FTX may be planning to purchase a stake in BlockFi
According to a Friday report from the Wall Street Journal, FTX is currently in discussions with BlockFi regarding the crypto exchange purchasing a stake in the firm, but no equity agreement has been reached.
The reported ongoing talks followed BlockFi signing a term sheet with FTX to secure a $250 million revolving credit facility on Tuesday. A BlockFi spokesperson told that BlockFi does not comment on market rumors.
Fashion brand Salvatore Ferragamo opens Ethereum NFT booth in NYC
The luxury fashion brand Salvatore Ferragamo is joining the swelling ranks of designers getting into NFTs.
As a part of a new concept store opening in the Soho district of New York City, opening Friday, Ferragamo has installed an NFT booth where customers can create and mint their own Ethereum NFTs from a menu of traits. All of the NFTs created at the Ferragamo booth will be free to visitors, but only 256 can be minted in total.
Highlights of the week
$WOO launches cross-chain swaps
$UNI acquires NFT startup Genie
$VET heads for consensus update
$RUNE mainnet goes live on 7 networks
$AVAX bridge launches native Bitcoin support
$DYDX announced launching dYdX V4 on Cosmos Blockchain
TIME and $SAND announce partnership to build ‘Time Square’ in the Metaverse
Fed Chair Powell doesn’t see significant macroeconomic implications from crypto sell-off
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on “the semiannual monetary policy report to congress” Wednesday.
Jerome Powell says the central bank is “not really seeing significant macroeconomic implications” from crypto’s volatility. The Fed chair stressed that there is a need for a better crypto regulatory framework.
Ripple opens its first office in Canada
Ripple (XRP) makes a strategic expansion to drive crypto innovations, despite unending cases with the SEC. To bolster its continued growth in the region of North America, Ripple has inaugurated a new office in Toronto.
This recent office dubbed a ‘key engineering hub” is Ripple’s first landing in Canadian territory. Notably, the underlying motive here is to stimulate crypto innovations in the region.
Crypto whales are massively accumulating MATIC
Crypto analytics firm Santiment says Ethereum (ETH)-scaling solution Polygon (MATIC) is now entering the sixth week of whale and shark accumulation.
The tiers of holders ranging from 10,000 to 10 million coins held have collectively added 8.7% more to their bags in this timespan.
THORChain mainnet goes live on 7 networks
THORChain’s native blockchain went live on seven supported networks after nearly four years of development.
The protocol currently supports swaps between seven major ecosystems: Bitcoin, Ether (ETH), Binance coins (BNB), Dogecoin (DOGE), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin cash (BCH) and Rune (RUNE). Support for cosmos (ATOM) and avalanche (AVAX) is expected shortly, developers said.
Binance signs Cristiano Ronaldo for exclusive partnership
Binance is announcing an exclusive, multi-year NFT partnership with Portuguese footballing legend Cristiano Ronaldo. Over the course of the agreement, Binance and Cristiano Ronaldo will create a series of NFT collections for sale exclusively on the Binance NFT platform.
The first NFT collection will be released later this year and feature designs created in collaboration with Ronaldo.
Axie Infinity’s Ronin Ethereum bridge to restart next week
The Ronin development team confirmed in a Twitter post yesterday the bridge will restart on June 28, three months after it suffered a $600 million exploit.
With the bridge going back online this coming Tuesday, the team has promised to reimburse those affected by the exploit. In the last 24 hours, AXS and RON have gained 23.49% and 14.17% respectively.
Shibarium public Beta may launch in Q3, 2022
The Unification Foundation, which is behind the development of Shibarium, SHIBA INU’s Layer 2 solution, today shared a detailed post on their Medium blog about Shibarium.
According to developers, the Shibarium will be able to provide movement of assets between Layer 1 and Layer 2, the possibility of staking and, in the future, ShibaSwap will also be implemented in it.