Liz Truss steps down as UK prime minister

Edition #39 - 21 OCT 2022

Liz Truss has resigned as UK prime minister on Thursday after serving just six weeks on the job.

Her time in office, filled with controversies over fiscal and energy policies, marked the shortest PM tenure in the country’s history. The resignation leaves the fate of bills on stablecoins and crypto seizures hanging in the balance.

gaming developments

• Sims pioneer Will Wright is making a blockchain game, but is down on NFTs;

• BNB Chain dominates GameFi with most titles, followed by Ethereum and Polygon;

• NFT game Alien Worlds launches in-game DAOs to increase competition;

• Gaming tokens including Axie Infinity, Chilliz and Apecoin battered amid the ongoing bear market.

metaverses & Adoption

• Meta’s flagship metaverse said to fall short of performance expectations;

• Collapsed crypto exchange ACX used $20 million of customers funds to fund a loan to its parent company;

• UK seeks to recognize crypto as regulated industry;

• Fidelity Digital Assets planning 100 more crypto hires within the next six months;

• DappRadar says Decentraland has 650 daily active users;

• Tether USD is now available across 24,000 ATMs in Brazil.

defi

• US accounts for 37% of all DeFi volume – more than any other region;

• Half of DeFi exploits are cross-bridge hacks;

• Terra Luna community votes to reduce the tax burn from 1.2% to 0.2%;

• DeFi lending protocol Moola Market hacked for over $9 million, hacker returns majority of funds for a $500,000 bounty;

• USDC market cap sheds almost $4 billion in less than 20 days;

• Aptos launches its highly anticipated mainnet;

• Crypto market maker Wintermute pays off $96 million TrueFi debt weeks after being hacked.

funding rounds

• Modular blockchain network Celestia raises $55 million in a combined Series A and B round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital, with participation from Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Blockchain Capital, NFX, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, Spartan Group, FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto;

• Stardust, a gaming platform, raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Framework Ventures. Acrew Capital, Blockchain Capital and Distributed Global are among investors;

• Layer 1 blockchain Shardeum raised $18.2 million in a Seed funding round. Jane Street, Big Brain Holdings, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Ghaf Capital, DFG, CoinGecko Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Jsquare, Cogitent Ventures, WeMade, Veris Ventures, ZebPay, Tupix Capital, and MapleBlock Capital are among investors.

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