Hodlnaut & Swyftx Lay Off Staff, USD 9M Carried Out in eNaira, MTV’s ‘Best Metaverse Performance’, Crypto Green and Red Regulatory Lights + More News

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

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Legal news

• In an update on its bankruptcy case, Singapore-based crypto lender Hodlnaut said it is facing “pending proceedings” with the Singapore Attorney-General and the Singapore Police Force. Furthermore, the company said it laid off 80% of its employees, or “approximately 40 employees”, “in order to reduce the company’s expenditure.”
• The US Trustee is seeking to appoint an examiner in the case of Celsius (CEL)’ bankruptcy, MarketWatch reported, claiming Celsius repeatedly failed to provide a detailed breakdown of its mining operations. They said an examiner needs to look into the role Celsius’s management may have played in the platform’s illiquidity. The move was met with concerns by the Committee of Unsecured Creditors, arguing that the move will only rake up costs, without providing any meaningful benefit.

CBDC news

• The Central Bank of Nigeria Governor Godwin Emefiele said in a speech that Nigeria’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), the eNaira, has been used to carry out transactions worth NGN 4bn (USD 9.4m) since its introduction in October 2021, adding that the eNaira app has been downloaded 840,000 times and currently has about 270,000 active wallets.

Metaverse news

• The 2022 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) added a “Best Metaverse Performance” category. Six artists are up for nomination: BTS, Blackpink, Ariana Grande, Charli XCX, and Twenty One Pilots.
• Africa has gotten a live metaverse called Ubuntuland, with a 3D Virtual Reality (VR) experience in it, Africarare, said a press release shared with Cryptonews.com. Africarare has secured a 12×12 village (144 plots of virtual real estate) to establish its visibility, together with the Austrian World Data Lab (WDL), which acquired a 6×6 village. WDL said it will use this virtual real-estate to “help improve quality of life for Africans and raise awareness of key-impact topics.”

Regulation news

• The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) said in its new guidelines that banks in the country “may act as a conduit for funds” tied to crypto service providers and “may play a role in customers wishing to purchase” or “receive payouts in fiat currency” in their bank accounts for the sale of crypto.
• The Central Bank of the Philippines published a warning note, “strongly urging” the country’s citizens not to deal with Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) that are either unregistered or domiciled abroad. There are 19 registered VASPs.

Exchange news

• Digivault, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)-registered crypto custodian that is a part of the EQONEX Group, has added support for Binance‘s BNB Chain, enabling clients to now hold assets running on BNB Chain, including BNB, BUSD, & BEP20 tokens, in their Digivault accounts.
• Australian crypto exchange Swyftx is laying off a fifth of its staff (21%), in a move described as a “hard decision” in a blog post. 74 people have lost their jobs due to “operating in an uncertain business environment, with levels of domestic inflation not seen in over two decades, rising interest rates, highly volatile markets across all asset classes, and the potential for a global recession,” it said.
• Singapore-based crypto exchange BHEX.SG announced that it has received the Standard Payment Institution license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

Mining news

• One of Japan’s biggest financial services providers, SBI Holdings, said it’s shutting down its mining operations in Siberia, as the war in Ukraine is creating overall uncertainty in the market. As per a Bloomberg report, the move ties back to the sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of its western neighbor, Ukraine.

Payments news

• Fintech firm Ripple has partnered with the local bank Travelex to bring its RippleNet On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) product to Brazil. This makes Travelex the first bank in Latin America to utilize Ripple’s ODL, and it is also the first bank registered and approved to operate exclusively in foreign exchange, said the press release.

DeFi news

• Digital asset custodians Copper integrated with the Solana (SOL) blockchain to support decentralized finance (DeFi), the company announced. Through the integration, customers will be able to interact with Solana dapps and transact under the protection of CopperConnect’s Multi-Party Computation (MPC) technology, they added.