Author: Bloomberg

An online platform for trading officially-licensed digital cricket collectibles, is raising about $100 million in a new funding round with backers including Cristiano Ronaldo, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Venture capital firms B Capital Group and Insight Partners are leading FanCraze’s Series A round, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information is private. The fundraising for the blockchain startup, previously known as Faze Technologies, has additionally attracted South Korea’s Mirae Asset, the people said. An announcement could be made as soon as in the coming weeks, another person said. Details of the fundraising such as size…

Read More

Russia’s central bank has granted Sberbank PJSC, the nation’s biggest lender, a license to issue and exchange digital assets. Using Sber’s platform, companies can issue their own digital assets to attract market investments, buy digital assets through Sber’s system, or make other digital assets transactions, the bank said in a statement Thursday. “We are just starting our work with digital assets,” said Sergey Popov, director of the transaction business division at Sberbank, adding companies will be able to make their first transaction on its blockchain platform in a month. Sberbank, a state-owned bank, is being sanctioned by the U.S. and European Union. It holds…

Read More

Collectors of Rare Bears, a recently-launched NFT project, have lost around $790,000 worth of NFTs and other cryptocurrencies in a phishing attack. Rare Bears is an NFT collection of 2,400 cartoon-themed bears on Ethereum. It was created by a New Zealand-based digital artist called Enox and was launched via a public mint last week. On Wednesday, an unknown person gained unauthorized access to the project’s Discord server and posed as an official moderator. This enabled them to share a phishing link that was designed to steal people’s funds. “Discord has unfortunately been compromised. Please DO NOT click any links, connect…

Read More

Small-time sports fans could get a piece of big-time teams with the help of blockchain technology, according to baseball-player-turned-businessman Alex Rodriguez. “With blockchain, I think millions of people around the world will have an opportunity to own a sports team, if not a small stake in one,” Rodriguez said at the Futures Industry Association conference in Boca Raton, Florida, Thursday. “We don’t have that opportunity, but tomorrow I think we will,” said the former Major League Baseball star also known as “A-Rod.” Sports teams have been embracing the digital asset craze, forming partnerships with crypto companies and issuing “fan tokens”…

Read More

Crypto doesn’t appear to be a successful tool for avoiding the sanctions that the U.S. and its European allies levied against Russian organizations and individuals including President Vladimir Putin following the country’s invasion of Ukraine, a panel of cryptocurrency experts told lawmakers. “We have not seen evidence of Russia or Putin systematically using cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions,” Jonathan Levin, co-founder of Chainalysis Inc., a blockchain-analytics firm that sells anti-money laundering services to the government, told the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday. U.S. lawmakers, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have raised concerns that Bitcoin, which can be traded without intermediaries, could make it harder for…

Read More

President Joe Biden’s cryptocurrency executive order put the nation’s two federal consumer protection regulators front and center in regulating digital money. The Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have largely taken a back seat to other financial regulators when it comes to crypto. But Biden’s March 9 order directed the CFPB and FTC to study how they can police crypto transactions for fraud and abuse, a mission both agencies are equipped to do. “They’ve taken the position that crypto is not a consumer product, but as of [March 9] that position is done,” said Laurel Loomis Rimon, a partner…

Read More

An online commotion around seemingly irregular trading of a NFT collection prior to the acquisition of the project is shining light again on a perceived lack of regulatory clarity in one of the most explosive corners of crypto. During the days leading up to the March 11 purchase by Yuga Labs of the intellectual property of the Meebits collection from Larva Labs, more than a dozen addresses on the Ethereum blockchain purchased a large amount of the nonfungible tokens. The price floor, or the lowest price a seller is willing to accept, went as high as 6.134 Ether, or about $15,800, on…

Read More

DeFi is being lumped in with CDS and MBS — two financial acronyms that became synonymous with financial risks and perils during the 2008 crisis — in an academic paper making the rounds. Proponents of this controversial corner of crypto may want to give the paper a read before they pounce at the next offer of outsize returns that seem too good to be true. In “Defi: Shadow Banking 2.0?,” Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, compares DeFi, or decentralized finance, with the credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities that strained the financial system more than a decade ago.…

Read More

Galaxy Interactive, Republic Crypto and Alameda Research are launching a consortium that will invest in blockchain-focused gaming studios and developers. The consortium called NG+ will seek to fund experienced, traditional video-game developers and studios, and help them with token economics and liquidity as they create blockchain-based titles. The members will receive minority stakes in the efforts’ tokens, said Richard Kim, general partner at Galaxy Interactive, billionaire Mike Novogratz’s venture arm. The blockchain-gaming industry became red hot last year, led by the games such as Axie Infinity that let users earn tokens. A myriad of copycats has emerged since, and so…

Read More

Robinhood Markets Inc.’s plan to let users loan out their stocks to other financial institutions — a program known as fully paid securities lending — is taking shape within its app, part of a push to compete with more conventional brokerages. Work on the feature, which Robinhood has said could be available in coming months, appeared in a beta version of its iPhone app. Code describing the service — dubbed Stock Loan Income Program, or SLIP — was discovered by developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg. “Through SLIP, you have the opportunity to earn passive income by lending whole shares of…

Read More