Crypto Donations Pour into Turkey
Since the fateful Monday of this week, when a devastating earthquake disrupted the lives of countless people in Turkey and Syria, crypto donations have been steadily flowing to the aid of the victims. Several crypto companies, including Keet, Tether, and Bitfinex, have pledged over 5 million Turkish Lira. Avalanche Foundation donated $1 million in AVAX tokens. Gate.io pledged 1 million Turkish Lira, whereas Tron founder Justin Sun promised to donate $1 million in TRX. Meanwhile, Turkish rock star Haluk Levent and charity organization Ahbap created a multi-sig wallet on BNB Chain to accept donations from the crypto community. The wallet has $839,171.94 at the time of writing.
Dell Joins Hedera Governing Council
Tech giant Dell is the latest member of the Hedera Governing Council. As a part of it, Dell will run a consensus node for the Hedera platform. Dell also plans to explore developing applications focused on decentralized use cases, such as edge computing.
StarkWare
Ethereum scaling development firm StarkWare has teamed up with crypto oracle ChainLink and joined the Chainlink SCALE program. Consequently, Chainlink price feeds are available on the StarkNet testnet and imminently on the mainnet.
Furthermore, StarkWare plans to open source its StarkNet Prover component, which would enable better code review and increase transparency.
FTX Wants Its Donations Back
FTX Group is sending “confidential letters” to political figures, political action funds, and others who have received donations from SBF led FTX. It is asking them to return the contribution before Feb 28, 2023. FTX also claims that it can force repayments with interest via bankruptcy court if the beneficiaries fail to return the money before the deadline.
Digital Pound Project
The UK’s central bank launched its digital pound project, calling it an opportunity to create a new form of money and a new payment system. The central bank will issue the currency, and businesses will be able to hold them in a digital wallet and access the digital coins using smartphones and cards.
Binance’s Tool for Crypto Tax Calculation
Crypto exchange Binance introduced a tool to its users in Canada and France to calculate tax applicable to their crypto transactions. The free tool supports reporting of up to 100,000 transactions.
Bitfarms Settles $21M Debt with $7.75M Cash
Bitcoin miner Bitfarms has restructured its loan agreement with BlockFi to settle $21 million of its outstanding principal and interest for a single cash payment of $7.75 million. Since June, the miner has reduced its debt from $165 million to $25 million.
DForce Suffers An Attack
DeFi protocol DForce became victim to a reentrancy attack on the Arbitrum and Optimism chains. The exploit that saw the platform lose $3.6 million was due to a vulnerability in a contract function that calculates oracle prices when connected to Curve Finance.
CoW Swap Exploit
DEX aggregator CoW Swap was exploited this week, and the attacker made away with over $180,000 in crypto assets. The hacker targeted CoW Swap’s settlement contract for a phony fund transfer.
Sandbox and Saudi Arabia
Metaverse gaming platform The Sandbox signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Saudi Arabia Digital Government Authority (DGA). The terms of the agreement were not disclosed. In response, SAND token surged 30%.
Signature Bank Slapped with Lawsuit
Algorithmic trading firm Statistica Capital has filed a class action lawsuit against New York based Signature Bank. The suit alleges that Signature Bank knowingly facilitated FTX’s fraud prior to its collapse last November.
Dookey Dash
BAYC has frozen the leaderboard of Dookey Dash, a web3 enabled game that was played for the last three weeks by BAYC users with Bored Apes’ “Sewer Pass” NFTs. BAYC would review the locked scores and award the players based on how high they scored. Meanwhile, when the leaderboard closed, the Sewer Pass NFT sales volume was almost $73 million. BAYC, however, had earlier accused some NFT owners of cheating by hiring seasoned players to play the game on their behalf.
Kraken and SEC
Crypto exchange Kraken has agreed to pay $30 million to settle charges brought about by the US SEC. The SEC had accused Kraken of not registering its offerings. As a part of the settlement, it will also shut down its on-chain staking program for US customers. Kraken, however, has neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s allegations.
How Decentralized is Uniswap?
This week, there was a debate on how decentralized the Uniswap DAO is as the venture firm a16z possesses a massive trove of the project’s UNI tokens and the controlling votes. In an unofficial community poll, which a16z didn’t participate in, the Uniswap DAO selected crypto bridge Wormhole as a part of its future expansion to BNB blockchain. But in the official poll, whose results are yet to be tallied, a16z participated and voted against selecting Wormhole, instead casting its vote for LayerZero. The debate that followed, questions the control that one player has on a supposedly decentralized project, which could potentially sway the outcome to its will and overturn the community vote.
Web3 Shorts
Genesis, its parent DCG, Gemini, and other creditors have reached an in principle agreement to recover assets. They were reportedly working on a term sheet that would “maximize value” for their clients and stakeholders.
Similarly, Yuga Labs, the firm behind the popular BAYC NFTs, has settled with one of artist Ryder Ripps’ collaborators on the artist’s controversial RR/BAYC project. Yuga Labs contends to be trademark infringement.
Computer scientist Craig Wright who has long asserted to be Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto has lost his claim in a UK court to stop Bitcoin spin-offs by deeming forks as his copyright infringement.
The Brave browser added support for Solana dApps on iOS and Android. Furthermore, users of Brave browser who store and transact SPL tokens can now connect their wallets to apps such as Magic Eden and Jupiter Exchange right from their browser app.
Peer to peer bitcoin trading service LocalBitcoin is shutting down after a decade in operation due to market conditions.
Former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges in connection with insider trading, where he is accused of front running listings of new tokens on Coinbase.
Web3 Investments
Decentralized ID startup SPACE ID raised $10 million in a strategic funding round led by Polychain Capital and dao5. The money is earmarked for network development and hiring.
Web3 investment firm gmjp led a $4 million seed round of Webacy, a startup focused on improving the security of self custody wallets.
Layer 1 blockchain VRRB Labs closed a $1.4 million pre-seed funding round from Jump Crypto and others that brought its valuation to $20 million.
Web3 customer loyalty program creator Cub3 secured $6.5 million in a funding round led by Bitkraft and Fabric Ventures.
Placeholder VC led a $4 million Series A funding round of Vault, a music platform built on web3 technology.
Dymension, a modular blockchain that is built using Cosmos’s and Celestia’s technologies, raised $6.7 million in a private token round led by Big Brain Holdings and Stratos.
Digital assets protection startup Coincover raised $30 million in a funding round led by Foundation Capital.
Swiss web3 gaming platform Ajuna closed a $5 million round led by venture firm CMCC Global.
Tower Pop, the gaming studio behind the web3 game Omega Royale, raised $2.1 million for funding its play to mint project in a round led by Play Ventures and Agnitio Capital.
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