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The latest price moves in bitcoin (BTC) and crypto markets in context for June 30, 2023. First Mover is CoinDesk’s daily newsletter that contextualizes the latest actions in the crypto markets.

Banking giant Citigroup (C) is reviewing its partnership with crypto custody firm Metaco one month after Ripple Labs announced that it agreed to acquire Metaco for $250 million.

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a decentralized domain name system built on the Ethereum blockchain, will implement Layer 2 interoperability with ENS domains, according to the project’s developer, ENS Labs, during a community call on Thursday.

The team said it identified Layer 2 interoperability as a crucial upgrade in the pipeline. Layer 2 solutions, such as Arbitrum and Optimism, are ‘off-chain’ mechanisms designed to handle transactions away from the Layer 1 Ethereum blockchain to improve scalability and reduce costs. By providing a mechanism for Layer 2 solutions to interact with ENS domains, the team aims to make domain name registrations and transactions more accessible to a broader user base.

The team plans to utilize off-chain resolvers with the help of an ENS off-chain registrar contract and various service providers, including the Coinbase-operated project cb.id, Lens Protocol (on Polygon), and OptiNames (on Optimism), among others.

Gasless import of web names 

The team announced that web-integrated domain name TLDs, including .art and .box, are collaborating with ENS Labs for close integration. This will allow users to register browser-supported names via ENS. Furthermore, it will also enable DNS names to be traded as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain for the first time this year.

In this context, a new roadmap feature discussed during the call and included in the roadmap is the option to import DNS, the web naming protocol, into ENS at no transaction costs, thus making it “gasless.” This feature, slated for release in the fourth quarter of the year, has the potential to improve web accessibility to the ENS ecosystem and lower the barrier to entry for traditional internet users, ENS Labs noted.

© 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.

No new crypto rules are needed, said Aaron Kaplan, co-CEO of Prometheum Inc., and his company means to demonstrate it – even as the issuers whose tokens it seeks to trade say no thanks.

The crypto exchange is faced with several risks that could trigger a reversal of the stock’s recent gains, the report said.

With the expiry done, the supposed price magnet at $26,500 from the max pain point is gone and prices could resume the upward journey, a common pattern during the bull market days of 2021.

After receiving 50 submissions as part of a consultation process, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) has said it won’t propose a regulatory approach towards stablecoins and crypto-assets.

Trade volume on OKX’s Liquid Marketplace, a network for professional and institutional traders, has t0pped $3 billion.

The second-largest crypto exchange by 24-hour trading volume announced the milestone on Friday. “The Liquid Marketplace, an on-demand liquidity network for institutional traders, exceeded USD$3 billion in trading volume,” OKX said in a statement.

The Liquid Marketplace allows professional and institutional traders to send requests for quotes (RFQs) to market makers for large digital asset transactions. The execution of the order is done discreetly and does not significantly impact the market price on settlement.

The exchange is expanding its offering for institutional customers. It recently struck a partnership with regulated digital asset custody service provider Komainu.

It also added ‘Nitro Spreads’ to Liquid Marketplace — which already offered OTC, futures spreads and options liquidity. Nitro Spreads is a trading tool that executes both legs of a trade simultaneously via a central order book, thereby mitigating leg risk between markets. The company added that Nitro Spreads automate this kind of trade into one-click. Traders can apply this feature across any combination of spot, perpetual and futures contracts listed on the exchange.

© 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.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has voiced his sympathy towards blockchain projects like Solana that have been targeted in recent enforcement actions by the United Securities and Exchange Commission against crypto exchanges.

“The one comment I’ll make is that I feel bad that Solana and other projects are getting hit in this way,” Buterin said, responding to a question from Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang about how he feels about the U.S. policy approach to crypto. “They don’t deserve it, and if Ethereum ends up ‘winning’ through all other blockchains getting kicked off exchanges, that’s not an honorable way to win, and in the long term probably isn’t even a victory.”

The SEC earlier this month sued crypto exchanges Coinbase, Binance and Binance.US, alleging they all offer trading in tokens it deems unregistered securities. The regulator named over a dozen tokens, including Solana’s SOL, Polygon’s MATIC and Algorand’s ALGO, saying they are all unregistered securities.

Buterin highlighted that Ethereum’s real competition is not other blockchains but “the rapidly expanding centralized world that is imposing itself on us as we speak.” He wished for “all honorable projects” to have a fair outcome in the current situation.

Companies and projects fight back

Responding to the SEC’s declaration of SOL as a security, the Solana Foundation recently said it disagrees with the characterization and welcomes the continued engagement of policymakers to achieve legal clarity on these issues. Polygon Labs also responded to the SEC’s claims recently that MATIC is an unregistered security, saying that the token was “developed outside the U.S., deployed outside the U.S. and focused to this day on the global community that supports the network.”

Coinbase and Binance have been fighting with the SEC amid the lawsuits. Earlier this week, Coinbase filed a motion to dismiss the SEC lawsuit, while Binance took an early court loss as a federal judge denied a request from Binance’s lawyers to rebuke the SEC over language it used in a press release.

© 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.

63.5% of respondents said they are positive on the outlook of crypto for the next year and 88% said they are optimistic for the next decade, according to a recent survey by the exchange.