Bitvo Backs Off FTX Acquisition Deal, Trust Wallet Integrates with Binance Pay, New Ethereum Climate Platform

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

Exchange news

Bitvo announced that its shareholder, Pateno Payments Inc., has terminated its previously announced acquisition agreement with FTX Canada Inc. and FTX Trading Ltd., said the press release. Bitvo has no material exposure to FTX or any of its affiliated entities, it added.Binance announced that users can transfer crypto between the exchange and the decentralised Trust Wallet with Binance Pay’s new integration. When users transfer assets from Binance Funding Wallet to their Trust Wallet accounts, they won’t need to scan/input a wallet address – only click “Deposit from exchange” on Trust Wallet App. There are no extra fees except blockchain gas fees, it said.Bitfinex announced the Bitfinex Freedom Manifesto at the Adopting Bitcoin conference in El Salvador, “outlining the exchange’s vision for a new age of self-sovereignty enabled through the use of peer-to-peer solutions and decentralized ledger technologies,” said the press release. The full Bitfinex Freedom Manifesto is accessible here.

Ethereum news

At COP27, a group of Web3 companies convened by ConsenSys and Allinfra, joined civil society leaders and the UNFCCC Climate Innovation Hub to announce the creation of the Ethereum Climate Platform (ECP) – an initiative to address Ethereum (ETH)’s former proof-of-work (PoW) carbon emissions, said a press release, adding: “Its mission is to incentivize and fund the development of real-world projects that will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and deliver positive environmental and social impact long into the future.” Founding members include AAVE, Art Blocks, Celo, Codegreen.Org, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, ERM, Filecoin Green, Gitcoin, Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC), Huobi, Laser Digital (Nomura), Microsoft, Polygon, The Climate Collective, UPC Capital Ventures, and W3bcloud, in collaboration with Gold Standard.

Mining news

Bitcoin (BTC) mining hosting provider Compute North is selling 11 containers for some $1.55 million to Crusoe Energy Systems. The US Bankruptcy Court in Texas approved the sale, according to the documents filed Wednesday. Crusoe had already made a deposit worth $187,000 on October 28.

Real estate news

South Africa will soon have its first non-fungible token (NFT) apartment complex for sale, said an announcement. Evolution Properties, a property developer in Cape Town, is releasing 294 NFTs that give the token holders the right to purchase one of the 294 units in a building in Salt River this month. The development is called The Spectrum, and the project is being carried out in collaboration with Web3 marketplace Momint. The NFT integration is intended to speed up the sales process and eliminate intermediaries such as the deeds office, while it also makes the property more investible and reduces administration, it said.

Investment news

Global broker Stonewall FX announced the integration of a “Bitcoin funding” method in their payments index, enabling clients to make deposits in BTC.Matter Labs, the team behind zkSync, a zero-knowledge rollup (ZK-rollup) Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, announced it has raised $200 million in a Series C round co-led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly, with additional participation from LightSpeed Venture Partners, Variant, and existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). This latest round brings the total to $458 million, which includes the $200 million raised in Series C, a $200 million dedicated ecosystem fund, $50 million in Series B led by a16z, and $8 million in prior investments. The team also announced the upcoming open-source MIT License, and the latest partnership with OpenZeppelin.

NFT news

Yuga Labs, the team behind Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), CryptoPunks, and Meebits, announced the Punks Legacy Project. The program’s inaugural donation is CryptoPunk #305 to Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The Punks Legacy Project will oversee the donation and installation of several CryptoPunks to leading contemporary art museums around the world. Russian punk/protest band Pussy Riot will perform at the unveiling and installation of CryptoPunk #305 on December 2.Sologenic, an ecosystem utilizing the on-demand tokenization of a wide range of assets, has announced the adoption of XLS-20, the protocol design for NFTs on the XRP Ledger (XRPL). This new standard introduces native support for NFT transactions on the XRPL, allowing the Sologenic NFT marketplace to offer cost-efficient minting, it stated.

DeFi news

THORChain, a non-custodial decentralized exchange (DEX), launched its single-sided staking capabilities, allowing community members to take advantage of decentralized finance (DeFi) while maintaining full ownership of their native bitcoin (BTC) or other assets. Savers vaults are enabled for the following assets on their native chains to earn like-kind yield: BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC, DOGE, ATOM, and AVAX.MakerDAO, a DeFi lending protocol and creator of the DAI stablecoin, said it launched Maker Teleport, a multichain infrastructure for teleporting DAI across different blockchain networks. Maker Teleport is now available on the smart contract chains Arbitrum and Optimism, enabling users to almost instantly transfer DAI between these chains, significantly reducing both time and fees, it said.dStorage project 0Chain became Züs, offering fast solutions for DeFi, NFTs, and Web3. Züs is an open-source protocol and a high-performance decentralized storage network, and this latest change reflects the increased power of the chain through product development and economic model maturation, said the press release. The team also announced an ecosystem of dapps that will be available soon.

Career news

AltLayer, a provider of pay-as-you-go blockchains for Web3 scaling, announced that Amrit Kumar, former Chief Science Officer at Zilliqa, will be joining the company as Chief Operating Officer. Kumar will execute the company’s global operations strategy and support CEO Yaoqi Jia in pursuing business development verticals, said the press release.