Thai SEC Responds to Bitkub Exchange, OpenSea Reward Whitehats, BIS Collaborating on CBDC Projects with (at Least) Seven Central Banks, and More News

Jamie Larson

• 4 min read
Thai SEC Responds to Bitkub Exchange, OpenSea Reward Whitehats, BIS Collaborating on CBDC Projects with (at Least) Seven Central Banks, and More News

Regulatory updates

  • Bitkub and two people are defendants in a case brought by Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which claims the cryptocurrency platform engaged in wash trading. It is requesting a civil penalty of almost $634,000, costs, and a six-month trading ban for the two parties involved.
  • Crypto.com, a Singapore-based digital asset trading platform, has received authorization to function in France as a Digital Asset Service Provider (DASP). The Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) registered it, according to the notice, after receiving approval from the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (ACPR).

News regarding security

  • Recently, NFT marketplace OpenSea paid $100,000 each in bounty payouts to at least two ethical hackers. The infrastructure of OpenSea, according to the two hackers Corben Leo and Nix, has serious security flaws.

CBDC news

  • According to Reuters, citing Sweden's Riksbank, the central banks of Sweden, Norway, and Israel have started a project with the Bank for International Settlements to test out international retail and remittance payments using central bank digital currencies (CBDC).
  • A multi-jurisdictional CBDC pilot has been deemed "successful" by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) following a month-long test phase that enabled real-value cross-border transactions worth $22 million. The mBridge Ledger, a specially created DLT platform, served as the pilot program's platform from August 15 to September 23, according to the statement. Along with 20 commercial banks from those regions, the central banks of Hong Kong, Thailand, China, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) participated.

Money news

  • The institutional wallet for Web3 MetaMask Institutional has received its third set of institutional custodians, according to ConsenSys (MMI). According to the press statement, MMI will add Cobo, Floating Point Group, Liminal, and Propine to its roster of custodians. With the most recent onboarding, MetaMask Institutional now supports a total of eleven custodians.
  • 10,000 iOS users who registered for the waitlist get access to the beta version of the "Web3 wallet" from US online trading platform Robinhood. According to them, Polygon (MATIC) is the first blockchain to be supported.

News NFT

  • Major auction company Christie's has unveiled Christie's 3.0, a newly created platform that will permit sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are entirely on-chain. According to the news announcement, Manifold, Chainalysis, and Spatial are three Web3 firms that helped build the on-chain market place from the bottom up. They noted that Christie's 3.0 permits complete auction execution on the Ethereum (ETH) network.

Trading news

  • According to the release from Binance, "the first-ever crypto-sponsored vacation," or "cryptotourism," would demonstrate how "efficient, secure and simple travel is in a web3 world." To encourage people to join the movement, the exchange is working with the travel influencers Lauren Bullen and Jack Morris on a global crypto-only scavenger hunt that includes giving away $50,000 in BNB.
  • The Global Law Enforcement Training Program at Binance, which "has developed dramatically since the expansion of the investigations team in the last year," was also publicly unveiled. Binance developed the program, which is a coordinated global effort, to aid law enforcement and prosecutors in the detection of financial and cybercrimes as well as in the prosecution of criminal actors, they noted.

Ethereum news

  • The Uzbekistan Direct Investment Fund and the digital payment network Wirex signed a Memorandum of Understanding. Through this collaboration, the business will assist the Uzbek government as it adopts blockchain solutions and distributed ledger technology for a variety of government functions.
    The dedicated innovation and staging network for the IOTA ecosystem, Shimmer Network, has officially launched, according to IOTA (MIOTA).
  • According to the announcement, this comes after more than two months of battle testing the Shimmer Beta version. Shimmer adds a composable tokenization framework to the DAG ledger, creating new opportunities for native, fee-free tokenization of everything (NFTs, real-world assets, stablecoins, fan tokens, etc.) on Layer 1.

Business news

  • According to Bloomberg, cryptocurrency venture capitalist Pantera Capital is seeking to raise $1.25 billion for its second blockchain fund.
  • According to a press release, institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure provider for node management and staking Blockdaemon and cryptocurrency market data provider CryptoCompare have launched a family of staking yield indices. By measuring the annualized daily staking income produced by the digital asset, the CryptoCompare Blockdaemon Staking Yield Index Family enables institutional investors to develop total return and yield swap products, benchmark portfolios, carry out research, and more. Avalanche, Cardano, Cosmos, Polkadot, and Solana will be included at first.

News DeFi

  • Through the introduction of SafeDAO and the SAFE token, Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe), an Ethereum-based digital asset management platform, announced the decentralization of its governance. An statement stated that the core team, chosen Safe guardians, $100 million in funding investors, and 55,000 Safe users are all qualified to participate in the unique decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance. The Safe ecosystem's expansion, Safe Token supply, interfaces, and protocol will all be governed by the DAO. You have until December 27 to claim SAFE.
  • The Arweave blockchain made an announcement about the project's increased decentralization and stated that it would establish two new entities to concentrate on creating the ecosystem: 1. Forward Research, a permaweb adoption organization focusing on expanding adoption across freedom of expression and digital permanence, is a launchpad, incubator, funding platform, and innovation organization. 2. The Digital History Association is a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland that specializes on Arweave protocol research and development.
  • Platform for structured products in decentralized finance (DeFi) According to a press release, Ribbon Finance has launched Aevo, a high-performance Ethereum options exchange. Users may instantly sign up from any non-custodial wallet of their choice, and it offers significant liquidity at launch, allowing them to trade more than 100 instruments across numerous expiries. Aevo will initially only offer ETH-based alternatives before launching BTC and other coins in the months to follow.

Mining news

  • Bitcoin miner CleanSpark from the US revealed that its hashrate had surpassed 4 EH/s and increased by more than 30% in less than a month. The business expects to achieve its 2023 year-end projection of 22.4 EH/s and retains its 2022 year-end guidance of 5 EH/s.