British Financial Advisers Don’t Like Crypto & Meme Stocks + 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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Investments news

• Over 90% of 200 surveyed independent financial advisers (IFAs) in Britain would never recommend cryptocurrencies or so-called meme stocks to their clients, an Opinium poll showed on Wednesday, per Reuters. However, a third of IFAs have increased interest in cryptocurrencies from clients this year, with 14% reporting higher interest in meme stocks, it added.
• Digital asset investment company Arcane Crypto’s subsidiary, Arcane Assets AS, said it has signed a Letter of Intent with Exchange-Traded Product (ETP) issuer Valour Structured Products Inc. to explore the issuance and listing of an ETP based on Arcane’s crypto fund.

CBDCs news

• A digital euro could suck away 8% of eurozone banks’ customer deposits, analysts at Morgan Stanley have estimated, per to Reuters. The number comes from a bear case scenario in which all euro area citizens above the age of 15 transferred EUR 3,000 (USD 3,637) to digital wallets controlled by the European Central Bank (ECB), but this share may be far higher in some of the smaller countries, the analysts estimate.
• A group of US House Democrats is forming a task force on financial technology, according to a virtual hearing announced by the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters. The group will focus on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to “engage with regulators and experts to do a deep dive on this poorly understood and minimally regulated industry,” Waters said.

Adoption news

• Latin America and the Caribbean-focused telecommunications provider GoldConnect said that the company is now accepting cryptocurrency payments through their new LatamConnect platform with crypto payment provider BitPay.
• Booking site Travala.com, backed by major crypto exchange Binance, is launching Dtravel, a blockchain-based platform for the home-sharing economy that would give homeowners and house guests a stake in the platform. The ecosystem will be powered by its native TRVL token, while its launch was funded by a USD 5m seed round led by Kenetic Capital.
• Bakkt Holdings, the digital asset marketplace behind the Bakkt App, sait it has partnered with Wyndham Rewards, the loyalty program of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, to allow program members to link, view and redeem their Wyndham Rewards points within the Bakkt App soon.

Exchanges news

• Crypto derivatives exchange FTX does not have any firm plans on going public, but it’s something they would be “silly not to be doing [their] due diligence on,” the company’s founder and CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, told Bloomberg. He has, however, been approached by sponsors of special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, which are investment vehicles that raise money from investors and use it to buy into another company, so he added that going public via them would not be a problem if they decide to take that route.
• Step Finance, “the front page of Solana,” said it has now aggregated Solana-based decentralized exchanges, including Raydium, SerumDex, and Orca to enable users to trade across the Solana Blockchain with USD 845m dollars of liquidity from the Step dashboard. “This is the first project in DeFi to execute aggregation that combines liquidity of DEXes across the Solana blockchain ecosystem into a single point of entry,” they said.
• Diginex Limited, the digital asset financial services company, said it is unifying its businesses under the EQONEX brand. The rebrand brings together under the EQONEX Group brand, its cryptocurrency exchange, custody platform, multi-venue trading business, over-the-counter (OTC) offering, its asset management solution, securitization business and the upcoming investment products and borrowing and lending businesses, they said.

NFTs news

• Fox Entertainment and its animation studio Bento Box Entertainment are increasing their non-fungible tokens (NFTs)-related expansion efforts by launching a USD 100m creator fund through its newly created business unit, Blockchain Creative Labs. The unit will have a dedicated digital marketplace that will start out with the upcoming animated comedy series “Krapopolis,” which will make it the first animated series to be curated entirely on the blockchain, according to Variety.
• An NFT with the timestamped documentation of the Internet’s creation by British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, called ‘This Changed Everything’, will be put on sale from June 23-30 in an auction, with bidding starting at USD 1,000, according to the New York-based auction house Sotheby’s. The NFT consists of the source code, a moving visualization of around 10,000 lines of code, a letter written by Sir Tim reflecting on the code and the process of creating it, and a digital “poster” of the full code created by Berners-Lee from the original files using Python.

Mining news

• Bitcoin miner Genesis Digital Assets is buying 10,000 Avalon mining machines from Canaan for USD 93.6m, the latter said, adding that it will deliver the machines by June 30 this year. “Our recent purchase orders for Canaan’s Avalon Miners will help us to increase our hash rate by a minimum of twofold over the upcoming months,” Abdumalik Mirakhmedov, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Genesis Digital Assets, was quoted as saying.
• Burfa, a tech-focused Estonian conglomerate specializing in IT, fintech and data processing, said it has concluded a USD 26m deal with crypto mining hardware and solutions firm Bitmain, to purchase new crypto mining equipment. As a result, the company will be able to more than double the capacity of its high-performance data processing centers in the coming years, they said.

DeFi news

• Yieldly, a DeFi platform built atop the Algorand blockchain, announced Yieldly Bridges — a linchpin between the Algorand ecosystem and major chains, including Ethereum (ETH), Polkadot (DOT), and Binance Smart Chain. Yieldly Bridges will initially open up Algorand to some 600,000 active Ethereum users, they said.

Crime news

• The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it charged three additional individuals for their roles in the USD 30m initial coin offering (ICO) fraud that was spearheaded by convicted criminal Boaz Manor and his associate, Edith Pardo. The SEC previously charged Manor, Pardo, and their companies, CG Blockchain and BCT Inc. SEZC in connection with the scheme in January 2020.

Career news

• Securrency, a developer of institutional-grade blockchain-based financial and regulatory technology, said it has appointed MonaLisa Raas Como as Chief Commercial Officer and Bill Ashlock as Chief Technology Officer. Prior to joining Securrency, Como was a key player at E*TRADE, TD Ameritrade, and Capital One Investing. Ashlock “brings decades of experience in banking systems, crypto token exchange and clearing, and digital transformation,” they said.