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Cryptocurrency exchange Huobi announced Monday that it has received approval from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC) to migrate its spot trading business to the British overseas territory.

Huobi currently operates its spot trading business from Seychelles through a “registered but unregulated entity,” Jeff Mei, director of global strategy at Huobi Group, told The Block. The move to Gibraltar means Huobi’s spot trading business will be regulated by the GFSC via a licensed entity called Huobi Technology (Gibraltar) Co. Ltd., said Mei.

Huobi said the Gibraltar entity received the distributed ledger technology (DLT) license from the GFSC in December 2018, but it was only for institutional brokerage and over-the-counter (OTC) services. Now the spot trading business has also been approved, the exchange said, meaning it can begin migrating all of its spot trading users to the licensed entity.

“The Gibraltar entity will offer spot trading services globally,” said Mei. He added that Huobi already has a local office in Gibraltar and is moving some of its technology infrastructure and cloud hosting in the territory. The exchange operator may also expand its local team as more users are migrated, he said.

Huobi said the move to Gibraltar comes as it focuses on international markets and more regulatory compliance after China’s latest crypto crackdown in September. With the migration, the exchange operator said it will be able to attract both retail and institutional clients who want to trade through a regulated platform.

Gibraltar introduced the DLT regulatory framework in 2018, and since then, it has attracted several industry players, including Bitso, LMAX Digital, INX, and eToro.

As for Huobi, the company says it has licenses in Japan (007 crypto exchange license), Hong Kong (type 4 (advising on securities), type 9 (asset management), trust, and trust or company service provider license), and in the U.S. as well (trust company license in Nevada), besides Gibraltar.

© 2021 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.

Huobi Global will move its spot trading services to Gibraltar, after receiving a license from the local Financial Services Commission (FSC), the exchange said in a press release shared with CoinDesk.

• The China-born crypto exchange is likely looking for a new home away from Chinese regulators. The exchange had already moved significant portions of its operations to Singapore when Chinese regulators launched a renewed crackdown on crypto trading on Sept. 24, CoinDesk reported. It later announced it would expel its Chinese users.
• The exchange will be migrating its existing spot trading users, tech infrastructure, and cloud hosting to a licensed entity in Gibraltar, a Huobi spokesperson told CoinDesk via email.
• But Huobi currently has “no plans to move the majority of its operations” to the city and might add staff to Gibraltar operations “depending on how the [user] migration goes,” the spokesperson said.
• Huobi will serve global customers from its Gibraltar base, the spokesperson said. The company claims to be pursuing a “decentralized” global structure with no particular headquarters.
• A Huobi subsidiary, Huobi Technology (Gibraltar) Co. Ltd., received a distributed ledger technology license (DLT) from the local FSC, which allows the company to use DLT technology to store or transmit value belonging to others, the press release said.
• In addition to these services, Huobi Gibraltar is also allowed to “operate a secondary market venue for trading virtual assets” and provide brokerage services, according to the FSC registry.
• This is the first time Huobi Global will move its spot trading services to a regulated entity, the press release said. The exchange believes that operating under a licensed entity will appeal to institutional investors, according to the presser.
• The Gibraltar entity was previously a crypto brokerage for institutional investors and high net worth individuals, as well ass over-the-counter trading services to retail users, according to the press release. It was incorporated in 2017, according to the FSC registry.
• Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory located at the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula, where Spain and Portugal are located.
• 30% of the exchange’s revenue comes from China, Huobi co-founder Du Jun told the Financial Times on Monday.

Read more: Ahead of Crackdown, Huobi Scrambled to Move Staff Out of China, Insiders Say

The banking industry will most likely try and capitalize on the demand for stablecoin deposits on the back of the market’s exponential growth, Morgan Stanley’s lead cryptocurrency strategist, Sheena Shah, said in a report.

• Some notable features of these coins is that they provide access to crypto-deposit interest rates and decentralized finance (DeFi). Crypto lenders offer over 5% interest on some of these coins, which in turn will cause regulators and governments to respond, Morgan Stanley said.
• Stimulus from governments and central banks have led to risky assets reaching all time highs and cryptocurrencies are no different, Shah said. Cryptocurrencies are trading “similarly to risky assets” with the support from the leverage growth in their markets, she added.
• Shah notes that “institutional investor interest in participating in the upward price momentum is building,” adding that bitcoin’s dominance is slipping as “alternative coins outperform due to their lower USD prices and potential use cases.”
• “The battle of the blockchains” is likely to continue as each picks up market share, Shah said, noting that stablecoin issuance has risen 20 times since 2020.
• As more institutions, such as asset managers, exchanges and corporates, decide to buy crypto, bitcoin units will end up in the possession of fewer participants, which will result in centralization, she said.
• Bitcoin was trading at $65,962 as of publication time.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has directed commercial banks in the country to close accounts connected to two entities accused of trading crypto.

According to a report by Nigerian media outlet Peoples Gazette, the order was contained in a Post-No-Debit Circular issued on November 3.

The circular signed by J. Y. Mammanand, director of banking supervision at the CBN, called for the immediate closure of the accounts belonging to one company TVS Hallmark Service Limited and two individuals, Nwaorgu Kingsley Chibuzor and Nnamdi Francis Okereke.

The CBN memo also instructed that the funds held by the indicted entities should be placed in “suspense accounts.” Several fintech firms have also suffered a similar fate in recent times although that action was due to the companies allegedly offering unlicensed asset management services.

Nigeria’s central bank banned financial institutions from providing services to crypto trading platforms in February. As part of the order, the central bank instructed commercial banks to identify and shut down accounts tied to cryptocurrency trading activities.

The CBN has clarified that cryptocurrency is not banned in Nigeria. According to the central bank, the banking prohibition was to prevent the use of the country’s financial apparatus to support crypto transactions.

Following the ban, peer-to-peer transactions reportedly account for the bulk of the country’s virtual currency trading activity. Cheaper remittance costs and currency devaluation continue to drive crypto adoption in Nigeria despite the CBN ban.

© 2021 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.

Colleen Sullivan, former CEO of crypto trading firm CMT Digital, has resigned as a non-executive director of Argo Blockchain, the London- and Nasdaq-listed crypto mining firm.

Argo announced Sullivan’s appointment on July 29 this year, hailing the wealth of crypto and finance experience she would bring to the firm.

But in an announcement this morning, Argo said Sullivan had stepped down to focus on other roles.

“She has taken on a new career role that does not allow her to serve as a director for the company and her resignation is not the result of any disagreement with the management or board of the company,” said the company.

Sullivan joined British hedge fund Brevan Howard Asset Management to steer its crypto investments in September. She had run CMT Digital, a division of CMT Group, since September 2017.

In the Monday announcement, Argo also stated that it had mined 167 bitcoin or “bitcoin equivalent” in October, bringing the total amount of bitcoin it has mined this year to 1,646. Revenues for the month came in at £7.24 million (or roughly $9.75 million).

Last week, the company was forced to disclose key information about upcoming projects after the contents of a private meeting were unexpectedly posted on Twitter.

© 2021 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.

Running a high-throughput network is no easy task.

Those keeping the Solana blockchain running need to handle 2,500 transactions per second, where there have been 38 billion transactions so far. Unsurprisingly, this requires expensive hardware, a good internet connection and other infrastructure. 

In September, the network was hit by so many transactions, some 400,000 per second, that it struggled to cope and went offline — for 17 hours. Those running the network had to come together to rebuild it and make it more durable. It’s no easy task. And according to Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, that’s all part of the challenge.

Speaking at Breakpoint, in Lisbon, Yakovenko said that the network was focused on two things: maximum pain and maximum humans. “What we really picked was max pain,” he said. “Part of our culture is to eat glass,” he added — citing Elon Musk.

Yakovenko argued that the number of nodes running a blockchain — or a global state machine, as he refers to Solana — is more important than the hash rate. His reasoning was that, if you take away all the nodes, the hash rate becomes irrelevant. This is sometimes referred to as the Nakamoto coefficient, a way to measure the decentralization of a blockchain network.

When it comes to Solana, the network is focused on high performance, something that puts the onus on those running the network to handle it. There are 1,150 validators on the Solana network right now, about a tenth of reachable nodes running Bitcoin.

As a result, while Yakovenko would like to see the network head toward 100,000 transactions per second, the challenge is to keep the number of validators high. “The hard part is finding the humans that want to run the network,” he said, noting that some people in Russia have to drive out into the middle of nowhere to put up servers.

“The challenge for us is not the technology challenge but the social challenge: How do we change behavior on this network such that the stake and the way the voting power and how the nodes are distributed actually maximizes the Nakamoto coefficient,” he added.

© 2021 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.

Speculative fervor in popular meme token shiba inu (SHIB) recently reached unprecedented levels, reprising the retail frenzy observed ahead of May’s price crash.

The number of addresses that acquired the cryptocurrency within 20% of the all-time high price climbed six-fold to a record 116,560 in the eight days to Nov. 2, amounting to 12% of the total count of non-zero addresses, according to data provided by blockchain analytics firm IntoTheBlock.

The spike in so-called “All Time Highers” addresses tracked by IntoTheBlock indicates a rush to buy the cryptocurrency near the lifetime price high – a sign of fear of missing out (FOMO) among traders. FOMO is often observed in the last leg of the bull markets.

“Last time this pattern emerged in Shiba Inu in May, SHIB dropped by 90%,” IntoTheBlock said in its weekly newsletter published Sunday.

That said, past performance is no guarantee of future action. As the old saying goes, markets can stay irrational longer than sellers can stay solvent.

So SHIB’s record number of All Time Highers doesn’t imply a crash is imminent. However, it does serve as a fairly accurate indicator of the degree of speculative action taking place, as IntoTheBlock noted. Savvy investors typically reduce long exposure whenever signs of retail FOMO emerge.

The self-proclaimed dogecoin killer fell 15% last week, ending a five-week rally that saw prices rise nearly 10-fold to $0.00008870. At press time, the cryptocurrency was changing hands near a descending trendline resistance at $0.00005785.

The Bank of China has shown a machine that converts foreign currencies into digital yuan, China Times reported today.

• The machine is likely in preparation for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, when the central bank digital currency (CBDC) is set to be introduced to the rest of the world.
• Users need to link their passports to the transaction, but don’t need a bank account, according to the report. The machine, unveiled at China’s International Import Expo in Shanghai, currently supports 17 foreign currencies.
• Foreigners in China have been able to use the digital yuan since at least May of this year.
• The CBDC has been used in $9.7 billion worth of transactions, the head of the PBOC Digital Currency Research Institute Mu Changchun said last week.

Read more: China’s CBDC Has Been Used for $9.7B of Transactions

Crypto mining company Argo Blockchain (LSE: ARB) said mining revenue rose 32% in October from the month before to £7.24 million ($9.75 million).

• The company mined 167 bitcoin or bitcoin equivalent, according to an announcement Monday, up from 165 in September.
• The new coins bring the company’s total production for the year to 1,646 and take the total owned to 2,128 bitcoin or bitcoin equivalent.
• Mining capacity grew by an additional 220 petahash per second to a total of 1.295 exahash per second.
• Read more: Argo Blockchain Shares Fall After Workers Accidentally Share Non-Public Information

BitBay, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Poland, has renamed itself Zonda and hired a new chief executive as it kicks off an expansion beyond Europe.

Zonda, which has more than a million users and holds a crypto license to operate across the European Union, is on track to snag a license in Switzerland next, to be followed by the U.K. and Canada, according to newly appointed CEO Przemysław Kral.

“We are very well-known in central and eastern Europe as we have a crypto/fiat license in Estonia and we are also the first exchange to have an audited financial statement there,” said Kral, who served as BitBay’s chief legal officer before becoming CEO. “Now we want to be fully regulated and have licenses everywhere.”

Many crypto companies are stuck at some stage of registration with regulatory authorities, given the steady creep of global anti-money laundering (AML) rules. Zonda’s move into Switzerland goes some way beyond just a license application, Kral said.

“We have a company structure in Switzerland and we are hiring there,” said Kral. “We also have a partnership with FINMA-licensed SEBA Bank. We expect to have our Swiss license in the first quarter of 2022.”