Thai SEC Comes After Bitkub Exchange, OpenSea Rewards Whitehats, BIS Working With (at Least) 7 Central Banks on CBDC Projects + 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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Regulation news

• Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a lawsuit against crypto exchange Bitkub and two individuals alleging the crypto platform was involved in wash trading. It is seeking a civil fine and expenses of around $634,000 and a six-month trading prohibition for the two people involved.
• Singapore-based digital asset trading platform Crypto.com has been approved to operate as a Digital Asset Service Provider (DASP) in France. Per the announcement, it has been registered in by the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) following clearance from the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (ACPR).

Security news

• NFT marketplace OpenSea recently awarded at least two ethical hackers $100,000 each as bounty rewards. The two hackers – Corben Leo and Nix – said they found critical security vulnerabilities in OpenSea’s infrastructure.

CBDC news

• The Swedish, Norwegian, and Israeli central banks have launched a project with the Bank for International Settlements to test international retail and remittance payments with central bank digital currencies (CBDC), Reuters reported, citing Sweden’s Riksbank. 
• The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has marked a multi-jurisdictional CBDC pilot has been marked as “successful” after a month-long test phase that facilitated $22 million worth of real-value cross-border transactions. The pilot program took place from 15 August to 23 September on the mBridge Ledger, a custom-developed DLT platform, the announcement said. The central banks of Hong Kong, Thailand, China, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) took part along with 20 commercial banks from those regions.

Wallet news

• ConsenSys announced the third round of institutional custodians onboarded to the institutional wallet for Web3 MetaMask Institutional (MMI). Cobo, Floating Point Group, Liminal, and Propine will join MMI’s suite of custodians, said the press release. The latest onboarding brings the total number of custodians supported by MetaMask Institutional to eleven.
• US online trading platform Robinhood has launched the beta for its “Web3 wallet” for 10,000 iOS users who signed up for the waitlist. Polygon (MATIC) is the first blockchain to be supported, they said.

NFT news

• Major auction house Christie’s announced Christie’s 3.0, a newly developed platform that will allow for fully on-chain non-fungible token (NFT) sales. The on-chain marketplace is built from the ground up together with three Web3 companies, Manifold, Chainalysis, and Spatial, said the press release. Christie’s 3.0 allows for auctions to be carried out on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain from start to finish, they added.

Exchange news

• Binance announced “the first-ever crypto-sponsored vacation,” dubbed ‘cryptotourism’, meant to show how “efficient, secure and simple travel is in a web3 world,” said the announcement. The exchange has teamed up with travel influencers Lauren Bullen and Jack Morris on a global crypto-only scavenger hunt that includes giving away $50,000 in BNB for those who want to join the movement.
• Binance also formally announced its Global Law Enforcement Training Program which “has grown exponentially since the expansion of the investigations team in the last year,” they said. The program, which is a coordinated effort across the globe, was created by Binance to help law enforcement and prosecutors detect financial and cybercrimes and to assist in the prosecution of bad actors, they added.

Blockchain news

• Digital payment platform Wirex announced the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding with the Uzbekistan Direct Investment Fund. With this partnership, the company will support the Uzbek government as they implement blockchain solutions and distributed ledger technology for various government services.
• IOTA (MIOTA) has announced the launch of Shimmer Network, the IOTA ecosystem’s dedicated innovation and staging network. This follows more than two months of battle testing the Shimmer Beta version, said the announcement. Shimmer extends the DAG ledger with a composable tokenization framework, opening up new possibilities to tokenize everything (NFTs, real-world assets, stablecoins, fan tokens, etc.) natively on Layer 1 without fees, they added.

Investment news

• Crypto venture capital investor Pantera Capital is looking to raise $1.25 billion for its second blockchain fund, Bloomberg reported. 
• Crypto market data provider CryptoCompare and institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure company for node management and staking Blockdaemon announced the launch of their family of Staking Yield Indices, said the press release. The CryptoCompare Blockdaemon Staking Yield Index Family is designed to measure the annualized daily staking yield generated by the digital asset, allowing institutional investors to create total return and yield swap products, benchmark portfolios, conduct research, and more. It will initially feature Avalanche, Cardano, Cosmos, Polkadot, and Solana.

DeFi news

• Safe (previously Gnosis Safe), an Ethereum-based digital asset management platform, announced the decentralization of its governance through the launch of SafeDAO and SAFE token. The core team, appointed Safe guardians, $100mil fundraise investors, and 55,000 Safe users are eligible to participate in the novel decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance, said an announcement. The DAO will govern Safe protocol, interfaces, Safe Token supply, and ecosystem growth. SAFE can be claimed until December 27.
• The Arweave blockchain announced the further decentralization of the project, saying that it will launch two new organizations to focus on building the ecosystem: 1. Forward Research: a launchpad, incubator, investing platform, and innovation organization focused on increasing permaweb adoption across freedom of speech and digital permanence. 2. The Digital History Association: a Swiss non-profit association focused on Arweave protocol research & development.
• Structured products platform for decentralized finance (DeFi) Ribbon Finance has launched Aevo, a high-performance options exchange on Ethereum, said a press release. It allows users to trade 100+ instruments across many expiries with deep liquidity at launch, and users are able to instantly onboard from any non-custodial wallet of their choice. Aevo will initially start with ETH options, and then launch BTC and other coins in the following months.

Mining news

• US Bitcoin miner CleanSpark announced that its bitcoin mining hashrate has exceeded 4 EH/s, increasing over 30% in less than a month. The company maintains its 2022 year-end guidance of 5 EH/s and expects to meet its 2023 year-end guidance of 22.4 EH/s.