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Bank of America (BofA) highlighted ten bullish charts for stocks with digital asset exposure, according to a research note today.

• The stocks are Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), American Express (AXP), Bunge (BG), Exelon (EXC), Facebook (FB), JB Hunt (JBHT), JPMorgan (JPM), SVB Financial (SIVB), Tesla (TSLA) and Workday (WDAY).
• Advanced Micro may have upside to $138 to $150, American Express upside $202 to $208, Exelon upside to $67-$72 and SVB Financial upside to $750 and $800, according to BofA technical research strategist Stephen Suttmeier.
• Bank of America earlier this week added 23 more stocks to its equities research coverage “that may see market value expansion due to digital asset exposure,” according to a research note dated Oct. 18.
• The U.S. bank launched its digital asset research team on Oct. 4 with a report listing 20 companies, and said that its “research aims to explore the implications across industries including finance, technology, supply chains, social media and gaming.”
• Its analysts reiterated in the latest report that with $2.5 trillion in market value and more than 200 million users, the “digital asset universe is too large to ignore.”

Read more: Bank of America Launches Research for ‘Too Large to Ignore’ Digital Assets

There’s been a lot of fuss about NFTs lately, but cNFT – is the next level of beloved digital ownership technology.

Brought to light by SUPERNOVAE – the team which pioneered the NFT gaming industry in 2017 with the release of MegaCryptoPolis – the cNFT protocol is the core of a new MMO game called Farsite. This is a new player-driven economic strategy, where all assets are secured on a distributed ledger. According to the post-apocalyptic lore, humanity was forced to leave the Earth onboard Spaceships in search of scarce resources.

The main asset in the game is a Spaceship, which is a cNFT – an NFT with an ERC-20 token – Credits, locked as collateral. The Ships are needed to explore distant galaxies, obtain and transport resources, and fight off enemies. Each Ship is unique in terms of stats and appearance, there are no 2 same Ships in the whole universe, moreover, they can be modified with Modules (which are cNFTs as well).

A Ship can be destroyed in battle or voluntarily disassembled, in both scenarios the owner receives the full amount of Credits. Credits are the only game currency, used to build and fuel Ships, acquire Sectors on Planets, and trade resources. Ships could be used to play the game and farm Credits or can simply make a fine addition to your NFT collection.

Generally speaking, the core game loop looks simple, yet intriguing – fly to distant Planets, acquire Sectors (starting October 28), mine resources, and haul them to the station to sell for Credits, or attack other haulers to take away theirs. 

The game is scheduled to go live in early 2022, yet it has already gathered a huge community of travelers willing to join the new space race. The pre-order of Crates containing scarce Ships, Blueprints needed to build new Ships, Credits, and Modules will launch on 25 November. The early adopters’ First Edition Ships were sold out in late May within just 4 hours and are now only available on OpenSea.

© 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.

XanPool, a Hong Kong-based payments infrastructure firm that provides crypto on and off-ramp services, has raised $27 million in a Series A funding round.

Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures led the round. CMT Digital and Taavet Hinrikus, founder and chairman of Wise (formerly Transferwise), also participated in the round, among other investors.

XanPool describes itself as a payments network, similar to Mastercard or Visa. But instead of having a “closed” network of banks as partners, XanPool says its network is open and is made out of individuals and businesses whose idle capital is used to settle cross-currency and crypto transactions.

XanPool says its network has over $200 million of liquidity, over 400 business partners and over 500,000 users.

XanPool also bills itself as a SWIFT-like network. XanPool CEO Jeffery Liu said like SWIFT, XanPool does not hold liquidity itself and earns fees based on the communication that its software facilitates, but unlike SWIFT, XanPool is compatible with crypto.

The team is very familiar with how SWIFT works. SWIFT veteran Daniel De Weyer works for XanPool since August 2019. Weyer worked at SWIFT for nearly three decades and is currently a director of payments and banking relationships at XanPool.

XanPool currently operates in over 13 countries in the Asia Pacific region and plans to expand its business further.

The Series A round brings XanPool’s total funding to date to more than $31 million. In September 2020, the firm raised $4.3 million in a pre-Series A funding round.

© 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.

Quick Take

• In June, State Street launched a digital unit to bring everything together under one banner.
• State Street Digital’s managing director Swen Werner explains what the unit currently offers and how it plans to evolve in the future.

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Bitcoin now worth nearly $7 million held by the DarkSide ransomware group involved in the Colonial Pipeline attack in May is on the move, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic.

• Following the attack, which threatened the petroleum supplies of five eastern states in the U.S., DarkSide’s share of the amount paid in ransom remained dormant until Oct. 21, Elliptic said Friday in a blog.
• The developer of “ransomware as a service,” DarkSide, maintained a wallet to hold its share of the funds, which included 11.3 BTC. That was identified by Elliptic using its intelligence collection and analysis of blockchain transactions.
• DarkSide subsequently said the wallet had been claimed by an unknown third party, sending 107.8 BTC ($6.8 million) to a new address.
• These bitcoin have now been sent through a series of new wallets over a period of several hours, with small amounts being ejected at each step – a common money laundering technique to make funds harder to track.
• Elliptic has linked this activity to ransomware group REvil, with which DarkSide has close ties, being hacked and forced online by a U.S. government-led operation.

Read more: Blockchain Analytics Firm Elliptic Raises $60M to Fund R&D, Expansion

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has replaced Binance as the world’s biggest bitcoin futures platform, thanks to the strong investor appetite for the recently launched ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF.

As of writing, the CME accounts for 22% or $5.68 billion of the total global futures open interest of $25.7 billion, while Binance is contributing $5.66 billion to the worldwide tally.

The amount of money locked in the CME-based futures contracts has tripled this month, with more than $1.5 billion flowing into the market after ProShares’ bitcoin ETF went live on Tuesday.

Launched under the ticket BITO on the New York Stock Exchange, the ETF has amassed $1.2 billion worth of assets in the first three days and could soon hit the CME’s position limits.

At the end of Thursday, the ETF held 2,133 contracts of November futures and 1,679 contacts due to expire on Oct. 29.

The CME allows a single entity to own a maximum of 2,000 contracts in the front-month futures while capping the overall positions across different maturities at 5,000 contracts.

“Exchanges enforce positions limits to keep a single entity from establishing unilateral control over the market and prices,” Pankaj Balani, CEO of Delta Exchange, said, adding that limit sizes vary from market to market and are flexible.

ProShares’ fund also appears to be close to hitting the limit in the October expiry and may continue to snap up longer duration futures.

That would expose the fund to a significant tracking error – the difference between bitcoin’s performance and actual returns from the fund. That’s because longer-duration futures contracts trade at a considerable premium to the spot price. As such, the fund could up selling low and buying high while rolling over positions on expiry, leading to contango bleed, as CoinDesk reported earlier this month.

The situation is expected to ease as more ETFs go live, and the CME raises caps on maximum positions a single entity can hold.

“Position limits are less of a concern as more ETFs enter the space, because there will be large holders of these contracts, and it will be harder for one entity to control the market,” Leah Wald, Valkyrie, CEO of Valkyrie Investments, said during an interview with CNBC on Thursday.

Wald added that Valkyrie’s futures-based ETF would begin trading on Friday. VanEck’s fund is also expected to go live in the next few days.

The CME recently announced that starting from November, the position limit for the front-month bitcoin futures, options on bitcoin futures, and micro bitcoin futures, will be raised to 4,000 contracts.

Each standard bitcoin futures and options contract on the CME represents 5 BTC, while the size of the micro futures contract is 0.1 BTC.

Bitcoin mining company Greenidge Generation is eyeing expansion into two new sites in Texas and South Carolina.

• The Nasdaq-listed firm announced Thursday it is entering into an agreement regarding potentially constructing new data centers in Texas.
• It also agreed to acquire printing company LSC Communications’ facility in South Carolina. It had originally thought to lease that site.
• Greenidge has also doubled its recent order of S19j Pro mining machines from Bitmain to 22,500 units. This brings the firm’s total order with Bitmain to 29,000 miners, which are to be delivered between now and third-quarter 2022.

A new proposal posits that Binance Smart Chain should adopt a regular fee-burning mechanism, somewhat similar to the one implemented via Ethereum’s EIP-1559. So far the proposal is in draft stage and is awaiting a vote to be implemented. 

The proposal recommends that a portion of the transaction fees in each block should be burned and that the proportion should be adjustable through the network’s governance system. The net result would be that validators on the network would receive fewer transaction fees as they would be destroyed instead. This would help to lower the circulating supply of BNB over time. 

Burning is the term used for when cryptocurrencies are sent to a “burn address” and are no longer accessible. Since nobody can spend them any longer, they are deemed to be destroyed and no longer count in the total supply of coins.

The proposal suggests that the portion of burned fees should be initially set to 10%. Currently the network sees around 6814 BNB ($3.4 million) in transaction fees per day, so a burn of that amount would reduce the supply by 681 BNB ($334,000) per day.

For the proposal to go to a vote, it needs to receive a minimum deposit of 2,000 BNB. If this happens, validators on the network can vote for or against the changes to go ahead. If it passes, the change will be implemented immediately.

Binance Smart Chain is already subject to regular coin burns. Initially set at a proportion of crypto exchange Binance’s trading fees, the exchange continues to burn large amounts of BNB every quarter. The most recent burn destroyed 1,335,888 BNB ($659 million) on October 18. This is part of the exchange’s plan to burn half the total supply over time.

Following in Ethereum’s footsteps

The proposal is similar but not identical to the one introduced on Ethereum by EIP-1559. That change added a burn fee to every transaction, one that rises or falls based on demand. Typically the total amount of fees burned has been lower than the new amount of ETH issued per block — meaning that it reduces the amount of inflation on Ethereum, but has not made it deflationary. 

The difference with the BSC proposal is that there is no inflation currently on the network. So rather than reduce the inflation, it will make the network deflationary from the get-go. 

So far the only comment on the GitHub proposal is against the idea, stating that it “doesn’t look like a good proposal.” The commentator claims that making the coin deflationary won’t work over the long term.

© 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.

Banks in Spain are getting ready to offer crypto services to their clients, but are being frustrated by the lack of clarity from their central bank.

• The Bank of Spain said in June it would provide instructions for entities wishing to register to provide crypto services.
• The corresponding registry is meant to be operational by Oct. 29, but the banks are still waiting for instructions, Spanish newspaper El Pais reported Tuesday.
• Specifically, there is uncertainty as to whether the registry – which aims principally to combat money laundering – is designed for financial institutions that are already regulated entities.
• “It would not make sense for a bank to have to go through the requirements imposed, since these entities are already directly supervised,” Gloria Hernández Aler, a partner at regulatory advisory firm finReg360, said.
• “However, it does make sense for them to notify that they are going to provide this type of service and, probably, they will need to change their money laundering policy to adapt it to the dynamics of crypto assets.”
• Lacking firm direction from the central bank, several of the large financial institutions’ compliance departments have set about finding out whether they have to be registered to offer crypto services, El Pais reported.

Read more: EU to Designate Bank of Spain, Securities Regulator for Crypto Oversight: Report

Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Energy plans to limit the electricity consumption of the the nation’s crypto-mining industry to a total of 100 megawatts as it looks to curb power shortages.

• All newly authorized plants will be limited to using just 1 MW over two years, according to an Oct. 1 draft signed by the newly appointed energy minister, Magzum Maratuly Myrzagaliev. The ministerial order doesn’t say if the restriction ends after that period.
• Kazakhstan has become the second-biggest contributor to the bitcoin network after a crackdown in China that started in May drove out crypto mining companies. It now accounts for 18% of the global hashrate, a measure of computing power used to mine bitcoin, according to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance.
• The 1 MW limit is far below what many existing industrialized mines operate on, but is more than many small cities consume. For example, earlier this week BIT Mining said it is investing in a site in Ohio to take capacity to 100 MW.
• The ministerial order takes effect 60 days after its publication.
• Increased demand for electricity is testing the Central Asian country’s electricity grid. Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty, was hit by a total blackout in mid-July. Coal plants suffered outages in October, adding to the power shortages, Reuters reported.
• At a Sept. 30 conference, the energy minister blamed the crypto mining boom for the power shortages, local news site Kazakhtan Today reported.
• The order also called on the country’s national grid operator, KEGOC, to audit any power plants with capacity of 5 MW within 10 working days. KEGOC is to look for ways crypto miners can use to plug into electricity plants and submit its findings to the ministry.

Read more: Bitcoin Mining After the China Ban: US Dominance Is Set to Continue