Author: The Block
UK fintech Wirex has today launched its services in the US, almost one year after its original launch date of April 2021. Wirex CEO Pavel Matveev says it currently has 300,000 US customers on its waiting list. In the US, the company sees Coinbase as a key competitor and believes it can compete with the exchange by offering zero exchange rates. Wirex allows its users to buy, hold and exchange fiat currencies — such as US dollars and cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether — in an account linked to a debit card. Spearheaded by its US CEO Harold Montgomery, the…
Aleo, a blockchain project focused on privacy through zero-knowledge-proof technology, has raised $200 million in a Series B funding round. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Kora Management co-led the round, with Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Samsung Ventures, Slow Ventures, and Sea Capital also participating. As part of the deal, SoftBank and Kora have each acquired one board seat at Aleo; however, the seats are yet to be assigned to specific executives, Aleo’s CEO and CTO Howard Wu told The Block. This was an equity funding round and will help Aleo build a company that provides services on top of…
Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking, the trust banking arm of Japan’s largest financial institution, has announced plans to launch a yen-pegged stablecoin in 2023. According to a report by Nikkei on Monday, the stablecoin dubbed “Progmacoin” will be used for clearing and settlements of digital securities. Progmacoin will reportedly be deployed in the settlement of digital securities on the planned SBI and SMBC digital securities exchange scheduled to go live this year. The Osaka-based platform will utilize blockchain technology for trading non-traditional securities like real estate and art. By using a stablecoin settlement layer, the bank hopes to accelerate fund delivery for such trades…
Beer giant Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light has partnered with Nouns DAO (a decentralized autonomous organization) for its Super Bowl ad airing on Sunday. Bud Light’s senior director of digital Corey Brown told The Block that the partnership will help the beer brand further authenticate itself in the NFT space. “As part of the partnership, Nouns has gifted Bud Light NEXT with a Nouns NFT in exchange for the famous Nouns glasses to be featured in our Super Bowl commercial,” said Brown. Nouns DAO is a generative NFT project on the Ethereum blockchain. Its avatars are based on nouns: people, places, and…
Brantly Millegan has been voted out of his role as a community steward of the organization that governs Ethereum Name Service (ENS). The vote to oust Millegan from the ENS DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) came on Sunday afternoon after a tweet from 2016 surfaced over the weekend — sparking instant controversy. In the tweet, Millegan had branded homosexual people evil, denied the existence of transgenderism, and described contraception as a perversion. ENS is a popular purveyor of Ethereum-linked domain names that take the form of NFTs and can be used as usernames within crypto ecosystems. DAOism In a blog post, ENS stated that a majority…
A senior manager at the Bank of England says the 327-year-old institution is “highly unlikely” to develop a retail-facing wallet that could be used to store and spend digital currency. The question of whether the United Kingdom’s central bank will issue a so-called Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is far from settled. The Bank plans to publish a consultation paper setting out its assessment of the merits of what some have dubbed the ‘Britcoin’ later this year. But while CBDC issuance remains an open question, the launch of an accompanying wallet appears to have been ruled out. “I think it’s safe to…
One senator is calling on US President Joe Biden’s cabinet to watch out for China’s digital yuan, which is seeing its first international usage during the Winter Olympics in Beijing. In a February 3 letter, Senator Pat Toomey (R-PN) asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to “closely examine Beijing’s CBDC rollout during the Olympic Games.” A CBDC is a central bank digital currency, and China’s CBDC is the largest of its kind to launch. Though its digital wallet just hit the app stores of Android and Apple in January, some form of digital yuan has been circulating for…
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) made a bitcoin purchase during the recent dip, according to new financial disclosures with the US Senate. A disclosure dated February 4 shows Cruz made a bitcoin purchase valued between $15,001 and $50,000. Cruz made the purchase on January 25 using River. On the day of the purchase, bitcoin price was hovering just under $37,000. Today, bitcoin price rallied above $40,000 for the first time since January 20. Cruz has become a crypto advocate in recent months, introducing a resolution for merchants on Capitol Hill to accept cryptocurrency payments and pushing for amended language to address industry concerns in the hotly-debated infrastructure…
A newly formed decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called AssangeDAO, formed by “a collective of cypherpunks,” is raising funds to be used to fight for the freedom of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The DAO is currently raising funds to bid on an NFT by digital artist Pak that was created in collaboration with Assange himself. Similar to ConstitutionDAO, anyone can donate to the pot of funds and contributors receive a proportionate amount of its governance token JUSTICE in response. A nd it’s certainly catching hold; so far AssangeDAO has raised 1,441 ether (worth $4 million). “This is a powerful movement showing we can organize in the…
GameStop has sold almost 15 million IMX tokens currently worth $42 million shortly after receiving a $100 million grant from Immutable X. This action has coincided with a significant dip in the price of IMX, with the token sliding as much as 30% from a two-week high of $4.13 to a low of $2.80. Per CoinGecko, the token is trading hands at $2.97 as of press time. GameStop recently received a $100 million grant from the Ethereum Layer 2 network as part of a partnership to build an NFT marketplace. This grant, denominated in IMX to the tune of 56,209,850 IMX tokens…