Scenius Sync (Issue #67)

Europeans More Bullish on Crypto than Americans, Bybit To Suspend UK Operations, MicroStrategy Adds $147m Worth of BTC, & Mixin Platform Suspends Activity Following Breach

Scenius: The intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. The communal form of the concept of genius.

Welcome to The Scenius Sync.

Our mission with this concise publication is twofold:

1. Share the essential stories driving the crypto industry and markets.

2. Highlight innovative applications and mainstream adoption of crypto and blockchain technology.

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Essential News 🗞

1. Crypto Exchange Bybit to Suspend UK Operations as New Ad Rules Kick In

   • Crypto exchange Bybit said it will suspend its U.K. operations next month in response to regulatory changes just a week after saying it was exploring all options to stay in the country. New customers won't be able to open accounts as of Oct. 1, and starting Oct. 8 existing customers won't be allowed to add funds, create new contracts or increase their positions. They will, however, be able to reduce and close their positions, and withdraw their funds from the platform, the Dubai-based company said in a post on its website.

2. Coinbase Has Recently Held Talks to Buy FTX Europe

   • Coinbase Inc., the U.S. crypto exchange that’s seeking to expand globally amid the regulatory crackdown in its home country, has recently considered buying FTX Europe, Fortune reported. This is part of Coinbase’s desire to expand its derivatives business, according to the article, which added that acquisition talks never reached a “late stage.”

3. Mixin Platform Suspends Deposits, Withdrawals After $200M Security Breach

   • Mixin Network was hit by an exploit on Sunday, resulting in a loss of up to $200 million, as reported in a tweet by the team earlier today.

     The project features a wallet for cross-chain asset transfers and a decentralized exchange to swap assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin, and Dogecoin among others. In its statement, the Mixin Network team revealed that hackers attacked its “cloud service provider” with a potential “loss of assets worth up to $200 million.”

4. Celsius creditors vote in favor of reorganization plan

   • Under the plan, which had support from the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors, debtors will distribute about $2 billion worth of bitcoin and ether to creditors, according to a letter from that group in August. 

   • In other Celsius news, Arrington removes himself from board of Celsius successor following board observer appointment.

5. MicroStrategy Buys Another $147 Million Worth of Bitcoin

   • MicroStrategy, the world’s largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, announced its latest acquisition of the market’s largest cryptocurrency. Per an SEC filing submitted on Monday, between August 1 and September 24, the firm and its subsidiaries purchased approximately 5,445 Bitcoin for about $147.3 million in cash. The average price per coin, inclusive of fees and expenses, was approximately $27,053.

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Innovation & Adoption 💡📈

1. Google Cloud adds 11 new blockchains to BigQuery data analytics service

   • he cloud division at Google has added support for 11 additional blockchains into its BigQuery data analytics service. These networks are Avalanche, Arbitrum, Cronos, Fantom, Near, Optimism, Polkadot, Polygon, Tron and the test networks Polygon Mumbai and Ethereum Goerli. Google Cloud notes that users can now make intricate on-chain queries, such as assessing the number of NFTs minted or contrasting transaction fees across these chains. Integration with end-user applications like Looker and Google Sheets is also available.

2. European Investors More Bullish on Crypto Than American, Says CoinShares Report

   • A new CoinShares report suggests that there is a "divergence in sentiment from a regional perspective" when investing in cryptocurrencies. This divergence is especially clear when comparing investors based in Europe with those in the United States, likely due to the stark regulatory differences between each region, reads the report.

3. Solana Friend.tech Fork Friendzy Volume Edges Towards $1M After Just One Week

   • Like Friend.tech, Friendzy lets users tokenize their Twitter accounts, giving other users the opportunity to buy and sell these tokens to join private chats.

     A spokesperson added that “we're gonna surpass $1 million in volume” by the end of the day. In comparison, the weekly volume on Friend.tech has hovered above $2 million for the past two weeks, according to data from the Dune dashboard by CryptoKoryo.

4. Polkadot eyes support for 1,000 parachains in future

   • The core developers at Polkadot are looking to expand the ecosystem’s current parachain limit of 100, aiming to eventually onboard 1,000 parachains in the future with help from software updates. "Asynchronous backing" is one such update to Polkadot’s parachain consensus protocol. The update is designed to halve the parachain block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds and augment the block space for each block by 5-10 times. 

5. Coinbase secures Bank of Spain registration as part of global expansion

   • Coinbase has secured registration as a cryptocurrency exchange and custodian wallet provider with the Bank of Spain. The exchange said it will offer a “full suite of products and services to retail and institutional users in Spain.”