“The Archax strategy has always been to expand its regulatory footprint globally, with the EU region being of prime importance for us, post-Brexit,” Graham Rodford, CEO and co-founder of Archax, said in a release. “This acquisition expands and enhances our access to permissions within the EU region, building on those we hold with the FCA in the UK,” he added. Source
The U.S. presidential election is an important short-term catalyst for Coinbase and the wider industry, and could lead to more regulatory clarity, analysts said. Source
While there may be some short-term volatility in crypto markets depending on whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris becomes the leader of the world’s largest economy, what’s more important is the broader integration of crypto, especially bitcoin (BTC), into American finance. For example, the widespread adoption of bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), with BlackRock (BLK), the world’s largest asset-management firm, running the biggest. Source
Coinbase Pours $25M More Into Fairshake as CEO Armstrong Says 'We’re Not Slowing Down' Source
Liu Zhou, 39, said to be from China and Canada, will be sentenced early next year in federal court for “the wash trading of client cryptocurrencies across multiple cryptocurrency exchanges,” according to the DOJ. Wash trading refers to the artificial driving up of asset prices by suggesting a fake level of transaction interest. Source
Any potential CBDC issued by the Federal Reserve would be managed by private-sector banks, Fed officials have said, meaning some of the institutions represented in the advisory group. However, the political chances for U.S. CBDCs, which are strongly opposed by Republican lawmakers, remain dicey in the near term. Source
“Really solid results across the board, I think quarter to quarter, you definitely see volatility playing a role in trading revenues and we saw that play out with softer market conditions in Q3 but we’re overall happy with the results,” Anil Gupta, vice president of investor relations, told CoinDesk. Source
MicroStrategy’s most recent previous disclosure was in mid-September when it announced the purchase of 7,420 bitcoins (BTC) for $458.2 million. That brought its holdings to that point to 252,220 bitcoins acquired for a total of $9.9 billion, or an average price of $39,266 each. At the current price of about $72,000 the company’s bitcoin is worth more than $18 billion. Source
In this week’s issue of The Protocol, our newsletter on blockchain tech, we’re covering the Optimism’s $42.5M token pledge to Kraken, crypto VC funding, grants for Bitcoin open-source developers, and Polymarket’s (negligible) impact on Polygon’s bottom line. Source
Termina, the SVM-as-a-Service platform by Nitro Labs, has raised a $4 million seed funding round, led by Lemniscap. [NOTE: SVM stands for Solana Virtual Machine — the operating environment for smart contracts on the Solana blockchain.) According to the team: “Recognizing the lack of SVM infrastructure offerings across the market, Nitro Labs got to work on building Termina, with a clear mandate to scale the SVM while empowering developers to create customizable Solana-based networks optimized for performance and privacy. Currently over 20 ecosystem partners are building alongside Termina, including both…