Senator Invests in Bitcoin, yearn.finance Goes Multichain, New Ad From FTX + More News

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.

__________

Investments news 

• US Senator Cynthia Lummis disclosed the purchase of bitcoin (BTC) worth USD 50,001-100,000 in a filing. She executed her latest purchase on August 16 via the brokerage platform River Financial.
• Gaming platform OP Games has raised USD 8.6m of seed funding. OP Games is building a platform that combines NFTs and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), working with developers to create games that they can collaborate on with their communities.
• Chingari, one of India’s short-videos sharing platforms with over 78m downloads, completed a funding round that raised over USD 19m for its GARI token across more than 30 venture funds and individual investors.  Participants include Galaxy Digital, Alameda Research, Solana Capital, and Kraken, among others. With the funds raised, the team will continue development for the Chingari platform, with the near-term roadmap milestones including testing of the blockchain live, Chingari Integration beta, and the upcoming GARI token sale.

DeFi news

• Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol yearn.finance (YFI) has added support for the Fantom Network (FTM), stating that they’ve gone multichain with the launch of Iron Bank Fantom and the first Fantom vaults. They added that “more multichain fun [is] coming soon.” Prior to this, yearn’s services were available only on Ethereum (ETH).

Exchanges news

• Binance said they will stop offering futures, options, and margin trading, as well as leveraged tokens, to users from South Africa due to the country’s regulations. Users will have 90 days to reduce and close their positions for these products.
• FTX has unveiled is new commercial that will play on US national television, in which a man with a moon-shaped head offers insights like, “Aim for the moon, they say. Maybe the moon is tired of being a target”. The commercial is the product of their partnership with US Major League Baseball (MLB) and promotes the FTX crypto trading app.

https://www.twitter.com/FTX_Official/status/1446216330080837634

 

Mining news

• Powerbridge Technologies Co., a SaaS solutions and Blockchain applications provider, said that its subsidiary Powercrypto Holdings is launching Bitcoin and Ethereum mining operations in Hong Kong. Powercrypto aims to deploy 2,600 high-performance mining rigs in Hong Kong, encompassing 600 high-performance BTC mining machines with a hashrate of approximately 60 PH/s, and 2,000 high-performance ETH mining machines with a hashrate of approximately 1,000 GH/s.

CBDCs news

• Software company EMTECH and distributed ledger company Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) announced a partnership to develop “an enterprise-grade, highly performant, highly secure and energy-efficient CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) infrastructure product.” Per the press release, the joint effort will bring together EMTECH’s Ethereum (ETH)-based CBDC Core Solution and Hedera’s public ledger, creating technology that will enable central banks to implement CBDC solutions.

Adoption news

• The Algorand Foundation has launched the Algorand Centres of Excellence Programme (ACE) as a university engagement initiative that aims to make a long-lasting, positive impact in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, they said. The ACE program is being launched with a budget of ALGO 100m (USD 190m) for the next ten years. Universities and non-profit research organizations can apply for funding to cover the cost of the set-up and operations of a center for three to five years.

NFTs news

• Fantasy startup investing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) marketplace Visionrare has shut down temporarily, refunding users who purchased shares and saying it will relaunch soon as a free-to-play game. The company – which lets users bid on auctions of fake NFT shares of real startups to build a “portfolio” and compete with others over whose portfolio is the most profitable – said that they had “underestimated the legal complexities” of the idea.