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Companies working with digital assets in Kazakhstan could soon be subject to anti-money laundering (AML) regulation, according to a new law passed by the national parliament today, news agency Sputnik wrote Friday. The country’s president has yet to sign the document into law, however.

Companies issuing digital assets or providing fiat on-ramps and crypto trading services would have to notify Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry when they launch their services or shut them down, Sputnik said.

The agency quoted parliament member Olga Perepechina, who said that the lack of such monitoring has led to a rise in money laundering and terrorism financed using digital assets.

Kazakhstan is a popular location for cryptocurrency mining, as being next door to China has made it a place of relocation for some Chinese miners that fled China due to the latest anti-crypto crackdown there.

Bitcoin cash (BCH) saw a sharp but short-lived uptick in its value on Friday after the publication of a fraudulent press release claiming that U.S. supermarket giant Kroger would be accepting the cryptocurrency as payment this holiday season.

• The crypto rose over 4.6% from $602.63 at around 11:30 UTC to $630.70 less than 15 minutes later following the fraudulent announcement’s publication. BCH subsequently gave back all its gains to fall below the price it had been prior to the announcement. At the time of writing, it was priced at $601.74.
• The fraudulent announcement, which was issued on PR Newswire and appeared on the Kroger website, claimed the grocery retailer would be accepting BCH for all in-store and online purchases from Dec. 1.
• A company spokesperson confirmed to CoinDesk at 11:49 UTC that the release was fraudulent. At press time, the release had been removed from the company site.
• “This morning a press release was fraudulently issued claiming to be The Kroger Co. that falsely stated the organization will begin to accept bitcoin cash. This communication was fraudulent and is unfounded and should be disregarded,” a spokesperson said.
• This fraud is similar to the one in September which fraudulently claimed that Walmart would start to accept litecoin.
• Bitcoin cash, the world’s 21st largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at the time of writing, according to CoinMarketCap data, was formed out of a hard fork on the Bitcoin network in 2017.

UPDATE (NOV. 5 13:20 UTC): Adds Kroger’s statement in fourth bullet.

Read more: Bitcoin Cash Has Split Into Two New Blockchains, Again

American grocery retail giant Kroger has debunked reports that it will begin accepting Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as a payment option in its outlets nationwide.

According to Reuters, a spokesperson for the company said that a press release appearing on the company’s website about accepting Bitcoin Cash from December was fake. As of the time of writing, the fictitious release is still up on Kroger’s investor page with a quote attributed to Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen.

This is reminiscent of another story that broke in September about Walmart partnering with Litecoin (LTC) that later turned out to be false. In the Walmart case, the people responsible reportedly registered a fake domain name which was later spotted as a spoof of the original corporate name.

When the Walmart news broke, it pumped Litecoin by over 30% from $175 to $231 before crashing when the story was revealed to be false. In contrast, today’s news barely impacted the price of BCH with only a 5% move occurring a few minutes before Kroger’s swift denial of the story.

© 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.

Solana Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and FTX announced Friday a $100 million fund to invest in startups focused on building blockchain gaming studios.

The announcement comes at a time when the concept of metaverse or virtual worlds is growing in popularity. Last week, Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta as the company has been developing new technologies that will help people connect and explore in the metaverse.

According to some reports, the metaverse will also play a key part in gaming’s future. Essentially, a theory is that the metaverse will allow users to meet, chat and play games together.

To that end, blockchain gaming startups have been raising a lot of cash recently. Venture capital firms believe that gaming will help bring more people to the crypto world.

“Gaming has a massive opportunity to bring the next billion users to web3,” said Amy Wu, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “We are excited to partner with FTX and Solana Ventures to play a leading role in growing this ecosystem.”

Lightspeed has invested in several gaming startups like Epic Games, 1047 Games, TripleDot Studios, and Faraway Games. It invested in Faraway Games along with FTX and Solana Ventures as part of the new $100 million fund and as the first investment. 

The fund is denominated in dollars, meaning cash will be invested in startups focused on web3 gaming on Solana, a spokesperson for Solana Ventures told The Block.

© 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.

FTX, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Solana Ventures are investing $100 million in Web 3 gaming development, the companies announced Friday.

The funding will support gaming studios and technology that integrate the Solana blockchain into video games on desktop and mobile platforms.

The initiative has already resulted in its first investment with FTX and Lightspeed leading a $21 million funding round for gaming studio Faraway.

Lightspeed said it’s already invested $300 million in “early stage gaming and crypto companies” that include Epic Games, 1047 Games, Tripledot Studios, Offchain Labs, Alchemy and Wintermute..

Web 3 gaming has skyrocketed in popularity with play-to-earn titles such as Axie Infinity and metaverse games like Decentraland and Sandbox.

Read more: FTX, Lightspeed Lead $21M Funding Round in Gaming Studio Faraway

While part of the investment will target the development of new titles, it will also be used to integrate Solana’s blockchain into existing games, creating in-game economies centered around NFTs and Solana wallet payments.

“Gaming has a massive opportunity to bring the next billion users to Web 3,” Amy Wu, partner at Lightspeed, said in a press release. “High-performance blockchains like Solana are now capable of delivering the kind of Web 2 experiences gamers expect while providing the advantages of decentralized Web 3 systems.”

Blockchain gaming studio Faraway has raised a total of $30 million in early-stage backing to develop browser-based games on the Solana network.

The Miami-based firm announced Thursday that it has secured $21 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and crypto exchange platform FTX.

Other backers in the Series A round include serial blockchain venture capital investors Pantera Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Silicon Valley VC giant a16z.

This $21 million Series A is in addition to the firm’s seed funding round also led by Lightspeed that secured over $8 million in capital for Faraway.

With early-stage funding secured, Faraway will be looking to launch its flagship browser-based game titled “Mini Royale: Nations,” a first-person shooter game. Faraway says it will be Solana’s first live multiplayer game.

By producing browser-based games and eliminating the need for strict hardware prerequisites for gaming, the company says it is hoping that the low entry barriers will encourage mass adoption among online gamers.

“We believe that the browser is the optimal platform for any blockchain game, especially in the short to medium term,” Faraway CEO Alex Paley stated, adding, “Our players do not have to worry about platform owners all of a sudden banning our game on their platform, as we’ve already started to see among big platform owners.”

Faraway’s $30 million fundraise is also the latest in a series of VC-led funding for blockchain gaming startups amid the growing popularity of the metaverse concept.

Gaming startup Mythical Games recently closed a $150 million Series C round led by a16z. NFT gaming outfit The Sandbox also secured $93 million from investors like SoftBank.

© 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.

Bitcoin (BTC) continues to trade in a tight range, although buyers appear to be holding support above $60,000. Short-term indicators are neutral, although pullbacks could be limited given a series of price breakouts over the past month.

If buyers fail to hold $60,000, lower support around the 50-day moving average, currently near $55,000, could stabilize a pullback.

Bitcoin was trading around $61,500 at press time and is roughly flat over the past 24 hours.

For now, upside momentum is slowing, which suggests a period of consolidation could persist in the short-term. Eventually, indicators suggest momentum could improve to support a breakout in BTC above $65,000 based on positive historical returns in the fourth quarter.

Binance has hired a veteran financial criminal investigation agent to head up suspicious activity reporting as it continues to strengthen its regulatory compliance front.

• Amjad Qaqish, a former criminal investigation special agent at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), was named as the largest crypto exchange’s director of global suspicious activity reporting on Friday.
• During his 30 years with the tax authority, Qaqish worked on cases relating to fraud, tax evasion, money laundering and terrorism financing, including those involving crypto.
• His role will involve monitoring suspicious activity to prevent “bad actors misusing the cryptocurrency markets,” Binance said.
• The hire is the latest of a series of appointments by Binance as it tightens up on regulatory compliance while tackling fraud and other criminal activity. The exchange encountered a slew of reprimands from financial watchdogs earlier this year, forcing it to become more proactive regarding compliance.
• Last month, Binance hired Mark McGinness, the former head of international relations at the Dubai Financial Services Authority, as its first chief regulatory liaison officer.

Read more: Binance Is Investigating Squid Game Token, Considers It a Scam

Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, traded little changed between $60,000 and $63,000 Friday before the U.S. jobs report. The price is also little changed over the week, while altcoins and gaming tokens have seen significant gains.

Solana’s SOL token has rallied 21% this week, breaking through its all-time high on Thursday. Ether (ETH) also climbed to a record, hitting $4,628 on Nov. 3. It is up 2.4% on the week.

“Alternative coins to ETH are still in favor,” said Daniel Kukan, a trader at Crypto Finance AG.

The bitcoin dominance chart, which shows the extent of the cryptocurrency’s dominance over the rest of the market, is signaling a bias toward altcoin exposure, according to Matthew Dibb, COO of Stack Funds.

“This trend will likely persist for the short term,” he said.

The chart shows bitcoin dominance declining as altcoins take a larger share.

“We have seen consistent bids for Layer 1 tokens throughout any market weakness,” said Dibb.

Avalanche’s AVAX token touched an all-time high $80.29 on Friday and is up 20% on the week. Polkadot’s DOT has also made significant gains this week and is up 20%.

Coins related to virtual worlds, or so-called metaverses, were also in the spotlight after Facebook said it will change its name to Meta and enter the arena.

“The recent rebranding from Facebook to Meta is making the crypto market reassess the future value of these metaverse competitors, which until last week, many of them were fairly undervalued” said Juan Pellicer, a research analyst at IntoTheBlock.

Decentraland (MANA), a virtual world on the Ethereum blockchain that allows users to monetize content and applications, is up 88% on the week. Sandbox (SAND), also a virtual world where players can build, own and monetize their gaming experiences using non-fungible tokens, has gained 132%.

Play-to-earn tokens have also experienced an uptick. Axie Infinity’s AXS token is up 5% on the week and Enjin Coin (ENJ), which is a gaming community platform and virtual goods marketplace with a market cap of $2.6 billion, is up 28%.

Enjin announced Thursday that it has formed a $100 million fund to support projects in its ecosystem geared toward developing a decentralized metaverse. The fund will focus on cross-chain NFT assets, digital collectible applications, gaming that harnesses mixed reality, virtual events and building multichain infrastructure.

Argo Blockchain, the London-listed crypto miner, estimates that the cost of building and kitting out its proposed 800-megawatt mining facility in Texas could be $1.5-2 billion.

The company has been forced to disclose the estimate alongside several other key nuggets of inside information that were discussed in a meeting and subsequently posted on Twitter.

In a regulatory filing this morning, Argo stated that its representatives had met with equity portfolio manager Anthony Coyle on November 4. At the meeting, Argo’s employees “inadvertently disclosed certain information that could be viewed as material non-public information under U.S. securities laws or inside information under U.K. securities laws,” according to the filing. Coyle then published that information on Twitter — a post that has since been deleted.

Argo is listed on the London Stock Exchange in the United Kingdom and on the Nasdaq Global Market in the United States. Its current market capitalization is £573 million (roughly $770 million).

The publication of the potential costs of constructing the mining facility in Texas comes just a few months after a damning report from short-seller Boatman Capital, which focused on the land on which the facility will be built.

Boatman argued that Argo’s $17.5 million purchase of the plot of land in question had been overpaid for by a factor of up to 100 times.  In a video shared on social media at the time, Argo’s CEO Peter Wall defended the purchase as “a very solid deal” and a “project acquisition.”

In this morning’s filing, Argo stated that the $1.5-2 billion range is based on “numerous assumptions,” including the type of machines used at the facility, the mix of owned and hosted machines, raw material costs, labour and power costs, and when construction begins.

“The actual costs for Argo to build and kit out the Helios facility in Texas will also depend on the extent to which Argo decides to fully develop the property, which has not yet been determined,” said Argo in the filing. “Each of the foregoing assumptions is subject to numerous inherent risks and uncertainties, and, as a result, future results could differ materially from the estimated range above.”

Other nuggets

In his post on Twitter, Coyle stated that Argo claimed it had achieved a 25% uplift in hash rate from the use of immersion cooling technology. Argo denied making the claim in its filing.

During the meeting, the company’s representatives told Coyle that Argo could, in the future, make up to 20% of its revenues from currencies other than bitcoin — its main focus at present. In this morning’s filing, Argo clarified that this was not intended as a forecast but as “directional insight.”

Another claim made by Argo’s representatives was that it had seen a 500% return on its investment in Equihash machines purchased in June 2020. “This statement was made to illustrate that return on investment can vary greatly, and this was a particularly favorable example,” said Argo in the filing. 

© 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.