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As the blockchain and virtual asset space continues to grow with the rise of cutting-edge applications, large companies and institutional investors are tapping into the space. As of now, there are more than ten thousand currencies in the global digital money market, and the total crypto market value has exceeded USD2 trillion. MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor also expressed that Bitcoin would continue to appreciate and he boldly predicted that the market value of Bitcoin would reach USD 100 trillion one day.

But the crypto landscape does present some challenges. Financial services are heavily regulated around the world, and each region has its own compliance standards and guidelines to meet. From Binance to Bittrex, many crypto companies bear the brunt and even had their licenses revoked in certain circumstances when the compliance requirements were not met. For global crypto institutions looking to provide custody solutions for clients around the world, the obstacles are particularly apparent. 

Providing compliant, customizable custodian services 

To ensure they trade and invest crypto in a regulatory-compliant environment, many institutional investors look to custody service providers for a diversified array of compliant and customizable custodian services. Being backed and supported by Huobi Technology Holdings Limited (“Huobi Tech”) (stock code: 1611. HK), a company listed on the Main Board of The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited which is dedicated to becoming a one-stop virtual asset service platform, Huobi Trust Hong Kong aims to provide asset custody, wealth management, private customization, family trust services, and more. 

“As a registered trust company under the common law system in Hong Kong, we aim to become the leading virtual asset trust service provider in the world,” said Lily Zhang, CFO of Huobi Tech.

Earning trust through transparency

Gaining the trust of virtual asset owners is another important element of crypto custody. Without the recognition of an independent third party, it’s hard for institutional investors to evaluate whether their custody provider is offering the best options in their clients’ interest. 

To attain this transparency, custody providers normally rely on attestation reports and certifications. But what’s more important than the third-party documents is that, custody providers must demonstrate a continuing commitment to improving their risk management protocols. 

As a registered trust company in Hong Kong, Huobi Trust Hong Kong is fully licensed and compliant with the requirements under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Ordinance (Cap. 615 of the laws of Hong Kong) and has obtained the Hong Kong Trust and Company Service Provider (TCSP) license (TCSP Licence No.: TC007494). As such, its daily operations must abide by the relevant Hong Kong regulations as well as the AML/CTF requirements, which precludes the company from money laundering, terrorism financing, and other serious risks that custody providers would possibly face.

“We realize transparency is the key to building trust with our clients, so we do our due diligence in this area,” Zhang said. 

Making security a priority 

One of the biggest concerns for institutional investors is the risk of cyberattacks. Since the theft of 850,000 bitcoins by Mt. Gox in 2013, crypto service providers have been facing different level of security pressure. In 2020 alone, hackers have stolen more than USD120 million in the crypto space. In August 2021, hackers took advantage of Bilaxy’s security vulnerabilities and stole more than USD21 million worth of cryptocurrency.

With an in-depth knowledge of best practices in security, Huobi Trust Hong Kong says it remains focused on cyber threats prevention and client assets protection via its in-house security infrastructure and a time-tested risk control framework. Huobi Trust Hong Kong offers products and services designed and built for asset protection including Globally-Distributed Multi-signature Cold Wallets, effectively improves the security level of customers’ asset storage; and much more.

“As the virtual asset space is evolving, we will continue to improve our product offerings in trust and custody services and ensure that the safety and security of our client’s assets always come first.” added Zhang.

As crypto regulations continue to evolve, it is imperative that institutional investors—and all investors for that matter—and their custody providers adhere to the compliance regulations and prioritize the security of their assets in a volatile environment. While the crypto space is ripe for many opportunities, there are also significant risks that must be mitigated in order to ensure the most secure user experiences possible. 

For more information on Huobi Trust Hong Kong, visit: https://www.huobihktrust.com/

© 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.

Purpose Investments has filed to list three further cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds with the Canadian securities regulators.

• The proposals for the three actively-managed funds – dubbed Purpose Crypto Opportunities ETF, Purpose Bitcoin Yield ETF, and Purpose Ether Yield ETF – was announced on Wednesday following the launch of the asset manager’s bitcoin and ether ETFs earlier this year.
• The Crypto Opportunities ETF aims to invest in companies with exposure to digital assets, akin to that filed by Evolve Funds with the Ontario Securities Commission in August.
• The Bitcoin Yield and Ether Yield ETFs meanwhile will aim to offer investors monthly yield by implementing a derivatives-based strategy and by obtaining either direct or indirect exposure to bitcoin and ether.
• Purpose Investments will act as the manager for the two yield ETFs, while private investment manager Neuberger Berman Breton Hill ULC will serve as an independent subadvisor for the Crypto Opportunities fund.
• The Canada-based asset manager also plans to launch a privately-offered fund offering exposure to decentralized finance (DeFi).

Read more: Ark Investment Management Opens Door for Fund to Invest in Canadian Crypto ETFs

Ether continues to struggle for a breakout above key resistance even as bitcoin, the crypto market leader, looks north after record daily close.

The native token of Ethereum’s blockchain is yet to take out the falling trendline drawn from May and September highs. Bitcoin cleared similar resistance two weeks ago and ended Tuesday above $64,000 – its highest daily close ever.

• Ether’s rally from September lows has stalled near the trendline resistance (above left).
• A convincing close higher may revive the uptrend, opening doors for a re-test of May highs near $4,400.
• The relative strength index (RS) is well short of above 70 or overbought levels, implying scope for a continued move to the higher side.

• Bitcoin narrowly missed the lifetime high of $64,801 early today and was last seen trading near $63,850.
• The immediate bias remains bullish as the uptrend line from September lows is intact.
• The daily RSI is signaling overbought conditions. So, a possibility of a temporary pullback cannot be ruled out. Below the rising trendline, support is seen at $57,800.

Blockchain platform Zilliqa has hired former Brave chief scientist Ben Livshits as CEO, according to a release.

Livshits has spent the last four years at Brave, a company building the privacy-first Brave Browser — which has an in-built crypto wallet. According to his LinkedIn profile, he built the company’s research division, which focuses on privacy, scalability and performance.

Prior to Brave, he spent five years at Imperial College London, mostly as an associate professor. He covered topics including blockchain technology and privacy. He also spent 10 years working at Microsoft as a researcher.

Zilliqa is a blockchain focused on using sharding to achieve a high number of transactions per second. The network is broken into shards. These split up the storage of the blockchain’s data across multiple groups of nodes.

According to the release, Livshits will encourage Ziliqa to become more data-driven and have a bigger focus on hiring from the fourth quarter of this year onwards.

© 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.

Animoca Brands, a prominent investor in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized gaming, has completed a capital raise of $65 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, the company announced Wednesday.

Investors in the round include Liberty City Ventures, Ubisoft Entertainment, Sequoia China, Dragonfly Capital, Com2uS, Kingsway Capital, 10T, Token Bay Capital, Smile Group, Tess Ventures and MSA Capital.

The new capital will be used to fund strategic investments and acquisitions, product development and licenses for popular intellectual property, the company said in a press release.

Animoca Brands completed a $138.88 million raise back in July, and the company’s valuation has now more than doubled since its funding round of $88 million in May, which valued the company at $1 billion.

Read more: Animoca Completes Funding Round, Gets an Extra $50M From Coinbase, Samsung

After hitting home runs on its early investments in companies like Axie Infinity, Dapper Labs and OpenSea, the company’s portfolio now includes more than 100 NFT-related ventures, it said in a press release.

Two recent investments include Genopets, a project that introduces “move-to-earn” to the GameFi lexicon, and reNFT, a company creating lending protocols for NFTs with rentable use cases.

Animoca Chairman Yat Siu sees a bright future for decentralized gaming based on blockchain technology.

“NFTs are really a digital store of culture. And we all engage in culture more than we engage in just money,” Siu told CoinDesk in an interview. “People coming from finance often see crypto in financial terms, but with gaming, we’re coming at it from a cultural perspective.”

Will the future of #gaming be decentralized? What role will #NFTs play in such ecosystems?

I discuss the topic with @ysiu from @animocabrands

Spotify: https://t.co/A8vjvYnRfx

Apple: https://t.co/HZoGHwXJej

Google: https://t.co/Plvo408Jf2

YouTube: https://t.co/iHBeh8RdGM pic.twitter.com/4maTrBYF8K

— Henri Arslanian (@HenriArslanian) October 18, 2021

Pennsylvania-based Bitcoin mining firm Stronghold Digital Mining has set the final price for its initial public offering (IPO) in the U.S. at $19 per share.

According to an announcement on Wednesday, the pricing exceeds the previous range of $16 to $18 per share. With that, Stronghold has raised $127 million via the offering of 6.68 million shares, which was also greater than the initial plan of selling 5.88 million shares. The trading is set to start on Wednesday on Nasdaq under the ticker SDIG.

Stronghold, which uses waste coal to generate electricity for its own power plants, expects to receive a net proceed of about $115 million from the offering.

Stronghold is currently operating 3,000 units of Bitcoin mining hardware with a hash rate of about 185 petahash per second (PH/s). It has preordered about 26,150 additional miners, of which 72% are set to be delivered this year. 

With the public raise, it now aims to buy another 55,800 Bitcoin miners to increase its proprietary hash rate to “over 8,000 PH/s by December 2022,” per its most recent S-1 filing.

Before completing the IPO, the firm has also acquired a second power station to double its own energy capacity. 

Stronghold Digital is the first Bitcoin mining firm to go public in the U.S via a direct initial public offering as Bitcoin mining continues to attract institutional investments. 

Existing U.S-listed Bitcoin mining firms either pivoted from previous businesses, such as Riot, Marathon, BIT Mining, or went public through merger deals, like Greenidge and BIT Digital. Others like Hut8, Bitfarms or Argo had already gone public in other markets before conducting a duo listing in the U.S.

Core Scientific, another major U.S-based Bitcoin mining and hosting provider, is also going through a SPAC deal in its bid to access the public market.

Meanwhile, North American Bitcoin mining firms have collectively been the biggest winner from China’s recent crackdown on the space with record productions over the months and increasing market shares. 

© 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.

Russia’s Ministry of Digitalization and the Bank of Russia have been asked for official comments on the idea that oil companies might open mining farms on their oil rigs, using flare gas to generate power.

Vasily Shpak, the deputy head of Russia’s Ministry of Industry and Trade, asked the agencies to clarify their positions on the matter, Russian newspaper Kommersant wrote on Wednesday.

The Ministry of Industrial Development told Kommersant that the idea came from the oil and gas companies themselves. They suggested getting regulatory approval to mine crypto using flare gas for electricity generation. Shpak’s letter also suggests that Russia starts manufacturing devices for turning flare gas into energy, Kommersant wrote.

Flare gas is a byproduct of oil extraction and is usually burnt, which is a liability for oil-extracting companies and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The idea to seek approval came from one of the country’s major oil and gas companies, which already has a small mining farm using flare gas, but wants to expand it, an unidentified source “close to the Ministry of Industry and Trade” told Kommersant. Russian law, however, currently doesn’t regulate mining business.

The only Russian oil company to publicly launch a mining farm is Gazpromneft. In December 2020, the company said it was starting a pilot mining venue on one of its oil fields in Siberia, CoinDesk wrote.

At the time, a Gazpromneft representative told CoinDesk that the company wasn’t planning to mine crypto for its own reserves, but would provide a venue for other miners. Mining firm Vekus became its first client and mined 1.8 BTC using 49,500 cubic meters of gas during one month last fall, according to Russian crypto news outlet Forklog.

Last summer, Russia passed a law classifying cryptocurrencies as a taxable property. It did not, however, explain any practical matters related to crypto, as to how crypto businesses should operate in Russia or how people are supposed to declare and pay crypto-related taxes. These issues still have to be clarified by the future laws.

Bored Ape #8585 was sold last night for a record-breaking 696.969 ETH ($2.7 million). That’s the most a Bored Ape has ever sold for.

This NFT is part of the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection, which features a range of apes with different expresssions and outfits — some rarer than others.

This sale follows on from a range of expensive Bored Ape sales. In the last 20 days, there have been two other sales above the $1 million mark, one for a Bored Ape that also has trippy fur, and one for a robot ape with cyborg eyes.

The buyer of Bored Ape #8585 also picked up a few other NFTs in recent days. These included a Fidenza — one of the Art Blocks Curated NFTs — for 200 ETH ($775,000), and two CryptoPunks. The CryptoPunks were bought for 155 ETH ($600,000) and 265 ETH ($1 million).

In total, the buyer spent $5 million on the JPEGs — and they still have a cool $1 million of ETH remaining in their wallet.

For more breaking stories like this, make sure to follow The Block 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.

Pennsylvania-based bitcoin mining company Stronghold Digital has upsized its initial public offering (IPO) to $19 per share with plans to raise $127 million.

• Shares are expected to commence trading on the Nasdaq Global Market today on Wednesday under the ticker symbol “SDIG”, the company announced.
• The company expects to receive around $114.8 million of the $127 million raised, which it will use to acquire new miners and power generating assets.
• The miner upsized its IPO price from the previously announced range of $16- $18 per share. It had planned to raise $94 million – $106 million as per its filing with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 13.
• Stronghold, which coverts coal waste into mining power, operates 3,000 miners, with a hashrate capacity of about 185 petahash per second. It plans to bring its total hashrate capacity to more than 2,100 PH/s by December and to more than 8,000 PH/s by December 2022.

Read more: Stronghold Digital Mining Raises $105M to Turn Waste Coal Into Bitcoin

Investor interest in the bitcoin options market increased, with the cryptocurrency nearing record highs in the lead up to Tuesday’s launch of the first-ever U.S.-based bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund (ETF).

Bybt data shows that the cumulative dollar value of bitcoin options contracts open on major exchanges rose to $14 billion on Tuesday, hitting the highest since April. The tally was a whisker away from the peak of $14.68 billion reached on March 24.

Open interest or the number of contracts traded but not squared off with an offsetting position rose to a six-month high of 229,220 BTC.

Bitcoin reached a record UTC close above $64,000 on Tuesday as the ProShares’ ETF made an impressive debut on the New York Stock Exchange, registering a trading volume of $1 billion.

Hopes that the U.S. would approve a futures-based ETF strengthened late last month after the Securities Exchange and Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler reiterated support for the structured product. Since then, bitcoin has rallied over 40%, and options open interest has increased by 50%.

The pick-up in options activity in the days leading up to the binary event – the SEC’s decision on ETF proposal – signifies increased participation by sophisticated investors and market maturity.

“An extremely rare occurrence for Bitcoin is the Event-driven trade, observed as Futures ETF deadlines approached and then approved. Options are a perfect tool to employ in these scenarios,” Deribit Insights tweeted. Deribit is the world’s largest crypto options exchange accounting for more than 80% of open interest and trading volume in bitcoin and ether options markets.

Options are derivative contracts that give the purchaser the right, but not the obligation to buy or sell the underlying asset at a predetermined price on or before a specific date. A call option gives the right to buy, and the put option gives the right to sell. A call buyer is implicitly bullish on the market, while a put buyer is bearish.

Seasoned traders often use both calls and options when the outcome of a binary event is uncertain, but a big move in either direction is expected. However, flows have been predominantly bullish ahead of ProShares’ ETF listing, with traders piling into out-of-the-money or higher strike call options, as blockchain data analytics firm Glassnode mentioned in its weekly report published Monday.

“The favoured options contracts appear to be call options with strike prices above $100,000, with a typical open interest of $250 million to $350 million for call options expiring at the end of the year. The open interest in call options dwarfs that in put options, aligning with the overall bullish market sentiment,” Glassnode said.

Over-the-counter tech platform Paradigm recently registered continuous buying of topside calls and call spread strategies at strikes between $70,000 to $120,000. Trades facilitated by Paradigm are automatically executed, margined, and cleared at Deribit.

The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy Fund saw a trading volume of $1 billion on Tuesday, becoming the second-most heavily traded new ETF on record, according to Bloomberg data.

“Volumes were pretty much right on the screws where the “ETF Nerds” had been predicting — about $1 billion,” David Nadig, chief investment officer and director of research of ETF Trends, said in a Twitter response. “The nature of that volume seems to be [coming from] the small lot, implying retail investors, speculators and high-frequency traders rather than large institutional allocations.”

According to Bloomberg analysts, Valkyrie’s futures-based bitcoin ETF may commence trading later this week.

The launch of futures-based ETFs could have a positive impact on the derivatives market. “CME options are currently a very small part of the whole crypto options market. Perhaps we could see some growth and development in CME options as a result,” QCP Capital said in its Telegram channel last week.

On Tuesday, the CME accounted for 2.7% of the global bitcoin options open interest of 229,220 BTC.