CME Group, the world’s leading derivatives marketplace, announced it plans to further expand its cryptocurrency derivatives offering with the introduction of Bitcoin Euro and Ether Euro futures on August 29, pending regulatory review.

CME Group, the world’s leading derivatives marketplace, announced it plans to further expand its cryptocurrency derivatives offering with the introduction of Bitcoin Euro and Ether Euro futures on August 29, pending regulatory review.

Starting this week on Instagram, Meta is testing digital collectibles with select US creators and collectors to share NFTs that they have created or bought. Meta/Instagram started with the international expansion to 100 countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Asset manager BlackRock has selected cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase to provide the institutional clients of Aladdin®, BlackRock’s end-to-end investment management platform, direct access to crypto starting with bitcoin.
Coinbase Prime will provide crypto trading, custody, prime brokerage, and reporting capabilities to Aladdin’s institutional client base who are also clients of Coinbase.
Built for institutions, Coinbase Prime integrates advanced agency trading, custody, prime financing, staking, and staking infrastructure, data, and reporting that supports the entire transaction lifecycle.

BlackRock and Coinbase will continue to progress the platform integration and will roll out functionality in phases to interested clients.
Access is available for institutions contracted with

JAROWA is a Swiss digital marketplace and transaction platform for insurance companies, property managers, and leasing companies to manage their trusted service providers and digital orders more efficiently. JAROWA has successfully closed its Series A funding round, led by Eos Venture Partners, a strategic venture capital fund focused on InsurTech. The proceeds will be used to further expand JAROWA’s offering throughout Europe.

DIC Corporation, one of Japan’s leading fine chemical manufacturers, is launching a pilot project which seeks to utilize blockchain technology and crypto tokens to improve transparency in plastic recycling and help it meet its environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.

Despite claims of immutability and decentralization, cryptocurrencies and public blockchains, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, are not quite delivering on their promises and are seeing a concentration of power in the hands of a few players.

This year’s cryptocurrency crash, which saw the market lose more than half of its value in the span of six months, is threatening to bring sports sponsorship deals to a halt as crypto companies look to cut costs.

In recent years, Switzerland’s blockchain and digital asset ecosystem has matured rapidly and grown into one of the world’s leading blockchain hubs, a position that’s asserted by its expanding workforce and a rising number of foreign companies setting up operations locally.

FIFA has teamed up with Zug based blockchain technology company Algorand to agree a sponsorship and technical partnership deal. The agreement means Algorand will become the official blockchain platform of FIFA and provide the official blockchain-supported wallet solution.

The Swiss Secretariat for International Finance (SIF) and Elevandi announced the programme and speaker line-up for the inaugural Point Zero Forum, taking place on 21-23 June in Zurich, Switzerland. Elevandi is a Company Limited by Guarantee (GLC) created by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to manage the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF).

Around the world, fraudsters are turning to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to reach billions of potential victims. As losses continue to pile up, regulators are voicing their concerns, with one going as far as suing a social media giant for not taking sufficient steps to tackle the rampant issue.

Binance, a global blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider, announced the opening of its space in at the startup campus STATION F in Paris.

2021 was a blockbuster year for the global blockchain sector, which saw funding activity surge, trading volumes balloon and further growth in key segments including custodians, exchanges, decentralized finance (DeFi), as well as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the metaverse, a new report by Swiss blockchain-focused investment company CV VC, in collaboration with PwC Switzerland, says.

Technological advances and evolving customer expectations are changing the financial landscape, stimulating fintech development and innovation. To keep up with the burgeoning fintech industry, top-quality fintech events are being organized on a regular basis to educate attendees on the latest trends and enable professionals to build meaningful connections.

Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions has collaborated with Bitcoin company NYDIG to launch the Bitcoin Risk Assessment. The Risk Assessment evaluates a financial institution’s control environment related to its participation in the NYDIG Bitcoin platform.

Wecan Group SA, a Swiss Blockchain software provider used  Swiss private banks, is favoring an expansion in France for its internationalization. Behind this choice: an investment from Michel Reybier, owner of La Réserve hotels, and a selection in the Swave program, an initiative of the French government to attract the most promising fintechs in France.

Blockchain technology is yielding tremendous innovation and value creation for consumers and businesses around the world. As the technology becomes more mainstream, companies need scalable, secure, and sustainable infrastructure on which to grow their businesses and support their networks. Google Cloud believes it can play an important role in this evolution.
Building on their existing work with blockchain developers, exchanges, and other companies in this space, Google Cloud announced a new dedicated Digital Assets Team within Google Cloud to support our customers’ needs in building, transacting, storing value, and deploying new products on blockchain-based platforms. This new team will enable our customers to accelerate their efforts in this emerging space and help underpin the

Blockchain-based data-sharing platform Spring Labs announced that is bringing TransUnion’s identity and credit data on-chain to help accelerate Web 3 and DeFi adoption.

SEBA Bank, a digital assets firm with a Swiss banking license from FINMA, announced that it has raised CHF 110 million in a significantly oversubscribed Series C funding round.

As investors increasingly incorporate digital assets into their portfolios, the crypto custody landscape continues to grow and mature. As of late-2021, around US$230 billion worth of digital assets, or about 9% of the total US$2.5 trillion cryptocurrency market, were being stored on the technology solutions of eight crypto custodians, separate research by The Block Research and Blockdata found.

BBVA Switzerland, the Swiss franchise of Spanish multinational financial institution BBVA, has expanded its cryptocurrency custody and trading service with the addition of Ether to its investment portfolio.
Its private banking clients and new gen customers will now have access to both Bitcoin and Ether, a statement from the company said.

A digital programmable euro is essential for innovative business models in Germany, according to the Frankfurt School Blockchain Centre (FSBC).

Bitcoin Capital has expanded its crypto asset offerings by launching two new crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) on the SIX Swiss Exchange.

Tangany has received a license from the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) as the third regulated service provider for the custody of digital assets in the country to provide crypto custody business. Furthermore, Tangany plans to apply for further licenses in Germany and Europe in the future and has already received preliminary permission from BaFin to manage registers of crypto securities.

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%).