American cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase announced that it has committed to invest US$500 million of its cash and cash equivalents into a diverse portfolio of crypto assets. Coinbase added that going forward, it will also allocate 10% of quarterly net income into this same portfolio.

US-based neobank MoneyLion announced the launch of its new cryptocurrency capabilities, enabling customers to buy and sell digital currencies within its app. MoneyLion said that eligible customers will initially be able to buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as round-up their debit card purchases in Bitcoin.

Blockchain-based invoice factoring platform Hiveterminal announced that it has expanded to the DACH region as part of its Europe growth plans. Hiveterminal aims to start cultivating relationships with Swiss-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who need fast and continuous access to liquidity without going through the hassle of applying for bank financing.

Not only does bitcoin fail to satisfy the notion of being a currency without a government, but the cryptocurrency is also not a reliable inflation hedge nor a safe haven investment, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a probability researcher and former quantitative trader, says in a recent paper.

With digital payments picking up pace across the globe, social media giant Facebook is extending its payment services to online retailers. Shopify has become the first e-commerce platform to sign up for Facebook Pay. This will allow Shopify merchants to offer Facebook Pay as a payment option during checkout, eliminating the need to re-enter payment information for every transaction.

Visa revealed that its customers had spent more than US$1 billion on its crypto-linked cards in the first half of 2021. The payments giant reported that it had partnered with 50 leading crypto platforms on card programmes that make it easy to convert and spend digital currency at 70 million merchants worldwide.

UEFA and AntChain, the blockchain business of Ant Group, announced a five-year global partnership around blockchain technologies and to jointly explore how blockchain technology can be used to further the digital transformation of football industry and improve the experiences of fans around the world.

Cryptocurrencies have been all the rage this year with total market capitalization surging 132% since the beginning of the year. Given this crypto frenzy, it is quite remarkable how some of the top marketcap ranking firms have eluded  mainstream attention.

Zurich-based FQX secures $4.7M in seed funding to scale their revolutionary eNoteTM infrastructure. Earlybird led the round with participation of SIX Fintech Ventures, the non-strategic corporate venture arm of SIX, and the unicorn founder Carsten Thoma.

ETC Group, a specialist provider of digital asset-backed securities, has announced that it will list its physically backed Ethereum and Litecoin cryptocurrency ETCs on the Swiss Stock Exchange SIX.

There are 56 fintech billionaires around the world who combine a total net worth of US$327.7 billion, data curated by Finextra based on Forbes’ 2021 World’s Billionaires list show. These represent some of the world’s biggest and most successful fintech companies in the world including Ant Group, PayPal, Stripe and Klarna.

Swiss banking group Swissquote announced that it is expanding its cryptocurrency offering with nine additional ones.

Societe Generale announced that it has issued its first structured product as a security token directly registered on the Tezos’ blockchain network.

Delta Exchange, a UK-based institutional-grade crypto derivatives exchange, announced that it has closed a US$ 5 million token raise from existing and new investors where Swiss venture firm Blockchain Valley Ventures (BVV) backed and advised the former on their token raise.

PayPal announced the launch of Checkout with Crypto, where US customers will be able to choose to check out with crypto seamlessly. Building on the ability to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency with PayPal, customers using Checkout with Crypto can check out safely and easily, converting cryptocurrency holdings to fiat currency, with certainty of value and no additional transaction fees.

Bitpanda, an Austrian digital investment platform dealing with cryptocurrency, announced that it has closed it Series B funding round with an investment of $170 million and attained unicorn status with a valuation of $1.2 billion.
The funding round was led by Valar Ventures with participation from partners of DST Global. Bitpanda had also previously secured $52 million during its Series A from Valar Ventures.
The Series B was signed last week and is currently in the necessary approval process of the Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA).
Bitpanda said in a blog post that it would be using the new funding to expand its team which currently has 350 staff members to around 600.
The company has already expanded into France, Spain, Turkey, Italy and Poland in 2020 and will enter additional

Bitcoin’s recent price surge has accelerated institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies leading to institutional investor pouring an estimated US$26 billion into bitcoin over the past eight months, an analysis by SNGLR Group shows.

In Europe, Switzerland, Estonia, Malta and Cyprus have the most advanced and mature blockchain ecosystems with well-developed startup scenes and high levels of regulatory maturity, a paper by the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum says.

Switzerland is home to 130 startups that are applying blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) to finance use cases, new data from Swisscom show. Most of these companies (48%) operate in the banking infrastructure vertical, followed by investment management (24%), and payments (21%).