Kategorie: Crypto Business

• Buffet’s Hathaway Berkshire acquired $1 billion worth of shares of a company whose business model supports Bitcoin.
• The veteran investor’s firm also sold $1.8 billion and $1.3 billion in Visa and Mastercard stocks respectively.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has invested in a Bitcoin-related business, shelling $1 billion in investment to acquire stocks of Brazil-based fintech Nubank.

Details disclosed in a securities filing on 14 February show that Buffet’s company purchased shares of Brazil’s digital bank in the fourth quarter, putting down $1 billion to get the fintech’s Class A stock.

The filing also showed that Berkshire’s firm sold over a billion dollars worth of each of Visa and Mastercard’s stocks. Per details in the firm’s Q4 2021 filing, the investment giant dumped $1.8 billion worth of its holdings in Visa shares and $1.3 billion worth of Mastercard stock.

Nubank is a New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)- listed company, debuting on the US exchange on 9 December 2021. At its IPO launch, the company was $45 billion to rank then as the largest digital neobank by market valuation.

The NU shares make up about 0.3% of the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio.

The „Oracle of Omaha,“ as the investment guru is fondly known, has never shied from criticizing Bitcoin and the broader crypto sector, previously calling Bitcoin “rat poison squared.”

He’s yet to invest directly in Bitcoin, but he holds stocks worth billions in companies that are increasingly leaning into the cryptocurrency space.

These include American banks such as Bank of America, US Bancorp and BNY Mellon. Berkshire also bought nearly $1 billion worth of shares of Activision Blizzard, a company recently acquired by Microsoft Corp.

The post Warren Buffett invests $1B in Bitcoin-friendly neobank appeared first on Coin Journal.

• Pantera Capital led the funding round contributed to by among other, Gemini Frontier Fund and Circle Ventures.

• Maverick seeks to use its strategic partnerships with several liquidity providers to revolutionize the decentralised finance (DeFi) derivatives market.  

Maverick Protocol, an innovative permissionless derivatives platform, has announced an $8 million funding round from leading investors in the crypto ecosystem, led by Pantera Capital.

According to the platform, the funds will go towards a product launch as well as team expansion in the next few months.

Circle Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund and Jump Crypto contributed to the funding round, with other major participants being Altonomy, CMT Digital, GoldenTree Asset Management, and Tron Foundation.

New technology for perpetual derivatives markets

Dubbed ALP (Automated Liquidity Placement), Maverick’s technology is designed to allow traders access to decentralised derivatives through an open listing model. The tech is set to change perpetual markets, according to Maverick co-founder  Alvin Xu, with users able to easily trade mid-cap tokens on decentralised derivatives exchanges.

“Perpetual markets still lack the ability to quickly list new assets due to the intensive work required to spin up a sustainable market. With Maverick […] markets can now be created by the community with way less capital, but still offer a great experience to traders,” Maverick’s co-founder, Alvin Xu said.

Maverick also looks to use the funds to scale the ALP via a rapid expansion of its core machine learning protocol. The platform will also seek to grow its team as it moves towards exploiting a growing market for derivatives.

The ALP protocol allows for open listing of derivative trading pairs, easing access to hundreds of pairs as opposed to the limit of 30 pairs allowed for DEXs.

With its innovation, crypto users will be able to leverage any trading pair, with any tokens in ERC20 token standard allowed as collateral, Maverick noted in its announcement.

Revolutionising the crypto DEX derivatives market

The innovation could revolutionise the decentralise finance (DeFi) derivatives market, said Pantera Capital co-CIO Joey Krug.

„DeFi needs someone to answer the demand for derivatives built on the mid-cap and long-tail assets that are underserved by existing exchanges,”

Users will benefit from low slippage, with gains made from capital-efficient staking to liquidity providers (LPs), he added.

Derivatives volume makes up more than 50% of the daily trading volume in the digital asset market. In this case, the massive growth seen in the sector since 2021 offers a great opportunity for derivatives DEXs.

Maverick plans to launch its innovative technology in mid-2022.

The post Pantera backs Maverick Protocol’s $8 Million Strategic round appeared first on Coin Journal.

Bittrex Global says it is looking at adding support for Tezos tokens FA1.2 and FA2

Bittrex Global, a top digital asset exchange that ranks among the world’s largest, is exploring the listing of two Tezos-based tokens, the exchange said in a press announcement shared with CoinJournal on Tuesday.

According to Bittrex, the two tokens under consideration are FA1.2 and FA2, crypto token standards on Tezos (much like the ERC-20 fungible tokens). They enable users to create unique digital assets in decentralised finance (DeFi), non-fungible token (NFT) and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs).

“The integration and listing of FA1.2 and FA2 tokens on Bittrex would signify that a variety of tokens on the Tezos blockchain can be supported and integrated on the exchange,” Bittrex said in its statement.

According to Bittrex Global, all token listings “follow a thorough review and close examination” before the tokens are added to the exchange.

Among key factors, the team considers amid the need for regulatory compliance include due diligence on the token issuer, project’s innovation, token’s economics, roadmap, and market interest.

Last week, the exchange added support for CCD, a token on the regulated digital asset platform Concordium.

Tezos (XTZ)

Tezos continues to be a leading blockchain platform for investors seeking to interact with yield farming protocols and decentralised exchanges (DEXs). Low gas fees and institutional-grade security has seen a spike in contract calls on the platform.

In January, there were over 6 million contract calls while active smart contract addresses grew 200% in 2021 to surpass 600,000.

In the market, Tezos’s (XTZ) price is up 4.6% in the past 24 hours and currently trades near $4.13. Its all-time high is $9.12, reached on 4 October 2021.

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The ASX chief notes that the Australian stock market’s goal is to see more investment opportunities in the crypto asset class space come to the exchange.

More businesses and companies with ties to the crypto ecosystem are likely to seek listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) as the sector continues to grow, says the ASX chief executive officer Dominic Stevens.

According to Stevens, cryptocurrencies are set to be a bigger part of the stock market’s future offerings.

As well as listing crypto-focused companies like Block (formerly Square) and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the ASX is looking towards spot ETFs for major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the Sydney Morning Herald has reported.

“I think as the industry matures, you may see Square-like companies listing into the future, but we’re protective of the quality of the companies on our exchange, and it is a very fast-moving space,” he noted.

Stevens, who announced he’d be exiting the exchange later this year, however, believes that there’s a lot still to be done across the broader crypto space in relation to consumer protection.

While people have created massive wealth in the sector, issues of hacks and other aspects of security breaches continue to plague the crypto ecosystem, he noted.

Crypto companies offer diversification

The ASX CEO said that technology companies will make up a large part of the index, with an uptick in listings for crypto companies and SPACs.

The ASX, he added, is in a good position to and will likely benefit more from an influx of companies as the technology sector becomes an even larger part of the global stock market.

The move is part of the exchange’s diversification as it looks to rival markets in the US and Asia. According to him, it would be a mistake not to have focused on the growing crypto-related ecosystem when it booms in the next few years.

On January 20, Jack Dorsey’s Block made its debut on ASX after its merger with Afterpay. The listing had observers noting that the move had the potential to open floodgates for many more companies powered by blockchain technology.

The post ASX eyes more crypto-focused companies, CEO Dominic Stevens says appeared first on Coin Journal.

The bank launched an institutional crypto trading desk in early 2021 after a regulatory nod from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

DBS, a banking and financial services giant headquartered in Singapore, has plans for a crypto trading desk that will target retail investors, the bank’s chief executive officer Piyush Gupta said on Monday.

Gupta revealed the plans during an earnings call following the bank’s fourth-quarter report released on Monday.

According to an excerpt of the call cited by news publication CoinDesk, much more needs to be done before the trading desk rolls out. However, the DBS chief believes the financial services provider will be all systems go by the end of the year.

“We are starting the initial work to expand it beyond the current investor base,” Gupta said.

At the moment, the Singaporean banking giant is looking to expand its current infrastructure to offer the new service to customers beyond its existing base of accredited investors, the CEO added.

Most of the work on the trading desk, Gupta noted, relates to compliance and usability.

Aspects of the desk to do with user-friendliness and integration with crypto-assets should be done in the next several months, with targets for accessibility put around June of 2022.

DBS received a regulatory go-ahead from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) last year to offer crypto trading services and has emerged as one of the major banking institutions around the world looking to lean into crypto to satisfy customer demand.

Plans for a retail crypto trading desk comes after the bank’s successful unveiling of an institutional-based crypto trading desk.

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