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On Wednesday, Prosegur — a Spanish security company founded in the 1970s — announced a new digital asset custody service focused on institutional clients.

“Prosegur Crypto combines the highest standards in physical security, an area in which Prosegur is a world leader, with state-of-the-art cryptographic security technologies,” the firm said in a press statement. “Users’ private keys are stored in a physical Prosegur infrastructure, without an Internet connection, and the guarded assets have military-grade cryptographic and logical security layer protection.”

Prosegur, which boasts more than 160,000 employees and nearly $5 billion in revenues for 2019, is the latest market incumbent to throw its hat in the crypto services ring. 

As previously explored by The Block Research, more than two dozen companies offer custodian services to institutional investors and clients. Many of those firms are from the startup realm, having been founded in 2017 or later and attracting in excess of $1 billion in overall investments.

The firm’s experience with cryptocurrency hasn’t been a wholly positive one. Last year, it became the target of a ransomware attack that resulted in a disruption of its operations.

© 2020 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.

Globe, a crypto derivatives exchange that is launching in the coming weeks, has raised $3 million in a seed funding round.

The round was backed by Y Combinator, Pantera Capital, Tim Draper’s Draper Dragon Fund, and Wavemaker Partners, among others.

With fresh capital at hand, Globe looks to launch its trading platform in the next few weeks and scale it thereon. CEO James West told The Block that Globe is aimed at serving institutional customers with new products and a better trading experience.

West said Globe has been built with a proprietary order-matching and risk engine called Thor, which would “rival Nasdaq in terms of latency and throughput.” Market experts have previously told The Block that speed is not a top priority for most traders. It is, instead, liquidity.

On that front, Globe plans to first attract institutional liquidity providers to its platform, said West. “We provide for them seamless integration and the usual riches of traditional futures exchanges like CME Group, the New York Stock Exchange, Japan Exchange Group, etc.,” said West. “After that we are targeting the kinds of quantitative investment funds which now are thinking about a crypto desk or two, enabling them to make the kinds of trades they make in traditional markets.”

Paul Veradittakit, partner at Pantera Capital, said the firm is seeing “a wave of interest” in crypto assets from major banks, fintech companies, and portfolio managers, and Globe’s platform and products have been built to meet their needs.

To start with, Globe would offer perpetual futures for bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), bitcoin volatility index (VIX), and decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens. All products are aimed at helping traders hedge their risk well and manage their wealth, said West.

Globe is launching at a time when there is an increased interest in the crypto space from traders and investors, and the market is rallying. The crypto derivatives market is also breaking records. The aggregated open interest in bitcoin futures, for instance, has touched a new all-time high at around $6.30 billion. Open interest is the value of outstanding derivative contracts that are yet to be settled, and its growth suggests that money is flowing in the market.

On the backing from Y Combinator especially, West said, “the last time Y Combinator backed a crypto exchange, it was Coinbase which turned out rather well, I guess you could call us Coinbase for derivatives.”

Globe, registered in Seychelles and based in London, will not be available to U.S. residents.

© 2020 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

• The top 10 validators account for roughly 42.4% of the voting power on Cosmos
• To date, the majority of proposals have been unanimous decisions by stakeholders, in which 16 of the 20 submitted proposals have passed
• Proposal 29 and 30 are the most recent proposals on Cosmos to pass 

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this Genesis research on The Block.

Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder and CEO of Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, says he doesn’t understand bitcoin as it is too volatile.

Speaking virtually at The New York Times’ Dealbook Conference on Tuesday, Son said he once invested in bitcoin as one of his friends “strongly recommended” it.

The friend suggested Son putting at least 1% of his personal net worth into bitcoin. As a result, Son ended up investing around $200 million or so in bitcoin at the time, he said. But the bitcoin market’s continuous volatility became so much of a distraction for Son that he ended up selling bitcoin at a loss of around $50 million or so.

“I was looking at the price every day…up and down. I said, this is no good. This is something I don’t understand. My mindshare is somewhat affected…this was distracting my focus on my own business,” said Son. “So I said okay I would sell whatever the price and I sold with some loss, maybe I lost [$] 50 million, I don’t know…I forgot.”

Last year, there were reports that said Son invested in bitcoin at peak prices in 2017 and sold it in early 2018 at a loss of more than $130 million.

The price of bitcoin has been rallying recently, having crossed $18,000, but it still doesn’t attract Son’s attention. At the conference, Son said bitcoin today “maybe more than the price I sold, but I feel so much better because at least I don’t have to put my mind in something I don’t understand.”

Son still believes that digital currency is the future, but his focus is on artificial intelligence (AI) now. 

“I think digital currency is definitely going to be useful with the security and so on…but I don’t know what digital currency, what structure…I would rather focus my 300 years for something that I feel passionate [about], which is the AI focus right now,” said Son.

© 2020 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.