NFT Warning, Bitcoin Mining Academy, Inflation in EU Heats Up + 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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Security news

• Yuga Labs, the team behind the NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced that their security team has been tracking a “persistent threat group that targets the NFT community” that they say “may soon be launching a coordinated attack targeting multiple communities via compromised social media accounts.”
• The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is warning financial institutions and investors about cyber criminals creating fraudulent crypto investment apps to defraud investors, stating that it has identified 244 victims and estimating the approximate loss to be USD 42.7m.

Mining news

• Foundry announced the launch of Foundry Academy, an initiative to train and develop technicians for the Bitcoin (BTC) mining industry. The program’s first session concluded in May, with all students now employed at various companies throughout the mining industry, they said, while the next one is starting September 12.
• Marathon Digital announced it secured around 254 megawatts (MW) of new hosting arrangements for its BTC mining operations, with an option to increase to 324 MW, from a variety of hosting providers. As a result, the company says it believes it has secured ample hosting arrangements to support its previously stated goal of approximately 23.3 EH/s of computing power for bitcoin mining.

Economics news

• The euro area annual inflation rate was 8.6% in June 2022, up from 8.1% in May, and was the highest on record, according to European Union statistical office Eurostat. European Union annual inflation was 9.6% in June 2022, up from 8.8% in May, and up from 2.2% a year earlier, they added.

Legal news

• The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced a settlement and injunction against Jimmy Gale Watson, the executive adviser of the crypto team of John McAfee, as Watson was found guilty of helping McAfee promote initial coin offerings of dubious tokens in exchange for undisclosed rewards in those tokens. The ultimate disgorgement against Watson was USD 146,000, and the CFTC further barred Watson from trading in commodities.

Regulation news

• The Monetary Authority of Singapore plans to broaden crypto regulations to cover more activities, and the revised rules may include “further tightening retail-investor access to crypto,” Bloomberg reported, citing the watchdog’s Managing Director Ravi Menon.

Exchanges news

• Gemini has made the second round of layoffs, TechCrunch reported, and there may be more on the way. An undisclosed source was quoted as saying that 68 employees, or 7%, have been fired.
• Crypto.com announced that it received registration and regulatory approval from the Italian regulator Organismo Agenti e Mediatori  as a provider of virtual currency and digital wallet services.
• OKX announced a partnership with investment site TradingView to enable retail users to execute trades on the exchange from their TradingView account.

Investments news

• In digital asset investment products, long-bitcoin trading positions saw outflows totaling USD 2.6m last week, and total assets under management (AuM) have risen from 11% since the end-June low to USD 17.8bn, per crypto investment and research firm CoinShares. Investors are still adding to short-bitcoin positions, bringing inflows to a record 4-week run totaling USD 88m (61% of AuM), compared to short-bitcoin inflows of USD 6.3m a week earlier. Ethereum (ETH) saw minor outflows of USD 2.5m, ending a 3-week run of inflows, while a week earlier, it saw USD 7.6m in inflows.
• Auction house Christie’s announced the launch of Christie’s Ventures, a new investment fund that will provide financial resources and support to emerging technology and fintech companies creating solutions with art market relevancy. The fund will start by exploring three broad categories: Web3 innovation, art-related financial products and solutions, and technologies that enable seamless consumption of art, they said.
• Alternative asset management firm Valkyrie announced a new affiliate called Valkyrie Ventures that will focus exclusively on early-stage blockchain investments. Eligible companies are those building infrastructure in, among others, security, compliance, custody, and transactions & payments, and those onboarding users to Web3 by replicating the Web2 experience on top of a crypto-native ecosystem.
• Bitcoin analyst and investor Willy Woo announced that, back in March, he co-founded Crest, a proprietary fund that aims to back quant funds in the crypto space.
• DeFi tools provider XLD Finance announced it raised USD 13m in a pre-Series A funding round led by Dragonfly Capital and Infinity Ventures Crypto. The funds will be used to enable the project to scale its product and for engineering teams to accelerate the product development efforts, they said.
• Bitcoin payments system project Zebedee raised USD 35m in a new round of funding. The funds will be used to further develop its payment systems for games and to integrate with new partners.
• Bitcoin project Fedi announced that it raised USD 4.2m in a seed round led by Kingsway Capital, ego death capital, and Ten31. The project will begin rolling out in Q1 2023, they added. The company says it is developing Fedi, an app built to work with the Fedimint protocol, a form of community Bitcoin custody. “The technology solves three of the biggest challenges to Bitcoin adoption today – custody, privacy and scalability,” they claim.
• Financial services firm Fintonia announced that it secured a provisional virtual asset license from Dubai authorities, allowing the firm to offer crypto services in the city. The firm will also expand its products to include treasury and balance sheet management services to the market in Dubai, they said.

Metaverse news

• Dubai authorities have launched the Dubai Metaverse Strategy that aims to “turn Dubai into one the world’s top 10 metaverse economies as well as a global hub for the metaverse community”, per the local news agency. They added that Dubai wants to attract more than 1,000 companies in the fields of blockchain and metaverse, and support more than 40,000 virtual jobs by 2030.

DeFi news

• Decentralized social graph CyberConnect announced the launch of its inaugural product, a social network of verifiable identities dubbed Link3. The project aggregates both on-chain and off-chain data to deliver “context-rich, verifiable information”, they said.