Binance Makes Major Move into P2P Trading + 9 More Crypto News

Crypto Briefs is your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptocurrency and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.

Major exchange Binance has launched peer-to-peer (P2P) trading functionality with BTC, ETH and USDT available for trading against Chinese yuan. Moreover, the company is now accepting fiat onramp with Alipay, a major Chinese online payment platform, and WeChat, another major Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app, confirmed Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance. Initially, this P2P functionality is available to Android users that have Binance accounts registered for over 30 days, the company said. The CEO added they "will expand the service to other regions soon." As previously reported by Cryptonews.com, fiat-to-crypto conversion is a big thing for Binance and “there’s a lot of initiatives happening.” Binance Coin (BNB), the native token of Binance, is the best performing coin among the top 10 tokens today. At pixel time (10:24 UTC), it trades at c. USD 17 and is up by more than 8% in the past 24 hours and by almost 10% in the past week.

Major German real estate developer, Bauwens Group has acquired shares of Fundament Group, the end-to-end security issuance solution for asset tokenization, the latter announced. The company did not provide any further details about the deal. "Attaining strategic investment from Bauwens, Fundament Group gains a long-term partner in the real estate development market as well as access to an extensive pipeline of projects in Germany’s key metropolitan areas including Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, and Frankfurt," it said in a press release.
One of the largest cryptocurrency asset managers in the world, Grayscale, has raised a total of around USD 85 million from investors in Q2, 84% of which came from institutional investors, Grayscale's director of sales and business development Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary told The Block.
ACINQ, one of the developers of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, said it raised USD 8 million, in order to grow its team, improve the Lightning protocol and expand its businesses as a major operator and liquidity provider. The investment round that increased their total funding to USD 10 million, was led by Idinvest Partners, with participation of Serena and Bpifrance, the partially state-owned French investment bank.

The Swiss National Bank said it will collaborate with SIX Group, the operator of the SIX stock exchange, in order to examine the integration of digital central bank money into a distributed ledger technology infrastructure. "This new form of digital central bank money would be aimed at facilitating the settlement of tokenised assets between financial institutions," the bank said.
UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, said it will now be able to receive, hold and disburse donations of ether and bitcoin, through its newly-established UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund. "In a first for United Nations organizations, UNICEF will use cryptocurrencies to fund open source technology benefiting children and young people around the world," the organization said.

Casa, the U.S.-based private key security specialist, launched a new version of their plug-and-play Bitcoin and Lightning node, Casa Node 2. The company claims the new device is faster and comes with more memory. "Under the hood, Casa Node 2 has a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 4 GB of RAM, along with a fast 1 TB SSD drive," according to the startup.

Nick Read, chief executive of telco giant Vodafone, said that Facebook's Libra needs to have an independed chief executive to fully separete it from Facebook, The Telegraph reported. However, Vodafone, which is one of the founding members of the Libra Association, reitareted its support for the troubled token project.

Major messaging app Telegram claims it has no control over the TON Blockchain network, which is about to be launched in October. We "do not have the ability to facilitate any cancellation or modification requests to transactions you have submitted," the company added in their Grams Wallet's terms of service.

Two law firms, Silver Miller and Levi Korsinsky said they have commenced a class action lawsuit on behalf of investors in Nano f/k/a RaiBlocks (XRB), alleging that Nano and key members of its core team violated federal securities laws. The Complaint further alleges that, in their push to introduce XRB to a wide market of investors, the defendants recklessly directed investors to open accounts and place their assets with a little known, and severely troubled, Italian cryptocurrency exchange called BitGrail, where USD 170 million of the investors' XRB allegedly "disappeared" in February 2018, according to the announcement. At pixel time (09:44 UTC) NANO trades at c. USD 0.8 and is up by 6% in the past 24 hours.

Article Produced By
Linas Kmieliauskas