On February 14, the highly anticipated Blur airdrop was finally kicked off. According to Dune Analytics, as of February 15, over 40,000 addresses have claimed the Blur airdrop, with 8.2% of them receiving over 10,000 tokens.

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Bitget, the world’s largest crypto copy trading exchange, announced the relaunch of its Launchpad platform, which provides exclusive access to promising blockchain projects at an early stage.

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This month, DPEX—a decentralized perpetual exchange with self-custody of user funds—made its debut via the official Polygon DeFi Twitter account. Since then, it has been garnering immense attention!

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PRESS RELEASE. Vienna, February 14, 2023 – Pantos, a multichain token system conceived by the team behind Bitpanda, announces the public beta launch of its multichain protocol today. Developers and users will be able to use the public beta to send tokens, wrap native coins of supported chains, and soon also create and deploy multichain tokens easily with a few clicks.

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Bit2Me, the biggest Spanish exchange, and the first company to be recognized as a virtual service provider by the Bank of Spain has just launched a long-awaited debit card. The Bit2Me debit card works across the entire Mastercard network, enabling both crypto-stablecoin payments across more than 90 million global businesses and up to 9% cash back on all payments.

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Elementus, a New York-based blockchain firm, has raised $10 million as part of its Series A-2 funding round, led by Web3 VC company Parafi Capital. The raise, which values the company at $160 million, aims to allow Elementus to keep improving its processes for providing effective and sound blockchain analytics to Web3 companies and government institutions.

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While operations with digital assets are not taxed in Uzbekistan, the government is receiving a growing amount of revenues from the industry. The increase in budget receipts has been attributed to the licensing regime and the introduction of fees for crypto companies.

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Lawmakers in Nur-Sultan have approved the final version of the law “On Digital Assets in the Republic of Kazakhstan.” The new legislation, including several other bills, regulates the circulation of cryptocurrencies in the country and introduces a licensing regime for crypto miners and exchanges.

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Trends show that artificial intelligence (AI) will be a major topic in 2023, as data indicates a surge in interest. Since interest peaked and Microsoft invested billions into Chatgpt, demand for AI-focused cryptocurrency projects has risen dramatically.

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The Brazilian city of Sao Paolo has introduced the concept of blockchain in its municipal data access and transparency law. The concept of blockchain is defined as a technology that can be of use in this field, but the city has not defined the structures or the implementation for its use in the future.

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The Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in California is running a project to digitize all of its titles and put them on a blockchain. The project, which will use the Tezos blockchain and has the assistance of Oxhead Alpha, a crypto dev company, aims to allow users to transfer titles as NFTs in the future.

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Lawmakers in the European Union have backed legislation imposing new capital requirements for financial institutions, including strict rules meant to cover crypto-related risks. The latter concern banks keeping digital assets and are expected to enter into force in January, 2025.

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In just the first 17 days of the new year, the Ghanaian currency reportedly depreciated by 12.7%, making it the second worst-performing among Sub-Saharan Africa’s top 15 currencies. While one U.S. dollar bought 13.10 units of the cedi on the parallel market, according to the latest Bank of Ghana data, one greenback buys around 10.36 units of the local currency.

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The financial monitoring agency of Ukraine has restricted access to a number of online crypto exchangers operating out of Russia. Some of the coin trading platforms are working with sanctioned Russian banks, the regulatory body announced in a report.

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Bank of America says “digital currencies appear inevitable,” adding that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins are “a natural evolution of today’s monetary and payment systems.” The bank expects “private sector beneficiaries to emerge in all phases of CBDC implementation.”

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While the global industry built around digital assets is losing funds and jobs are dropping off, Switzerland seems to be weathering the storm relatively well, one piece of research claims. In fact, more crypto companies settled in the country during the past turbulent year than those that left it, or the business altogether.

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Vueling, a low-cost Spanish airline, has announced it is exploring the functionality of blockchain and NFT (non-fungible token) technology to accept cryptocurrency as a means of payment for its services. The company enlisted the aid of Criptan, a registered Spanish cryptocurrency exchange, and aims to open this payment option for users by Q3 2023.

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The recently approved Brazilian cryptocurrency law will likely be reviewed and revised by the newly inaugurated government of Luis Inacio “Lula” Da Silva. According to statements made by the former rapporteur of the law, Expedito Netto, the new government will likely review the law to include some issues that were left behind for its approval.

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The body overseeing the securities market in Israel is taking steps to incorporate rules for digital assets into the existing legislation. The regulator released a draft proposal to introduce the changes that would define the legal status of cryptocurrencies in the country.

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The government of India is launching a crypto awareness campaign that will educate investors about the legality of cryptocurrencies in the country while highlighting the risks of investing in crypto assets.

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A Moroccan draft crypto law, which seeks to protect individuals from the risks associated with crypto trading, is ready and will soon be presented to stakeholders, Abdellatif Jouahiri, the governor of Bank Al-Maghrib (BAM), has said. Adoption of crypto by Moroccan residents is now inevitable hence a regulatory framework is needed.

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Microstrategy is now holding approximately 132,500 bitcoin following its most recent purchases. This year, the world’s largest cryptocurrency has emerged as “the institutional-grade digital asset,” said Microstrategy founder Michael Saylor.

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Crypto trading volumes in India have plunged significantly this year. The FTX meltdown has exacerbated the problem, hurting “the sentiment across crypto tokens.” Local crypto experts are not expecting a recovery in the near future “Unless something dramatic happens” in the upcoming Union Budget.

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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged Thor Technologies and its co-founders with conducting an unregistered securities offering. In 2018, the company minted and sold tokens to raise funds for its ‘gig economy platform,’ the development of which had not even started at the time.

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A strategist at global investment bank JPMorgan says crypto is effectively nonexistent as an asset class for most large institutional investors. “The volatility is too high, the lack of an intrinsic return that you can point to makes it very challenging,” he added.

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According to a new study, out of the estimated 55.3 million cryptocurrency holders that are spread among 33 African countries, three countries — Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya — account for approximately 36.14 million or nearly two-thirds of this total.

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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently said it has launched a blockchain payment solution for digital cash distribution to internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Ukraine. According to the agency, the use of the blockchain-based cash distribution system ensures the funds are instantly transferred to the intended recipients.

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While billions of dollars in crypto assets have been withdrawn from Binance, the world’s largest exchange in terms of volume, the stablecoin BUSD has seen its coins in circulation drop considerably during the last three days. While 20% of BUSD’s supply was drained since last month, statistics show that 14.77% of the reduction took place on Dec. 13.

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Decentralized applications (dapps) are prone to data tampering because they “are largely built on top of centralized databases and services,” the CEO of Space and Time Nate Holiday has said. The CEO also shared a list of data tampering risks which he said are specific to data warehouses.

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Alex Bornyakov is the Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine. He recently joined the Bitcoin.com News Podcast to talk about how the country is using cutting edge technologies such as cryptocurrencies, NFTs and web3 in face of the dreadful challenges of war.

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