The multi-drone trial was held in Port Montrose, Scotland, and Cranfield University in Bedfordshire in April and October of 2021 respectively.
Tag: London
London assembly member calls for ban on crypto ads in trains and buses
Sian Berry, former co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales and current member of the London Assembly, is looking to crack down on crypto advertisements on public transport.
According to a Nov. 14 Twitter post, Berry said she would be recommending the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, ban all crypto advertising in the city’s transport network, including many rail and bus services. The assembly member’s call to action comes following token project Floki Inu announcing it would conduct an “full-out assault on the London public transportation system” with posters on Underground trains and buses.
Like gambling ads, which we have finally got the Mayor to remove, there is no way our public services should be used to advertise these unregulated, risky schemes to Londoners. I asked for a ban in July and I am still pushing.
https://t.co/i7EBxfbGrV
— Sian Berry (@sianberry) November 14, 2021
“Where the advert says ‘this is completely unregulated, you may lose all your money’, they ought to have had second thoughts,” said Berry in an interview with the Guardian. “I don’t think cryptocurrency ads should be on the network. They’re unethical.”
The U.K. capital is no stranger to crypto advertising, being home to a number of exchanges and projects. Tokens including Richard Heart’s HEX have previously targeted the city for ads in newspapers, on public transportation, and even during sporting events. Last year, Binance blanketed the city in ads in advance of the launch of its U.K. arm.
Though many of these campaigns have gone forward without incident, Berry’s concerns seem to be focused on possible “pump and dump” schemes, in which advertising for a project could potentially cause a large number of Londoners to buy tokens and only a few investors profit by selling their holdings when the price rises. The United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority blocked a campaign by crypto exchange Luno in May by claiming the firm’s “it’s time to buy” statement on ads could give the impression that investing in Bitcoin (BTC) was “straightforward and accessible.”
“I want to clean up ads on the tube in various ways, including removing ads for cars and airlines,” said Berry. “Risky financial products, like gambling, are part of that policy. I don’t want to ban cryptocurrencies outright and have no power to do so.”
Related: UK advertising watchdog classifies crypto ads as ‘red alert’
Berry added that she wasn’t specifically targeting Floki in the push for this crackdown, but rather as one of three crypto advertising campaigns in London. However, she noted that members of the Floki Army — i.e. supporters of the token on social media networks — had inundated her with messages “making it appear more like a cult than a scam.”
In Floki’s case, the ads seem to be contributing to a rise in the token price. According to data from CoinMarketCap, the price of the token surged more than 500% between Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, when it hit an all-time high of $0.0003406.
Cointelegraph reached out to Sian Berry, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
London High Court Orders Binance To Hunt and Seize Assets of Crypto Hackers
London’s High Court is ordering major crypto exchange Binance to track down and freeze the accounts of crypto hackers behind an alleged $2.6-million security breach.
The order, which was made public last week, grants the requests by artificial intelligence (AI) company Fetch.ai for Binance to find and freeze the allegedly stolen assets.
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Fetch.ai claims that on June 6th hackers obtained access to its Binance accounts that held several crypto assets, including Bitcoin (BTC), Binance Coin (BNB), Tether (USDT) and its own Fetch.ai (FET) token among others.
The hackers allegedly traded the stolen cryptocurrencies at a massive discount to a third party.
Judge Pelling QC describes the order in a transcript of the court proceedings.
“A worldwide freezing order is sought against those who were knowingly involved in the fraud for the purposes of freezing their assets worldwide, in order to ensure to the best that can be achieved that the claimant is able to freeze assets, which will enable any judgment of the court to have real effect.”
Syedur Rahman, a partner at the Rahman Ravelli law firm that represents Fetch.ai, tells Reuters that the missing assets are recoverable.
“We need to dispel the myth that crypto assets are anonymous. The reality is that with the right rules and applications they can be tracked, traced and recovered.”
A Binance spokesperson says that the exchange is helping to recover the stolen assets.
“Binance routinely freezes accounts that are identified as having suspicious activity occurring in line with our security policies and commitment to ensuring that users are protected while using our platform.”
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KingTiger Casino Temporarily Shuts Down Due To Ethereum Network Congestion
KingTiger Casino recently went out of operation due to Ethereum congestion issues. The online casino announced that they wouldn’t be operating until they get a suitable solution for their users.
On their website, the company gave the reason for shut-down due to congestion on the Ehereum network. According to them, it has become impossible to run their games on the network with their current format.
Related Reading | Coinbase Removes USD Coin (USDC)” Backed By Dollar” Statement
For now, KingTiger Casion is searching for a better solution to accommodate their new games and advanced features. Presently the casino services are not working, but users are still able to access their wallets.
Funfair Technologies, the owner of KingTiger, also allows users who wish to create new accounts to do it. Also, KingTiger Casino has assured non-custodial wallet users that they can still control their assets. They assured these users that they could keep their funds in their personal wallets until they want or move them to an ERC-20 address.
A Brief On Funfair And KingTiger
KingTiger was using the FUN token to operate. This is not surprising since the parent company, Funfair technologies, is behind the FUN token based on smart contracts. Funfair technology is a gaming platform using Ethereum smart contracts to execute transactions.
The platform is decentralized and was launched in 2017. The company is yet to make further statements concerning this temporary shutdown of its casino.
Ethereum Hard Fork To Provide Alternative To These Problems
One of the reasons that made the recent London hard fork commendable is that it aims at solving the Ethereum network issues. Before now, there were unsteady transaction fees and a lack of scalability.
Also, the network was becoming too congested following the rise of DeFi and NFTs on the network. But with this upgrade, the community is hoping to see a solution to the scalability issues.
Related Reading | Lionel Messi To Get Paid In Crypto For Joining Paris Saint Germain
With the hard fork, there is now an additional 800 deflationary blocks formed following the excessive burning of ETH that surpassed mining rewards. As a result, this mechanism automatically decreased Ethereum supply temporarily.
At the time of writing, ETH targets to cross the $4k mark following Bitcoin's growth | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com
After the upgrade, the price of Ethereum went as high as $2,000 and later broke the $3000 level. However, as of now, the transaction fees on the Ethereum network are still high. Before the upgrade in July, the transaction was as low as $4 but has now added $16. But even at its level, it is still lower than the $33 which Uniswap charges on its network.
Featured image from Pixabay, chart from TradingView.com
Cointelegraph Consulting: Measuring the effects of the London hard fork
The much-talked-about Ethereum hard fork finally went live on Aug. 5 after block 12,965,000 was mined. Dubbed “London,” the software upgrade will bring together significant alterations in Ethereum’s code. Overall, the code changes target improvements to the network’s transaction fee market, user experience and much more.
London comes with five Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIP), with EIP-1559 garnering the most attention due to the impact on transaction fees and miner revenue, which initially caused miners to push back, raising concerns over the protocol consensus and a potential chain split.
EIP-1559 was originally proposed in April 2019 and underwent testing back in June prior to the launch. What’s most pressing about EIP-1559 is that it’s primarily geared toward improving Ethereum’s transaction payment system. Before the upgrade, most users faced uncertainty, as Ethereum network transaction fees can be volatile and potentially spike to hundreds of dollars per transaction. EIP-1559 is unlikely to substantially decrease transaction costs, as it’s more of a scalability issue. However, it aims to reduce transaction fee volatility and delays.
EIP-1559 transaction fees, base fee and tipping miners
The upgrade introduces a fixed-price sale mechanism with a base fee and tip rather than a single gas fee. Miners receive the total transaction fee minus the base fee, which is burned. This base fee is a known value calculated for each block and adjusts according to a target block size. Users can also send an additional tip to miners on top of the base fee to prioritize their transactions.
Miners’ incentives remain unchanged as the most expensive transactions are selected first to fill blocks. However, sender strategies are now clearer than under first-price blind auctions. Rather than guessing fees based on recent transactions, users can refer to the base fee metric directly and add their tip.
Can EIP-1559 make ETH deflationary?
With all these changes, one of the burning questions in the community is if the activation of EIP-1559 will render Ether (ETH) more deflationary? Ether does not have a hard supply limit like Bitcoin but rather has ongoing inflation capped at 18 million ETH per year, which is used to reward miners.
However, there are deflationary forces on Ether’s supply as well. Firstly, the liquidity locked in decentralized finance, around $155 billion at the time of writing, cuts down the tradable supply. Secondly, there is an ongoing rate of lost or irrecoverable Ether. Finally, there is the new EIP-1559 protocol.
Since London went live, a total of 26,965.9 Ether was burned, according to Etherchain.org. At Ether’s current price, that translates to about $86 million worth of ETH. In the six-day period after the hard fork, the new ETH supply from block rewards was reduced by roughly 33% per day due to burning fees.
EIP-1559 has increased deflation in Ethereum, but it is still an overall inflationary asset. To get a gauge of how burning base fees impact Ether’s circulating supply, the report compares last year’s data to create a hypothetical scenario where the London hard fork was activated in 2020. The calculation implies the present burn rate of 3.81 Ether per minute, which assumes that everything remains constant.
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This resulted in a burned supply of 3 million Ether, approximately 17% of the total inflation per year. This is a significant reduction in inflation, which is projected to increase the scarcity of Ether in the long term.
At the current market price, this equates to approximately $10 billion worth of Ether burned since January 2020. Given the current $378-billion market cap of Ether, this is a sizable 3% of Ether’s supply value removed from circulation.
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Ethereum’s London hard fork sets ETH on a more deflationary path
The London hard fork of Ethereum, which went live on Aug. 5, ushered in a new era for the transition to Ethereum 2.0, a complete proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain. In fact, the London upgrade is the penultimate step on the way to the final transition to PoS scheduled sometime in 2022. The upgrade got triggered almost on time at 12:33 pm UTC at the block height of 12,965,000.
Along with the highly anticipated Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, this upgrade brings four other EIPs to the network, EIP-3554, EIP-3541, EIP-3198 and EIP-3529. The main change that EIP-1559 brought is the management of transaction fees on the blockchain. In the previous pricing mechanism, the transaction fees would go to the miner directly, but now, there is a fixed-per-block network fee that is burned. This eventually means a lower revenue from transaction fees for miners.
A representative from ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company backing Ethereum’s infrastructure, told Cointelegraph about the enthusiasm of network users when compared to the initial discontent of the miners:
“Users seem much more supportive of the hard fork because this provides them with more predictable gas fees. As of today, 97,5% of clients are ready for the London hard fork. This is why EIP-1559 became mainstream among the community and is the most important proposal approved by the Ethereum community included in the London Hard Fork.”
However, miners still have an additional stream of revenue over the two Ether (ETH) reward that they receive for every newly minted block. The EIP-1559 also adds the concept of a “tip” to the transaction pricing mechanism. The tip can be seen as a priority fee so that applications and users can choose to pay if they want their transaction to be prioritized by the network.
Kent Barton, head of research and development of ShapeShift, a cryptocurrency trading platform, discussed the impact of EIP-1559 on the dynamics of the community with Cointelegraph, stating: “The reduced miner profitability of 1559 led to some initial opposition from that part of the Ethereum ecosystem. However, there was no realistic alternative, 1559 had wide support from the rest of the community.”
MEV to gain more prominence before the merge
Barton believes that the miners decided to abandon their opposing stance, as a contentious hard fork, in addition to being unpopular, would also trigger a pullback for the price of ETH, ultimately going against their own interests. In response to the reduction in direct revenue miners earn, several mining pools have begun to resort to Miner Extractable Value (MEV) solutions to push their net revenues.
MEV is a metric that measures the profit that a miner, validator, or sequencer can earn, using their ability to benefit from arbitrage by including, excluding, or reordering transactions within mining blocks that are produced. MEV solutions can only be triggered and executed by miners as only they have the power to organize transactions within a block on the network.
Caleb Sheridan, a core developer at the Eden Network, a priority transaction network, spoke with Cointelegraph about MEV, saying, “MEV (Miner Extractable Value) is more important than ever. Miners are finding novel ways to augment their revenue after the reduction faced in EIP-1559. These techniques and tools will find their way to proof-of-stake, where validators will also use them to augment their revenue.”
Sheridan further mentioned that MEV solutions offer onboarded miners increased rewards for “honest participation in the ordering protocol proposed by the network.” This would also keep these solutions relevant for validators after the completion of the PoS transition.
However, it’s important to remember that one of the main aims of the London upgrade through EIP-1559 was to curb the issue of high gas fees that had plagued the network all throughout the bull run from late Q4 2020 to halfway through Q2 2021. Since the London upgrade was triggered on Aug. 5, the gas fees have also shown a spike.
The gas prices have risen 44% from the pre-upgrade levels of 45.77 Gwei on Aug. 4 to a 45 day high of 65.22 Gwei on Aug. 10. Gwei is a quantity used to calculate gas fees. Gwei or a Gigawei is a small unit of Ether, known as the smallest base unit of the token. One gwei is equal to 0.000000001 ETH, or the other way around, 1 ETH is equivalent to 1 billion gwei.
However, this spike in gas fees could just be a function of increased network congestion that the price action of the asset and the upgrade itself attracted. It’s noteworthy that this spike in gas fees is still a lot lower than the gas fees the network charged back in May, the last time ETH traded at its current price range.
These increased gas fees are now burned instead of going to the miners, thus leading to the destruction of some Ether tokens from the network’s economy. This burning impact of the EIP-1559 adds deflationary pressure on the token. The representative of ConsenSys discussed this further, saying:
“Investor sentiment toward ETH as an asset seems to be reacting to the diminishing supply of ETH due to EIP-1559. Already, 23k ETH has been burned, which is slowing the emission rate of new ETH (which is paid in the form of block rewards for new blocks added to the chain).”
At the current rate of burn, 2.3 ETH is destroyed every minute. This means that at the current market value of the token, $10.7 million worth of ETH tokens are burned every day. However, this rate of burn has given way to the “deflationary asset” narrative for Ethereum’s native token. But in reality, this upgrade doesn’t really make Ether a deflationary asset, it just reduces the rate it’s currently inflating at. In fact, Ether will remain inflationary even when the transition to Ethereum 2.0 is complete.
A model made by Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation reveals that as a “best guess,” there will be 1,000 ETH issued per day and 6,000 ETH burned in the same period. His model assumes that if more validators join and the staking annual percentage returns (APR)/yield is 6%, the annual decrease in supply will be 1.6 million Ether tokens and hence, reducing the annual supply rate for the asset to 1.4%. This model confirms that the token would still be an inflationary asset, just one with higher deflationary pressure on it.
ETH gains surpass BTC among other metrics
This hard fork for Ethereum has led to enormous gains for its native token. ETH has fluctuated over the $3,000, around 30% off the all-time high of $4,362 it reached on May 12, 2021. The token is trading at levels it was trading in May, before the flash crash of the majority of the crypto market on May 19 — a day that is now known as “Black Wednesday.”
Although Bitcoin (BTC) has also posted impressive gains in the past seven days, Ethereum has outperformed the premier cryptocurrency yet again. The seven-day gains for ETH are at 29.62% as compared to the 21.69% in Bitcoin’s price. Even though the London upgrade is an important step in the Ethereum roadmap, the movement it represents is way larger. It is the impact of institutional investors, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi) and the general public’s distrust of centralized finance (CeFi).
Armstrong opined further on this comparison saying that “The London upgrade was an important step in the Ethereum roadmap but its movement against Bitcoin is more than just London: It’s a network effect of institutional investors, NFTs, the DeFi summer and the general public’s distrust of CeFi.” Mike McGlone, a senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence has even mentioned that Ethereum could lead the way to Bitcoin hitting $100,000.
Related: Bitcoin dominance on the rise once again as crypto market rallies
The next step for Ethereum would be the final merge to the proof-of-stake, which according to ConsenSys, is “likely to happen in early 2022.” The ConsenSys representative also revealed that some analysts are expecting that staking payouts will more than double to $20 billion soon and they will double again to hit $40 billion by 2025.
Whether these predictions come to fruition or not, it is evident from the market sentiment that despite the slump in the market between June and July, Ether is cementing its place further as the cryptocurrency with utility, especially with network upgrades like the London hard fork spurring its growth by addressing pre-existing pain points like gas fees.
The community is seemingly responding well to what ConsenSys founder and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin has called the introduction of ultrasound money. Even Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame has also further perpetuated the ultrasound money narrative, citing the lack of a supply floor as a reason.
Kevin O’Leary of ‘Shark Tank’ espouses deflationary future for Ethereum
Canadian entrepreneur, investor, and reality television personality, Kevin O’Leary — also known as “Mr. Wonderful” — appears to now be singing Ethereum’s praises as a deflationary asset.
Clearly reading from a script, O’Leary took to Cameo — a website that allows users to purchase personalized video messages from celebrities — to espouse the benefits of Ethereum’s August 5 London upgrades. Most notably, the upgrades saw EIP-1559’s highly awaited burn mechanism introduced into Ethereum’s fee market.
Mr. Wonderful talks about #ethereum #EIP1559 and #EIP3675 (the merge) and Ethereum becoming cashflow positive and https://t.co/VLOOtk2Wyu pic.twitter.com/lzTNCq1rtU
— Taras.eth | Taras Bobrovytsky (@TarasBob) August 9, 2021
“It introduced a very important change to the monetary policy of Ethereum,” said O’Leary. “Currently the fees that users pay to send transactions go to the miner, but after this improvement, the fees will be burned.”
“When you combine this with EIP-3675, which switches the network to Proof-of-Stake, […] Ethereum will become deflationary,” he concluded, adding:
“If Bitcoin is sound money because of the $21 million supply ceiling [Ethereum] is ultrasound money because there is no supply floor.”
At the time of writing, it has been five days since Ethereum’s highly anticipated 1559 improvement proposal went live.
According to Ultrasound.money, a website tracking the rate at which Ether is being burned through transaction fees, estimating that roughly 20,500 Ether (roughly $63.75 million) have been burned so far.
Related: Ethereum could pave way for $100,000 Bitcoin, Bloomberg analyst asserts
While a firm date for Ethereum’s forthcoming chain merge — which will complete the network’s transition to Proof-of-Stake consensus — is yet to be announced, experts are predicting the merge will occur in early 2022.
Last month, the chain merge was formalized as an Ethereum Improvement Proposal for the first time. Now dubbed EIP-3765, the upgrade was formalized through the creation of a pull request on GitHub.
3 reasons why Ethereum is unlikely to flip Bitcoin any time soon
After a 13% rise in two days, Bitcoin’s (BTC) market capitalization surpassed $800 billion to reach its highest value in 79 days. During the same timeframe, Ether (ETH) accumulated a 45% gain in two weeks, placing the network’s market capitalization at $340 billion.
Positive expectations for the London hard fork and its potential deflationary effect undoubtedly played a role, but some investors continue to question how Ether’s valuation stacks against Bitcoin. Some, including Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead, expect Ether to outpace Bitcoin as the largest cryptocurrency.
Market participants may have also been excited after Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari suggested that the Fed may stick with the asset-purchase program a bit longer. The reason cited was the Delta variant’s spread and its potential harm to the labor market.
Kashkari said:
“Delta could discourage people from returning to jobs that require in-person interaction and keep kids out of schools.”
Extending the stimulus for longer raises the inflationary risk, which increases the attractiveness of scarce assets like real estate, commodities, stocks, and cryptocurrencies. However, the impact of these macroeconomic changes should equally impact Bitcoin and Ether.
Active addresses give Bitcoin a clear lead
Comparing some of Ethereum’s metrics could shed some light on whether Ether’s 58% discount is justified. The first step should be to measure the number of active addresses, excluding low amounts.
As shown above, Bitcoin has 6 million addresses worth $1,000 or higher, and 3.67 million have been created since 2020. Meanwhile, Ether has less than half at 2.7 million addresses with $1,000. The altcoin’s growth has also been slower, with 2.4 million of those created since 2020.
This metric is 55% lower for Ether, and this corroborates the market capitalization gap. However, this analysis does not include how much large clients have invested. Although there is no good way to estimate this number, measuring cryptocurrency exchange-traded products could be a good proxy.
Ether lags on exchange-traded products
After aggregating data from multiple exchange-traded instruments, the result is telling. Bitcoin dominates with $32.3 billion in assets under management, while Ether totals $11.7 billion. Grayscale GBTC plays a vital role in this discrepancy because its product was launched in September 2013.
Meanwhile, Ether’s first exchange-traded product came in October 2017, when the XBT Provider Ether Tracker was launched. This difference partially explains why Ether’s total is 64% lower than Bitcoin’s.
Futures open interest justifies the price gap
Lastly, one should compare the futures markets data. Open interest is the best metric of professional investors’ actual positions because it measures market participants’ total number of contracts.
An investor could have bought $50 million worth of futures and sold the entire position a couple of days later. This $100 million in traded volume does not currently represent any market exposure; therefore, it should be disregarded.
Bitcoin futures open interest currently amounts to $14.2 billion, down from a $27.7 billion peak on April 13. Binance exchange leads with $3.4 billion, followed by FTX with another $2.3 billion.
On the other hand, the open interest on Ether futures peaked about a month later at $10.8 billion, and the indicator currently stands at $7.6 billion. Therefore, it is 46% lower than Bitcoin’s, which further explains the valuation discount.
Related: Ethereum market cap hits $337 billion, surpassing Nestle, P&G, and Roche
Other metrics like on-chain data and miner revenues show a more balanced situation, but both cryptocurrencies have different use cases. For example, 54% of the Bitcoin supply has remained untouched for longer than one year.
The truth is that any indicator has a downside, and there is no definitive valuation metric to determine whether a cryptocurrency is above or below its fair value. However, the three metrics analyzed suggest that Ether’s upside, when priced in Bitcoin, does not signal a “flippening” anytime soon.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Here’s what traders expect now that Ethereum price is over $3,000
This week Ethereum’s London hardfork was completed without a hiccup and investors have now reset their eyes on new highs above $3,100.
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the price of Ether (ETH) did in fact experience a “sell the news” sell-off shortly after London went live but dip buyers quickly rushed in and pushed its price back above $2,800, its highest level since June 7. This bullish momentum extended further after Bitcoin price surged above $44,000 and at the time of writing Ether trades at $3,050.
Now that the network is operating smoothly following its biggest update of the year, here’s a look at what traders and analysts expect next from the top altcoin.
A close above the weekly resistance extends the uptrend
Insight into Ether’s price action was provided by pseudonymous Twitter analyst Rekt Capital, who highlighted the altcoin’s weekly resistance level as an important hurdle to jump in order to continue the current uptrend.
According to the chart provided, Ether needs to close above $2,714 to confirm a trend continuation.
Rekt Capital said:
“Ether is now at one of its final major higher-timeframe resistances. Once Ether is able to break past this ~$2770 resistance, there will be little resistance ahead until the old All-Time High of ~$4400.”
Even with overhead resistance traders expect ETH burns to lift prices
According to SpinTrades, a pseudonymous Twitter analyst, traders should keep an eye out for a possible move to $2,600, while a break and close above $3,000 could lead to a rally to $3,300.
$ETH Trade price, not hype
Break and hold over 2900-3000 -> 3300
Break below 2600 -> 2200-2400
Rejection at 2900, consolidation 2600-2800#Ethereum #ETH #ETHUSD pic.twitter.com/uULOKn0OTE
— SpinTrades (@SpinTrades) August 5, 2021
Related: London is live and Ethereum bulls control Friday’s $357M ETH options expiry
One of the more interesting upgrades included in the London hard fork was a new Ether burning mechanism which burns a portion of the transaction fees and removes it from the circulating supply of coins.
As noted in the following tweet from Alex Krüger, more than 2,160 Ether ($6 million) were burned within the first seven hours and investors appear to be assuming that the price will rise if this trend continues.
2160 ETH burnt in just seven hours. Impressive.
(also, outstanding website: https://t.co/fJ6Wo6L2kg) pic.twitter.com/044eOtPhni
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) August 5, 2021
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Rothschild’s trust led funding round for Aspen Digital’s London expansion
Prominent British banker Jacob Rothschild’s investment firm Rothschild Investment Trust (RIT) Capital Partners partnered with New York-based Liberty City Ventures to lead pre-A funding for Aspen Digital, a crypto asset investment platform.
According to the official announcement, the funding round ended up raising $8.8 million to help the Hong Kong-based company develop an institutional crypto investment platform targeted at asset managers, institutions and professional investors. Aspen Digital CEO and co-founder Yang He said that the funding would also help the company penetrate into the London market.
The announcement states other prominent investors include Somerley Capital, Cherubic Ventures, Token Bay Capital, and Thailand’s richest family and owner of Fortune magazine, Chatchaval Jiaravanon and Chaval Jiaravanon. With the platform’s launch before the end of this year, Aspen Digital has shared intent to target budding Europe, Asia and the Middle Eastern markets. The company is currently planning to lead this initiative by establishing headquarters in London and Singapore.
Citing the rising interest for a single portal to manage all crypto holdings, Yang He said:
“To have the oldest wealth management family in the world putting trust in us as a platform solution for the new world of crypto investment is a great validation.”
Adding to its existing services such as client portfolio reporting, risk management, market insights, and custody solutions, Aspen’s new platform aspires to centralize prominent crypto offerings from market leaders including Celsius Network, Hex Trust and FTX.
Along similar lines, Cointelegraph previously reported on a survey highlighting investors’ interest in buying more crypto assets. Based on the information collected across a small group of 50 wealth managers and 50 institutional investors, 40% shared their intention to “dramatically increase their holdings.” However, the London-based surveyor Nickel Digital Asset Management highlighted that “many (investors) have just been testing the market to see how it works.”
Related: Thailand’s XSpring Capital raises $225M to build integrated financial marketplace
Just three months ago, Rothschild’s RIT invested $5.3-billion to acquire a stake in the Kraken crypto exchange. Based on Cointelegraph’s report, the move was made just as Kraken prepares to “go public through a direct listing in 2022.”
Back in December 2020, RIT was also involved in a $142M funding round for Paxos, a stable coin issuer partnered with PayPal.