Voyager Digital Buys European Crypto Exchange Focused on Institutional Investors

Crypto-asset broker Voyager Digital Ltd is buying LGO Markets, a French cryptocurrency exchange focused on corporate investors. The two firms will merge under one brand, Voyager, and their two separate native tokens, VGX and LGO, will also merge. The deal grants Voyager, a Canadian Securities Exchange-listed (CSE) firm, access to the European retail market through LGO’s Virtual Asset Service Provider licence held with the French financial regulator, industry media reports. LGO will cease to concentrate on institutional investors on Oct. 31, as it simultaneously assumes the Voyager brand. To complete…

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Prepping for Next Year’s Travel Rule: 25 US Crypto Service Providers Publish Compliance Solutions Paper

A great number of cryptocurrency businesses are preparing for the upcoming Financial Action Task Force (FATF) rules toward cryptocurrencies, specifically the Travel Rule. This month 25 Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) published a paper that outlines how American-based VASPs aim to comply with the FATF Travel Rule. Digital currency companies, otherwise known as Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) in the eyes of global regulators are concerned about regulation and compliance this year. In fact, in the recent report written by the Digital Currency Group (DCG), the survey’s findings indicate over…

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Mastermind of Alleged Billion Dollar Spanish Pyramid Scheme Arrested, Faces 16 Year Prison Sentence

The CEO of Arbistar the Spanish investment company, Santiago Fuentes, has been arrested and arraigned on charges of fraud, belonging to a criminal organization and money laundering. Fuentes, who has been in hiding since September, was arrested at one of his properties in the south of Tenerife. The Arbistar Pyramid Scheme Fuentes’ arrest stems from lawsuits filed by Arbistar clients who allege pyramid fraud after the bitcoin trading company abruptly froze accounts leaving 32,000 families affected. During a hearing, the Investigating Court Number 3 of Arona (Tenerife) described operations of…

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Bitcoin Is A Mature Asset

Bitcoiners have to endure a lot of criticism from those who are still skeptical of the digital asset. A lot of the time, this skepticism comes from misunderstandings about the true nature of what the network is capable of. Headlines like “Bitcoin Was Hacked,” “Bitcoin Is Used By Criminals,” and “Bitcoin Is Bad For The Environment” are examples of the common misunderstandings that Bitcoiners have to disprove to their colleagues, friends and family whenever the topic comes up.  One such argument that may be difficult to counter is the fact…

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Video: Sync Bitcoin Faster! Assume UTXO

On this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors discuss “Assume UTXO,” a proposal and project by Chaincode Labs alumnus James O’Beirne. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, bottlenecks for scaling Bitcoin is initial block download: the time it takes for a Bitcoin node to synchronize with the Bitcoin network, as it needs to process all historic transactions and blocks in order to construct the latest UTXO-set: the current state of bitcoin-ownership. Aaron and Sjors explain some of the ways sync-time has been sped up over…

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Bitcoin Businesses on the Mend: Report Shows 57% of Crypto Execs Expect the Industry to Accelerate, Companies Are Hiring

Digital Currency Group (DCG) recently published the firm’s “State of Crypto 2020” report which polls more than 150 portfolio crypto companies. According to the study, 75% of the respondents believe the value of their business has grown this year, while 50% of the startups have seen outperforming start-of-year projections. The state of the cryptocurrency industry is growing according to Digital Currency Group’s (DCG) latest report. The study surveyed over 150 DCG portfolio companies’ executives in order to “quantify sentiment and provide qualitative analysis of operational trends in the crypto community.”…

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Grayscale Adds $300 Million in Cryptocurrency Assets Under Management in Just 24 Hours

Grayscale Investments said Thursday that it added $300 million in net assets under management (AUM) in just the last 24 hours. The firm now has a record $7.3 billion in total AUM, according to a tweet by Barry Silbert, chief executive officer of the Digital Currency Group, Grayscale’s parent company. The biggest daily increases were reported in the litecoin trust, whose value rose 8% to $34.3 million. The bitcoin trust remains Grayscale’s biggest portfolio, inching 4% to $6 billion. The ETH and BCH trusts rose 4.9% and 4.6% respectively. Others…

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Yearnify Finance (YFY) Next Generation Decentralized Finance Project, Token Pre-sale is Now Live

PRESS RELEASE. Yearnify Finance is a community-centered DeFi-project, modeled to take the successful features of Yearn Finance (YFI), and improve upon them, we aim to bring the true value of yield farming finance accessible to all users, we offer the most secure and simple way to earn reliable yields on your assets. Yearnify Finance is a powerful DeFi Platform focusing on staking, farming, borrowing and mortgage. Our platform is powerful enough from a scalability, interoperability, developability and governance perspective to help make the vision of Web3 a reality that aims…

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Russian Public Officials Must Now Declare Their Crypto Holdings as Income

Public officials in Russia will now be required to declare all the crypto assets they hold as income. The measures are with effect from Jan. 1, 2021, local media reported. Russia’s prosecutor general Igor Krasnov declared: “Starting next year, civil servants will be required to declare [virtual] currencies on an equal basis with other assets.” Krasnov said this on Oct. 20 while speaking at a corruption meeting involving 15 other prosecutor generals from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states and elsewhere. The SCO is an eight-member political, economic and…

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