Last week, financial giants HSBC (NYSE: HSBC) and Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) started using a blockchain platform to settle bilateral foreign currency trades in the latest sign of how blockchain technology gaining traction in mainstream activities, Reuters reports.
Baton Systems, the firm behind the Core-FX distributed ledger technology said the two British and American banks are using the platform to settle forex trades using real currencies and real accounts, in less than three minutes. The technology avoids passing the trades through CLS, a third-party bank widely used in the sector for settling forex trades, meaning such rapid settlement directly between the two banks reduces exposure and settlement risks. Faster settlement results in a shorter period of tying up costly capital and liquidity to insure against a trade going wrong.
The move by the two storied Wall Street names signifies further institutional adoption of blockchain technology in finance.
Here is the rest of the week in review:
CoinMarketCap suffered a major glitch Tuesday that caused a wave of wildly inaccurate pricing across the crypto sector. Popular data provider CoinMarketCap and crypto exchange Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) briefly displayed vastly inflated cryptocurrency prices following apparent glitches on their respective platforms, leading some users to mistakenly believe they made enormous gains. Tweets showed Bitcoin's (BTC) value on CoinMarketCap at $799 billion per coin, giving it a market value of $14.7 quintillion, and it was trading even higher at $887 billion per coin on Coinbase. CoinMarketCap said its engineering team was aware of incorrect price information on its site, which lasted for about an hour. The firm then noted it "has deployed a fix, all prices should be accurate." Bloomberg also reported that the data aggregator owned by Binance, added there is no evidence suggesting its glitch was caused by an external party. Coinbase also acknowledged the issue and then fixed it, saying it did not impact trading.
InfiniteWorld announced Monday it is going public via a merger deal with special purpose acquisition company Aries I Acquisition Corp (NASDAQ: RAM). The metaverse infrastructure platform InfiniteWorld said the combined entity will have a pro-forma equity value of $700 million and will trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the "JPG" ticker. Aries said: "With up to $15 trillion of wealth expected to flow into digital assets over the next 10 years, we are witnessing the birth of a new global asset class and economic system." InfiniteWorld helps brands create and monetize digital assets and non-fungible tokens, as well as use the digital assets and NFTS to engage with consumers and fans. The firm said it has partnered with over 75 creators and brands. The SPAC merger deal will provide InfiniteWorld with $171 million in new funds, including cash held by both firms and crypto owned by InfiniteWorld valued at $93 million. The two firms expect the deal to be completed in the first half of next year, and InfiniteWorld plans to use the deal to accelerate its platform development and expand brand partnerships.
Crypto prices dipped to $2.2 trillion this week. For the majors, Avalanche (AVAX) entered the top 10 and Terra (LUNA) soared, while the others largely dropped. In the top 100, the biggest decliners were Gala (GALA), down 22%, Internet Computer (ICP), down 21%, and BitTorrent (BTT), down 21%. The biggest gainers were yearn.finance (YFI), up 44%, Arweave (AR), up 36%, and Decred (DCR), up 29%.
The author owns a small amount of BTC.