The Friday Focus: Issue 29

Apr 15, 2022

Welcome to our Friday newsletter. Here you find the most exciting crypto content from the previous week - curated for you by us.

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Weekly happenings

The pace in the crypto industry is slowing down as industry participants take well-deserved time off as we approach Easter. Still, we see some interesting developments, especially on the regulatory side.

The US Government suspects that a North Korean hacking group was behind last month's $600M Ronin exploit. Unrelated, an Ethereum developer was sentenced to five years in prison for teaching crypto to the North Korean government in 2019. The latest in the EU's streak of increasingly stringent sanctions is a ban on high-value crypto services to Russia.

Let's move over to more benign regulatory territory. For the first time, the Portuguese Central Bank granted a crypto license to a bank, while the state government of North Dakota pushes to double the size of the state's bitcoin mining industry.

Binance announces a €100M expansion into France. Crypto exchanges are expanding all around the globe but seem to be overlooking Africa, which is interesting given that a recent report showed that over a third of Nigerians own crypto.

Blockstream and Block will launch a bitcoin mining center powered by solar power and Tesla batteries. Wikipedia contributors are not as bullish, asking the Wikimedia Foundation to ban crypto donations. On the other hand, Mozilla will accept crypto donations, but only from proof-of-stake coins. Ethereum passed the first major test in its transition to proof-of-stake, but they are still pushing the "merge" from Q2 to Q3.

USDC issuer Circle announces a $400M raise and a partnership with BlackRock. Avalanche developer Ava Labs raises $350M at a $5.25B valuation, and NFT avatar platform Genies achieves unicorn status after a $150M raise at a $1B valuation.