Here are some of the major developments from the world of crypto over the past few days
Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has received the green light to sell around $873 million of trust assets, with proceeds used to repay creditors impacted by the exchange’s collapse in 2022, according to a November 29, 2023 filing in a Delaware bankruptcy court.
The $873 million in assets will be sourced from FTX’s stakes in various trusts issued by crypto asset manager Grayscale Investments, valued at $807 million, and custody service provider Bitwise, valued at $66 million.
While the court document references a total of $744 million in assets, this is due to the valuation figure being as of October 25, 2023. The assets have increased in value since.
The approval comes nearly four weeks after FTX debtors filed a motion to Judge John Dorsey on November 3, 2023 requesting the sale of the six cryptocurrency trusts, including the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE) and Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund.
Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo has been hit with a proposed class-action lawsuit from plaintiffs claiming that they suffered losses from his promotion of the now-legally embroiled crypto exchange Binance.
In a November 27, 2023 filing to a United States district court in Florida, the plaintiffs claimed that Ronaldo “promoted, assisted in, and/or actively participated in the offer and sale of unregistered securities in coordination with Binance.”
Binance had entered into a multi-year partnership with the football star in mid-2022 to promote a series of his own non-fungible tokens (NFTs), with at least three of the footballer’s collections tied to Binance.
The complaint claims users who signed up for Ronaldo’s NFTs were more likely to use Binance for other purposes, such as investing in what they claim are unregistered securities, including Binance’s BNB and its crypto yield programs, according to a report in Cointelegraph.com
Cross-chain protocol Wormhole has secured a $225-million investment at a valuation of $2.5 billion. According to the November 29, 2023 announcement, the investment round was led by Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Jump Trading, ParaFi, Dialectic, Borderless Capital and Arrington Capital.
The Wormhole Foundation also announced the launch of Wormhole Labs, which the company said “is an independent technology company that specialises in building products, tools, and reference implementations that help grow cross-chain activity and development.”
At present, its Blockchain-to-Blockchain communications technology is used to bridge assets, power oracle data feeds, and transfer NFTs.
Wormhole was launched in 2021 and has since facilitated over $35 billion in transactions. Developers claim that the protocol processes over 2 million cross-chain messages across more than 30 chains every day.