“BNY Mellon (NYSE: BK), the world’s largest custodian bank with some $41 trillion in assets in its safekeeping, is moving into crypto. Announced Thursday, BNY Mellon will roll out a new digital custody unit later this year, to help clients deal in digital assets.
We are starting with the anchor in this space, which is custody. Then it comes down to what our clients need from us. So that’s not just safekeeping of these assets, they want to leverage them for lending purposes, they want to leverage them for collateral. Then we are also looking at issuing digital assets like tokenized securities, real assets.
There has been some discussion among large crypto exchanges, trading desks and custody businesses about which financial institution will provide white-glove prime brokerage services, currently lacking in crypto. BNY Mellon’s plans would seem to be looking in that direction.”
“The first publicly traded bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in North America has been given the go-ahead by Canada’s financial regulator. The fund seeks to replicate the performance of the price of bitcoin minus the ETF’s fees and expenses.
Senior analyst at Bloomberg, Eric Balchunas, believes the fund in Canada is a “good sign” for a U.S.-sanctioned bitcoin ETF.
Either way, U.S. usually follows shortly after.”
See Also: 4 top universities submit CBDC designs to the Bank of Canada
“Khosrowshahi said the company will look into such options if it can identify a benefit or a need to do it. Uber has been a member of the libra (now diem) stablecoin association since October 2019.”
“PayPal could be to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) what private banks are to physical dollars.
You think about how many [digital wallets] we’re going to have in the next two, three or five years, and we’re a perfect complement to central banks and governments to distribute those digitized forms of currency.
Schulman also revealed that PayPal is looking into smart contracts and tokenizations of other non-crypto assets.”
See Also: PayPal’s Crypto Products Coming to the UK in Months
“Microsoft has launched a browser game that rewards players with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for use inside Minecraft, one of the world’s most popular games. NFTs acquired by playing the game will allow players to unlock a new “quest” inside the MyMetaverse Minecraft server.
Microsoft says the new initiative demonstrates a viable interoperability between multiple platforms, applications and games.
Enjin is proud to work alongside Microsoft to generate innovative opportunities for merging virtual worlds, bringing digital communities closer together and celebrating powerful women in science and tech.”
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“Grayscale Investments has registered an LLC for a prospective Yearn Finance (YFI) Trust. Grayscale now has 33 registered trusts in the state, though only nine are active.
Registering a corporation doesn’t mean that the new business entity is operational. In this case, the LLC is a placeholder for a future fund offering that may or may not come to fruition.”
“RAI tracks longer term gains and losses of ETH without the gigantic movements by taking advantage of control theory from traditional engineering.
The most important thing to understand is that DeFi can and should be detached from the fate of the US Dollar. RAI is a first step in that direction.
Many stable assets in use today are pegged to fiat currencies, a design with many limitations. These networks have limited economic incentives that can be used to influence the market price of their native stablecoins. Reflexer is opening up a completely new design space in the realm of ‘stable’ cryptoassets.”
“A cross-section of Nigerian senators have reacted to the recent Bitcoin ban enacted by the country’s central bank.
For Senator Musa, Bitcoin (BTC) and not mounting foreign debt, decades of poor economic policies, and corruption are to blame for the naira’s decline. Meanwhile, Bitcoin adoption has been on the rise in the country amid questionable monetary policies adopted by the CBN.
Bitcoin has made our currency almost useless or valueless.
Other senators who made their voices heard during the plenary session argued against the CBN ban.”
See Also: ECB’s Lagarde says central banks holding Bitcoin is ‘out of the question’
The Disrupt 