Spanish football club FC Barcelona has received a €120 million ($132 million) investment from Libero Football Finance AG and Nipa Capital BV for their Web 3.0 effort, Barça Vision.
The globally renowned football club has been keen on creating a non-fungible token (NFT) collection for much of the past year.
In accordance with the announcement on August 11, 2023, FC Barcelona exchanged the capital for a 29.5 per cent stake in Bridgeburg Invest, the holding company for Barça Vision.
Developers said that “Barça Vision is the Club’s initiative to integrate all digital content centred on Web3.0, Blockchain, and other technologies, including NFTs and the metaverse, as part of the club’s strategy to create the digital Espai Barça.”
Libero is a publicly traded German company that offers financial advice to football clubs, while Nipa Capital is a venture capital firm based in the Netherlands.
The deal is likely to finalise in Q4 2023, subject to the approval of FC Barcelona shareholders.
Curve Finance Vows To Reimburse Users After $62 Million Hack
Curve Finance, a decentralised finance (DeFi) platform for Stablecoin lending, has publicly announced its plan to compensate users who were harmed by the recent hack that resulted in a $62 million loss from the system.
An article from Curve Finance claims that ongoing investigations are making headway, with about 79 per cent of the money being successfully recovered.
“The platform emphasises that determining the proportional portions of each harmed user is its top concern now. The objective of this review is to make sure that resources are distributed fairly,” Curve Finance said in the article.
The incident, which happened on July 30, 2023 featured malicious actors taking advantage of flaws in the Vyper compiler release history of Curve Finance to orchestrate the hack.
SEC Rejects ARK 21 Shares’ Spot Bitcoin ETF
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has rejected the ARK 21 Shares spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETF), and has further invited views on the proposal.
“A decision by the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States about the acceptance or rejection of the spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) proposed by ARK Investment Management has been postponed,” the SEC announced in a notice.
Incidentally, ARK Investment Management founder and CEO Cathie Wood had predicted on August 7, 2023 that the SEC would delay its decision on the firm’s spot BTC ETF application.
The SEC said it has extended the time it would take to decide whether or not to authorise a spot crypto ETF in the US by 21 days following publication of the ARK 21 Shares Bitcoin ETF in the Federal Register.
ARK initially submitted a listing application for the ETF in May this year, allowing the SEC up to 240 days, or until January 2024, to make a judgment.
The goal of ARK Investment Management is to be listed on the Cboe BZX Exchange. As such, applicants must provide proof of a “comprehensive surveillance-sharing agreement in place with a regulated market of significant size”.
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The SEC had previously disapproved the company’s proposals for a cryptocurrency ETF, stating that they were not “designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices" or safeguard investors.
“The regulated market of significant size test does not require that the spot bitcoin market be regulated in order for the Commission to approve this proposal, and precedent makes clear that an underlying market for a spot commodity or currency being a regulated market would actually be an exception to the norm,” the SEC further said on August 11, 2023.
