Edition #88 - 25 NOV 2023
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty, names Richard Teng as new CEO.
• Binance agrees to pay fines totalling $4.3 billion;
• Binance reached agreements with FinCEN, OFAC, CFTC and will credit $1.8B to them and additional forfeiture of $2.51 billion;
• Binance appoints an independent compliance monitor for 3 years;
• CZ plea deal may preserve company's ability to operate;
• CZ to retain majority ownership of Binance;
• CZ can't operate Binance for 3 years from start of agreed up on date.
gaming developments
Web3 platform for cross-game player profiles Artifact Lab raised $2M in a Pre-seed funding round led by RW3 Ventures, IOSG Ventures, with participation from Raptor Group, Cypher Capital, HerculesDAO.
Fantasy football P2E game on TON Fanton closed funding round led by TONCoin Fund. Amount raised is not disclosed.
Free-to-play Web3 games hold the key to mass adoption.
GAM3 Awards 2023 Shortlisted Final Nominees Revealed.
FPS Mobile Game in Metaverse Matr1x FIRE raised $10M in a Series A funding round led by Folius Ventures, SevenX Ventures, with participation from ABCDE Capital, Jambo, Initiate Capital, Find Satoshi Lab.
metaverses & AI
Project focused on AI training using blockchain BP-FLAC raised $10M in a Seed funding round from Eureka Partners, Westlabs, Amazon Alexa Fund, Nvidia.
Sam Altman got fired and returned as OpenAI CEO following in-principle agreement.
Nike dropped some new sneakers that come with NFTs. There’s an embedded near-field communication (NFC) chip in the sneakers that lets the owner “obtain a digital collectible and connect the physical product shipped with the digital collectible obtained.”
Paris Saint-Germain F.C. is launching a new NFT collection. 10% of the collection will be redeemable for a box of physical items from the soccer club.
defi
DeFi dashboard with asset and risk tools DeFi (ex DeFiYield) raised $5M funding round from HOF Capital, OKX Ventures (ex OKEx Blockdream Ventures), HTX Ventures (ex Huobi Ventures), MEXC.
Decentralized Open Compute Platform Expanso raised $7.5M in a Seed funding round led by General Catalyst, Hetz Ventures.
funding rounds
Crypto exchange for social trading OMTrade raised $6M in a Seed funding round led by Find Satoshi Lab, Folius Ventures, with participation from Meteorite Labs, Incuba Alpha, KSK Fund.
Web3 scalability protocol for the automated deployment of dedicated blockspace Saga raised $5M in a Seed funding round led by Placeholder.
Ethereum L2 with native yield for ETH and stablecoins Blast raised $20M funding round from Paradigm, Standard Crypto, eGirl Capital, Manifold, Santiago R. Santos.
NFT marketplace for pro traders Blur raised $40M funding round .
Toolkit for progressive authentication in Web3 Privy raised $18M in a Series A funding round led by Paradigm, with participation from Sequoia Capital, BlueYard Capital, Archetype, Linda Xie.
