A total of nine of the ETFs offering exposure to ether futures came to market on Monday. Five will hold only ether futures, while four will hold a mix of bitcoin and ether futures. One of those funds, Valkyrie’s Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BTF) – soon to be renamed – has been in existence for about two years as a bitcoin-only fund, but is changing its strategy to include ether. The rest of the vehicles are new to market.

“At Grayscale, our unwavering commitment is to offer investors transparent and regulated access to crypto through product structures that are familiar,” said Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein in a statement. “As we file to convert ETHE to an ETF, the natural next step in the product’s evolution, we recognize this as an important moment to bring Ethereum even further into the U.S. regulatory perimeter.”

Notwithstanding Valkyrie’s actions, it does appear that a number of ether futures ETFs will begin trading in the U.S. on Monday, with ProShares, Bitwise and VanEck among those confirming as much in SEC filings on Friday morning.

“When I joined two years ago, NEAR had around 50,000 users, and now we have over 2.5 million daily active users,” Flament said in an interview with CoinDesk. She added that Donovan is well-suited to the CEO role now given “the current regulatory landscape.” She added: “We are not the only ecosystem making a move like that.”

Sam Bankman-Fried’s dad, Joe Bankman, was paid a $200,000 salary by FTX’s U.S. division, according to the filing from FTX’s bankruptcy estate, which just sued the parents. But that wasn’t enough, he said, telling an FTX executive in a Jan. 12, 2022, message that he was supposed to get $1 million annually starting the previous month, according to the filing. Then he emailed his son. “Gee, Sam I don’t know what to say here,” he wrote, according to the filing. “This is the first [I] have heard of the 200K a year salary! Putting Barbara on this.” Barbara is former FTX CEO Bankman-Fried’s mom, Barbara Fried.

Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has sued founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, to “recover millions of dollars in fraudulently transferred and misappropriated funds,” the company said in a Monday court filing. The filing, redacted in parts, asks the court to award the FTX estate damages, the return of any property given or payment made to the parents by FTX, and punitive damages resulting from “conscious, willful, wanton, and malicious conduct.” According to the filing,”FTX Trading paid $18,914,327.82, inclusive of taxes, fees, and costs, for Blue Water, to which Bankman and Fried received title, as well as various expenses related to Blue Water totaling more than $90,000,” as one example. The filing also alleged that “Bankman’s command of tax law and unique understanding of the FTX Group’s muddled corporate structure allowed him to facilitate the transfer of a cash gift totaling $10 million to himself and Fried consisting of Alameda Ltd. funds.”

On Monday, Chainlink’s co-founder Sergey Nazarov spoke at SWIFT’s global financial services networking event Sibos. Nazarov and Nigel Dobson, banking services lead at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), dove into cross-chain settlement using Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).

At press time, bitcoin was holding at $27,300, up 3.1% over the past 24 hours. Coming later this week is a rate-setting meeting for the U.S. Federal Reserve. The central bank is almost universally expected to hold its benchmark fed funds rate steady at 5.25%-5.50%.

“Interestingly, it is not decentralized finance (DeFi) applications nor non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces driving the surge in Base’s activity. Instead, a significant portion of usage can be attributed to a new social application, FriendTech,” said Lucas Outumuro, head of research at IntoTheBlock.

According to data from Kaiko, the average trade size for bitcoin on crypto exchange Kraken increased to above $2,000 on Tuesday after the ruling, from around $850 the day prior. The last time bitcoin’s average trade size was higher than $2,168 was in June, said research firm Kaiko. The bitcoin average trade size also jumped on most other exchanges.

Among publicly-traded crypto names moving higher are Coinbase (COIN), up 13% and MicroStrategy (MSTR), up 9%. The thoroughly roughed-up miners are posting even bigger moves, with Marathon Digital (MARA) ahead 24%, and Riot Platforms (RIOT) and Hut 8 Mining (HUT) each gaining 16%.

Near users will be able to connect their wallets to the Tokenproof app and unlock online and in-person experiences, said the press release.

Major cryptocurrencies traded flat over the weekend, with alternative tokens showing muted price movement as markets seemed to stabilize following one of the largest liquidation events in recent months. Bitcoin remained steady at around $26,000 with ether little changed from Sunday’s $1,670. “So long as bitcoin continues to hold above $25,000 on a weekly close basis, we suspect we will see renewed demand and a push back to the topside in the days ahead,” crypto exchange LMAX Digital said in a morning note. “If this happens, ether and the rest of the crypto space should follow along.” Meme coin shiba inu (SHIB) slid 2%, increasing losses to more than 21% in the past week following the botched launch of its Ethereum layer 2 network, Shibarium. Transactions stalled in the hours after the network went live last Wednesday, with over $1.7 million worth of tokens in a bridge – a tool used to transfer tokens between two blockchains – said to be stuck owing to a bug in the code.

The move comes as ether, the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization suffered a 10% decline over the last seven days, amid a broad market downturn which saw traders witness $1 billion in liquidations. Ether has recovered slightly on Monday, trading in the green over the last 24 hours at $1,700.

Bitcoin (BTC) has dropped 7% over the past 24 hours, plunging to levels not seen since June as the digital-asset market witnessed one of the worst sell-offs this year. Crypto traders were hit with $1 billion worth of liquidations over the past 24 hours, according to Coinglass data. The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value was trading at around $26,400 at the time of writing, but briefly fell to $25,234 on Thursday. Altcoins performed slightly better with ether (ETH) losing 6% over the same time period and Solana’s SOL losing around 5%. Traders say market structure and liquidations were a likely reason for the sudden drop instead of a singular fundamental catalyst. “We’ve seen BTC OI ramp up in position, with a bias to shorts,” said Decentral Park Capital trader Lewis Harland, in a message to CoinDesk. “The break below $28,500 led to material volumes of longs being liquidated. This has been combined with spot selling ahead of the date (likely anticipating further delays).”

Starting in fall, Avalanche’s Multiverse funds will be released over 12 months via the Dexalot incentive program. The funds are contingent and will be distributed in accordance with the subnet hitting new milestones, said the press release. The company declined to comment on the details of what the milestones are.

Payments giant PayPal will temporarily pause crypto purchases in the United Kingdom until early 2024, the company said Wednesday, citing stricter rules by the country’s financial regulator. Customers who have previously purchased crypto assets through their PayPal account can keep them on the platform or sell them at any time, said the company. Starting October 1, however, the ability to make new purchases will be disabled. “We’re taking this measure in response to new rules enacted by the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) that require crypto firms to implement additional steps before customers can purchase crypto,” PayPal said in a statement. This comes as the company has accelerated its footprint in crypto in recent weeks, specifically in the United States with the launch of a stablecoin, PayPal USD (PYUSD), which the payments giant announced earlier this month.

Sei Labs, the company behind layer 1 blockchain Sei, has announced that its mainnet is now live after a successful testnet phase. The blockchain’s native token SEI also went live today on exchanges such as Binance, Kraken and Huobi, among others. The focus for Sei is to create a chain that offers users the ability to exchange assets easily, said the Sei Labs team. Whether this means assets for social platforms, games or NFT’s, Sei is hoping to offer the smoothest experience. SEI was trading at around $0.27 at the time of writing, around the same price as when it launched on Tuesday. The token traded at a premium of $0.64 on Upbit.

The layer-1 is pioneering the idea of “microchains” within the blockchain, according to the press release. “The competition for blockspace in traditional layer-1 blockchains, coupled with limited production rates and block sizes, creates a bottleneck during traffic peaks, leaving users outpriced or delayed, rendering the infrastructure effectively unavailable,” the press release said.

Bitcoin and ether remained little-changed on Tuesday, trading at $29,350 and $1,840, respectively. The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value has struggled to find directional momentum over the past few weeks, trading in an exceedingly tight range. A possible catalyst for shaking the market up would be a spot bitcoin ETF. While the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may or may not make a decision soon, analysts are expecting a court to deliver a verdict – perhaps as soon as today – in Grayscale’s lawsuit against the SEC over its plans to convert its bitcoin trust (GBTC) to an ETF. With most of the crypto market flat, Hedera Hashgraphs HBAR continues to outperform, climbing 12% over the past 24 hours.

“There is a misconception that Sei is a decentralized finance (DeFi) focused chain, but we have more of a focus on social platforms, gaming, and carbon credits,” added Feng. “There are plenty of other places to trade DeFi assets,” he said.

According to a report by Messari, Hadera’s average daily active accounts have grown 288% year-to-date, jumping from 3,500 to 13,500 by Q2 2023. In terms of average daily creation of new accounts, there was a 340% surge over that same period, said Messari. The main driver behind the uptick in activity in Q2 was propelled by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), with the main driver of NFT activity being Karateka, a Web3 game built by GameOn leveraging the IP of Karate Combat. The report noted that last year’s activity was primarily driven by DeFi.

Hedera Hashgraph’s HBAR token took the lead among major cryptocurrencies on Monday with a gain of 15% over the last 24 hours, after the U.S. Federal Reserve’s FedNow added a Hedera Hashgraph-based micropayments platform, Dropp, as a service provider. FedNow is an instant payment service provider developed by the Fed for depository institutions in the U.S. Hedera is a public distributed ledger based on a Hashgraph algorithm that the company says allows users to process transactions quickly and cheaply. Bitcoin and ethereum were trading flat on Monday after trading in a tight range over the weekend.

Looking at the price action since April, and in particular since mid-June, there’s been a noticeable abruptness of reversals any time bitcoin has attempted a breakout above $30,000. The most dramatic occasion came on July 13 when the cryptocurrency surged to a one-year high above $31,800 following a favorable court ruling for XRP in its case with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Within hours, bitcoin had given up not just the $31,000, but also the $30,000 level, and within days had even dipped below $29,000.

Upbit bucked the general market trend, witnessing a 42.3% increase in trading volume to $29.8 billion, pushing the exchange beto the second-largest platform by trading volume, after Binance. Coinbase was previously the second largest crypto exchange by trading volume.

“At Google Cloud, we’re focused on strengthening the Web3 ecosystem by offering founders and developers the tools they need to scale their applications,” Carlos Arena, director of digital assets at Google Cloud, said. “Running a validator on the Celo network builds on our collaboration with the Celo Foundation, and we look forward to helping to enable the growth of the network.”

Looking forward, August tends to be a slow month for markets. FundStrat said in a note to investors that although the final month of the summer tends to be a time for market depth to weaken, the fact that so many cite August as a seasonal risk, “actually makes us think this is less likely to be the case.”

Celo said in the proposal that the benefits of the move will include “further Ethereum alignment and EVM compatibility, a stronger security assurances than Celo provides individually and a trustless bridge to Ethereum, simplifying liquidity sharing between Celo and Ethereum.”

An approval of only the listed proposals, which include, Ark 21 Shares, Invesco Galaxy, iShares (BlackRock), Valkyrie, VanEck, WisdomTree and Wise Origin (Fidelity), would reflect a positive “but sudden and significant change in the Commission’s application of the relevant statutory standard, and as such would improperly grant an unfairly discriminatory and prejudicial first-mover advantage to these proposals,” said the statement.