau5 is launching a sale of 6000 NFTs.
The NFTs will entitle their holders to access exclusive content from the artist.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has confirmed the arrival of Ethereum futures on the platform.
The product is scheduled for February 8, subject to prior regulatory approval.
The number of derivatives regulated on ETH is increasing, which will give more tools to institutional and professional investors to position themselves on this asset.

Billionaire Alan Howard is an investor in One River Asset Management.
One River Asset Management is creating a new institutional investment fund that aims to position itself for $1 billion in BTC and ETH by early 2021.
CEO Eric Peters explains that it has already positioned itself for $600 million.

American Express invests in crypto trading startup FalconX.
The amounts remain unknown, but this demonstrates the company’s growing interest in the world of cryptoassets.

The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has proposed new regulations regarding holders of, and transactions to, cold wallets.
This would require a KYC for any transaction over $3,000 to a personal wallet, and a declaration to FinCEN if the transaction exceeds $10,000.

Grayscale has temporarily blocked any new investors wishing to enter six of their funds, including those for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

MicroStrategy announced today that it has purchased an additional 29,646 bitcoins for nearly $650 million. With this purchase, MicroStrategy has purchased more than $1 billion in bitcoin this year, and owns more than 70,000 BTCs.

Layer 2 Loopring and DiversiFi have just launched L2².
The L2² initiative includes a committee, as well as a working group, with the aim of advancing the transition of the Ethereum ecosystem towards Layer 2 solutions.
This announcement was accompanied by a token exchange between Loopring and DiversiFi.

The bridge between the Ethereum mainnet and the new Secret Ethereum network is live. This bridge allows ETH holders, and some ERC20 tokens to transfer them to the new network, and get an anonymous version of these tokens.
The Secret Ethereum network offers the same tokens, with the same contracts, but with the addition of anonymity features similar to the Monero token.
In addition, the network also offers Secret Smart Contracts, which are encrypted, or encrypted transactions.

Compound announces the launch of its own chain, the Compound Chain.
This network, with its native CASH token, will seek to bring a new version of the Compound protocol available on several blockchains at the same time.
By locking funds on several chains in “Starports”, it will also be possible to send funds between several chains such as Tezos, Polkadot, Ethereum, or Ethereum’s Layer 2.

Following an attack based on a Flash Loan, the Warp Finance protocol lost the equivalent of $7.7 million in stablecoins.
Warp is a loan protocol on Ethereum, whose smart contracts had been audited.