The central bank of Mexico will launch its own digital currency by 2024, announced the Mexican government on social media. “Banxico reports that it will have its own digital currency in circulation by 2024,” the Mexican government wrote on its official Twitter account this week. In its post, the central bank said it considers these new technologies and the latest payment infrastructure “very important” and “valuable options to advance financial inclusion in the country.” Banxico, the monetary authority of Mexico, however, hasn’t confirmed the development itself. The central bank is legally ind ..read more

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is seeing a growing focus on Ethereum competitors, the institutionalization of decentralized finance (DeFi), and non-fungible tokens (NFT). This week, Surojit Chatterjee, Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, released some predictions for 2022. It noted that while it is expecting Eth scalability to improve, with crypto going mainstream, scalability changes for ETH are likely to grow further. “I am optimistic about improvements in Eth scalability with the emergence of Eth2 and many L2 rollups,” said Chatterjee. He also sees the emergence of new L1s besides the curr ..read more

Sberbank, the largest and state-owned Russian bank, has introduced the country’s first exchange-traded fund (ETF) to offer exposure to companies involved in the blockchain industry. The fund launched by the bank is called Sberbank Blockchain Economy ETF that trades on the Russian stock market under the ticker “SBBE,” Sber Asset Management said in a statement. The new ETF aims to track the Sber Blockchain Economy Index and provide its investors’ exposure to crypto trading firms, including publicly listed crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN), crypto asset management firm Galaxy Digital, and Digindex ..read more

The US Securities and Exchange (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce commented on crypto market participants like Coinbase and Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) calling for one regulator to oversee the cryptocurrency market. While she understands the interest in an exclusive regulator, Peirce, aka ‘Crypto Mom,’ has a problem with it. “Typically in Washington, when you build another regulator, all you get is all the existing regulators plus one,” she said in an interview with CoinDesk. Yet again, Peirce also commented on the lack of guidance and “little concrete regulatory progress” from the authoriti ..read more

Bitcoin and Ether continue to struggle as they trade around $48k and $3,800 respectively on Friday. The leading cryptocurrency is now testing a key technical level that has been acting as a floor for Bitcoin over the past two years. The latest drop in the largest crypto asset’s price has taken it to its 55-week moving average, a decisive break below which would take it to as low as $40,000. According to Katie Stockton of Fairlead Strategies, a research firm focused on technical analysis, Bitcoin has notched a new short-term buy signal and suggests a two-week rebound. However, it is “low-convic ..read more

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is introducing new rules to promote cryptocurrency development while curbing digital currency scams targeting investors in the country. Under the new rules, crypto scammers will face prison time for up to 5 years and a penalty of up to AED 1 million (just over $272k), starting January 2, 2022. Previously, the UAE laws banned promoting crypto but didn’t penalize it, but now, in a first for the country, the amendments have been introduced to punish those who promote or encourage a dealing in crypto that is not officially recognized in the UAE or post misleading ads ..read more

A new proposal has been submitted to Aave’s governance forum that calls for deploying the DeFi lending protocol to StarkNet, StarkWare’s permissionless and decentralized ZK-Rollup. Yael Doweck, product manager at StarkWare, submitted the proposal to onboard the protocol on behalf of StarkNet creator, much like MakerDAO has on its L2. “With the success of the Polygon and Avalanche markets, deploying on StarkNet incurs additional value for Aave,” noted the proposal. While Polygon was a sidechain that has its own security model, StarkNet is an L2 solution that brings Validity rollups added securi ..read more

The leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance will continue to operate in Ontario, Canada, after having a successful discussion with the regulators. In June, the exchange told its users that they would no longer stay open in Canada’s most populous province and asked users to close their accounts by Dec. 31. At the time, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) issued a statement of allegations against several crypto exchanges, including Bybit, Poloniex, and KuCoin, claiming that they failed to comply with their regulations. Earlier this year, the OSC had warned crypto trading platforms that they ..read more

Virtual real estate platform, the Sandbox, is planning to move to Polygon, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, to better cater to its growing audience. Polygon has been seeing an increasing amount of interest from applications and users who are priced out of Ethereum due to its high fees and slow processing. The Ethereum-based Metaverse play-to-earn (P2E) is migrating to Polygon to minimize transaction fees and network congestion when interacting with the game. “The metaverse needs to be built by the people,” said The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget in an interview. “Once the ..read more

Just before the end of the year, the crypto market continues to take a beating. After the initial green start of the last week of 2021, prices have only been going down. This rout further extended to late Wednesday and early Thursday when Bitcoin price dipped further just under $45,900 and Ether to about $3,585. As of writing, BTC/USD has been trading above $47k while Ether is also over $3,700. While the leading cryptocurrency is down 31.6% from its $69,000 all-time high early last month, Ether is only down about 24%. This month, however, Bitcoin is down 17.5% compared to ether’s almost 20%, a ..read more