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Private equity firm GTCR agreed to buy a majority stake in payments firm Worldpay from Fidelity National Information Services at a valuation of $18.5 billion, according to a statement.

“GTCR will acquire 55% of Worldpay, and [Fidelity National Information Services] will retain the remaining 45%, in a transaction that values the business at $18.5 billion,” the firm said. The private equity giant is spending $11.7 billion to acquire the controlling interest in Worldpay, according to Reuters.

Fidelity National Information Services agreed to pay about $35 billion for Worldpay roughly four years ago.

Worldpay’s crypto plans

The company last year announced expanded interest in cryptocurrency when Fidelity said the payment unit would allow its merchant clients to accept direct “settlement” for payments made in the USDC stablecoin.

At the time, Fidelity also said it would partner with both Circle and trading platform Crypto.com as part of the plan.

The Block contacted GTCR for comment regarding any plans for Worldpay’s cryptocurrency endeavors in the wake of the deal but did not immediately receive a response. 

 

 

 

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Volatility Shares Trust, the small issuer of the only leveraged bitcoin futures ETF in the U.S., said that trading exceeded half a million shares in the fund’s first week.

The ETF began trading on the Chicago Board Options BZX Exchange last week, and the share price has hovered around $15.

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have been a hot topic since massive traditional financial institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity began pursuing approval to launch their own spot bitcoin ETFs. Volatility’s product differs as it is a leveraged bitcoin futures ETF.

Trading under the ticker symbol BITX, the Volatility fund “seeks daily investment results…that correspond to two times the return of the S&P CME Bitcoin Futures Daily Roll Index for a single day,” according to a filing.

Volatility Shares Trust is based in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Citigroup Inc., HSBC, BNY Mellon and other global financial giants have been experimenting with what they call a “regulated liability network” for conducting round-the-clock, wholesale payments using shared ledgers, and a paper released Thursday suggests the system has potential.

IDEX, one of the oldest decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges on Ethereum, announced plans to build a Polygon zkEVM-based Layer 2 chain named Xchain. Currently in the testnet phase, the blockchain is being developed based on zkEVM from Polygon’s Supernets software stack and aims to offer a decentralized perpetual trading platform.

Polygon’s Supernets enables developers to build customizable app-chains that can operate as either sidechains or Layer 2 chains. In the case of IDEX, it’s the latter.

IDEX will also integrate Polygon’s zkEVM technology to function as a Layer 2 network, deriving its security from Ethereum.

Founded in 2017, IDEX was counted as one of the most notable decentralized exchanges on Ethereum between 2017 and 2019, alongside other DEXs like EtherDelta. However, the advent and subsequent popularity of automated market makers, starting with Uniswap, led to a decrease in IDEX’s competitive advantage. Now, IDEX is looking to reinvent itself with its own Layer 2 network.

“Throughout the six years of our company history our development has focused on matching the performance and user experience of centralized exchanges,” said Alex Wearn, co-founder and CEO at IDEX. “Xchain represents the final piece necessary to go head-to-head with centralized exchanges.”

IDEX raised $2.5 million in seed funding round in 2020.

Xchain and Polygon’s Supernets

Xchain also aligns perfectly with Polygon’s strategy of enabling existing crypto projects to create their own blockchains. In the past, the Polygon team has assisted projects in developing individual chains for Immutable and Aavegotchi, also created with Supernets.

“This is a great example of exactly the types of products we were envisioning when we built Polygon Supernets powered with zkEVM and Polygon zkEVM,” said Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon. “We’re just at the beginning, but when others see what IDEX is able to do with this technology, we know they’re going to rush to implement it as well.”

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

NFT Inspect, which recently released a Chrome browser extension that analyzes NFTs used as Twitter profile pictures, is integrating MoonPay’s payment solutions.

Crypto exchange Bitifinex has recovered $312,000 in cash and 6.917 BCH ($2,000) from a 2016 theft. 

Bitfinex received the assets from the United States Department of Homeland Security, which played an instrumental role in seizing the stolen digital assets and prosecuting the culprits. 

“We are extremely pleased to be able to reach another successful milestone in the recovery of assets stolen from Bitfinex in 2016,” Bitfinex Chief Technology Officer Paolo Ardoino said in a company statement. “We look forward to recovering as much of the stolen bitcoin as we possibly can and redistributing that to holders of the tokens that were issued in response to the hack in 2016.” 

The recovered funds will be paid out proportionally to owners of Recovery Right Tokens (RRT). These tokens were issued to holders affected by the 2016 hack. RRT holders can swap their tokens 1:1 with $1 of recovered funds, and 30 million RRTs remain in circulation.

Bitfinex lost 119,756 BTC through a security breach in the 2016 hack. Since then, the U.S. government incrementally recovered funds related to the hack. In February of 2022, the Justice Department recovered 94,000 BTC, worth $3.6 billion at the time, for Bitfinex, The Block previously reported.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Hong Kong is unlikely to introduce a government-backed stablecoin, claimed according to a senior researcher at OKG.

On Tuesday, a Hong Kong University of Science and Technology paper advocated for a government-issued HKD stablecoin to compete with dollar-denominated coins. However, Jason Jiang, senior researcher at OKG, said it is unlikely the Hong Kong government will issue a HKD stablecoin backed by government foreign reserves, “given the existence of the digital HKD and the uncertain regulatory framework for stablecoins.”

“There is little mention of it in the official statements from the Hong Kong government, instead, the government encourages innovative practices such as digital HKD and tokenized deposits,” he told The Block.

Hong Kong Monetary Authority

Jiang thinks the Hong Kong Monetary Authority will continue to execute their digital Hong Kong dollar in three stages, while accelerating the formulation of a stablecoin regulatory framework.

The academic proposal had argued a privately issued HKDG stablecoin could not compete with U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins, hence the need for backing by government reserves. In addition, it stated the coin would improve the Hong Kong dollar’s cross-border liquidity and increase transaction efficiency.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Swift signed the sponsorship agreement worth as much as $100 million following more than six months of discussions.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Balancer has attracted several of its peers with a new tokenomics proposal dubbed the “8020 Initiative.”

Excitement over the hoped-for approval of a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund is back again. This time, financial giant BlackRock’s entrance to the race for an ETF has spurred hope that the Securities and Exchange Commission will approve the long-awaited product, a decade after the crypto industry first sought to launch a bitcoin ETF.