Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.__________
Investment news
Financial services firm Goldman Sachs plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to buy or invest in crypto companies following the FTX collapse, Reuters reported. Executive Mathew McDermott is quoted as saying that the company is on the lookout for opportunities that are “priced more sensibly” and is doing its due diligence on some crypto firms.The Panoptic team has raised $4.5 million in seed funding, led by gumi Cryptos Capital, with contributions from Uniswap Labs Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Jane Street, Blizzard (the Avalanche Ecosystem Fund), Zee Prime Capital, and others, including strategic founders in the DeFi space. The press release stated that the Panoptic team has been building for the past six months to create “an innovative perpetual options protocol […] for anyone to trade options on any digital asset in a completely decentralized and permissionless manner,” due for release in Q1 2023.Gaming-optimized blockchain Oasys announced that it successfully closed a strategic funding round, with participation from Galaxy Interactive, South Korean gaming giant Nexon, as well as Presto Labs, MZ Web3 Fund, Hyperithm, Jets Capital, Jsquare, AAG, YJM Games, and ChainGuardians. Oasys also announced the conclusion of its public token sale held from 30 November to 4 December, “which saw its funding goal reached within 12 hours, with commitment from 60 countries.”CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider built for large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads, announced it secured $100 million from Magnetar Capital, an alternative asset manager, to scale its on-demand GPU compute resources for customers and democratize access to market disruptive AI products, it said. Galaxy, a financial services and investment management company in the digital asset, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology sectors, served as the exclusive financial advisor to CoreWeave and the sole placement agent for its financing round.
Regulation news
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating a few unnamed crypto firms over deceptive or misleading crypto advertising, according to Bloomberg. “We are investigating several firms for possible misconduct concerning digital assets,” said the FTC spokeswoman, Juliana Gruenwald Henderson.
Wallet news
Ethereum (ETH) software firm, ConsenSys said it would release updates to the platform in response to user backlash regarding data collection – after the previous “update ignited a variety of public and internal conversations around how we could better prioritize the privacy of MetaMask and Infura users,” it said. Among the clarification, it noted that “we retain and delete user data such as IP address and wallet address pursuant to our data retention policy. We are working on narrowing retention to 7 days and we will append these retention policies to our privacy policy in an upcoming update.”
Payments news
Payment processor for the gaming industry ZEBEDEE and Web3 infrastructure provider MoonPay today announced an expanded integration of MoonPay’s services in the ZEBEDEE app, allowing gamers in over 100 countries to top up their bitcoin (BTC) balances with a debit or credit card from within the ZEBEDEE app, without leaving the app and connecting with an exchange, said an announcement.Strike, a digital payments platform built on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, announced its partnership with African payments platform Bitnob, as well as its ‘Send Globally’ feature, enabling instant, low-cost payments to Africa, said the press release. The feature is available to all Strike users in the US starting today, with initial coverage for Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana.
Career news
Video game retailer GameStop has started a round of layoffs, which heavily impacted the team building the blockchain wallet, Axios reported citing a source familiar with the matter and LinkedIn posts. The report stated that the approximate scale of the layoff is unconfirmed.
DeFi news
MakerDAO, a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol and creator of the DAI stablecoin, has integrated its DAI Direct Deposit Module (D3M) with Compound, an Ethereum-based permissionless money market protocol. Per the announcement, “D3M enables the interaction of Maker’s credit-facility engine with third-party lending pools, allowing MakerDAO to enforce a maximum variable borrow rate for the DAI market on these lending protocols.” MakerDAO’s Risk team expects to generate an additional DAI 1.8 million in annualized revenue for the Maker protocol through the integration.
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