Bitcoin Gets Closer To 18M Users, Bullish Billions + More News

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
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Adoption news

• Bitcoin (BTC)-focused financial services firm NYDIG, and Q2 Holdings, a provider of digital transformation solutions for banking and lending, today announced they will collaborate to provide the more than 18.3m registered users on the Q2 platform with the ability to buy, sell and hold BTC. Q2’s digital banking platform currently powers nearly 30% of the top 100 banks in the US, they added.
• Unstoppable Domains, which enables crypto users to customize their wallet addresses to make them easily readable, said it is now integrated with all Blockchain.com products, which include a wallet service, an exchange, and a blockchain explorer. Users can sign up for a unique username for a one-time fee, as well as choose between a .crypto and .zil domain, which is set to make sending funds simpler and less prone to error due to unreadable addresses.

Investments news

• Billionaire-backed crypto exchange Bullish is reportedly in talks to merge with special purpose acquisition company Far Peak Acquisition Corp., according to Bloomberg. This could value the exchange at around USD 12bn, but the price of BTC will affect the final valuation, and the agreement might be reached within the next few weeks, per the report.
• Chainalysis, the blockchain data platform, said it secured a USD 100m Series E financing led by Coatue, bringing its valuation to USD 4.2bn. Previous investors also participated. Chainalysis’s Series E financing follows its USD 100m Series D round in March 2021, bringing the total amount raised to USD 365m.
• While weak flows and price dynamics resulting from last month’s selloff fueled bitcoin’s recent declines, possible sales of shares in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust upon the expiry of a six-month lockup period could be an additional headwind, JPMorgan strategists led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote in a note Wednesday, per Bloomberg.
• Investment company for blockchain- and crypto-related businesses Cryptology Asset Group said it has purchased additional USD 49m worth of blockchain software company Block.one shares in a private transaction.

Exchanges news

• BTCChina, which once ran the country’s largest crypto exchange, said it has ‘completely exited from bitcoin-related businesses’ amid Beijing’s extensive crackdown on BTC mining that has firms across the country trying to distance themselves from the industry, the South China Morning Post reported. BTCChina also sold its stake in the Singapore-registered bitcoin exchange ZG.com to an unidentified foundation in Dubai in May 2020, it added.
• Gemini, the crypto exchange founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, said it donated USD 4m in credits to Climate Vault in order to help offset the carbon emissions footprint of BTC it holds in custody. The offset covers Gemini’s holdings in both hot and cold wallets, and they intend to continue to offset their carbon footprint until only renewable energy is used in securing the Bitcoin network.

Payments news

• Bank of China, Bank of New York Mellon, BNP Paribas, Citi, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Chartered have announced their endorsement for SWIFT’s new transaction management platform, which boasts several enhancements expected to roll out over the course of the next 18 months. These include upfront validation of beneficiary details, central management of exceptions, extension of SWIFT’s high-speed gpi rails to lower-value payments, etc., all meant to facilitate instant and frictionless end-to-end transactions anywhere in the world.
• Cryptoasset platform Crypto.com said today that its online payments solution Crypto.com Pay will now accept BTC payments from any wallet.

Privacy news

• Brave, the privacy-centric browser with their own native token, BAT, said it has released the beta version of Brave Search, their new search engine. It is integrated into the browser and will become its default search engine later this year, but users of other browsers can also use it for its privacy-preserving features that don’t track users, their searches, or their clicks, the company claims.

NFTs news

• China’s fintech group Ant Group is trying to draw the line between non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies after selling two NFT-backed app images, which raised concerns over whether the transactions are legal in China, per Reuters. “NFT is not interchangeable, nor divisible, making it different by nature from cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin,” said a spokesperson at AntChain, the Ant unit that develops blockchain-based technology solutions.

CBDCs news

• The Palestinian Monetary Authority (PMA) is investigating the possibility of issuing a digital currency. In an interview with Bloomberg TV, PMA Governor Feras Milhem discusses the prospect of digital currency issuance and the USD 425m aid package received from the European Investment Bank.

DeFi news

• Circle said it will soon launch its DeFi API that should help businesses to access various DeFi protocols. “Businesses will soon be able to automate USDC flows into DeFi lending markets by leveraging Circle’s powerful DeFi API,” they added.