Spot BTC ETFs

The London Stock Exchange has confirmed that it will accept applications for the listing of Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto ETNs in the second quarter of 2024. The exchange-traded funds will require cold storage of Bitcoin or Ethereum, with custody governed by AML regulations in the UK, EU, Switzerland, or the USA. The product is expected to be available only to professional investors.

Mudrex, an Indian subsidiary of Y-Combinator venture capital, announced the listing of spot Bitcoin ETFs from BlackRock, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton to make spot Bitcoin ETFs available to Indian institutional and retail investors. This move opens up another significant market for these products.

The Thai regulatory authority has amended its rules to allow institutions and ultra-high net worth individuals to invest in US-issued spot BTC ETFs. Previously, this was not possible due to legislation governing the investments of asset management companies not extending to ETFs for digital assets.

Grayscale Investments LLC, the largest crypto asset manager, has filed plans with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust, which would be backed by Bitcoin and traded under the “BTC” ticker. Essentially, they seek to launch a clone of the world’s largest Bitcoin-based trust, but with significantly lower fees. If approved, the exchange-traded fund would launch with an unspecified percentage of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), and existing GBTC shareholders would automatically receive a stake in both GBTC and BTC without triggering a taxable event.

Financial Institutions and Crypto Brokers

Several leading financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, and Cboe Global Markets, have completed testing of the Canton Network communication system, which has been operational for a year. The network is designed for institutional assets, serving as an interoperable blockchain network. Institutional investors conducted over 350 simulated transactions via distributed ledger technology in areas such as tokenized assets, fund record-keeping, digital cash, repo, securities lending, and margin management.

The Singapore subsidiary of crypto broker OKX has received in-principle approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore for a Major Payment Institution license, bringing OKX closer to its goal of providing digital payment token services in Singapore.
Coinbase, a leading crypto broker, announced plans to sell $1 billion in bonds to institutional investors to cover existing debts and corporate expenses.

Project Investments

Monad Labs plans to raise a funding round of over $200 million led by Paradigm venture capital, with $150 million supporting the project at a $3 billion corporate valuation. Monad is a high-performance Ethereum-compatible L1 network introducing optimizations in four main areas, resulting in a blockchain capable of processing 10,000 transactions per second (tps).

The Arbitrum Foundation, the team behind the Arbitrum layer 2 network, plans to invest 200 million ARB tokens, equivalent to approximately $400 million, over two years in support of gaming projects running on the blockchain. Subject to DAO approval, most of the funds would be allocated to support the growth of the gaming ecosystem through developer grants.

D2X, a crypto broker based in the Netherlands, has raised $10 million in a financing round led by Point72 Ventures, alongside investors such as GSR Markets. The company plans to double its European presence with the capital raised.
The Berachain DeFi project has raised over $69 million in a funding round led by Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Ventures. The team plans to launch the mainnet in the second quarter of 2024.

Blockchain Developments, Partnerships, Web3, and DeFi

Stablecoin issuer Tether announced that its USDT stablecoin will soon be available on the Celo blockchain. Celo is a network used to facilitate payments for mobile users and is also EVM-compatible. The Celo ecosystem will help facilitate the acceptance and use of USDT in countries like Kenya and Ghana.

MicroStrategy, a US software technology company, announced the purchase of an additional 12,000 bitcoins, approximately $821.7 million. The funds for the purchase came from the successful issuance of $800 million in bonds completed on March 8.
Starbucks, the American multinational coffeehouse chain, will discontinue its Odyssey Beta NFT program on March 31, which was an NFT extension of its existing rewards system. The Odyssey marketplace will move to the Nifty marketplace, but Stamps, like many other NFTs, can be transferred to external wallets and traded on other marketplaces.

Ethereum core developers have implemented the Dencun upgrade on the mainnet, introducing “blobs” that significantly reduce transaction costs for layer 2 chains. Layer 2 rollups can now use blobs instead of the “calldata” method to submit transactions, aiming to maintain low costs even during high network congestion on chains like Base, Optimism, Arbitrum One, zkSync, Starknet, and others.

BNB Chain has introduced a new rollup-as-a-service (RaaS) solution, providing infrastructure for dApp projects to build cost-effective, dedicated rollups on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) network, including codeless deployment options. With RaaS and the ecosystem’s interoperability capabilities combined, developers will have a comprehensive toolkit to build efficient and scalable layer 2 solutions on BSC.

QANplatform, with Hungarian roots, has announced a partnership with an unnamed EU member state to protect its government-owned cybersecurity infrastructure from quantum computer attacks. The partners are developing and implementing post-quantum cybersecurity (PQC) solutions based on the QAN blockchain platform’s post-quantum feature.

Legal Proceedings and Hacking Attacks

The US Attorney’s Office announced the seizure of approximately $1.4 million worth of Tether (USDT), suspected to be proceeds from a customer service scam. The successful seizure was led by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), with active assistance from stablecoin issuer Tether. Tether reports that they continue to cooperate with law enforcement agencies worldwide to create a safer environment.

Charlotte Fangot, alias Krishna Okhandiart, the CEO of Remilia Corporation behind the popular Milady NFT collection, was targeted in a hacking attack, resulting in the theft of over $3 million worth of ETH and NFTs. The main losses were Fumo LP and staked NFTs, which are irrecoverable. Other NFT contracts and metadata ownership rights were previously transferred to hardware wallets, ensuring their security.

The Mozaic Finance yield-generating protocol, operating on multiple blockchain networks, fell victim to an exploit on the Arbitrum network. According to CertiK’s report, the attacker exploited the application with private key access, resulting in the theft of assets worth $2.4 million.

A six-week court trial in the UK initiated by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) against Craig Wright to prove his false claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto has concluded with a verdict. The British court has ruled today that Wright is indeed not the father of Bitcoin. Wright has been engaged in legal and media warfare for years to convince people that he is the creator of Bitcoin, originally based on claims made to the Australian tax office in 2013 that he owns more than 1 million bitcoins.