Surging Adoptions, Unsupporting BUSDs, Winning Cases and 20 Crypto Jokes

Press Release This week in the cryptoverse, there was a lot of crypto. More specifically: major Ethereum staking providers promised not to own more than 22% of validators, Bitcoin adoption in Argentina was surging, contrasting the more measured approach seen in El Salvador, Shibarium resumed token withdrawals via the bridge, Tether established a banking relationship with Britannia Bank & Trust, Argo Blockchain reduced its total losses to $75 million from last year, and the EOS Network secured whitelist approval from Japan’s regulator allowing EOS to be traded against the yen, Friend.tech lost steam after its splashy debut.

Then, SEBA Bank obtained an approval-in-principle from the SFC in Hong Kong, Robinhood ended its crypto business relationship with Jump Trading, while the former was identified as the third-largest BTC wallet owner, Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani was set to invest in blockchain to drive ‘digital adoption in India’, and Prada Group embraced blockchain to combat counterfeit products. OpenZeppelin launched its last blockchain security upgrade Defender 2.0, and Galxe announced the launch of its permissionless self-sovereign identity infrastructure Galxe Protocol.

In Binance news, the exchange decided to delist eight BUSD trading pairs as part of its plan to withdraw support for the stablecoin by 2024, it introduced a new product in Latin America called “Send Cash”, it removed Banco de Venezuela as a payment option from its peer-to-peer services in the country, the head of Binance Asia-Pacific left his position, and Binance was considering a complete withdrawal from the Russian market amid growing Western sanctions. Meanwhile, OKX and Bybit also delisted sanctioned Russian banks from their peer-to-peer services, Coinbase resolved a technical glitch that showed empty balances for some wallets, and Nexo launched a “Dual Mode Crypto Card” to offer debit and credit functionalities for the EEA.

In FTX news, the US DoJ asked a court to reject Sam Bankman-Fried’s planned defense to blame a law firm for the FTX fraud, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys filed a motion seeking his “temporary release”, but the judge denied that request. FTX customers’ info was compromised during the security breach at the bankruptcy claims agent Kroll earlier this month, and phishing attacks escalated for the users following the SIM swap incident.

As this was happening, a class action lawsuit filed against Uniswap was dismissed, Grayscale won its highly anticipated case against the US SEC over the spot Bitcoin ETF application, a US Congressman called for the removal of Gary Gensler as the SEC chair following the Grayscale ruling, US Republican lawmakers accused the Fed of obstructing advancements on the stablecoin bill, and two SEC Commissioners expressed their reservations regarding the agency’s first NFT enforcement action against the media firm Impact Theory. Speaking of NFTs, Cryptoys confirmed that it collaborated with Disney to launch a new collection featuring Mickey Mouse, Minnie, and Pluto, and FirstMate raised $3.75 million for further development of a new NFT storefront builder platform,

In CBDC/mining/won/arrest/job news, Russian banks will have the opportunity to question the Central Bank on its digital ruble pilot next month, » …