Bridgewater Associates ‘Transitions’ from Ray Dalio, LG Partners w/ NFT Platform

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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Career news

• Major hedge fund Bridgewater Associates said that its founder Ray Dalio has finished a leadership transition that began in February. The necessary and required legal, regulatory, and investor requirements to finish the transition procedure have been completed, and, from now on, the fund will be led by co-CEOs Nir Bar Dea and Mark Bertolini, as well as co-chief investment officers Greg Jensen and Bob Prince.
• Daniel Leon, co-founder of bankrupt lender Celsius Network, has stepped down, Bloomberg reported.
• Infrastructure and technology solution Pool Data announced that Andrew Yang, former US presidential candidate, entrepreneur, and Web3 advocate, will join its team as a Strategic Advisor. Yang will support Pool Data’s mission to redistribute power, value, and control in the data economy, they said.
• Major crypto exchange Coinbase has hired a Goldman Sachs executive Usman Naeem as its new head of global derivative sales and agency trading in London, according to a LinkedIn post. Naeem also worked in the equity derivatives department of Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

NFT news

• South Korean tech giant LG announced a global partnership with Portuguese-based non-fungible token (NFT) platform Fr0ntier X to deliver interactive NFT integrations and experiences on LG webOS Smart Signage, said a press release. This partnership is built around Fr0ntierX’s suite of software solutions and its application that allows for authentication of NFT’s on-screen. This enables a new class of possibilities for brands and users to explore while maximizing NFT utility, they added.

Exchange news

• Coinbase is expanding its services in Australia with new product features, said an announcement. Australians will now be able to buy, sell, and trade crypto with new PayID features,  and they will get access to Retail Advanced Trading, providing more advanced traders with in-depth technical analysis of crypto markets.
• OKX’s website has been blocked in Russia, according to Roskomsvoboda, a local NGO monitoring online censorship, and as first reported by CoinDesk. The reasons for it being blacklisted are unknown. 
• Digital asset exchange EDX Markets and blockchain infrastructure platform Paxos (PAX) announced a partnership that will enable institutional custody of traded assets for EDXM clients, and provide Paxos customers with direct access to this new ecosystem, said the press release.

Web3 news

• Web3 services platform Chainlink announced that Two Sigma Securities, a systematic liquidity provider and trading business, has joined the Chainlink network, enabling developers in the Web3 ecosystem to access Two Sigma Securities’ market data to support a wide range of smart contract use cases that rely on an aggregation of data sources for financial market data, including swaps, options, and other derivative markets. Two Sigma Securities is contributing its proprietary data to Chainlink decentralized oracle networks (DONs) to generate tamper-resistant oracle reports, said the press release.
• The foundation behind the NEAR Protocol announced a new partnership with Google Cloud. The collaboration will involve Google Cloud providing technical support for NEAR grantees as they develop and scale their Web3 projects and dapps, said an announcement.

DeFi news

• Market infrastructure provider Cboe Markets announced it has joined the Pyth network, a decentralized financial (DeFi) market data distribution platform for aggregated data. Per the announcement, Cboe plans to begin publishing limited derived equities market data for certain symbols from one of its four US equities exchanges to the Pyth network in fourth-quarter 2022, providing real-time, institutional-grade pricing information to help further grow the network.
• Polkadot (DOT)-based DeFi-focused parachain Acala said on Wednesday that it has fully reopened its services to users following its security incident. “The community referendum for stage 3/3 of resuming Acala operations has been executed. All functionalities on Acala are now live,” the team said in a tweet.

Investment news

• Talent Protocol, the web3 professional community for high-potential builders, has acquired Agora Labs, a social token and NFT infrastructure platform for creators to build and scale their communities, said a press release. The acquisition will not only integrate Agora’s tech stack and community into Talent Protocol, but also onboard its young founders, Matthew Espinoza (CEO) and Freeman (CTO), into the team.

Gaming news

• Oasys, a blockchain developed for the gaming community, announced a strategic partnership with tofuNFT, a multi-chain, GameFi-focused NFT marketplace, to expand the Oasys gaming ecosystem. As part of the strategic partnership, tofuNFT will integrate with all of the Verses (gaming-focused Layer-2s on Oasys), said the press release.