FTX closes record fundraise; China Mobile gets hot wallet patent

Transcript

Welcome to The Daily Forkast, July 21st, 2021. I’m Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief of Forkast.News, covering all things blockchain.

Coming up, FTX closes in US$ 900 million fundraising round, the largest in crypto exchange history. China Mobile patents a hot wallet currency management system, and decentralized home-sharing platform Dtravel hits 200,000 listings.

Let’s get you up to speed from Asia to the world.

Hong Kong-based FTX has closed the biggest fundraising round in crypto exchange history.

The US$900 million Series B fundraise values the company at US$ 18 billion. Now compare that to Nasdaq listed Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the US, whose current estimated value at today’s stock price is US$46.9 billion.

For investors, FTX represents a lot of room for growth.

Big names in the private equity and crypto industries space participated in the round, including Sequoia Capital, Third Point, SoftBank and Coinbase Ventures.

The cash raised is expected to expand product offerings, user base and partnerships.

Now one expert told us that FTX’s exponential growth has allowed for the development of innovative trading products at breakneck speeds.

“The rise of our blockchain-enabled financial markets infrastructure is leading to an explosion of innovation. It’s introducing new products that are easily accessible, and they’re empowering the next generation of traders.”

Since its launch in May 2019, FTX has grown to over one million users and it has a daily average trading volume of over US$10 billion.

That’s more than double what Coinbase does. It reported an estimated

US$ 335 billion US dollars in trading over the first three months of the year, or a little under four billion dollars a day over at Coinbase.

Now, FTX, revenues have increased more than tenfold this year and 75x since its series A funding round in 2020.

I can’t wait to see what shopping spree FTX is about to go on.

Meanwhile, China’s largest telecommunications company has been granted a patent on a virtual currency management system.

China Mobile’s newly patented system claims to prevent the theft of hot wallet keys. And it does that by allowing the hot wallet to interact indirectly with the public data net via a wallet server that could keep virtual currencies safer.

The announcement was made on the same day that the communications giant was named as a member of the E-CNY research and development team at a press conference held by the People’s Bank of China, or PBoC, following the publication of its white paper on the digital currency.

China Mobile is a wholly state-owned entity, falling under the supervision of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the State Council.

And in a country of 1.4 billion people, China Mobile has 950 million customers.

Talk about market saturation.

All right. Onto the markets right now. Bitcoin up almost 3.5% at just under US$31,000.
That’s as of 4 p.m. today, at the end of the next trading day in Asia, and the last trading day of the week for Japan before a national holiday ahead of the Olympic Games.
And in the top ten for cryptocurrencies, PolkaDot up almost 8%, DogeCoin up just over 7.5%.

Dtravel, the decentralized home-sharing platform has seen quite a homecoming!

The platform, which has a team spread out across Australia, Vietnam and the United States, had hoped to list around one million properties within its first 12 months. But since last month’s launch, more than 200,000 properties have been listed in more than 2,000 cities around the world.

By comparison, Airbnb took two and a half years to see 50,000 properties listed there. Dtravel’s co-founder says the next step is to decentralize control.

“We plan to have a lot of authority moved from the founding core team to the community. Are the community’s governance authority in the first half-year to a year.”

In a locked-down pandemic with people desperate to see their loved ones, the travel industry is poised to pick up again.

Home sweet home once again, hopefully in a post covid world.

And that’s The Daily Forkast from our vantage point right here in Asia. For more, visit Forkast.News. I’m Angie Lau. Editor-in-Chief. Until the next time.