Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was the backbone of many startups and venture capital funds around the world. Its collapse signifies the biggest banking failure since the 2008 financial crisis. While the crypto market has largely been spared from an adverse effect, the same cannot be said for the non-fungible token (NFT) space.
According to the latest edition of the DappRadar report, the NFT traders went “numb” in response to the banking turmoil in the United States.
NFT Space Amidst Banking Chaos
The NFT industry followed a steady upward trajectory for most of 2023. In fact, the sales recorded highs as the broader market recovered while mainstream adoption of NFTs also saw a spike. However, the collapse of SVB and the de-pegging of one of the largest stablecoins – USDC – was

On-chain analyst Lookonchain detected an address tied to the exploiter of the Ethereum-based lending protocol sent 100 Ether (approximately $171,700) to a wallet associated with Lazarus Group’s mammoth Ronin network hack.
While it is still unclear if the Euler exploiter is affiliated with the North Korean state-sponsored cyber threat group linked to the North Korean Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), the interaction is peculiar as many community members had previously speculated that the notorious collective could be behind it.
Lazarus Group was initially sanctioned by OFAC in 2019 and has been involved in several exploits. In addition to the $625 million exploit of Axie Infinity’s Ronin network, it was also behind last year’s $100 million Harmony bridge hack.
Euler

Payment processing company Stripe announced signing agreements for a Series I fundraising of over $6.5 billion at a valuation of $50 billion.
Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, MSD Partners, and Thrive Capital will participate in the funding round alongside new investors such as GIC, Goldman Sachs Asset and Wealth Management, and Temasek.
The Funding
Stripe intends to deploy the freshly raised funds to provide liquidity to current and former employees and address staff withholding tax obligations related to equity awards, resulting in the retirement of company shares that will offset the issuance of new ones to Series I investors.
Stripe said in a press release that it does not require this capital to run its business. Talking about the

The USDC depeg caused significant turmoil in the market last week. The stablecoin issuer Circle claimed that it has cleared “substantially all of the backlog of minting and redemption requests for USDC.”
In a recent statement, Circle said it had redeemed $3.8 billion of USDC tokens over the period and minted $800 million.
The Boston-headquartered company also went live with a new transaction banking partner for domestic US wires in and out on March 14.
Circle further revealed going live for international wires to and from 19 countries as well with the same partner the following day. The team expects to “bring more capabilities back online” starting this week.
Highlighting the events of the past week that affected the liquidity operations for USDC, the company said,
“Circle

Last week’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the subsequent contagion appeared to have worked in favor of the decentralized exchanges as trading activity soared to levels not seen since November 2022.
According to the latest data from DeFiLlama, the daily trading volume on decentralized exchanges was up by an astonishing 255.36% over the past week and is inching closer to $60 billion, a level last seen four months ago. The figure reached almost $25 billion on March 11th as a result of investors scrambling to move money.
All the top decentralized exchanges were in the green, with the majority noting increases upwards of 100%.
Uniswap is clearly the largest decentralized exchange, as per the leaderboard, raking in a trading volume of $31.69 billion over the past

Coinbase is ramping up its expansion effort, with Singapore being the first stop. As part of its ambitious plan, the crypto exchange has announced forging a strategic banking partnership with Standard Chartered in the city-state to provide its users with an option to move funds between any lender and Coinbase.
The news comes amidst the crypto industry losing a number of banking on- and off-ramps due to the recent turmoil in the US banking industry.
Coinbase-Singapore
According to the official blog post, Singapore customers will now be able to transfer funds to and from their Coinbase account using any local bank in the city-state for free. The aim is to offer users more flexibility and control of their assets by enabling them to cash in or cash out of their Coinbase

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced the addition of key industry members to the newly constituted Technology Advisory Committee (TAC).
The official press release stated that the agency has appointed White House official Carole House as the new chair, while blockchain analysis company TRM Labs’ Ari Redboard has been onboarded as the vice chair of its Technology Advisory Committee.
Committee Members
The Technology Advisory Committee will be joined by executives from IBM, Amazon, CME Group, and Cboe Global Markets. Professors from university law schools, including Cornell, Washington College of Law, and the University of Michigan, have also been named in the list.
The TAC also features several members from the cryptocurrency industry, namely – Ava Labs

Omniscia, the auditing partner of Euler Finance, has released a post-mortem report on the same which stated that the vulnerability that was exploited by the malicious hackers originated from the decentralized finance lending protocol’s incorrect donation mechanism that failed to account for the donator’s debt health.
The vulnerable code introduced in eIP-14 brought about several modifications throughout the Euler ecosystem. This enabled the attacker to create an over-leveraged position and liquidate it themselves in the same block by artificially causing it to go “under-water,” said the firm in a statement.
The feature at the center of the vulnerability was not in the scope of any audit conducted by Omniscia.
An outside audit was responsible for reviewing the vulnerable

Blockchain security firm, Halborn has detected several critical and exploitable vulnerabilities impacting more than 280 networks, including Litecoin (LTC) and Zcash (ZEC). Code-named “Rab13s,” this vulnerability has put over $25 billion of digital assets at risk.
This was first detected in the Dogecoin network a year ago, which was then fixed by the team behind the premier memecoin.
51% Attacks and Other Issues
According to the official blog post, Holborn researchers discovered the most critical vulnerability related to peer-to-peer (p2p) communications which, if exploited, can help attackers craft consensus messages and send them to individual nodes and take them offline. Eventually, such a threat could also expose networks to risks such as 51% attacks and other severe

The decline of centralized entities has worked out well for their decentralized counterparts. Over the weekend, USDC witnessed a significant trading volume on several decentralized exchanges.
Uniswap, for one, reached its highest daily volume ever of $11.84 billion on March 11th. But it isn’t the only decentralized protocol that saw traction.
Decentralized Exchanges Register Impressive Growth
The development comes in the backdrop of Circle’s USDC de-pegging event that occurred over the weekend after the collapse of Signature, Silvergate, and Silicon Valley Bank.
Several centralized crypto exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Bitpay, halted payments and auto conversions in the stablecoin. This caused the stablecoin prices to fluctuate wildly, and gas fees

Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer – Nissan – has reportedly filed for four Web3-related trademarks at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) last week. The applications are for its Infiniti, Nismo, and Nissan brands.
According to the filing, Nissan intends to strengthen its foothold in the web3 space by creating virtual clothes, cars, headgear, trading cards, toys, tickets, and an online NFT marketplace for trading and minting NFTs.
The filing also covers “entertainment services” such as online video, images, artwork, tickets, audio, sounds, music, and trading cards. Nissan’s application covers software for creating, minting, sending, receiving, accepting, trading, storing, tracking, authenticating, and submitting NFTs and videos.
The company

The unprecedented injection of liquidity into the market from the Federal Reserve during that period was an attempt to stimulate an ailing economy.
But before that, crypto, which closely tracked the stock market’s movements, went into a downward spiral soon after. Bitcoin crashed from $8,000 to $3,750 in a matter of hours.
It was the “loaded” retail and amateur players that tapped crypto and meme stocks as markets recovered. Eventually, the asset class soared to new heights in 2021. While dramatic blow-off peaks and drawdowns of over 80% are not out of the norm, the last bull run managed to capture the attention of investors, both big and small, like no other.
Several public companies made significant investments in crypto. Overall, it was a record-breaking year for space.

Mark Zuckerberg-led social media giant – Meta – is developing a decentralized text-based app called Codenamed P92.
According to a report, users can log in to the new app through their Instagram credentials. The latter’s head, Adam Mosseri, has been roped in to lead the project. With the new app using existing Instagram data, including names, profile photos, and followers, among other things, this may not sit well with many since Meta has faced criticism in the past for its handling of user data and privacy issues.
Keeping this in mind, the company has also onboarded the legal department to work out privacy concerns before rolling out the app in public.
Decentralized Social Network
P92 will be based on a decentralized framework similar to that of Mastodon, which has

Decentralized proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain Hedera finally confirmed a security breach. In an update, the team behind the platform revealed that attackers managed to exploit the Smart Contract Service code of the protocol’s mainnet to transfer Hedera Token Service tokens held by victims’ accounts to their own.
It said the root cause of the issue has been identified by the team, and are working on a solution.
Hedera Exploit
Hedera further noted that the attackers targeted those accounts which were used as liquidity pools on multiple decentralized exchanges – including Pangolin, SaucerSwap, and HeliSwap – that utilize Uniswap v2-derived contract code ported over to use the Hedera Token Service to carry out the theft.
Hedera announced shutting down network services and

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance’s non-fungible token arm – Binance NFT – has announced adding support for the Polygon network on March 8th.
The integration of the Polygon network will enable users to explore and trade a wider variety of NFTs across multiple blockchains. This includes – BNB Smart Chain (BSC), Ethereum (ETH) network, as well as Polygon from their Binance accounts.
Despite the announcement, Binance has taken a cautious approach in terms of NFT listings. As such, the marketplace said that not all NFT collections would be available at the moment.
According to the official blog post, only handpicked ERC-721 NFT Collections on the Polygon network are available on the Binance NFT marketplace.
So far, ten collections have been added. The platform plans to integrate

Shiba Inu developers revealed that the Shibarium public beta platform will be launched sometime this week.
The plan for the layer-2 platform was first unveiled in January this year. It was viewed as a major step for the Shiba Inu ecosystem from being a mere memecoin to offering a way for the SHIB community to access faster and cheaper transactions, with increased scalability and enhanced security. The team backing the token revealed building Shibarium on top of the Ethereum network.
The upcoming launch of the beta version of Shibarium is for testing purposes only.
As stated in its introductory blog, Shibarium’s Layer 2 blockchain protocols intend to tap the Metaverse, Web3 innovation, and gaming. The team had earlier also teased the possibility of going off-chain for more

Glassnode has detected the movement of approximately 40,000 Bitcoins tied from wallets tied to seizures conducted by US law enforcement.
The transfers have sparked concerns about a sell-off primarily because such an activity could point towards a potential sale that could put significant pressure on Bitcoin’s price.
Bitcoin is currently facing significant sell pressure after dropping below a critical area of support to $22,018.
Movement of Seized Bitcoins
The transfers were flagged by Glassnode. According to the crypto-analytic firm’s update, a majority appear to be internal transfers. However, nearly 9,861 BTC (worth $217 million) seized from the Silk Road hacker have been sent to the crypto exchange Coinbase.
This was later confirmed by the blockchain security firm,

Increasing electricity costs and a decline in digital asset prices coupled with high mining difficulty in the fourth quarter slashed mining profit margins and made it difficult for miners to stay afloat.
Chinese crypto mining rig maker – Canaan – reported a mining revenue of $10.5 million in the fourth quarter, representing an increase of 16.3% from the previous quarter. It was also up by a staggering 368.2% compared to the same period in 2021.
But the bigger picture tells a different story.
Canaan’s Financial Results
According to the official press release, Canaan was not spared in the crypto winter either, as its year-on-year revenue took a severe hit. The company reported a staggering loss of 82% to $56.8 million. During the same period, it sold a total computing power

The hacker of the DeFi project – Uranium Finance – started moving 2,250 ETH, worth approximately $3.35 million, in stolen funds into the popular coin mixer, TornadoCash.
The movement of funds from the wallet was detected by the blockchain security firm, PeckShield, on March 7th.
Data from Etherscan reveals that the hacker transferred the funds over a time frame of seven hours in transactions ranging from 1 ETH to 100 ETH.
In addition to this, another Ethereum wallet tied to the hacker shows it was last active 159 days ago. Gauging further, it was found that 5 ETH was sent to privacy-focused Ethereum zk-rollup on Aztec.
Uranium Finance was exploited on April 28, 2021. The attackers targeted its v2.1 token migration event and exploited the project’s balance modifier.
The

Kraken has had a tough time with the United States regulatory agencies. Despite the difficult environment, the crypto exchange is planning to roll out its own bank.
Marco Santori, Kraken’s chief legal officer, revealed Kraken Bank is very much on track to launch.
Kraken Bank
According to Kraken Support, the offering will initially be available to the existing clients of the exchange in the US. Potential international expansion is also in the cards.
Its official website states that Kraken Bank will be based on the Wyoming SPDI framework allowing it to “prioritize asset custody and safekeeping, data protection, security standards, and stringent regulatory oversight.”
It further explained that SPDI banks are required to maintain full reserves, which means user funds won’t be

The negative sentiment in digital asset investment products reached the fourth week recording an outflow of $17 million. Confirming the same, the latest edition of the CoinShares report stated,
“The poor sentiment likely represents continued investor concerns over regulatory uncertainty for the asset class.”
Institutional investors are feeling the pressure as the US regulatory agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), continued to target the crypto entities in the country. The outflows, however, have been minor this week compared to the figures in the past few weeks.
A majority of these outflows were from Bitcoin totaling $20 million, according to the fund manager’s report.
On the other hand, short-bitcoin saw inflows for a third week totaling $1.8 million

Since being embroiled in a regulatory tussle, BUSD’s market cap went on a steep downward spiral. Since hitting an all-time high of $23.04 billion in November 2022, the market cap of the once-major stablecoin declined by more than 60% to $9.17 billion at the time of writing.
The Paxos situation is indicative of the larger picture of crypto exchanges under assault from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Uncertainty is looming over the stablecoin industry. Despite the fact that Binance does not issue BUSD, the stablecoin is still critical to its ecosystem.
Implications of Crackdown
Adam Cochran believes the SEC suggesting Binance is an unregistered securities exchange on the grounds BUSD is unregistered security is “brutal 4D chess.” He further

The emergent NFT marketplace Blur may have raised an open battle against the once-market leader, but the latter appears to be making a comeback, albeit slowly.
According to Dune Analytics data compiled by sealaunch.xyz, the percentage of unique users on OpenSea saw an uptick since taking a plunge in mid-February.
Simultaneously, it was found that there has been a significant decrease in the average sale size per user on Blur after the airdrop. Since the event, the trading volume of major collections such as CryptoPunks, BAYC, Otherdeed, MAYC, Meebits, Moonbirds, CloneX, and Doodles decreased on Blur and instead rose on OpenSea.
BLUR, the governance token, was airdropped to the users last week. The tokens even accumulated more than $1 billion in trading volume.

1/ Since

The bankrupt cryptocurrency lending firm Celsius announced the reopening of Distributable Assets in certain Custody Accounts.
Following the update, some customers took to social media to reveal being able to withdraw funds for the first time since the lender halted its services last June.
The development comes a month after the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York authorized Celsius to reopen withdrawals for certain customers with assets held in Custody Accounts.
Criteria For Withdrawal
Customers that meet certain eligibility requirements laid down in the court filing are only eligible for the process. For instance, “Pure” Custody Account Assets that were never in the Earn Program or Borrow Program and were transferred directly into the

Blockchain-based metaverse company – The Sandbox – has warned its users about a security breach through a malware application.
According to the official blog post, an unauthorized third party managed to gain access to the computer of one of its employees and used the information it found to send an email falsely claiming to be from The Sandbox. Its statement read:
“We have blocked the employee’s accounts and access to The Sandbox, reformatted the employee’s laptop, and reset all related passwords including requiring two-factor authentication. We have not identified any further impacts.”
Security Breach
The Sandbox explained that the security breach, which was first identified on February 26, enabled the third party to access several email addresses to which it then sent a

Hodlnaut was one of many firms severely impacted by the collapse of FTX last November, even as the first signs of crack date back to at least as early as May when it lost nearly $190 million in the crash of the Terra ecosystem.
Despite previously downplaying its exposure, Hodlnaut was forced to halt withdrawals in August and enlist third-party interim managers while simultaneously slashing 80% of its employees as part of its cost-cutting measures. But a new affidavit revealed that Hodlnaut is willing to sell the firm.
Searching for “White Knight Investors”
The interim judicial managers, who were appointed to oversee its restructuring last summer, released the sixth affidavit wherein its co-founder Simon Lee proposed that selling the business would serve the best interest

Distressed crypto lending platform Vauld was granted another period of extension of creditor protection from the Singapore High Court until March 24, during which the company will work out revival plans.
Vauld halted withdrawals for its customers last summer after being hit by an unprecedented $200 million worth of withdrawals in under two weeks amidst excessive turmoil in the market. The lender, backed by Coinbase Ventures, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, and CMT Digital, among others, had assets worth around $330 million and liabilities worth $400 million.
The deal with its rival lender Nexo fell flat, following which it filed for protection against creditors in Singapore. The first moratorium was granted for three months.
Vauld contended that Nexo failed

Robinhood Markets said it received an investigative subpoena from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in December. The agency’s move is part of a major crackdown against the digital asset industry after the dramatic collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire last year. The disgraced crypto mogul was recently hit by fresh criminal charges relating to political donations he made while running FTX.
According to its latest 10-K filing, the subpoena is in regard to the supported assets at its subsidiary Robinhood Crypto LLC, as well as its custody of cryptocurrencies and other platform operations.
The SEC previously maintained that the digital asset industry would not be spared by the pre-existing securities laws, thereby signaling that several tokens meet the

Solana outages have yet again sparked questions about the design of the premier Layer 1 blockchain.
The validators tried to restart the network twice over the weekend after the on-chain activity froze. At one time, Solana was processing only 93 TPS. Following the performance degradation, the validator community eventually had to opt for a synchronized chain restart of the network.
Solana Outage Again
According to the official blog post, the cause of the outage has not been determined yet, but Solana is still under active investigation. The team said the network was unable to recover without intervention by the validator community.
The decision to restart the network was suggested by the engineers debugging the issues. Following this, the validator community jointly decided

Crypto mining saw severe losses last year as prices went south. Several notable players in the space slid into bankruptcy, while others had to take cost-cut measures and shut down branches.
This was also reflected in the Canadian cryptocurrency miner Hive Blockchain’s revenue, which halved to $14.3 million in Q3 as compared $29.6 million total it made in the previous three-month period.
Hive Blockchain’s Q3 Result
According to the official report, Hive said hedging its energy contracts, selling power back to the grid, and optimizing its operating capacity to focus on maximum profit per KWHR helped it realize a profit from mining operations in the third quarter of 2022.
During this period, it reportedly mined 787 Bitcoin, with a 25% Gross Mining Margin representing $3.62