• FTX Gets Court Approval to Sell Billions in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana
Collapsed digital asset exchange FTX was given the green light to sell billions in crypto assets by the judge overseeing its bankruptcy proceedings.
Judge John Dorsey on Wednesday approved that the defunct crypto brand can now sell $3.4 billion in Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other assets at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.
The company’s plan for offloading the assets, first outlined in August, will appoint Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital as the investment manager overseeing the sale. According to the plan, FTX will cap its selling at $100 million worth of tokens per week, a limit that could be increased to $200 million on an individual token basis.
• India, Nigeria, Vietnam lead grassroots crypto adoption: Report
India, Nigeria and Thailand are ranked as the top three countries in Chainalysis’ “2023 Global Crypto Adoption Index,” with lower middle-income (LMI) nations leading the way in the grassroots adoption of cryptocurrencies.
The blockchain analytics firm released an excerpt from the report showing that central and south Asia and the wider Oceania regions dominate the top of its index, with six of the top 10 countries in this part of the world.
The index highlights that worldwide grassroots cryptocurrency is down as a whole in the wake of the FTX implosion of 2022. However, lower-middle-income countries, identified under the World Bank’s classification of nations by wealth, have shown the strongest recovery in grassroots crypto adoption over the past 12 months.
• Franklin Templeton Files for Spot Bitcoin ETF
Global investment firm Franklin Templeton filed for a spot bitcoin exchange traded fund (ETF) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday,1 joining BlackRock, Fidelity and others in seeking to start the first bitcoin ETF.
The spot bitcoin ETF filing from Franklin Templeton has terms similar to those seen in recent applications from other major players in traditional finance. According to the filing, Coinbase (COIN) will act as the custodian of the bitcoin held by the fund. Additionally, the ETF is to be traded on Cboe BZX Exchange and will use the CME’s CF Bitcoin Reference Rate–New York Variant for pricing.
• MetaMask to be usable outside the EVM ecosystem with Snaps launch
MetaMask, the most widely used web3 wallet, has announced the launch of a new software mechanism called Snaps — aimed at expanding its use on blockchain networks that are not natively compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Until now, MetaMask has primarily been used with Ethereum and Ethereum-compatible blockchains like BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism. Snaps will enable MetaMask’s use on non-EVM blockchains that include Cosmos, Solana, Tezos, Starknet and Algorand, among others.
Snaps are software modules that can be integrated into the MetaMask wallet for different add-on use cases, such as making the wallet compatible across multiple blockchain ecosystems with specialized code.
• Binance.US CEO Has Left, Crypto Exchange Cuts 1/3 of Workforce
Binance.US CEO Brian Shroder has left the crypto exchange and the company has eliminated one-third of its workforce, according to a spokesperson.
It’s been a tough year for crypto exchanges in the U.S., with Binance.US feeling particular pressure. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued the company in June for allegedly violating securities laws, which built on accusations from another American regulator.
“The actions we are taking today provide Binance.US with more than seven years of financial runway and enable us to continue to serve our customers while we operate as a crypto-only exchange,” the company said in a statement. “The SEC’s aggressive attempts to cripple our industry and the resulting impacts on our business have real world consequences for American jobs and innovation, and this is an unfortunate example of that.”
• Liquidation cascade puts crypto market into shock: Report
August was the worst month for the crypto markets since Bitcoin bottomed out in November 2022. What was initially perceived by many as merely a summer slump turned into a pronounced market downturn as liquidations cascaded on the derivatives market, erasing 7.3% of BTC’s and 6.9% of Ether’s value. Grayscale’s court victory was only a temporary reprieve from these losses, as the price retraced back to the levels starting out the month. This caused one of the largest liquidation events in crypto, totaling more than $1 billion lost when the price dropped to $26,000.
To further kick the industry when it was down, venture capital (VC) investment inflows were down 42.7% in August from July, only bringing in $401.9 million across 77 deals. Investment in the crypto industry was on the rise up until May of this year but has been steadily declining since.
Concluding Notes:
- FTX Gets Court Approval to Sell Billions in Crypto
- India, Nigeria, Vietnam Lead Crypto Adoption
- Franklin Templeton Files for Spot Bitcoin ETF
- MetaMask to be usable outside the EVM ecosystem
- Binance.US Crypto Exchange Cuts 1/3 of Workforce
- Liquidation cascade puts crypto market into shock
