Another busy news week in fintech with the Celsius bankruptcy saga taking another turn. We also had news from Block's Square small business unit, SWIFT partnering with Chainlink, JPMorgan's UK bank celebrates one year and more.
The news was led by Goldman Sachs again this week as we learned the details of their restructuring. Mastercard is getting deeper into crypto, the CFPB is in turmoil, Voyager Digital customers may get 72% of their assets back and Chase is looking to move into small business payments.
A variety of fintech news this week with FTX reportedly raising $1 billion, Stash announcing they have built their own core, bidding for Voyager assets, Nasdaq launching crypto custody, Adyen partnering with Cash App and more.
2016 was an influential year for blockchain technology; companies across all industries invested in blockchain development; CoinDesk reflects on the year with 13 top stories on blockchain; among the leading headlines were Hyperledger and R3, consortiums which led development within the industry; central banks explored the use of blockchain with the Bank of England announcing in January plans for testing distributed ledger with its settlement system; IBM took a lead role, both with its blockchain as a service offering and involvement with the Hyperledger Project; digital currencies were also at the forefront of industry activity. Source
Realty Shares Advisors and Amplify Trust ETF both launched blockchain ETFs yesterday; both focus on blockchain based companies and invest in companies with a market cap over $200 million; CoinDesk shares more details about the ETFs. Source
Goldman Sachs leads off the news this week with some bad news and some good news. Step raised a huge debt round (eschewing equity), BNY Mellon is getting into crypto, which makes Custodia Bank very unhappy. And of course, there were plenty of crypto stories to round out the news.
Lots of news from or about the government this week with FSOC warning on the dangers of crypto, the White House laying out plans for AI and Congress giving up on crypto legislation for this year.
Kevin McPartland, the head of research for market structure and technology at Greenwich Associates put together his list of the top ten trends that will define finance in 2018; some of the highlights from the list include alternative data become less alternative and more part of the norm; regulators are better at getting things done as opposed to congress; continued innovation in the fintech space and the fear of a potential cyber breach in the space; banks will begin to focus more attention to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Source.
Tradeshift Pay is a new end to end cloud based platform for supply chain payments, supply chain finance and blockchain...
TechCrunch reports that OmiseGO (OMG) and Qtum both surpassed $1 billion in market cap; they became the first subtokens built on ethereum and subsequently sold to investors to pass the $1 billion mark; both companies have achieved this in staggeringly short amounts of time; OMG raised $25 million in July and now tokens are valued at over $11 compared to $0.27 at the time of the raise; Qtum raised $15.6 million in March with tokens now priced over $17; both companies do not have an actual product available in the market. Source