The Block
Quick Take Crypto custody firm BitGo said it has hired former Silvergate Bank President Ben Reynolds to oversee the growth of its USD Standard stablecoin. The crypto-friendly Silvergate Bank liquidated and shuttered its doors in 2023.
Quick Take We’re less than a week out from the election, and while most of you are glued to the polls, I’m fixated on crypto derivatives. This column is adapted from The Scoop newsletter.
Quick Take DWF Labs’ Managing Partner Andrei Grachev said his firm would consider legal action against founding partner Eugene Ng, following allegations of drink spiking that surfaced on the social media platform X. DFW Labs said earlier this week it had dismissed a partner but did not identify the individual, although Ng was removed from the firm’s team page.
Quick Take The U.S. government has been given more time to negotiate with certain political action groups over the return of up to $13.25 million in donations made in the names of former FTX executives Sam Bankman-Fried and Nishad Singh, a recent filing shows. The political groups in question are mostly Democrat-aligned and include the Senate Majority PAC, Emily’s List/Women Vote, and the Future Forward PAC, which received $6 million. Singh was recently sentenced to time served and three years of supervise
Quick Take Investment bank UBS has launched its first tokenized investment fund, a money market fund on the Ethereum blockchain. UBS joins BlackRock and Franklin Templeton in exploring the tokenization of real-world assets by offering such funds.
Quick Take DeFi protocol Pendle says it saved around $105 million from being further drained following a $27 million hack of Pendle-based yield optimizer Penpie. The project said in a post-mortem that funds on Pendle were not at risk, and normal operations have since resumed, though Penpie remains paused.
Quick Take Polygon developers have migrated the MATIC token to POL after a year of extensive community-led discussions. POL is now the new ticker symbol for the native gas and staking token on the Polygon PoS chain.
Quick Take During his fireside chat at Korea Blockchain Week, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the company will launch its new stablecoin in “weeks, not months.” Garlinghouse also criticized SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s approach to crypto, saying what happened to OpenSea is “unfortunate.” The Ripple CEO said he is more “optimistic” about the next five years of crypto than he has ever been.
On Tuesday, spot bitcoin ETFs in the U.S. recorded $287.78 million in net outflows.Bitcoin traded down 3.93% over the past 24 hours at $56,680 at the time of writing.
Quick Take Bitcoin fell 4.5% in the past 24 hours to change hands at around $56,696 at the time of writing, while ether slid 6.4% to trade at $2,366. Japan’s TOPIX and South Korea’s KOSPI indexes were down over 2% this morning in Asia after Wall Street plummeted on weaker ISM data in the U.S.
