Tag Archives: AA News

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...

Companies willing to acquire the troubled Signature Bank will reportedly have to give up its cryptocurrency business. Those interested in purchasing the financial institution or Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) can submit bids by March 17.  Both entities, which acted as main lenders for numerous crypto organizations, revealed operational difficulties earlier this week, prompting American regulators to close them down. The Necessary Condition: Forget About Crypto According to a...

A consortium of 11 major U.S. banks has agreed to invest $30 billion into First Republic Bank – a regional US bank that showed signs of destabilization this week following Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)’s collapse.  The uninsured deposits come from Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York Mellon, PNC Bank, State Street, Truist, and U.S. Bank. As reported by Yahoo Finance, the former four banks each contributed $5...

European regulators and policy experts are dismayed by how American watchdogs handled the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last weekend.Certain policymakers take issue with the Fed’s “systemic risk exception,” which they believe could undermine the credibility of banking globally.  Critiques of the Bailout According to the Financial Times, a senior eurozone official said the Federal Reserve showed “total and utter incompetence” in its response to SVB’s failure, turning its...

New York Judge Michael Wiles of the District Court of the Southern District of New York has denied the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) appeal to stay the $1 billion asset-sale plan between bankrupt crypto broker Voyager Digital and Binance.US. During a Wednesday hearing on the DOJ’s motion to halt the order pending appeal, Judge Wiles reiterated his approval of the plan on the basis that further delay would harm the interests of Voyager’s customers. Judge Denies DOJ’s...

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...

After a months-long wait since the Merge, Ethereum developers have set a target date for the network’s highly anticipated Shanghai hard fork.  The upgrade will enable the network’s stakers to withdraw their locked Ether (ETH) for the first time since December 2020.  Withdrawing Staked ETH During a recorded call among core developers on Thursday, devs set April 12 as their target date for “Shapella” – the dual upgrade enabling ETH withdrawals. Shapella is a combination of the...

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...

America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange is expecting a flood of staking withdrawal requests after Ethereum developers enable the functionality next month.  While providing details about how the upgrade will impact the business on Wednesday, Coinbase said it could take “weeks to months” for unstaking requests to be fully processed. Shapella is Coming In a blog post on the matter, Coinbase explained that the upcoming Shanghai and Capella upgrades (collectively known as...

On March 14, the bank Anchorage Digital announced the layoff of 20% of its workers due to the crypto winter and regulatory uncertainty in the US. According to the official statement, the departure of 75 of its employees (approximately 20% of its team) is necessary to focus its resources on other essential processes. This is the latest development in a series of events that have affected both the banking and the crypto industry as a whole. 2023 has been marked by the closures...