Singapore Financial News

In a new blog post published Thursday, Coinbase says that starting Monday, all of its customers in the Netherlands will need to complete new Know Your Customer, or KYC, requirements when transferring digital assets to wallet addresses that are not based on the exchange. This includes providing the recipient's full name, the purpose of the transfer and the recipient's complete residential address. Transfers between Coinbase accounts are not affected by the new rule. 

The Singapore-based crypto venture firm Three Arrows Capital (3AC) failed to meet its financial obligations on June 15 and this caused severe impairments among centralized lending and staking providers like Celsius and Babel Finance.

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

Crypto platform FalconX doubles valuation to $8 billion in new funding round

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

Trust Wallet, a major self-custodial cryptocurrency wallet owned by the Binance crypto exchange, has completed a significant integration to enable easier crypto purchases.

Major Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com received in-principle approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) for its Major Payment Institution License. The license will let the platform provide a range of payment services in the country. 

Despite the ongoing bearish trend in cryptocurrency markets, venture capital firms continue pouring capital into major industry players like FalconX.

TerraUSD's paired token, Luna, plunged in value last month.

CDOs, which repackaged risky mortgage bonds to make them look safer than they were. “CDOs are nothing but a massive Ponzi scheme,” said the villain of a fictional account of the 2008 meltdown. How much more carnage will it take this time to know that blockchain-based lending is similarly reckless? The idea that one could ditch regulated intermediaries like banks and make far higher returns by lending digital assets was a key attraction of decentralized finance, or DeFi. But that was before the bloodletting began, triggered by the collapse last month of the cryptocurrency pair Terra-Luna. The appeal of changing money into TerraUSD, a stablecoin that promised 1:1 convertibility into dollars, lay in the near-20% yield on TerraUSD deposits. Withdrawal of funds from Anchor Protocol, the main DeFi lending application on the blockchain, crushed the coin, as well as Luna, its sister asset. Soon after, lenders Celsius Network and Babel froze deposits. BlockFi Inc., a Peter Thiel-backed lending platform, said it “fully liquidated or hedged all the associated collateral” of a large client believed to be Singapore-based Three Arrows Capital, a troubled crypto hedge fund. BlockFi is reducing headcount by 20% just as Coinbase Global Inc., the largest US-based digital asset exchange, lays off 18% of its workforce. There’s no end in sight to the crypto winter. Of the $252 billion of investor funds tied up in DeFi protocols last December, less than $75 billion remain.

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub released a report Tuesday looking at four projects that examined wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) transfers across borders. The projects demonstrated the technical feasibility of the transfers, the BIS found, but practical and policy issues remain outstanding. 

In the history of dangerous naivety, the decentralized finance mania of 2021 will hold its own against the 2007 boom in collateralized debt obligations. It took a financial crisis for the world to wise up to CDOs, which repackaged risky mortgage bonds to make them look safer than they were. “CDOs are nothing but a massive Ponzi scheme,” said the villain of a fictional account of the 2008 meltdown. How much more carnage will it take this time to know that blockchain-based lending is similarly reckless?

South Korean prosecutors have banned an unspecified number of current and/or former Terraform Labs officials, including developers, from leaving the country.

Terra (LUNA) employees are reportedly unable to leave South Korea as the country's prosecutors imposed a departure ban on key developers of the project.

Bitcoin plunged through several closely watched price levels to the lowest since late 2020 as evidence of deepening stress within the crypto industry keeps piling up against a backdrop of monetary tightening.

The 2022 version of crypto winter has been unlike anything we’ve seen before. As I warned last month, the meltdown of the Terra ecosystem didn’t end with Luna Classic (LUNC) hitting zero. The biggest threat was contagion. As the dust began to settle, we finally got a glimpse of who was left holding the bag. Crypto lender Celsius and Singapore-based venture firm Three Arrows Capital suffered heavy losses during the debacle. These firms, once a staple of the budding crypto industry, now risk demise following weeks of massive selloffs in the market. 

This past week, the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem faced the brunt of the bears fueled by liquidation rumors of Three Arrow Capital (3AC) and Celsius liquidations. MakerDAO decided to cut off Aave (AAVE) from its direct deposit module as a safeguard in light of the possibility that Celsius folds and crashes the price of staked Ether (stETH).

Venture firm Three Arrows Capital (3AC) has reportedly failed to meet margin calls from its lenders, raising the spectre of insolvency after this week’s crypto market collapse triggered unforeseen liquidations for the Singapore-based company.

The outlook across the cryptocurrency ecosystem continue to dim as the sharp downtrend that was initially sparked by the collapse of Terra now appears to have claimed the Singapore-based crypto venture capital firm Three Arrows Capital (3AC) as its next victim. 

The Three Arrows Capital crisis seems to have taken a new shift after latest developments. The Singapore-based hedge fund has been edging towards insolvency with massive liquidations. Co-founder Su Zhu’s tweet also indicated the ongoing struggles at the company.

The United States Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, reportedly plans to “bulk up” its capability to monitor crypto — a move which could include scooping up employees recently terminated from crypto companies.