CoinDesk Crypto

Enterprise software company R3’s Corda network, backed by many of the world’s largest banks, is following the general trend toward public-facing blockchains. 

Announced Tuesday, a group of former RBS bankers, now known as LAB577, is bridging the way for eXchange inFinite (XinFin), a blockchain focused on the trade finance space. Its native token, the Ethereum-compatible XDC, will be used as a settlement coin inside Corda.

(In case you’re having déjà vu, DASL previously introduced a prototype token on Corda called XDC but later agreed to change the ticker to avoid confusion with the aforementioned trade finance token – and now DASL is acting as a handmaiden for XDC and its community.)  

Related: Nayms Brings Blue Chips and Disruption to Crypto Insurance

“The first currency across is XDC, but this lays the groundwork to connect Corda to ERC-20s and other cryptocurrency networks,” said LAB577 director Richard Crook. “What you should see here is the age-old challenge of interoperability being solved.”

Launched in 2015, R3 was a first mover in promising the benefits of blockchain, the shared database underlying bitcoin, to banks, who obediently joined the enterprise software consortium in droves. It quickly became apparent that no bank was going to allow competitors insights into its private data, even encrypted. With this in mind, Corda was born: a system that lets transacting counterparties see they are on the same page, without tipping their hands to anyone else. 

Recent years have seen an open-source version of Corda released, and cautious moves toward the public space, including a payment engine said to be interoperable with Ripple’s XRP cryptocurrency and talk of a so-called “Corda Coin” that emerged at R3’s annual gathering in 2019. 

The XinFin and XDC community is based out of Singapore, having graduated from the Abu Dhabi regulatory fintech sandbox. 

Related: PayPal to Start Letting US Customers to Use Their Crypto at Checkout: Report

XinFin co-founder Atul Khekade explained that XDC is a public network but one that should appease regulatory concerns among banks and financial institutions eyeing the potential of more open blockchains. 

“The validators have to lock 10 million XDC tokens [about $300,000] to be a validator and must attach their own KYC to the node,” said XinFin co-founder Atul Khekade. “It’s a public network, since we don’t really control who is going to join the network, but unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum where anyone can be a validator, there’s an extra KYC step.” 

A number of trade finance applications are being built on Corda, such as the TradeIX-backed Marco Polo project. So will these existing trade finance players be getting around the campfire with XDC and singing Kumbaya? 

“I think it’s more a case of a rising tide lifts all boats,” Crook said. “This is continuing to make Corda the go-to place for financial services, and in this case, trade finance.”

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Cryptocurrency company Ripple has acquired a large stake in an Asia-based cross-border payments specialist in order to meet growing customer demand.

Ripple said Tuesday that it has agreed to acquire a 40% stake in Tranglo for the purpose of expanding its RippleNet On-Demand Liquidity service, according to a press release. Tranglo is a cross-border money and prepaid credit transaction hub providing businesses and individuals the ability to transfer payments globally, according to its website.

Southeast Asia’s payments landscape is “highly fragmented,” Ripple said in the release. Each country possesses its own form of payments infrastructure, but the region lacks a standard integration for regional cross-border payments.

Related: Civil Liberties Group Calls FinCEN Crypto Wallet Rule ‘Unconstitutional’

Ripple said its investment in Tranglo is a part of its commitment to enhancing the payments ecosystem in Southeast Asia, according to the release.

“By partnering closely with Ripple and introducing On-Demand Liquidity to new markets, we aim … to provide accessible and equitable financial services to the masses,” said Tranglo’s CEO Jacky Lee in a statement.

See also: Uber, Goldman Sachs Veteran Joins Ripple as Asia Managing Director

The move into Southeast Asia coincides with Ripple’s new hire: on March 19, former Goldman Sachs executive Brooks Entwistle joined the firm as managing director of Southeast Asia. Entwistle is expected to lead and scale the company’s operations in the region.

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A U.S. nonprofit civil rights group has accused the U.S. Treasury Department of infringing the rights of cryptocurrency holders using private wallets to store their digital assets.

In a press release on Monday, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) said the department is engaging in an “unconstitutional power grab” that could lead to a “massive collection” of individuals’ personal information.

In December 2020, a bureau operating inside the treasury known as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) proposed a rule requiring crypto exchanges to collect counterparty information from transactions sent to “unhosted wallets” dubbed “Requirements for Certain Transactions Involving Convertible Virtual Currency or Digital Assets.”

Related: US Government Sues Decentralized Content Platform LBRY Over $11M in Token Sales

Under the rule, cryptocurrency exchanges would need to maintain personal data on transactions above $3,000. In the event a transaction is over $10,000, the exchange would need to gather, store and report it to FinCEN.

The nonprofit filed comments on Monday objecting to the rule claiming it “represents a radical extension of FinCEN’s financial surveillance of innocent Americans.” March 29 marks the last day the regulator is taking public comments on its proposed rule.

NCLA said the move could widen the scope of the Bank Secrecy Act as digital assets would fall into the monetary instruments category of regulated currencies, according to the release.

Further, the nonprofit is arguing that the proposed rule goes beyond appropriate constitutional limits by bolstering FinCEN’s to “exercise Congress’ exclusive legislative power.”

Related: Nifty Gateway Pledges to Go ‘Carbon Negative’ Amid Criticism of NFTs

See also: FinCEN’s Wallet Rule Aims to Close Crypto-Cash Reporting Gap, Official Says

“FinCEN’s proposed rule unlawfully attempts to transform the agency’s limited authority to regulate banks into permission to engage in the mass financial surveillance of innocent individuals who merely use digital assets,” said NCLA’s Litigation Counsel Caleb Kruckenberg

“FinCEN ought to recognize that its proposal would be grossly unconstitutional and promptly scrap this rule,” Kruckenberg said. Failing to do so would prompt the group to “file suit to protect Americans’ civil liberties,” according to the group’s comments.

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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is pursuing yet another case of a blockchain company allegedly selling unregistered securities.

According to court documents filed Monday, peer-to-peer content distribution network LBRY is being accused of selling “millions of dollars worth of unregistered securities to investors” beginning in 2016.

The securities regulator is seeking a permanent injunction against LBRY from selling further tokens in addition to a disgorgement of “ill-gotten gains” plus prejudgement interest.

Related: Civil Liberties Group Calls FinCEN Crypto Wallet Rule ‘Unconstitutional’

The SEC says the securities were sold in the form of LBRY Credits (LBC), which were communicated to investors as being used to fund LBRY’s business and build its product, according to the document.

LBRY is an open-sourced protocol allowing participants to post content without fear of retribution. The SEC says LBC tokens were sold as investment contracts in exchange for U.S. dollars and other non-monetary contributions.

The network has solicited help from the cryptocurrency community, claiming the industry is at risk while simultaneously saying its credits are not securities.

“The SEC complaint against LBRY reflects an outdated view of the economy that stifles innovation, accessibility, and creativity,” LBRY’s CEO Jeremy Kauffman told CoinDesk via email. “Under the overreaching standard set by the SEC complaint, most blockchain tokens would be deemed securities, leaving uncertainty and confusion in the industry.”

Related: Nifty Gateway Pledges to Go ‘Carbon Negative’ Amid Criticism of NFTs

Kauffman added the SEC’s complaint fails to acknowledge steps taken by his company to comply with the law and its efforts to conduct its business in a “forthcoming and transparent way.”

Of particular note in the SEC document and brought to attention in a tweet by crypto lawyer Grant Gulovsen are allegations LBRY enlisted a vendor to use 40 million LBC from its institutional fund to act as a market maker (MM).

The MM operated as a middleman to buy and sell LBC on a “regular and continuous” basis at prevailing market prices. The SEC alleges this activity provided an air of credibility that the platform was capable of generating a profit.

LBRY and Altonomy announced a market-making partnership as recently as June 2020. Polychain Capital led a $7 million funding round in Altonomy in July 2019.

Stemming from the initial coin offering (ICO) craze in 2017, the SEC has been clamping down on cryptocurrency and blockchain businesses it claims are operating outside of U.S. securities law by selling unregistered products to vulnerable investors.

Among these, the most notable cases include Ripple, Block.one and Telegram.

UPDATE (March 30, 2021, 2:40 UTC): Includes comments from LBRY CEO Jeremy Kauffman

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Gemini-owned non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Nifty Gateway pledged Monday to become “carbon negative” this year through a combination of offset purchases and technology improvements.

Nifty Gateway will buy offsets equivalent to double its CO2 footprint at the end of every month, said founders Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster. Site developers also plan on running Nifty’s NFT minting system through EIP-2309 to cut Ethereum gas fees by 99%.

The concession comes as environmentalists attack NFT creators for crypto’s carbon emissions, reserving particular shade for marketplaces like Nifty Gateway that drive thousands of transactions. Already, a torrent of online criticism prompted one art website to abandon its NFT plans.

Related: Civil Liberties Group Calls FinCEN Crypto Wallet Rule ‘Unconstitutional’

Nifty Gateway said the offset program will use an open-source emissions project as its benchmark. That codebase (whose contributor did not immediately reply to CoinDesk) estimated Nifty Gateway was responsible for 13 million kg of CO2 through March 22 – the second-largest footprint among marketplaces – despite it being only the fourth-largest marketplace by transaction count.

“In theory Nifty Gateway will become a net remover of carbon,” the Cock Fosters wrote in their blog post.

Even as they touted the offsets, the twins bemoaned the “double standard” they claimed is applied to the booming crypto art scene – which relies in large part on traceable transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Meanwhile, the “offline art world” goes unchecked, they said.

“Because there is no blockchain to account for the carbon footprint of the traditional art world,” they wrote, “such criticism has not been leveled against” it, pointing to museum-goers who drive cars as one example.

Related: US Government Sues Decentralized Content Platform LBRY Over $11M in Token Sales

Indeed, CoinDesk could not find public estimates on the global carbon impact of patrons of the arts by press time. This reporter estimated that driving to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s gift shop for the purpose of buying a Claude Monet print (a 6.7-mile drive, his nearest available marketplace) would emit 4 kg of CO2. Meanwhile, acquiring a GIF of a 1,239-run gummy bear mugshot on Nifty Gateway would produce nearly 31 kg of CO2, according to Digiconomist.

A representative for Gemini did not immediately tell CoinDesk when Nifty Gateway would begin purchasing offsets.

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• Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $57,626.86 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Climbing 4.38% over the previous 24 hours.
• Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $54,826.06-$58,353.53 (CoinDesk 20)
• BTC trades between its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a sideways signal for market technicians.

Bitcoin proved resilient to the latest instability in traditional markets, as the No. 1 cryptocurrency by market capitalization rose above $58,000 briefly Monday, well above last week’s low around $50,000.

The divergence offers a reminder of how bitcoin, which traded lightly in sync with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of U.S. stocks for most of last year, is now more or less back to doing its own thing: The 90-day correlation between the two has dropped to zero. 

Some U.S. stocks went through an unprecedented sell-off on Friday after the forced liquidation of more than $20 billion in holdings linked to Bill Hwang’s family office, Archegos Capital Management. On Monday, stocks were mixed as traders weighed the potential fallout on Wall Street. 

Related: Nifty Gateway Pledges to Go ‘Carbon Negative’ Amid Criticism of NFTs

“We are still getting reports of continual liquidation by prime brokers on the Street,” Annabelle Huang, partner at Hong Kong-based market maker Amber Group, said. “But from a crypto-centric perspective, we observed 208.8K BTC ($11.05 billion worth) was withdrawn from Coinbase in the past four months, which is a bullish sign for bitcoin and the crypto market.”

The stock market in general has struggled in the recent weeks. The Nasdaq Composite is down 7% from a intraday record on Feb. 16.

Bitcoin, still considered an alternative asset and a risky one by many investors, traveled lower with the stock market, down by 18.0% to $50,458.10 on Thursday from its all-time high at $61,556.59 on March 13. 

Yet, the quick recovery to near $58,000 demonstrates stronger confidence from investors in the oldest and largest cryptocurrency. The next level of price resistance is seen at around $60,000.

Related: Cryptocurrency Fund Flows Now at Lowest Since October 2020

“Exchange outflows have increased this week, indicating market participants are moving crypto assets into cold storage or private custody,” the digital-asset data firm TradeBlock wrote in its weekly newsletter on Monday. “Private-wallet custody typically indicates a pattern of longer-term holding.” TradeBlock is owned by CoinDesk.

Moreover, bitcoin received another price boost from Visa after the payment giant announced its support for USDC, the second-biggest stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar.

There’s no direct link in the deal to bitcoin, but the announcement was seen by traders as a fresh sign of growing institutional and mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies. 

Read More: Bitcoin Breaks Out, Near $58K, After Visa Adds Support for Stablecoin USDC

Ether rising

• Ether (ETH) trading around $1815.06 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Climbing 8.33% over the previous 24 hours.
• Ether’s 24-hour range: $1665.63-$1839.80 (CoinDesk 20)
• Ether trades above its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a bullish signal for market technicians.

“Ether is rising from short-term oversold territory along with bitcoin following a swift about 18% pullback below minor resistance from February,” Katie Stockton, a market technician at Fairlead Strategies, wrote in her weekly newsletter on Monday. “After a few weeks of additional consolidation, we expect a buying opportunity to unfold once overbought conditions are worked off.”

CoinDesk reported Monday that a sharp drop in an obscure data point from cryptocurrency options markets – the spread between the one-month implied volatility (IV) for ether and bitcoin – suggests traders may be shifting their primary focus back to bitcoin after several weeks of focusing on ether and other altcoins.

And while the link between Visa’s deal and bitcoin is tangential and abstract, there’s a direct and concrete connection to ether. Visa processed the landmark cryptocurrency payment transaction directly on the Ethereum blockchain; Crypto.com sent a USDC stablecoin transaction over the network to an account at Anchorage custody under Visa’s name.

Read More: Ether-Bitcoin Implied Volatility Spread Points to a Macro-Driven Market

Other digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly in green Monday. Notable winners as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET): 

• omg network (OMG) + 10.1%
• algorand (ALGO) + 8.41%
• tezos (XTZ) + 7.16%
• kyber network (KNC) + 6.98%
• litecoin (LTC) + 6.81%

No major losers as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET).

Read More: Visa Settles USDC Transaction on Ethereum, Plans Rollout to Partners

Other markets

Equities:

• Asia’s Nikkei 225 closed in the green 0.71%.
• The FTSE 100 in Europe was down by 0.07%.
• The S&P 500 in the United States closed in the red 0.087%.

Commodities:

• Oil was up 0.97%. Price per barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude: $61.56.
• Gold was in the red 1.13% and at $1711.00 as of press time.

Treasurys:

• The 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield climbed Monday in the green 1.714%.

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Flows into digital asset investment products declined by roughly $79 million to $21 million during the seven-day period through March 26, the lowest since October, according to a new report by CoinShares, a digital asset investment firm.

Slowing investor appetite for cryptocurrency funds reflects sideways price action in bitcoin (BTC). The cryptocurrency has traded between $50,000 and $60,000 over the past week.

“Investor appetite for digital assets has waned in recent weeks as volatility remains high and the price trades sideways,” CoinShares wrote in the report.

• “We have recently witnessed a significant reduction in inflows, and in some cases outflows, for the larger and longer-established pre-2016 investment products,” according to the report. “We believe this is due to investors sitting on multi-year gains taking profits.”
• Investment flows in the U.S. are slowing, while Europe and Canada continue to hold up.
• Trading volumes in digital-asset investment products declined to $788 million per day last week, versus an average $900 million per day so far in 2021.
• Bitcoin received the largest inflows, according to the report, “but Ethereum on a market capitalization basis (as we’ve seen in previous weeks) remains more popular with inflows of $5 million.”

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Uniswap’s latest plans may be public, but that isn’t stopping rivals from building alternatives.

Integral, a new automated market maker (AMM) designed with a baked-in order book, went live early Monday. The protocol’s asset pools have attracted $239 million as of press time as savvy decentralized finance (DeFi) traders race for early token rewards.

The project – built by four Harvard friends and a cast of industry bigwigs – is hoping to syphon liquidity away from decentralized exchanges like Uniswap with its approach to impermanent loss and order book mirroring. Integral’s team members think their design can not only quote better prices but provide fairer returns for liquidity providers (LPs).

Related: Market Wrap: Bitcoin Trades Near $58K; Stocks Struggle After Archegos Margin Call

“Our primary research question was: ‘What would be the final form of AMMs?’ And the answer: ‘One that eats other exchanges’ liquidity,’” Integral wrote in documents shared with CoinDesk, adding:

“Whenever another exchange tries to beat us with better liquidity, we mirror this liquidity onto ourselves until we regain the world’s best liquidity again. This process can be thought of as a continuous vampire attack until all world liquidity is integrated by us.”

Vampire attacks were made famous by SushiSwap, a clone of Uniswap created by the pseudonymous developer Chef Nomi. During that time, the platform offered token rewards for liquidity moved from Uniswap to SushiSwap. It now seems Integral is taking the idea one step farther by “mirroring” liquidity onto itself to gain adoption.

The founding team of nine, which has requested to remain nameless, is being advised by Polychain Capital founder Olaf Carlson-Wee, Gauntlet founder Tarun Chitra, Compound Finance founder Robert Leshner and Framework Ventures co-founders Michael Anderson and Vance Spencer.

Integral’s scheme

Related: Cryptocurrency Fund Flows Now at Lowest Since October 2020

Integral relies on two features to market itself as a competitor to Uniswap, whose latest version typically does $1.25 billion in 24-hour trading volume.

First, Integral uses Uniswap’s own price oracles, but with a five-minute delay. The team thinks the time delay will decrease instances of impermanent loss, where assets contributed to a DEX’s pool bleed out value. That bleeding is the result of how AMMs quote prices – by balancing asset reserves against one another and having arbitrage traders add or remove assets based on price movements off the exchange. 

This rebalancing, in certain situations, can lead to LPs losing value instead of gaining it. It’s thought a time delay will force traders to other platforms while still offering competitive prices.

Second, Integral will mirror snapshots of Binance’s order book onto the AMM to artificially create depth accompanied by Uniswap’s (delayed) prices. By doing so, Integral can experiment with different price curves relative to other AMMs.

Integral expects to be a home for whales, at least for the time being, given the need for liquidity to on-board to the exchange. Four pools will be supported: ETH/DAI, ETH/WBTC, ETH/USDC and ETH/USDT.

To this end, the Integral team raised 11 ETH in a Gitcoin grant to deploy the project on the Ethereum blockchain. 

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Over the past couple of months, Non-Fungible Tokens, also known as NFTs, have burst into the public consciousness, expanding and even challenging our collective understanding of digital scarcity and ownership.

Behavioral finance and economics have long held that asset prices tend to overshoot during short-term directional moves, even those driven by fundamental factors

Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Jay Clayton has taken on an advisory role at hedge fund One River Digital Asset Management the parent company of the newly launched digital asset fund One River Digital.

In a press release on Monday, One River Digital Asset Management which manages over $2.5 billion in institutional assets, announced Clayton will join the firm’s newly formed Academic and Regulatory Advisory Council along with economist Jon Orszag, and former White House adviser Kevin Hassett.

Clayton led the SEC during its crackdown on unregistered and fraudulent initial coin offerings. During that time the commission also refused to approve the application of any bitcoin exchange-traded funds and sued Ripple Labs.

Related: Visa Just Supercharged Stablecoin Legitimacy

Institutional bitcoin firm One River Digital is backed by billionaire hedge fund manager Alan Howard and has invested $600 million in bitcoin and ether for institutional clients.

The new advisory council will be tasked with assisting One River Asset Management to navigate existing policies concerning digital assets.

“The One River Academic and Regulatory Advisory Council will help us consider how these new digital systems and the investment opportunities they present will best fit within existing policy, while also helping us think through how to advance these frameworks in ways that ensure the US continues to lead the world in financial innovation and asset management,” said Eric Peters, CEO of One River Asset Management.

Earlier this month, Clayton was named non-executive chairman of Apollo Global Management’s board of directors.

Related: Blockchain Sleuth Kim Nilsson on the Mt. Gox Saga

Read more: Former SEC Chief Clayton to Chair Investment Giant Apollo

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Cryptocurrency traders might be shifting their primary focus back to bitcoin after several weeks focused on ether, alternative digital assets and even non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

That might be one takeaway from an obscure data point pulled from the market for cryptocurrency options: the spread between the one-month implied volatility (IV) for ether (ETH) and bitcoin (BTC). It’s a measure of expected relative price turbulence between the two, and it has dropped to 8%, the lowest since Dec. 8, according to the data provider Skew. 

Historically, the implied volatility spread has proven a reliable indicator of upcoming shifts in market leadership. In September the ether-bitcoin implied volatility spread fell to multi-month lows, signaling a change in traders’ focus to bitcoin from ether and decentralized finance (DeFi); some even called it the end of the “Summer of DeFi.” Then, during the final three months of 2020, bitcoin surged 168%, outperforming ether and other major cryptocurrencies. 

Related: Visa Just Supercharged Stablecoin Legitimacy

Implied volatility is investors’ expectation of how risky or volatile an asset would be over a specific period, and is driven by net buying pressure for options and historical price volatility. In this case, the focus is on the difference, or spread, between the implied volatilities of the two crypto assets.  

At the most basic level, the drop in the spread to three-month lows indicates that options traders foresee ether and other coins trading in line with bitcoin, the biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. 

So cryptocurrency markets in the coming months might trade more in line with bitcoin’s fundamental drivers, which last year became more closely tied with economic data, because a growing number of large investors and institutions started buying the largest cryptocurrency as a hedge against inflation. Analysts say bitcoin has matured as a macro asset, with several public-listed companies such as Tesla adding it to their balance sheets. 

Factors such as monetary and fiscal policy expectations, news flow related to institutional adoption and traditional market action could have a bigger sway in determining prices for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, at least over the next four weeks. 

Related: Former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton to Advise One River Asset Management on Crypto

Ether is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value, and many other so-called altcoins are built atop Ethereum’s blockchain technology. As such, many alternative cryptocurrencies tend to trade in line with ether.

The volatility spread climbed to record highs in January, suggesting scope for bigger percentage moves in ether and other alternative cryptocurrencies.

The volatility gauge peaked at a record high of 58% on Jan. 20 and has been falling ever since. Three- and six-month spreads are also on a declining trend.

While bitcoin has gained 100% this quarter, names like ether, XRP and chainlink (LINK) have chalked out more significant gains. 

One giant caveat: While the compression of the ether-bitcoin implied volatility spread suggests low expectations for ether price turbulence relative to bitcoin, it doesn’t necessarily say anything about the direction of impending moves. 

So bitcoin could go higher or lower, with ether and other coins likely to follow suit, and possibly charting smaller percentage moves than the crypto market leader.

Also read: Bitcoin Breaks Out, Near $58K, After Visa Adds Support for Stablecoin USDC

That said, April is a historically bullish month for bitcoin, and some options traders are buying $80,000 call options expiring April 30 in anticipation of a price rally. 

Bitcoin is already on the offensive heading into the seasonally bullish period. The cryptocurrency jumped to $58,000 on Monday, breaking out of a two-week-long bearish trend, after payments giant Visa added support for the stablecoin USDC. The announcement was seen as  a sign of growing mainstream adoption of digital assets. 

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Mogo Finance Technology Inc., a Canadian fintech firm listed on Nasdaq (NASDAQ:MOGO) and Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX:MOGO), is now giving its members who take out a new mortgage or refinance an existing one the chance to earn cash to buy bitcoin using its bitcoin rewards account. 

In an announcement on Monday, Vancouver-based Mogo said the cashback rewards program now includes “MogoMortgage” and will give users up to C$3,100 (US$2,461) in cashback rewards. The rewards are distributed in dollars into clients’ accounts which, in turn, allows clients to buy bitcoin through the MogoCrypto program within the Mogo app. 

Canada’s residential mortgage market is estimated at C$1.7 trillion (US$1.35 trillion). According to the company, this new scheme allows Canadians to get a mortgage while earning a cash reward to purchase bitcoin.

Related: Visa Just Supercharged Stablecoin Legitimacy

“Given the volatility and speculative nature of bitcoin, there’s an increasing number of Canadians who are looking for ways to participate without risking their own money, and our bitcoin rewards program meets this demand,” said David Feller, CEO of Mogo.

MogoMortgage is currently available to Mogo Members in a number of selected provinces including Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

The rewards program already applies to the Mogo Visa Platinum prepaid cardholders, allowing users to earn 1% cashback on purchases in Canada and 2% for foreign transactions, which can then be exchanged for bitcoin within the app. 

In February, Mogo announced it would acquire a 19.99% stake in the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange Coinsquare with the rights to increase ownership up to 40%.

Related: Former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton to Advise One River Asset Management on Crypto

Mogo was founded in 2003 and had an initial public offering on the TSX in June 2015 and has a market cap capitalization of over CA$500 million.

In December, the company announced its plan to make a corporate investment of up to CA$1.5 million (US$1.19 million) in bitcoin and said it will consider additional purchases throughout 2021.

At the time of publication, Mogo shares listed on the Nasdaq were trading up 4% at US$8.82 and up 2.63% at CA$10.91 on the TSX. 

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Why did cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX agree to pay $135 million for the naming rights to a Miami stadium? For the good of humanity, says CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. (Well, in part.)

In an appearance Monday on CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover,” Bankman-Fried said he wants to make as much money as possible in crypto and give it away through the practice of effective altruism. 

This was one motivation for FTX’s deal with the Miami-Dade, Fla., venue, home to National Basketball Association team Miami Heat, he said. To his mind, it’s partly an investment in the community.

Related: Visa Just Supercharged Stablecoin Legitimacy

“I’m looking at what role I can be playing in the world,” Bankman-Fried said. “Frankly, I hope we did a lot of good with some of the money that’s going to be spent there on this, and help a lot of residents in the county.” 

Disruptive technologies have birthed a long line of billionaires that go on to print their names on the side of arenas and team jerseys. Amid a booming period in the cryptocurrency industry, Bankman-Fried said he’s looking at what his legacy will be.

Internet legends Chamath Palihapitiya is a minority stakeholder of the Golden State Warriors and Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks in January 2000. If the NBA approves FTX’s deal, Bankman-Fried would become the first crypto chief executive whose name could be synonymous with a sports franchise. 

To be clear: This is still a business transaction. Bankman-Fried acknowledged there’s no “well-understood conversion break” to determine how much to pay for the naming rights and whether it’s a good deal. In some sense, the $135 million spent could be considered an advertising expense. 

Related: Former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton to Advise One River Asset Management on Crypto

“We feel like we’ve built a really great product … and we’d really love to see a lot of people get exposed to it and try it out and see what they think,” Bankman-Fried said. Miami is a growing hub for crypto businesses, and the headline-grabbing deal could lure in a new set of users who have never played around with crypto, he said.

“You see reverberations from what happens in the states,” Bankman-Fried said.

The line between making money and doing good is frequently blurred in crypto. Non-fungible tokens, for instance, touted for the ability to democratize ownership of digital goods, are becoming an arena for scams, Bankman-Fried said. 

“I worry that a lot of what’s going on in NFTs is not …  someone taking a product with intense demand and finding a way to use blockchain to make it that much better,” he said. “The worry here is this ends up like 2017, 2018 with [initial coin offerings] and ends up giving a bad name to some of the space.”

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Silvergate Bank will be the second lender to extend bitcoin-backed loans to investors who custody their crypto with Fidelity.

Fidelity began accepting bitcoin as collateral for cash loans in December after partnering with crypto lender BlockFi. The product targets investors who are interested in using their bitcoin without selling it, hedge funds, miners and over-the-counter trading desks.

Silvergate has been offering bitcoin-backed loans since June through its Silvergate Exchange Network, which allows customers to instantly move dollars between different crypto exchanges and is open even on weekends.

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“Like Silvergate, we recognize the opportunity to create a more seamless investor experience by helping institutions maximize capital efficiency, as well as the opportunity to strengthen the digital assets ecosystem through greater integration and collaborations like this,” Christine Sandler, head of sales and marketing at Fidelity Digital Assets, said in a press release.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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As Cosmos enters its next chapter, one of the leading firms behind the interoperability network is rolling out a $20 million fund to support promising projects.

“We’re trying to lay the foundations for decentralized networks to flourish as part of Cosmos,” Tendermint CEO Peng Zhong told CoinDesk in an interview. “So, just providing another source of liquidity for people that want to build on our stack.”

The fund’s announcement is timed to the activation of Cosmos’ inter-blockchain communication protocol (IBC), a major milestone that went live earlier today. IBC enables distinct blockchains built on Tendermint Core to work together. The cross-chain flow of tokens could be a catalytic step for making financial products in the Cosmos network more widely used.

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The company says the Tendermint Ventures fund, denominated in ATOM and IRIS tokens, will be the largest in the Cosmos ecosystem. 

“Tendermint Ventures is similar to ConsenSys Ventures,” Peng said, referring to the investments wing of Joe Lubin’s Ethereum workshop. “We’re going to identify promising projects, building using Cosmos tech and provide venture capital to accelerate their growth.”

The fund is meant to complement other efforts in the ecosystem, such as the $10 million Terraform Capital fund announced in February. But where Terraform focuses on decentralized finance (DeFi) on just the Terra blockchain, Tendermint Ventures seeks broader reach.

“In the near term, we are focusing on creating a really robust DeFi ecosystem within Cosmos,” explained Jin Kwon, the Tendermint chief of staff leading the new venture fund. “Our goal at the end of the day is that these projects that we bring in will be complementary to each other. So one may be doing something in one aspect of DeFi and another project will be to leverage that project.”

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Indeed, Terra, which recently launched a high-yield savings account known as Anchor, is among the early investments by Tendermint Ventures. To date, the fund has also invested in Regen, IRIS, B-Harvest and Tgrade.

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The Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) has requested feedback on its proposed regulations of security tokens, including derivatives.

• In an announcement made on Monday, the DFSA said it has published its framework for regulating the space and is giving the public 30 days to comment.
• The regulatory body is proposing updating its regulations to facilitate activities based on distributed ledger technology (DLT). The update will focus on public access to buying and trading security tokens and on issues related to the provision of custody.
• The key changes include allowing those facilities that trade security tokens to have direct access members, including retail clients, said DFSA.
• The agency said it will issue proposals for other types of tokens such as “exchange tokens” and “utility tokens” later in 2021.
• “The proposal for regulation of Security Tokens is a key milestone in paving a clear and certain path for those issuers who wish to raise capital in or from the DIFC using DLT and similar technology, and for those firms who intend to be involved in this market, by conducting or providing financial services,” said Bryan Stirewalt, the chief executive of the DFSA.
• Stirewalt said the DFSA has drawn on the experience of other regulators who have taken cautious steps in the rapidly developing area.

Read more: Dubai Free Zone Becomes First UAE Government Entity to Accept Bitcoin

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Digital asset custodian Hex Trust has completed a multimillion-dollar raise from prominent cryptocurrency and traditional investors to further its products and scale its operations.

According to a press release shared with CoinDesk on Monday, the custodian, which is licensed as a trust company in Hong Kong, has raised $6 million in a Series A funding round led by QBN Capital.

Other investors included Cell Rising, Radiant Tech Ventures, Kenetic Capital, HashKey, MD Labs, Fenbushi Capital, Borderless Capital, Genesis Block Ventures and Henri Arslanian.

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The investment, Hex Trust said, will allow the company to hire “key talents” based in Hong Kong and Singapore in order to meet what it called “Asia’s soaring institutional interest in digital assets.”

“We are past the inflection point as blockchain has established itself as the next financial markets infrastructure,” said Hex Trust’s CEO, Alessio Quaglini. “The next 12 months will be critical to define the structure of the overall market.”

See also: Hex Trust Launches Licensed Custody Service for Non-Fungible Tokens

Earlier this month the platform launched a secure way of storing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) via its NFT Safe service. The service provides custody support to NFT collectors and investors within its Hex Safe platform.

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The funds coming from the raise will also be used to flesh out the Hex Safe offering while building out the platform’s compliance module in order to move in lockstep with regulatory developments, according to the release.

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Bitcoin (BTC) held support around $50,000 after registering an oversold signal on the four-hour relative strength index (RSI). The next level of resistance is seen around $60,000.

• The four-hour RSI is not yet overbought, which could keep buyers active above the $54,000 support level.
• BTC is now breaking above a series of lower price highs from March 13, which suggests the short-term trend is recovering.
• The daily RSI is back in neutral territory, which previously supported strong price rallies.
• However, traders should continue to monitor intraday resistance levels as the broader uptrend from January slows.  

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Bitcoin (BTC) is rising in the wake of payments giant Visa announcing support for USD coin (USDC), a stablecoin whose value is pegged to the U.S. dollar.

• The biggest cryptocurrency by market value is trading higher on the day, near $58,000 at press time, with the daily chart showing a bullish breakout out from a two-week-long descending channel identified by trendlines connecting March 14 and March 20 highs and March 16 and March 25 highs.
• Prices have risen by nearly $2,000 since Reuters reported earlier Monday Visa’s decision to allow the use of stablecoin USDC to settle transactions on its payment network.
• USDC is the second-biggest stablecoin, with a market capitalization of about $11 billion, as per data source CoinGecko.
• According to Reuters, by adding support for the stablecoin, Visa has stripped out the need to convert the cryptocurrencies into traditional money for settling transactions on its network.
• The latest Visa news comes five days after Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the electric maker would accept bitcoin as payment for its cars. Bitcoin jumped from $54,700 to above $56,000 after Tesla’s announcement only to surrender gains amid heightened uncertainty ahead of Friday’s monthly options expiry.
• With the options expiry now out of the way, bitcoin’s price gains seen at press time look sustainable in the near term – especially with blockchain data indicating the market sentiment is bullish.

• With the channel resistance flipped into support, the focus is now on the psychological level of $60,000.

Also read: Elon Musk’s Bitcoin Marketing Coup

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