Dogecoin pumps as Twitter accepts Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid

DOGE price jumped to highs near $0.17, while Twitter shares also gained to close 5.6% higher at $51.70.

Dogecoin (DOGE) surged by more than 25% on Monday 25 April after its biggest fan Tesla CEO Elon Musk, acquired Twitter (TWTR).

DOGE, which has pumped on previous Musk-related news, soared to intraday highs near $0.17. The top meme coin’s upsurge came after a day-long tease, with investor sentiment around the coin peaking after Musk reached a deal with the Twitter board over the purchase.

While the cryptocurrency remains a long way off its all-time high of $0.73 reached in May 2021, the reaction to today’s news could only be among many to come.  

At the time of writing, DOGE/USD was trading around $0.16, about 15% up in the past 24 hours after paring some of the intraday gains.

Twitter accepts Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout

On Monday, Twitter announced in a press release that its board had “entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk.”

According to the announcement, the acquisition translates to $54.20 per share for a value of $44 billion. At this price, Twitter shareholders are getting a 38% premium on the company stock’s closing price on 1 April 2022, a day before the Tesla CEO disclosed a 9% stake in Twitter.

Musk says he will ensure Twitter becomes the ‘bedrock’ of free speech, better than ever and free of spam bots. He will enhance it with new features as well as seek to authenticate all humans.

Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it,” he said. 

Musk also hopes that him owning the social media company doesn’t push some users off the platform.

Twitter’s share price jumped from under $49.00 on Monday, soaring to highs of $52.29. Despite paring some of the gains, the stock still closed more than 5.6% up at $51.70.

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Avalanche, Solana and Terra attracted notable institutional interest last week: CoinShares

Solana, Terra, and Avalanche are in the top ten list of largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Avalanche (AVAX), Solana (SOL), Terra (LUNA) and Algorand (ALGO) are among altcoins to see notable investment inflows over the past week, digital asset manager CoinShares reported on Monday.

According to the crypto asset manager, the week saw a slowdown in outflows from institutional investment products, largely due to interest in altcoins.

Altcoins remain the focus amongst investors, with notable inflows into Avalanche, Solana, Terra and Algorand of US$1.8m, US$0.8m, US$0.7m and US$0.2m respectively,” the firm said in the latest edition of the Digital Asset Fund Flows Weekly.

Other altcoin products in Binance, Ripple, Tron and Litecoin remained largely unchanged over the week.

Ethereum sees 3rd week of outflows

Despite the negative sentiment that swept through the cryptocurrency market last week, outflows reduced significantly. CoinShares says the industry posted total outflows of $7.2 million for the week ending 22 April. Comparatively, total outflows a week earlier were $97 million.

Solana, for instance, had seen an outflow of $27 million due to what CoinShares said was down to profit-taking deals.

But while the overall digital asset investment product space recorded minor outflows last week, the story was a bit different for Ethereum.

Per the report, weekly flows for funds tailored around the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap totaled 16.9 million. With these, Ethereum’s outflows monthly and year-to-date at the end of last week stood at $57 million and $169 million respectively.

Bitcoin sees inflows of $2.6 million

Bitcoin stemmed the negative trend by registering minor inflows, the report showed. Investment funds around the leading cryptocurrency by market attracted institutional inflows of $2.6 million.

However, due to recent market weakness, Bitcoin’s monthly flows are around negative $178 million. Year-to-date flows in BTC-related investment products are around $252 million.

Overall, crypto investment products have suffered outflows of $219 million in the past three weeks. Year-to-date flows are, however, positive at $389 million.

The digital assets funds report tracks flows from major crypto asset investment fund providers such as Grayscale, ETC Group, ProShares, 3iQ and CoinShares itself. These providers have launched numerous institutional-focused crypto products in the US, Europe and across the globe. 

 

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Maple Finance launches on Solana with $45M to support ecosystem growth

Maple Solana plans to grow its fund pool to $300 million by end of 2022, and offer up to $1 billion in uncollateralized loans.

Maple Finance, a decentralized corporate debt marketplace for institutional borrowers, has expanded its access to the Solana as it looks to enable funding of projects built on the smart contracts blockchain.  

The marketplace, also available on Ethereum, is the first multi-chain capital platform. It’s also the pioneering institutionally-focused uncollateralized lending for projects in the Solana ecosystem.

Scaling the Solana ecosystem

According to Maple Solana, the project starts with a $45 million pool for uncollateralized loans. The team will then look to grow this over the next eight months to bring it to $300 million by the end of the year.

Quinn Barry, the head of Maple Solana, said their goal is to help scale the Solana ecosystem via on-chain capital-market infrastructure.

Over the next three months, we expect to bring over $300 million of liquidity to Solana. We will soon welcome another credit-expert to the platform, and share more details on how liquidity protocols are already using Maple’s infrastructure as a launchpad onto Solana,” he added.

Sid Powell, the CEO and co-founder of Maple Finance commented:

Building the first multi-chain capital market solution has and will continue to attract high quality lenders and borrowers, create unprecedented growth opportunities for innovators building on Solana, and enable the entire industry to thrive.” 

Maple Solana targets issuing $1 billion worth of loans, the crypto-capital network that also provides the service on Ethereum said in an announcement. There are also plans to launch SYRUP, a governance token that will offer the same functionality as the Ethereum-based MPL token.

X-Margin is the first pool delegate

As part of the milestone towards transforming capital markets via technology in the Solana ecosystem, Maple Solana has secured the corporation of data-driven lender X-Margin.

The firm will be the first pool delegate, with its lending business having attracted huge deposits from three major partners. Financial services and payments technology provider Circle deposited $10 million while digital assets manager Coinshares added $20 million.

X-Margin also received $10 million from Solana natives, and is open to deposits of up to $5 million in USDC to make the initial $45 million pool.

Lending to crypto blue-chips

The X-Margin team will leverage its privacy-preserving credit infrastructure and underwriting expertise alongside Maple’s on-chain credit facility to offer credit to some of the biggest borrowers in the crypto space.

Darshan Vaidya, the CEO of X-Margin said:

Maple’s multi-chain infrastructure continues to lead the way for institutional credit infrastructure in crypto. X-Margin’s privacy preserving credit platform is a natural fit for this, helping to scale a more data-driven and transparent credit market in DeFi and CeFi.” 

Borrowers will have to adhere to Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML). This is part of regulatory compliance, and to ensure lending is advanced to reputable projects.

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HCX and Portal to help tokenize pre-IPO companies on the Bitcoin blockchain

 Portal, the Bitcoin-built cross-chain Layer-2 DEX network, has announced via a press release that it will be collaborating with High Circle Ventures’ blockchain-based asset marketplace HighCircleX to facilitate pre-IPO companies to tokenize shares on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The collaboration presents a first of its kind opportunity for pre-IPO companies to tokenize equity in private and create the provision of liquidity to illiquid assets. Further, companies will continue to benefit from the “many layers of application” that Portal envisions to build on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Some of the most-desired pre-IPO companies including Klarna, SpaceX, Automation Anywhere, Epic Games, and Cross River Bank will allow for their ownership interest to be tokenised and traded under the collaboration, the press release stated.

The partnership is a crucial breakthrough in achieving Portal’s vision of incorporating real-world use cases to Bitcoin

Portal’s Executive Chairman Dr. Chandra Duggirala explained the importance of the partnership by stating that the company will make way for the tokenization of many more financial assets to the blockchain:

“Although these assets are not bearer assets like Bitcoin, having both digital asset securities and non-security digital assets available through a simple interface for users who meet accreditation investor criteria marks the beginning of merging Bitcoin ecosystem with mainstream finance.” 

This will further fix the problem of liquidity fragmentation across many different exchanges and applications, he added.

Hemanth Golla, the CEO of HighcircleX, commented on the partnership by saying:

HCX makes it a breeze for investors to invest in private equity offerings. It gives members instant access to fractional ownership of stocks in the hottest companies. We believe that tokenization and fast, easy tradability that come with it will unlock and expand this market tremendously.

For Portal users, the partnership brings in seamless access to both tokenized securities and non-security digital assets from one wallet. On the other hand, for HCX, the partnership will allow the elimination of limitations such as illiquidity, lock-in periods and value uncertainty that are inherent in private markets and increase the available investor base.

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Kraken gets a crypto trading license to operate in the United Arab Emirates

Kraken became the second cryptocurrency exchange after Binance to get regulatory approval to allow it to operate in the United Arab Emirates. Kraken is now allowed to operate in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the Abu Dhabi international financial center and free zone.

After obtaining the crypto trading license, Kraken will now provide local investors to the global crypto market through the dirham (AED) trading pairs, which marks a diversification in trading pairs to use local currencies instead of using the traditional British pound and US dollar.

Integrating with local banks in UAE

With the new crypto trading license, Kraken intends to integrate with local payment service providers in Abu Dhabi; something Kraken’s managing director Curtis Ting believes will help Kraken bring global-level liquidity to UAE.

Dubai is specifically known to have massive crypto following with a trading volume of more than $25 billion annually.

Curtis Ting said:

“For us, it’s really important to facilitate access to global markets and global liquidity by making sure that investors and traders in the region have access to local currencies [trading pair].”

Crypto exchange interest in the Middle East

While Kraken has only obtained its first crypto trading license in the Middle East, Binance, its competitor, has already gotten crypto trading licenses to operate in both Dubai and Bahrain.

Following the influx of regulated crypto exchanges in the Middle East, local businesses have also started stepping into the crypto world. Citizens School in Dubai, for example, started accepting Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) as tuition payments where the crypto payments are automatically converted into dirhams.

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