Weekly Digest Hot Altcoin events

Coinbase is facing a US probe into whether it improperly let Americans trade digital assets that should have been registered as securities.

Kraken is under federal investigation, suspected of violating U.S. sanctions by allowing users in Iran and elsewhere to buy and sell digital tokens.

FTX.US has opened stock trading to users in all 50 American states.

Bitfinex and Tether launch peer-to-peer video calling app Keet. The two companies have invested $10 million to date in the new project and plan to invest up to $100 million more.

Oasis Labs partners with Meta to assess fairness for its AI models.

Binance CEO sues Bloomberg’s Hong Kong partner for defamation.

Miami is partnering with TIME magazine publisher Time USA, Mastercard, and Salesforce to launch 5,000 Ethereum NFTs.

Huobi Group has been granted MVP provisional approval by the Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), while it undertakes the process of applying for a license, in accordance with VARA requirements.

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp has obtained approval to operate in Italy.

Immutable lays off around 8% of staff, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Crypto venture investment firm Variant raises $450 million for two new venture funds. It raised $300 million for a so-called opportunity fund as well as $150 million fund to invest in more nascent startup projects.

Launch House, a startup incubator, debuts a $10M fund called House Capital with Web3 in focus.

The UK-based bank Barclays is among a crop of new investors joining a funding round for Copper.

The Central African Republic has started selling its Sango Coin crypto. About 5% of the token supply allocated for the public sale has been sold in the first 24 hours.

Thailand-based cryptocurrency exchange Zipmex files for bankruptcy.

Audius, a music streaming protocol, was hacked using a malicious governance vote.

The hacker transferred 18 million AUDIO tokens and sold them for $1.1 million.

Babel Finance lost over $280 million (8,000 BTC and 56,000 ETH) in proprietary trading with customer funds.

The firm now seeks to convert hundreds of millions of dollars of debt into equity and raise more funds in a revolving credit facility, per the deck.

Wallets connected to developers of BNB Chain-based Teddy Doge sold over $4.5 million worth of its TEDDY tokens for other cryptocurrencies over the weekend. TEDDY token fell ~99.7% in 24 hours.

ICOs/IEOs news

Layer 1 blockchain Aptos Labs has raised $150 million in a Series A funding round led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto.

The round included investment from a16z crypto, Multicoin Capital and Circle Ventures among other crypto firms.

Unstoppable Domains, a Web3 service that provides NFT-based domain names for crypto wallets and websites, has raised $65 million in a Series A funding round at a $1 billion valuation.

The raise was led by new investor Pantera Capital and includes funding from Mayfield, Alchemy Ventures, Redbeard Ventures, Polygon, CoinGecko, OKG Investments, and others. Previous backers Draper Associates and Boost VC also took part.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s VeeFriends has closed a $50 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The NFT project said it will use the capital to support building the future IP of the 283 VeeFriends characters.

Blockchain ecosystem Topl has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round.

The raise was co-led by Mercury, Republic Asia and Cryptology Asset Group.

The Sweat Economy team behind the Health and Fitness app — Sweatcoin — has completed $13M in funding, including a private token sale, to accelerate their move into Web3.

A number of blockchain investors joined, including Electric Capital, Spartan Capital, OKX Blockdream Ventures, Swissborg Ventures, and GSR Ventures. Existing investor Goodwater Capital also participated.

AntPool, the mining pool affiliated with mining rig giant Bitmain, has invested $10 million to support the Ethereum Classic ecosystem.

Mighty Action Heroes, a web3 game, has raised $10m in a funding round led by Framework Ventures.

Investors: Mirana, Sfermion, Spartan, Dune Ventures, Sanctor Capital, Folius Ventures, Polygon, Play Future Fund, Everblue, Ancient8, Ready Player DAO, Razer, Avocado DAO, DWeb3, Great South Gate, mrblock and more.

Space and Time, a decentralized data warehouse for blockchain applications, raised $10 million in a seed funding round that was led by crypto investment firm Framework Ventures.

Investors: CoinDesk’s parent company Digital Currency Group, Stratos, Samsung Next, IOSG Ventures, Alliance Ventures and others.

The funds will primarily go toward hiring engineers and building out the platform.

Web3 media company Trustless Media raised a $3.25 million in a seed funding round that was led by Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research with participation from Ava Labs and Red DAO.

Blockchain development company EvaCodes raises a $500,000 round from the Web3-oriented hypra.fund.

Game development giant Square Enix partnered with nonfungible token (NFT) platform Enjin (ENJ) to launch a digital and physical collection featuring Final Fantasy VII, a video game series.

Clearpool has announced its launch on Polygon.

The Arbitrum Rinkeby migration to Nitro has successfully been completed.

The Lido Finance community has voted against a proposal to sell 10 million LDO tokens without any lock-up requirement for $14.5 million to venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital.

Aurora Labs has announced the launch of Vote – a decentralized governance platform to empower the community to govern the protocol themselves.

The VOTE tokens can be earnt by staking AURORA on Aurora+.

The Jungle DEX, an AMM platform from the Elrond team, has introduced an automatic and permissionless listing process.

Lossless has announced that Aegis private beta version is live.

Aegis is a B2B tool that facilitates proactive monitoring of suspicious activity.

Projects will be able to automatically prevent potential flash-loan attacks, prevent their systems from interacting with malicious actors, and more.

Bounce Ecosystem Roadmap & Updates. A fully integrated suite of Web3 marketplaces each housed within its Metaverse City.

Prom is launching a beta test for rental in collaboration with the play-to-earn game CryptoBlades.

 Coinbase and Coinbase Pro have listed Nest Protocol (NEST).

Binance Futures has launched BUSD-margined ETC and LDO perpetual contracts with up to 20x leverage.

Binance Futures has launched coin-margined OP perpetual contracts with up to 20x leverage.