23.12.[News of the day] • Visa buys CurrencyCloud, a Ripple partner, for $ 925 million • and other articles

Welcome to today’s  overview:

MARKETS

Yesterday, the price of BTC was on its way to $ 50,000. It peaked at $ 49,600, but got stuck and couldn’t go higher. Today, however, the situation is somewhat different. At the time of writing, BTC is trading at $ 48,350, down 1.8% in the last 24 hours. So far, it seems to hold the level of $ 48,000.

The rest of the market is colored both green and red, as some altcoins have made serious gains, while others have failed. For example, ETH failed to hold above $ 4,000 and fell 2.5% to $ 3,900.

BTC analysis – the price did not overcome resistance and there was no signal at the end of the correction

UNI analysis – the price rebounded from the long-term support. Is a growing trend waiting for us?

Cryptocurrencies

Ripple CEO Confirms XRP Has Experienced “Strongest Year in History” Despite Ongoing Litigation

Despite an ongoing lawsuit between Ripple (XRP) and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the digital currency has grown significantly on the international stage.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced on Twitter on December 22 that the year between the SEC lawsuit against Ripple, Chris Larsen, and himself, when the regulator said the XRP, a publicly traded cryptocurrency, should be registered as a security.

In his thread, Garlinghouse emphasized that what he said earlier still applies today: it is an attack on the crypto in the United States, not just Ripple. Some, he noted, accepted the SEC’s accusation as a coin and assumed it was a one-off event, but that was no longer the case.

Banks, crypto exchanges, companies

Binance burned 1.355 million BNBs and replaced the quarterly burning with automatic BNB burning

Binance has just burned an incredible 1.335 million coins in the 17th quarter. This equates to $ 704,198,842 at the current BNB / USD exchange rate: 527.489770 USD. These coins were permanently withdrawn from circulation. Then, the published article states that the amount of BNB that will be destroyed during automatic burning will be 1.69 million BNB.

BNB serves as a fuel for transactions in the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and for participation in decentralized management at the BSC, as well as as a means of payment for corporate and crypto exchanges. In addition, the automatic burning of BNBs will stop as soon as the total amount of BNBs in circulation falls below 100 million.

Visa buys CurrencyCloud, a Ripple partner, for $ 925 million

Visa, a leading payment processing company, has completed the acquisition of CurrencyCloud for an incredible £ 700 million, or approximately $ 925 million. In a press release dated December 20, Visa, the payment processor, announced that it had completed the acquisition of CurrencyCloud.

It is a platform that allows banks and fintech companies to provide foreign exchange solutions for cross-border payments. CurrencyCloud also confirmed this message via its Twitter account.

It is also worth noting that CurrencyCloud entered into a partnership with Ripple as early as July 2020. This partnership focuses on the processing of cross-border payments in the RippleNet network.

Uniswap V3 is released on Polygon, while MATIC reaches record levels

Uniswap V3 was launched on Polygon after a change proposal was successfully accepted. More than 72 million votes were cast. Most of them were for use at Polygon. Only a fraction of the 503,000 votes were against the change. Voting ended on December 18, and the deployment of Uniswap V3 at the Polygon took place five days later, on December 23.

The proposal states that the Polygon team wanted to deploy the Uniswap protocol on PoS Polygon on behalf of the community. He said the move would bring more users, more savings and revenue, as well as a return to DeFi’s vision without borders.

Polygon also said it would set aside up to $ 20 million in financial incentives to support the initiative. As much as $ 15 million will be set aside for a long-term liquidity campaign. Up to $ 5 million will be set aside for the overall adoption of Uniswap at Polygon.

CBDC, Regulation

Paraguay has moved closer to digital currency regulation

On December 17, 2021, the Paraguayan Senate approved a bill on cryptocurrencies, which was introduced in July. The provisions, which define several key terms, including virtual assets, and call for the issuance of cryptocurrency mining licenses, will now be sent to the Chamber of Deputies for further discussion.

Senator Fernando Silva Facetta revealed that the bill was approved in the Paraguayan Senate after a controversial debate. According to the senator, the aim of the law is also to support the growth of mining activities in the area of ​​cryptocurrencies by using the excess electricity produced in the country.

The main part of the legislation contains the definition of virtual assets, tokens, cryptocurrency mining and virtual asset service providers (VASPs). It also gives the Ministry of Industry and Trade the power to ask government authorities outside its borders to help implement the law.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has not approved two ETFs on spot BTC

The US Securities and Exchange Commission rejected two physically supported ETFs on BTC. Valkyrie and Kyptoin have previously applied to include spot BTC exchange traded funds, but both products did not meet regulator standards.

The Securities and Exchange Commission used the same arguments to reject the investment as before for other financial instruments related to spot digital assets. According to the commission, stock exchanges that act as asset price determinants do not meet its requirements.

Regulators require centralized and decentralized exchanges to prevent fraudulent manipulation and even volatile price fluctuations, which is inherently impossible due to the decentralized nature of almost any asset in the cryptocurrency market.