Kategorie: Crypto Business

Walmart Chief Technology Officer Suresh Kumar expects “a lot of the disruption” around crypto “in terms of different payment methods, and different payment options.”

Crypto adoption across the payments industry continues to gather speed, with major financial institutions adding various cryptocurrencies to payment methods for merchants and other online platforms.

And Walmart’s Global Chief Technology Officer Suresh Kumar says digital currencies are set to become a crucial part of customer transactions.

Kumar’s comments came during an interview with Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit aired on Monday.

Walmart is one of the leading global companies embracing crypto, and the Walmart CTO reiterated the role crypto will play in the retail giant’s business and across the globe.

“Whether it is physical goods or virtual goods, they play a part in terms of what a customer wants,” Kumar said as he highlighted digital assets’ use both in the metaverse and in live streams (what’s happening with crypto support in payment apps or social media apps.)

Crypto important to how customer transact

Kumar also spoke about Walmart’s plans around the growing footprint of crypto adoption. According to the retailer, customer transactions going into the future will largely be digital and crypto is already playing a big role in that.

“Crypto will become an important part of how customers transact,” the Walmart CTO explained, adding that the company wants to ensure such transactions are “friction free for customers” as much as possible. In this way, he added, users will easily be able to buy digital assets and also “drive value out of it.”

The company is therefore looking at how to streamline product discovery amid the global push that’s putting crypto on the forefront of various payment options. 

“I think a lot of the disruption is going to start happening in terms of different payment methods, and different payment options,” Kumar told Yahoo Finance.

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Shardeum is an EVM-based layer-1 blockchain project co-founded by Nischal Shetty, the founder of India-based cryptocurrency exchange WazirX.

Shardeum, an EVM-based layer-1 blockchain startup co-founded by WazirX founder Nischal Shetty, has raised $18.2 million in its seed funding round, the platform announced on Tuesday.

The seed round was at a $199 million valuation, Shetty said in a company blog post, noting that the funding funding initiative attracted more than 50 investors. He also shared the news on Twitter.

Shardeum has raised over $18M in seed funding from 50+ investors @ $199M

We painstakingly worked on ensuring a broad set of investors and these investors are operators themselves. They’ve been helping us all along.

Glad to have everyone on board 🚀#BuildWeb3 #Shardeum $SHM https://t.co/gojxGxzeHC

— Nischal (Shardeum) ⚡️ (@NischalShetty) October 18, 2022

Major VCs back Shardeum

Some of the VCs backing the startup are Jane Street, Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, CoinGecko Ventures, Cogitent Ventures, ZebPay and WeMade.

The round also attracted numerous angel investors, with the Shardeum co-founder saying that the startup chose to go with as many investors as possible as part of its pursuit of a decentralised outlook on its investor portfolio.

“For the round, we chose to have a large number of investors with over 40% of them being angels. With the focus on decentralisation, we wanted to maximise the distribution of SHM and not to have a select few investors that own a majority of tokens. Our cap table includes diverse global institutional, venture and angel investors that are motivated to support Shardeum’s success,” Shetty wrote in the blog post.

Funds to help advance Shardeum’s sharding technology

Shardeum, a proof-of-stake blockchain co-founded by Shetty and Omar Syed, uses sharding to offer a unique architecture for auto scalability, security and energy efficiency. 

Its such issues that Ethereum seeks to solve as it transitioned from proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

According to the Shardeum’s founders, the sharding technology provides for a network designed to better the systems currently in use across the sharded blockchains ecosystem. 

The network is “the first linearly scalable smart contracts platform that increases transactions per second (TPS) by adding more nodes,” according to details on its website.

The blockchain platform will use the funds to ramp up its marketing, work on its product and design and expand its research efforts. The team also plans to roll out hackathons across India, the United States and other parts of the world over the next year.

Other efforts will go into incentivising developers to build on the Shardeum blockchain as the ecosystem grows.

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Sam Bankman-Fried, a leading crypto personality and founder of FTX crypto exchange, had previously suggested he would spend over $100 million and up to $1 billion on political donations.

Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who’s the founder of major cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is not going to splash hundreds of millions of dollars on political donations.

This comes after the crypto billionaire looks to have spent about $40 million in the current election cycle – the midterms set for November.

Bankman-Fried makes U-turn on campaign spending

According to Politico’s financial newsletter Morning Money, the FTX chief has changed tune on how much he is going to spend. 

The publication quotes Bankman-Fried as saying that his earlier comments about donating $100 million and up to $1 billion in the lead up to the 2024 US election was a huge slip on his part.

In May, Bankman-Fried said he was open to spending heavily into the US midterms – only weeks away now – and that he would put more into super political action committees and other campaign vehicles starting with the current election cycle.

But speaking to MM in a recent podcast, he noted the intention was to always reach a given limit despite widespread belief that the 30-year-old billionaire would go full blast as the campaigns heat up.

Explaining his U-turn, he said his $1 billion quote was “dumb” on his part. “I think my messaging was sort of sloppy and inconsistent in some ways,” he added in a quote MM cited on Friday.

According to Morning Money, Bankman-Fried’s flipping on this one doesn’t augur well for Democrats, the biggest beneficiaries of the crypto billionaire’s donations.

Indeed, the FTX founder has spent about $40 million on PACs and other campaign contributions in 2022, most of which has reportedly been to the Democratic Party. In 2020, Bankman-Fried was among the largest single political donors for Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden.

As CoinJournal recently covered, Bankman-Fried is open to moving his crypto company to the US once registration with the US Securities Exchange Commission is secured.

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Decentralised crypto exchange Uniswap has raised $165 million in a latest funding round and will use the funds to invest in its web app.

Uniswap, one of the leading decentralised cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, announced on Thursday, October 13th, that it had raised $165 million in a Series B funding round.

1/ We’re proud to announce that we’ve raised $165 million in Series B funding to bring the powerful simplicity of Uniswap to even more people across the world 🦄🍾https://t.co/ChilydWOEO

— Uniswap Labs 🦄 (@Uniswap) October 13, 2022

The crypto exchange said the funding round was led by Polychain Capital and with participation from longtime investors a16z crypto, Paradigm, SV Angel, and Variant.

Uniswap revealed that it would use the proceeds from the funding event to invest in its web application. The crypto exchange said;

“Now, Uniswap Labs is bringing the powerful simplicity and security that has defined the Uniswap Protocol to even more people across the world by investing in our web app and developer tools, launching NFTs, moving into mobile — and more!”

Uniswap Labs said as it focuses on building its products, a much broader cryptocurrency ecosystem continues to grow and thrive beyond what any single company can do in isolation. 

The team revealed that the governance community recently voted to create the Uniswap Foundation. 

The Uniswap Foundation is tasked with contributing to the Uniswap Protocol’s decentralised development. The Foundation will also issue around $60 million in grants to community projects over the next few years. 

Uniswap founder Hayden James said he is proud of the DEX’s journey so far. He stated that;

“When I built the Uniswap Protocol in 2018, it was an experiment to see if I could create something that fully embodied the values of Ethereum: transparent, secure, and accessible. Since then, it has grown and evolved in ways I never imagined. It’s supported $1.2 trillion in trading volume to date and has become critical public infrastructure for exchanging digital value.”

Uniswap is the second-largest decentralised exchange, according to Coinmarketcap. The platform processes over $300 million in daily trading volume and is only behind dydx. 

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Tether’s commercial paper has shrunk to zero, the USDT issuer has announced.

Instead of holding commercial paper, Tether has replaced the investments with US Treasury Bills (T-Bills).

The news comes just a few months after the USDT issuer said it would completely remove commercial paper from its reserves, and is a route the company has pursued as it looks to increase transparency around its stablecoin reserves.

Tether has eliminated over $30 billion dollars of commercial paper without any losses, a proof of how Tethers’ reserves are conservatively and professionally managed. Tether has also increased its direct exposure to US Treasuries by more than $10 billion in the last quarter.(2/3)

— Tether (@Tether_to) October 13, 2022

Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino affirmed in May that USDT was fully backed, and in July 2022, Tether announced its CP holdings were on track to fall below $3.5 billion.

Ardoino then said in August that the stablecoin issuer’s commercial paper holdings would drop below $200 million at the end of the month and to zero by the end of October 2022. In September, the company revealed that its CP holdings had dropped below $50 million.

In all, Tether has managed to eliminate $30 billion worth of commercial paper from its reserves.

USDT reserves in more US Treasury bills

On the company’s website, Tether shows it holds 54.57% in US Treasury Bills and 15.89% in Commercial Paper and Certificates of Deposit.

The total reserves breakdown shows Cash & Cash Equivalents and Other Short-Term Deposits & Commercial Paper make up 79.62% of the USDT reserves, with 8.36% in other investments that include digital tokens, 6.77% in secured loans and 5.25% in corporate bonds, funds and precious metals.

Going by these percentages, replacing commercial paper investments with T-Bills increases the latter’s overall holdings under cash and cash equivalents to 70.46%.  

US T-Bills means Tether now backs its USDT with the “most secure, liquid reserves in the market,” the company noted.

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