Stripe plans to re-enter the crypto space, 3 years after the payments giant ended support for Bitcoin (BTC). Stripe has begun assembling a crypto engineering team to steer its new future in digital assets.
According to LinkedIn (NASDAQ: MSFT) posts, the new team will be headed by Guillaume Poncin, the firm's former head of engineering for banking and financial products. He is aiming to hire at least 4 staffers to help with crypto strategy. The job posts say the engineers will "design and build the core components that we need to support crypto use cases." Poncin tweeted Tuesday: "We're starting a new crypto team at @Stripe. I'm hiring engineers and designers to build the future of Web3 payments."
Today processing hundreds of billions of dollars in annual ecommerce, Stripe started supporting Bitcoin in 2014 as an industry first but scrapped the service in 2018, and now the firm is increasing its interest in digital assets, especially non-fungible tokens.
Here is the rest of the week in review:
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Friday fined Bitfinex and Tether $42.5 for untrue or misleading claims their USDT stablecoin was fully backed and for Bitfinex's violation of a previous agency order. The federal commodities regulator settled charges with the sibling crypto firms, barring both from "any further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations." According to the CFTC, Tether's stablecoin was fully backed by reserves only one-fourth of the time over a 26-month period between 2016 and 2018. Also, Tether comingled reserve funds with its corporate funds and held reserves in non-cash products. CFTC noted: "The order also finds that, instead of holding all USDT token reserves in U.S. dollars as represented, Tether relied upon unregulated entities and certain third-parties to hold funds comprising the reserves." CFTC added that Tether relied on unregulated entities and third parties to hold funds comprising the reserves. But Bitfinex and Tether contested the claims, arguing they have always maintained adequate reserves and satisfied redemption requests.
Jacobi Asset Management, a British newcomer to digital assets management, announced Friday that it obtained approval from regulators on the island of Guernsey to launch a physically-backed Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). Jacobi plans to list the new ETF on Cboe Europe (BATS: CBOE) pending further regulatory approval. The firm said in a press release that the UK's Financial Conduct Authority still must give the final green light on pre-listing. The Jacobi Bitcoin ETF will only be available for institutions to purchase when it launches. Fidelity Digital Assets will serve as custodian of the fund's Bitcoin holdings. The new product also assesses a 1.5% management fee. The Guernsey approval comes as US investors eagerly expect the SEC to approve a ProShares Bitcoin futures ETF, as well as several others later this year.
Crypto prices rose to $2.45 trillion this week. For the majors, Polkadot (DOT) and Binance Coin (BNB) posted outsized gains, while XRP and Cardano (ADA) slipped. In the top 100, the biggest losers were Flow, down 18.5%, Decred (DCR), down 16%, and Arweave (AR), down 15%. The biggest gainers were NuCypher (NU), up a whopping 403%, Perpetual Protocol (PERP), up 22%, and Polkadot, up 14.5%. Next week traders will watch if Bitcoin reaches another record high.
The author owns a small amount of BTC.