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Robinhood has announced Robinhood Crypto's worldwide expansion with the acquisition of crypto exchange Bitstamp. The U.K.-based exchange, one of the biggest in Europe, was sold for $200 million cash and is expected to close in the first half of 2025. Robinhood hopes this purchase will help them attract institutional customers.
Crypto exchange Kraken is looking to raise more than $100 million as part of plans to go public in the United States. Rumors have been circulating about Kraken's plans to go public for the past few years, but the firm has recently been fighting accusations from the SEC about operating an unregistered brokerage. The round could be completed by the end of the year.
MEV taxes allow apps to capture their MEV without sacrificing composability. By charging a fee as a function of the priority fee of a transaction, smart contracts can capture a variable percentage of MEV. This strategy can only be used on OP Stack L2s at the moment as it relies on a block building algorithm sorting by priority fee.
Infrastructure provider Alchemy has announced its Rollup platform, which offers developers a 99.999% uptime sequencer and all-in-one toolkit. It supports Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, and Celestia DA modularity options.
Mountain Protocol has launched USDM, a stablecoin backed by US Treasuries. The protocol uses an auto-rebasing feature that accrues daily yield directly in users' wallets, differentiating it from competitors by sharing the yield generated from treasury assets, thus enhancing its appeal as a reliable and innovative financial tool in the stablecoin market.
Regan Bozman narrates his journey from exploring operator funds to co-founding Free Company, a syndicate that successfully invested in various crypto projects during the 2020-2021 bull market. Despite initial success, changes in member finances and the market led to the dissolution of the syndicate, prompting Bozman to co-found Lattice, a $20M fund that made significant investments in the crypto space.
Robinhood is aggressively expanding its cryptocurrency services and offerings. It most recently acquired BitStamp (daily volume of $196 million and 1.2 million monthly active users) for $200 million. This strategic move, along with Robinhood's 263% month-over-month growth in crypto volumes, positions Robinhood to potentially surpass its equity trading volumes with crypto. The acquisition also enables Robinhood to potentially increase its Assets Under Custody to approximately $30 billion and expand its trading options to match the token pairs offered by BitStamp.
ZK and verifiable compute is a new developer primitive that could introduce exciting new applications, much like how the iPhone's camera and GPS led to innovative applications like Instagram, Uber, and Doordash. DeFi protocols could integrate risk modeling in ZK and complex offchain pricing functions that are trustlessly verifiable onchain. Blockchain and ZK could enable ownable, censorship-resistant AI companions and agents or onchain ML.
Asset manager Franklin Templeton is considering a crypto-focused institutional investment fund.
Assuming all goes as planned, Ethereum's upcoming Pectra hardfork will be one of the largest ever.
TON Wallet Tonkeeper is currently #1 for finance on the Google Play Store.
Interoperability protocol Wormhole has introduced staking for governance.