Here are the top web3 stories from this week.
Products
Blackrock Partners with Coinbase
🤝🏻 Institutional asset management leader Blackrock announced a partnership this week with Coinbase Prime to offer Crypto investing to its enormous customer base. Blackrock customers will now have access to Coinbase’s Crypto trading, custody, prime brokerage and reporting capabilities.
Regulation
U.S. Bans Tornado Cash
⚖️ The U.S. Treasury Department added Tornado Cash to the Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklist. Tornado is a Crypto privacy service where users send Crypto, they get mixed and aggregated with other users’ Crypto, and they come back out anonymized. While there are certainly general privacy use cases, Tornado was used by hackers and criminals to wash their illicit funds. A Treasury official said, “Since its creation back in 2019, Tornado Cash has reportedly laundered more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency.” U.S. exchanges are scrambling to figure out how to address this ban in this developing story.
Market Disruption
More Market Failout
💥 Babel Finance, a Crypto trading firm in Asia, told investors they lost nearly $280MM on the market selloff this year. The firm’s proprietary trading group had excessive risk and leverage, and now they are attempting to raise funds to restructure and continue operations. News also broke of a $3.5MM rug pull by the NFT gaming project Dragoma. I covered rug pulls a few weeks ago in this post.
Capital Raised
Crypto Venture Firms and Startups Get Cash
💰 Hedge fund giant Brevan Howard reportedly is raising a $1Bn Crypto fund. Lattice Capital added $60MM for its second fund, and Portal Ventures closed $35MM for its debut fund. On the startup side, CreatorDAO brought in $20MM for a new media company, and Pinata inked $21.5MM for its NFT platform.
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