The central People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has acknowledged a cooperation deal with a domestic third-party payments provider ahead of the launch of the bank’s forthcoming digital yuan – a project that is currently in the advanced testing phase. Per Leiphone, Lakala has sealed a deal with the PBoC, which is described as a “strategic cooperation agreement.” The companies have not revealed what the terms of the agreement would involve. However, Lakala is the only central mobile payment platform beside the duopoly of WeChat Pay and Alipay to have been listed on the Chinese stock market. Lakala also provides point-of-sale devices and portable swipe-type card readers.
Mining News
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty, which is the measure that shows how hard it is to compete for mining rewards, increased by 4.82%, reaching 17.6 T, as more miners turned their machines on, boosting the speed at which a new block on the Bitcoin blockchain is found. The mining difficulty is modified every two weeks (that is, every 2016 blocks) to support the standard 10-minute block time. For most of November, it was below 10 minutes. On November 3, the difficulty had its largest drop since 2011 and the second-largest in the network’s history.
Regulation News
Chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, verified today that after serving for more than three and a half years, he would conclude his tenure at the end of this year.
A specialist has cautioned that the Russian government may strive to monitor crypto for tax enforcement reasons. As earlier mentioned, the Russian Ministry of Finance has unveiled plans to crack down on those who fail to declare their crypto earnings – with jail time on the cards for violators. As claimed by media outlet Regnum, Konstantin Ordov, the lead of the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation (FinU)’s Department of Corporate Finance and Governance, stated, “The fiscal system that has been used in the past will not be able to keep up with the pace of changes in the monetary sphere of the present and future. […] It is very difficult to track transactions in the crypto world.”
Legal analysts in South Korea have cautioned that lawsuits will likely follow if multiple crypto exchanges close down next year. Through Hanguk Kyungjae, several anonymous lawyers have informed the news outlet that a fresh set of regulations that will soon force all crypto exchanges in the nation to use real-name confirmed bank accounts and separate client funds from their own in banking transactions will stregthen numerous companies out of business – with consumers possibly requiring to go to the judiciary to reclaim their funds. The ordinance will start to be in effect in March 2021, despite the fact that exchanges will have a six-month grace period to adjust to the new compliance rules.
DeFi News
Decentralized finance protocol Value DeFistated it lost around USD 6m due to “a complex attack” this past weekend. According to them, a hacker performed a flash-loan exploit on the MultiStables vault of Value DeFi protocol. The team promised to create a compensation fund funded by a combination of the dev fund, insurance fund, and a portion of the fees currently generated by the protocol.
M&A News
Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd.announced it had acquired DrawBridge Lending, a digital asset lending specialist, borrowing, structured products, and Blue Fire Capital, a proprietary trading firm specializing in market-making two-sided liquidity for digital assets. No other information about the transactions were given.
Career News
Alex Solomon, who led the Azure Direct business as part of Microsoft’s Western Europe HQ team, joined Enjin (ENJ) as Executive Director of Enterprise Platforms. Solomon announced he would guide the development of a new Enterprise arm. “Ultimately, we aim to offer a full-service stack that enables businesses to create powerful token projects quickly through a template-driven experience,” he included.
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