Digital Currency Group (DCG), a global enterprise that builds, buys, and invests in blockchain companies, today announced the acquisition of Luno, a leading cryptocurrency exchange.

Based in London and with regional hubs in Singapore and Cape Town, Luno has grown significantly in recent years, with nearly 400 employees and more than five million global customers spanning over 40 countries.

New York-based DCG will be making a significant financial commitment to help Luno expand globally, both in geographies where Luno currently operates and beyond. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

 Led by co-founder and CEO Marcus Swanepoel, Luno has become a digital asset powerhouse in many emerging and frontier markets, providing digital asset education, knowledge, and investment tools for individuals in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Luno has helped broaden the global crypto investment community and the company has seen record growth of its customer base in 2020.  

In Africa, the company saw more than 550,000 new users on its platform in Q2 2020 and contributes the largest share of cryptocurrency trading volume on the continent across non-P2P exchanges. Luno is a leading exchange in several countries that have the highest percentage of cryptocurrency ownership, including South Africa (third-highest of its citizens owning digital currencies), Nigeria (fifth-highest), Indonesia (sixth-highest), and Malaysia (tenth-highest). 

 DCG first invested in Luno in its seed round in 2014. 

 “We are proud to have supported Luno as an early investor, and we recognize a shared commitment to building mission-driven companies that can help transform traditional financial services and improve economic freedom for people all over the world,” said DCG Founder and CEO Barry Silbert. “Luno is a high growth, global business and there is a massive opportunity to expand organically and through acquisitions.” 

DCG enables its subsidiaries to operate as independent companies, providing leadership, partnership, and investment capital to help scale the businesses. The Luno leadership team will remain entirely intact and Swanepoel will lead acquisition efforts in his role as CEO.  

“The past seven years have been an incredibly exciting journey for Luno – helping millions of our customers get access to crypto for the first time,” said Swanepoel. “DCG has been an integral part of the Luno story during all of this time, and we’ve been fully aligned on our vision and culture since day one. Having the full backing of DCG just as we’re experiencing such a pivotal moment of growth in the industry is not just an exciting and important milestone for Luno, but more importantly it will significantly accelerate our ability to reach our goal to help upgrade 1 billion people to a better financial system by 2030.” 

“We have been extremely impressed with Marcus and the Luno team since we made our initial investment,” added Silbert. “Marcus understands our culture and appreciates how well Luno fits into the DCG family. He is a focused, high integrity leader and exactly the kind of person we want running one of our companies at this critical moment when the crypto industry is at an inflection point.” 

Founded in 2013, Luno has been backed by global tech giant the Naspers Group and Balderton Capital amongst others. During these last seven years Luno has maintained its commitment to upgrading the world to a better financial system. The company believes that the legacy system was built for a non-digital age, ignoring the needs of modern individuals and adding unnecessary inefficiencies and gatekeepers. The world now has access to new technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum that will fundamentally change how the world views and uses money. Like communication evolving from landlines to mobile phones, money is finally catching up with other information revolutions. 

Luno maintains regional offices in Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, Jakarta, and Johannesburg, and will continue to focus on the existing geographies where it operates across Europe, Africa, and Asia. The Luno team has also developed an aggressive road map for future growth and will ultimately compete with financial services firms globally. Luno is actively hiring for positions all over the world. 

Source: siliconnigeria.com.ng

Author: Published 13 hours ago on September 29, 2020

Utopia p2p Releases CRP (Crypton) cryptocurrency on Crypto Exchanges

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LONDON, Sept. 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — One of the most anticipated cryptocurrencies of 2020 – Crypton (CRP) – is coming to the international cryptocurrency market. Recently, it has become available for trading on the exchange platforms latoken.com and zg.com, where everyone can now buy, sell, and exchange CRP. All the up-to-date information about the coin exchange rate is available on coingecko.com and coinmarketcap.com.

*Crypton is the internal cryptocurrency of Utopia P2P network — a revolutionary data privacy project on the Internet created by the anonymous creators.

For anyone who missed the chance to invest in Bitcoin at the early stage of its development, here is a second chance to get in on the ground floor and invest in a new and rapidly developing cryptocurrency right now. At this stage of development, everyone can buy the cryptocurrency at the lowest price. So, invest a little now, and make a profit as the value increases steadily.

Crypton is the cryptocurrency of the future that guarantees the protection and confidentiality of financial transactions. What is noteworthy is Crypton’s uniqueness, which is based on a mixture of blockchain and its own protocols in the Utopia P2P ecosystem. There, the developers are able to combine all the necessary Internet tools in one place. By the way, no Internet project has done this before. It includes the ability to transfer and store any data safely, as well as the complete anonymity and privacy of each user.

As a result, by investing in Crypton, you contribute to the usage and popularization for private use of such tools as:

uMessenger: An instant messenger where communication between users is decentralized and encrypted.
uMail: Protected file sharing with secure information transfer.
Idyll Browser: An anonymous browser with hidden traffic based on its own security protocol.
uWallet: An encrypted e-wallet based on blockchain technology where financial transactions are in a chain on master nodes, and everyone has a chain with uNS channels.
uNS: A unique domain name system as a completely secure alternative to DNS.
Mining bot: A special bot that uses unique proof-of-memory technology for a quick way to earn Cryptons just using the ecosystem.

Each Utopia client gets all the necessary Internet tools for the modern world in one place with the internal cryptocurrency Crypton. Note that it is becoming more and more popular on international cryptocurrency exchanges every day.

Crypton has many similarities with Bitcoin. Neither currency used an ICO, and both have a high degree of protection based on decentralization.

Nobody knows who is the real owner of these projects. Bitcoin was developed by a person or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto, while the developer of Crypton is the team of anonymous creators. They decided to hide their real names to avoid pressure from government agencies and third parties. In the case of Crypton, it is helping to provide a real revolution in the cryptocurrency world.

Moreover, CRP does not display any transaction data. It is intended for anonymous payments. Third parties do not have access to information about the identity of clients who use Cryptons for personal purposes. The entire process of conducting a transaction is linked under a cryptographic signature. The transfer itself over the network is also wrapped in encryption.

Until now, the Utopia platform has only been available for desktop devices. However, the developers have already announced the release of a mobile version of the ecosystem. In other words, Utopia is poised to become even more accessible and popular, which means that Cryptons will significantly increase in price.

Take a chance and be one of the first who earn money on a developing cryptocurrency. Start investing in CRP right now.

Photo(s):
https://www.prlog.org/12839515

Press release distributed by PRLog

SOURCE Utopia p2p

Source: www.prnewswire.com

Author: Utopia p2p

FinCEN director warns banks about cryptocurrency risk exposure

FinCEN has warned U.S. banks that it is closely watching how they respond to crypto risk exposure with their AML programs.

Published on September 29, 2020

The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) director Kenneth Blanco has warned banks to think seriously about their cryptocurrency risk exposure.

During the virtual 2020 ACAMS anti-money laundering Conference in Las Vegas this week, Blanco discussed the obligations of banks in implementing effective anti-money laundering (AML) policies.

Current FinCEN regulations (FIN-2019-A003) state that it is the responsibility of all financial institutions to identify and report suspicious activity concerning how criminals and other bad actors exploit card verification checks for money laundering, sanctions evasion, and other illicit financing purposes. For many banks, it is still unclear how virtual currencies affect their institutions.

The director emphasized the need for banks to have another look at their AML policies and procedures, especially in relation to cryptocurrencies, adding that “if banks are not thinking about these issues, it will be apparent when examiners visit.”

“To be clear, exchanges are not the only ones with crypto risk exposure. These risks are not unique to money services businesses or virtual currency exchanges; banks must be thinking about their crypto exposure as well. These are areas your examiners, and FinCEN, will ask you about when assessing the effectiveness of your AML program.”

According to research by crypto analytics firm CipherTrace Labs in 2019, eight of the ten major U.S. retail banks had dealings with illicit crypto money service businesses (MSBs). These MSBs accept cash payments in exchange for crypto, essentially running as unregistered P2P exchanges.

In addition many P2P exchanges have no AML or know-your-customer (KYC) programs in place, resulting in extensive money laundering risks to banks and other financial institutes.

Banks have long been criticized for failing to maintain robust AML and KYC programs. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICJI) report that more than $2 trillion of processed transactions have been identified by banks as suspicious and should be frozen. The amount of suspicious money not identified by banks could be many times larger.

Source: news.iobanker.com

Author: ByioBanker

Gemini crypto exchange adds shielded withdrawals for privacy coin Zcash

Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, aims to improve user privacy with a major privacy token, Zcash (ZEC).

Starting Sept. 29, Gemini will support shielded withdrawals of ZEC, which allows users to hide their transaction data.

Gemini representatives said that the new feature is the “first time shielded ZEC withdrawals are available on a regulated exchange.” The new option comes in line with Gemini’s mission to strengthen financial privacy and “empower the individual through crypto,” Gemini executives said.

Launched in 2016, Zcash is a major privacy-focused cryptocurrency, enabling two user privacy levels through two types of addresses — transparent, or t-addresses, and shielded, or z-addresses. In contrast to transparent addresses, shielded ZEC addresses are designed to encrypt and hide transaction data like sender, receiver, as well as the amount sent.

According to Gemini, the exchange will store ZEC in t-addresses. In order to complete a withdrawal of shielded ZEC, users can simply withdraw their ZEC to a z-address. Exchange users are already able to deposit ZEC from a z-address into their accounts.

Gemini did not specify whether the exchange received any special regulatory approvals to introduce shielded ZEC withdrawals. However, the reps said that the new feature “demonstrates that with the right controls in place and the proper education, regulators can get comfortable with privacy-enabling cryptos.”

Gemini’s addition of shielded ZEC withdrawals comes amid regulatory uncertainty over Zcash.

As previously reported, some global exchanges like Japanese Liquid had to delist Zcash to be compliant with regulations. Over the course of 2019, a number of crypto services like OKEx and Upbit cut support for Zcash alongside major privacy coin Monero (XMR), citing concerns over their anonymous nature. In August 2019, major American crypto exchange Coinbase announced the termination of Zcash custody for customers based in the United Kingdom.

Source: www.bitcoindoorway.com

Author: by admin

Uniswap Captures $2 Billion Locked, Dex Volume Outpaces Second-Largest Centralized Exchange | Exchanges Bitcoin News

The decentralized exchange (dex) built on Ethereum, Uniswap has accumulated a whopping $2 billion in total value locked (TVL) this week. Tuesday’s data shows out of all the decentralized finance (defi) application’s Uniswap dominates the $11 billion landscape by over 18%.

Just recently, the defi space has touched a few new milestones as the ecosystem’s TVL this week has topped $11 billion. The dex Uniswap is dominating the defi landscape by 18.65% with over $2 billion TVL to-date.

Uniswap is followed by Makerdao ($1.9B), Aave ($1.56B), Curve.fi ($1.22B), and the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) project ($990M). The Uniswap trading platform has captured a massive amount of demand this week with 104,324 unique users during the last seven days.

Today according to stats, the Uniswap dex is moving just as much trade volume as some of the top centralized exchanges (cex) globally. On Tuesday, Binance has the top trade volume as far as cex trade volumes are concerned with $2.5 billion in 24-hour volume.

Coinbase Pro is the second-largest cex in terms of trade volume on Tuesday with $343 million trades during the last 24 hours. Uniswap is well above Coinbase Pro with $398 million today, making the dex the second-largest crypto exchange worldwide in terms of trade volume on September 29.

Dex volume in general has been quite large this week and during the last seven days Dune Analytics data shows 13 dex platforms saw $3.7 billion in trades. $2.3 billion of those swaps took place on Uniswap as it currently captures 63.7% of the trailing seven day average.

Cumulatively, all 13 dex platforms saw a whopping $24 billion in swaps during the last 30 days. Dex platforms following Uniswap’s trade volume lead include Curve.fi, 0x, Balancer, Kyber, Synthetix, Dydx, and the Bancor Network respectively.

Uniswap’s weekly and 24-hour trade volume has been a topical conversation on social media and crypto-related forums. A number of crypto enthusiasts wonder if dex volumes will someday supersede cex volumes entirely.

Ethereum proponents believe the rise of stablecoins and dex platforms like Uniswap are starting to prove ETH skeptics wrong.

“In the last bull market, critics said ETH had no use case besides scammy ICO’s,” the CTO and analyst Leon Fu from the web portal cryptocurrency.market recently told his 19,000 Twitter followers. “With the rise of stablecoins, Uniswap, and other protocols [that] enable actual utility [and] have nothing to do with ICO’s. Clearly, ETH skeptics were wrong,” he added.

What do you think about Uniswap’s massive trade volume this week and during the last 24 hours? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments below.

0x, Balancer, Bancor Network, Binance, Coinbase Pro, crypto assets, crypto exchanges, Cryptocurrency, Curve.fi, defi landscape, DEX, Dydx, ETH, ether, Ethereum, Kyber, swaps, Synthetix, trade volume, uniswap

Spot-markets for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple, Litecoin and more. Start your trading here.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

Source: news.bitcoin.com

Author: Exchanges by Jamie Redman

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