Announcements

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Monday that more than $3.36 billion worth of Bitcoin affiliated with the DarkNet marketplace Silk Road was seized by law enforcement last November. This seems to be the DOJ’s second-largest Bitcoin confiscation to date. The announcement from the US Attorney’s Office comes after James Zhong, the man who…

Circle, the issuer of stablecoin USDC, is expanding Euro Coin to the Solana blockchain in the first half of 2023. The payments firm plans to launch its cross-chain protocol, and it will also be expanded to Solana. In June, Circle launched Euro Coin as a European take on its popular stablecoin USDC but pegged to…

Google Cloud is adding support for the Solana blockchain in BigQuery, to make it easier to access Solana data. It is also working on bringing Solana support to its Blockchain Node Engine. Support for Solana will go live in the first quarter of next year, Nalin Mittal, Web3 lead for Google Cloud, said at Breakpoint,…

Top investment deals across the crypto sector over the last week (Oct. 29–Nov. 4, 2022): Fireblocks-powered crypto custodian RakkaR Digital raises $10 million RakkaR Digital, a Singapore-based crypto custodian that uses technology from Fireblocks, has raised $10 million in a seed funding round. The round was backed by a single investor — SCB 10X —…

Top crypto news from the Middle East region over the last week (Oct. 29 – Nov. 4, 2022): Visa announces World Cup NFT auction In partnership with the exchange giant Crypto.com, payments giant Visa has launched a new NFT initiative dubbed “Visa Masters of Movement” to celebrate the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar. The…

Swiss investment bank UBS AG introduced its digital bond, claiming to be the world’s first publicly traded bond settled on both blockchain-based and traditional exchanges. The bond will be issued on the blockchain platform of SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), not requiring a central clearing counterparty. Issuing the blockchain-based bond will probably encourage more banks to…