TronWeekly

Crypto World News

You are here: Home / Search for "USDC"

Search Results for: USDC

Uniswap Brings NFT Marketplace Genie Into Its Fold

by

Leading DEX Uniswap has announced buying NFT marketplace aggregator Genie for an unspecified amount. The platform has now expanded its products to include both ERC-20s and NFTs. Further, the exchange published a blog and stated,

NFTs will be integrated into our products, starting with the Uniswap web app, where soon you’ll be able to buy and sell NFTs across all major marketplaces. We’ll also integrate NFTs into our developer APIs and widgets, making Uniswap a comprehensive platform for users and builders in web3.

The trading platform’s foray into NFTs began in 2019, as it launched Unisocks, the first instance of NFT liquidity pools, and of NFTs backed by real-world assets. Per the blog, the DEX revealed a USDC airdrop for historical Genie users.

“The airdrop will launch in August and be claimable for up to 12 months, based on a snapshot that has already been taken. Stay tuned for more details,” the blog read.

image 7
Uniswap Brings NFT Marketplace Genie Into Its Fold 2

The blog post ended with a disclaimer that the acquisition would not affect the Uniswap Protocol, Governance, or the UNI token. And that Genie users will continue to have uninterrupted service to its website until the new Uniswap NFT experience is available.

Following the integration, UNI’s price surged by 16% in just 6 hours. At the time of publication, the value stood at $4.84, up by 7% in the past 24 hours.

Uniswap Surpassed Ethereum in Terms of Daily Fees

Two days back, Uniswap overtook its home network, Ethereum. With $4.3 million in fees generated as of June 20, the world’s largest decentralized exchange [DEX] has jumped to the top of CryptoFees’ leaderboard.

Even though its holders don’t get a piece of the cash flows, which come from users paying a fee when swapping between digital assets.

Still, as one of the most recognizable DeFi players and other smart contract-enabled activities, it’s noteworthy that a protocol topped Ethereum, in terms of fee generation. 

Above all, the lucrative fees have come during an extremely turbulent period for crypto and world markets at large. It is quite apparent by now, despite being a dismal year for digital asset prices, that the DeFi sector keeps on working.

A Controversial Voting By A Solana-Based DeFi App Led To Huge Uproar; Here’s Why

by

On 19 June 2022, Solana-based DeFi app Solend initiated a voting proposal [SLND1] to mitigate on-chain liquidation risk from a whale having a tremendous margin position.

As per the initial blog post, efforts to contact the largest holder went unanswered, which is why they voted to temporarily take over the big HODler’s wallet till it reaches a safe level.

The voting would grant Solend Labs complete autonomy to liquidate the whale’s position which has nearly $21 million in SOL, through the Over-the-Counter [OTC] route instead of the usual DEXes, in case the token drops to $22.30.

The proposal received overwhelming support with 97% responding YES and 2.5% voting NO. Solend Labs then informed that the special margin requirements for accounts that represent over 20% of borrows have now gone into effect.

Immediately after the proposal was passed, criticisms began to mount over the “forced takeover” questioning whether the platform is truly decentralized. There were also discussions over how the voting was hastily arranged and lasted only a day.

Some posted screenshots where it showed one user with 1,014,210 votes alone. Another quipped,

“VCs, insiders, etc hold the overwhelming majority of wealth in the Solana ecosystem due to the initial token distribution, so it isn’t a surprise that the solend protocol vote passed.”

Solend Proposes To Revoke Previous Voting

Amidst the growing clamor, Solend finally responded with a fresh plan to nullify the earlier proposal [SLND1], increase the voting duration, and bring a new one that does not involve emergency powers to take over an account.

“The price of SOL has been steadily increasing, buying us some time to gather more feedback and consider alternatives”, the platform wrote in its latest blog.

Urging the community to be active for the next few days, the borrowing and lending platform stated,

“We recognize that a voting time of 1 day is still short, but we need to act swiftly to address the systemic risk and the fact that normal users can’t withdraw USDC. We ask our community to be active in governance in the next few days. Voting time will be revisited in a future proposal.”

“We’re committed to protecting user funds, transparency, and doing what’s right”, it added.

Office building listed in ETH as an NFT; Price dips by $12M

by

The owner Chris Okada says the building will be relisted in the coming days for adjusting the 40% price drop of Ether.

A New York City office building went on sale 2 weeks ago for $29 million with a Web 3 twist. The rights to purchase the property were sold as an NFT on OpenSea.

The price of the listing was set in Ether, which plummeted over 40 % since the start of June, taking the listing price of the building down with it.

The dollar value of the NFT has got down from $29 million to $16.8 million. However, its owner Chris Okade says the price will soon be adjusted.

In an interview with CoinDesk earlier this week, Chris Okada said “We are going to relist the sale at $29.5 million”. And when asked if he would stay with ETH or go with USDC, Chris said that if he goes with ETH it will be closer to 26,500 ETH. It is currently listed for 15000 ETH.

Chris Okada is the CEO of Okada & Co, a commercial Real Estate company that owns 43 buildings in Manhattan and is now dealing with blockchain to make clientele strong.

In a recent interview, Okada says, “There are crypto billionaires and crypto millionaires out there but they have no real utility instead just keeping them in their wallet,” He also said about his listing of buildings in NFT that he sees this as a marriage of his real estate knowledge and NFT interest.

Linking real estate business with NFT

Okada said that his company is trying its best to link its real estate business with technology such as blockchain. They were excelling in it but ran into a legal complication with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently.

Future Plans

Future plans for the Blockchain-based real estate sales will include rentable office space and co-working desk, a similar concept exercised by the SOHO neighborhood of New York City just 2 months ago.

Justin Sun to the rescue of USDD

by

In an attempt to save the peg of USDD, Justin Sun revealed today that he was increasing the reserve by 500 million USDC. To combat the exceedingly challenging market conditions, the TRON DAO Reserve team stated that USDD is now collateralized by 310 percent. The extra effort is being made to guarantee that the USDD does not end up like the UST.

Screenshot 42

TRON’s recently established stablecoin (USDD) may be in peril only a few months after its inception. USDD is experiencing its toughest test yet, with the US-pegged stablecoin falling to $0.9807 at 07:52 UTC this morning. USDD has rebounded significantly as of press time, but it is still one cent short of the dollar, trading at $0.969412.

However, the de-pegging of USDD had trembled the crypto market enthusiasts by instilling a sense of fear in them. Nonetheless, Justin Sun had given clarity regarding the same.

Screenshot 43

TRX workforce to increase as Justin Sun follows Binance

Justin Sun is following Binance’s lead in extending recruiting to help those who have lost their jobs due to the current market conditions. Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, has offered his support to anyone who has been laid off by a number of crypto companies.

Sun stated on Twitter that those who have lost their employment might apply for various positions in the TRX ecosystem.

“For those who have lost their jobs over the current extreme market condition, trondao, Poloniex, BitTorrent, usddio, apenftorg, DeFi_JUST, defi_sunio are all actively hiring! We are targeting to hire 50% more.”

Additionally, Binance appears undeterred by corporate hiring sprees and continues to hire. Crypto companies such as Crypto.com, Gemini, Coinbase, and BlockFi have all announced layoffs and hiring freezes.

Other companies, such as Bitso, Mexico’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, have just let off 10% of their workforce. Buenbit, a cryptocurrency exchange based in Argentina, has laid off 45 percent of its workforce.

In other news, Coinbase just revealed that, because of the difficult market conditions and economic volatility, it will lay off 18 percent of its workforce. Almost 1,100 employees were laid off, according to the company’s release.

This Singaporean Exchange Accepts Crypto To Attract High-Net-Worth Clients

by

Singapore-based trading platform ADDX has become the first financial firm in the city-state to accept cryptocurrencies as proof of accredited investor status or in other words high-net-worth clients. The recognized assets are Bitcoin [BTC], Ethereum [ETH], and Tether [USDC].

ADDX in a statement on Wednesday stated that it would recognize only those cryptocurrencies that have a higher market cap and would apply discount rates when valuing these assets.

Doubling down on the digital assets market, ADDX CEO Oi-Yee Choo said,

“Cryptocurrencies are here to stay. They no longer exist only on the fringes of wealth and investment conversations”.

“With a large minority of investors owning crypto, it is reasonable for these digital assets to be recognized as a part of one’s portfolio – not unlike any other assets that can be valued in the marketplace, such as real estate or equity,” Choo added.

Under Singapore’s law, individuals need to have at least $217,991 of income from the past 12 months, $1 million in net financial assets, or $2 million in net personal assets to qualify as accredited investors.

ADDX also divulged that it will accept crypto assets only in the category of net personal assets and will apply a 50% discount rate for bitcoin or ether when calculating the value of these holdings and a 10% discount for USDC stable coin.

On the contrary, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat has advised retail Investors to stay clear of cryptocurrencies citing that they are “highly risky.” He stressed, “We cannot express this enough.”

Singapore’s Deputy PM Urged Investors To Refrain From Crypto Trading

Speaking along the sidelines of the recently held Asia Tech x Singapore [ATxSG] summit, the minister took a critical note of the fallout of cryptocurrency terra [LUNA] and algorithmic stablecoin terrausd [UST], where many investors reportedly lost millions and used it as an example to support his point.

Singapore has maintained a cautious approach toward crypto, with the country’s central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore [MAS], as the main regulator of the crypto sector. 

For the last two years, the MAS has only granted licenses and in-principle approvals to 11 digital payment token service providers. As per reports nearly 100 entities have failed to meet regulator requirements.

TRON Founder- “USDD’s New Makeover Will Spearhead The Stablecoin 3.0 Era”

by

TRON founder Justin Sun today announced a new upgrade in its stablecoin project USDD which involved increasing transparency and adding collateral.

According to the medium post published, the project has upgraded itself to the first over-collateralized decentralized stablecoin [OCDS], which it claims to offer faster transactions with the highest collateral ratio.

By doing this, it aspires to advance the Stablecoin 3.0 era, making finance accessible to all.

As per the blog post, USDD enjoys a guaranteed collateral ratio of at least 130%, higher than the 120% set by DAI. The real-time collateral ratio of USDD is published on the TRON DAO Reserve’s website, publicly available 24/7.

Sun stated that the “upgraded, over-collateralized USDD will add more diversified features to underpin its stability. Currently, the 200%+ collateral ratio offers USDD a very strong safety net,” he claimed.

USDD, just like Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin UST, made its appearance on the TRON blockchain on May 5. The latest move is seen as a preventive measure to avoid a Terra Luna situation.

Tron Founder’s Future Roadmap of USDD

On May 31, founder Sun published a blog outlining the lessons he learned from Terra’s dramatic fallout. According to Sun, these lessons will be implemented in TRON’s decentralized stablecoin USDD.

In his blog, Justin mentioned that “Inorganic and unsustainable growth is bad” and “Transparent over-collateralization is critical to preventing depegging” were the lessons he learned after the Terra crash.

In addition to that, the attempt of Terra to establish the Luna Foundation Guard to diversify UST’s collateral and prevent depegging was already too late. The reserve consisted of just $3 billion worth of BTC, which was not enough to secure the nearly $19 billion UST supply, he wrote.

In Sun’s plans, The TRON DAO Reserve will create a utility for USDD across crypto markets to help drive its adoption. USDD trading pairs aim to have more liquidity than USDT or USDC on both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

The blog post concluded with a rough blueprint of USDD’s journey to be crypto’s new settlement currency.

USDD is also planning to extend its support to multiple chains. Currently, they are active on TRON, BNB Chain, and Ethereum.

Chainlink Deploys 7 Price Feeds For Solana Developers

by

Blockchain oracle pioneer Chainlink Price Feeds has announced integrations on the Solana Mainnet for decentralized finance [DeFi] applications. In accordance with the press release, the latest deployment will help developers building on Solana to leverage seven different Chainlink Price Feeds that include BTC, ETH, USDC, and others.

Chainlink claims to offer high-quality near real-time price updates, enabling them to build a new realm of hybrid smart contract applications that provide superior performance around trade execution and risk management.

Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana said, the launch on Solana will grant DeFi developers access to the most widely used oracles in the blockchain. “Solana’s high-speed blockchain can deliver high-frequency pricing data to dapps, enabling developers to build new DeFi dapps and products,” he added.

The integration with Solana is a major leap forward for the kind of scalable, institutional-grade, DeFi applications that can be built only on Solana,” Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink.

Additionally, Chainlink also plans to launch the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol [CCIP]. With this new feature, the platform boasts that Solana users and developers will be able to move tokens and execute smart contracts across different blockchains, enabling the creation of cross-chain applications.

In the next few months, hundreds of additional Chainlink Price Feeds, as well as other Chainlink oracle services, will be made available to Solana developers during the next stages of the integration, the blog post read.

That said, Solana which was once considered a rising star of the cryptoverse has grabbed the limelight for the wrong reasons. The network’s latest string of outages has cast serious doubts on its reliability.

Chainlink’s latest addition comes amidst Solana’s network woes

At 16:55 UTC on June 1, developers claimed that the outage was due to a bug in the blockchain’s consensus mechanism. They then asked validators to upgrade their client versions as the bug fix was released and even published instructions on executing the restart procedure.

The mainnet was eventually restarted at 21:00 UTC.

Immediately after the incident, Alchemy, the Web3 development platform, and infrastructure provider announced its support for the blockchain. This goes to show that the controversial blockchain continues to be a preferred choice for building Web3 applications.

Chipotle Adds Native Option To Pay for Food With Crypto; Sets Community Buzzing

by

Chipotle, the iconic Mexican fast-food company, is now taking cryptocurrency payments at all of its 2,950 locations in the United States, thanks to the digital payment service Flexa.

Flexa announced the agreement on June 1st, and Chipotle will accept all 98 cryptocurrencies supported by Flexa, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and seven dollar-pegged stablecoins such as USD Coin (USDC).

The fast-food behemoth joins other significant firms such as Regal Theaters and Bancoagrcola, El Salvador’s largest financial institution, as Flexa partners with the bank to facilitate both retail and merchant Bitcoin transactions for its clients.

Chipotle is not new to crypto

Chipotle has previously dabbled in the world of cryptocurrencies. It gave away $100,000 worth of Bitcoin together with free burritos in April 2021 to commemorate National Burrito Day, claiming to be the first U.S. restaurant brand to do so.

For the “chiptocurrency” promotion, Chipotle teamed up with former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas to create a game in which participants could win a burrito or up to $25,000 in Bitcoin by guessing a code.

The game mocked Thomas’ loss of over 7,000 BTC after forgetting the password to his crypto wallet, which was valued at over $208 million at the time.

Other fast-food companies have looked into or expressed interest in cryptocurrencies and Metaverse uses for their brands. In November 2021, Burger King teamed up with trading platform Robinhood to give out free Dogecoin (DOGE) BTC and ETH with meal purchases.

McDonald’s, which is notorious for mocking crypto Twitter, submitted a slew of trademark applications in February, including ones for “a virtual restaurant incorporating actual and virtual goods” in the Metaverse and “running a virtual restaurant with home delivery.”

Despite the market turmoil, crypto acceptance in the United States remains robust, and retailers have shown a willingness to integrate payment solutions to capitalize on the increased interest.

Only 4% of retailers presently take cryptocurrency payments, according to a crypto.com global study issued in February, but nearly 60% expressed interest in accepting cryptocurrency payments within the next year.

MoneyGram Strikes Partnership With Stellar to Launch a Stablecoin Remittance Service

by

MoneyGram International, one of the world’s leading cross-border transfer businesses, has teamed up with the Stellar blockchain to develop a stablecoin-based money transfer platform. Users of Stellar wallets will be able to send Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) to receivers who will be able to utilize the MoneyGram network to cash them out for their native fiat currency.

“We’re trying to be a bridge from the crypto world to the fiat world.”

MoneyGram CEO Alex Holmes said in an interview.

It is also in talks with third-party companies in El Salvador to offer digital wallets in addition to the Chivo wallets, which were released last year when the country made Bitcoin (BTC) legal tender. If it can reach an arrangement with one of these companies, it will be able to compete for BTC transfers.

MoneyGram praises El Salvador

“If a country like El Salvador is going to make Bitcoin seamless with US dollars in country, I think that consumers, through MoneyGram, should be able to transfer Bitcoin to El Salvador or transfer dollars and convert them to Bitcoin.”

Holmes spoke to Bloomberg

The decision comes as remittances become increasingly common in emerging economies, as well as heightened scrutiny of stablecoins that are supposed to maintain a 1-to-1 relationship with a commodity or currency like the US dollar.

Users with Stellar blockchain digital wallets will be able to convert their holdings to Circle Internet Financial’s USDC stablecoin once MG starts the service. The service can be used to convert the stablecoin to fiat currency.

MG has a previous deal with Ripple Labs, which previously held a large number of the company’s shares. Ripple and MoneyGram dissolved in March 2021, shortly after Ripple was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States. A class-action lawsuit was filed against MoneyGram in March 2021 as a result of their partnership with Ripple.

In October 2021, MG and Stellar began working together, and a trial service was released in November. There had been speculations earlier in the summer that Stellar was interested in purchasing MoneyGram.

Goldman Sachs and Barclays Spearhead $70M Funding Round For A Crypto Fintech

by

Leading investment banks Goldman Sachs and Barclays are among the few to lead a $70 million funding round for a UK-based crypto trading platform Elwood Technologies, which valued the firm at around $500 million, according to a report by Financial Times.

The funding exercise was supported by crypto-friendly German bank Commerzbank, digital asset investment manager Galaxy Digital and Dawn Capital. Elwood was founded by billionaire British hedge fund manager Alan Howard.

The latest backing is another example of the growing adoption of digital assets despite the prevailing market condition.

Speaking on the financial round, Elwood Technologies CEO James Stickland said the fundraising was “another validation of the longevity of crypto” brushing off the falling prices from the last few weeks:

We’re getting investments from financial institutions that aren’t expecting to get massive returns in 15 minutes. They’re investing in the infrastructure, I think it’s a reassurance message.

Elwood Technologies provides a crypto portfolio management system with crypto market information and trading infrastructure for institutional investors that features an interface that connects to crypto exchanges, liquidity providers, and custodians.

Commenting on the deal, Goldman Sachs’ global head of digital assets Mathew McDermott, stated that the investment reflects its “continued commitment” to cryptocurrencies. He then added

“As institutional demand for cryptocurrency rises, we have been actively broadening our market presence and capabilities to cater to client demand.”

Goldman Sachs’s Massive Crypto Push

Last month, Goldman Sachs [GS] offered its first bitcoin-backed loan which signifies Wall Street’s deepening crypto ties. The banking giant claimed its’s secured lending facility enabled a borrower to use bitcoin as collateral for a cash loan.

Goldman, which has a dedicated digital assets team, traded its first over-the-counter bitcoin options to Galaxy Digital in March.

Looks like the investment firm is following in the footsteps of other traditional finance giants moving further into crypto. A few months ago, Cowen launched a digital assets unit and BlackRock [BLK] participated in the  $400 million funding round for USDC stablecoin creator Circle.

With regards to Elwood, the firm will continue to have Howard as the majority stakeholder, who had been one of the UK’s most prominent investors to take the plunge into crypto markets.