Mastercard announced it has completed its acquisition of CipherTrace, a leading cryptocurrency intelligence company that offers digital asset security and fraud solutions for some of the world’s largest banks, exchanges and other financial institutions.
The deal creates an integrated offering that combines AI, cyber and blockchain capabilities to provide businesses with greater transparency to help identify and understand their risks and manage regulatory and compliance obligations. The acquisition advances Mastercard’s digital assets strategy and differentiates its real-time payments infrastructure.
“We help companies – whether they are banks or cryptocurrency exchanges, government regulators or law enforcement to keep the crypto economy safe,” said Dave Jevans, CEO, CipherTrace. “Our two companies share this vision to provide security and trust throughout the ecosystem. We are thrilled to join the Mastercard family to scale CipherTrace’s reach across the globe.”
Digital asset merchant bank Galaxy Digital announced today that it had acquired custodian provider BitGo for $1.2 billion in cash and stock.
Galaxy said it will use its balance sheet to fund the cash portion of the deal. When the deal closes, Galaxy will issue incremental shares to BitGo’s shareholders in exchange for net digital assets.
BitGo, founded in 2013, was one of the first companies to offer institutional-grade wallets and infrastructure products long before the recent bitcoin rally made corporations eye the asset for their balance sheet.
“The power of the technology, solutions, and people we will have as a result of this acquisition will unlock unique value for our clients and drive long-term growth for our combined business. We are excited to welcome Mike Belshe and the talented BitGo team to Galaxy Digital,” he added.
A pair of ambitious DAO communities led by young hotshot developer teams pulled off a massive merger via dual votes.
The Rari and Fei development teams initially proposed the idea of joining forces in mid-November, however, only after several weeks and a few rounds of modifications to the deal terms did the wider Fei and Rari communities embrace the concept.
Rari started as a sort of robo-advisor for generating yield from stablecoins, but over the past months has grown and evolved into a money market-like protocol with about $1.4 billion in total value locked — mostly stablecoins and DeFi-related tokens on Ethereum.
“Fei can permissionlessly grow the utility and use cases for Fuse, including streamlined lending bootstrapping and manipulation-resistant oracles. Rari is an ideal platform to enhance FEI demand and utility, as well as a place for PCV to grow via the upcoming Vaults,” Santoro wrote.
Utah-based NFT company RTFKT joined the ranks of some of the world’s most iconic brands in December when Nike announced it had acquired RTFKT for an undisclosed sum. “This acquisition is another step that accelerates Nike’s digital transformation and allows us to serve athletes and creators at the intersection of sport, creativity, gaming, and culture,” Nike president and CEO John Donahoe said at the time.
Founded in 2020, by Benoit Pagotto, Chris Le and Steven Vasilev, RTFKT is a pioneering and innovative brand that redefines the boundaries of physical and digital value to serve their broad community of creators. This dedicated team leverages the latest in game engines, NFTs, blockchain authentication and augmented reality to create one of a kind virtual products and experiences.
“This is a unique opportunity to build the RTFKT brand and we are excited to benefit from Nike’s foundational strength and expertise to build the communities we love,” says Benoit Pagotto, one of RTFKT’s co-founders. “Nike is the only brand in the world that shares the deep passion we all have for innovation, creativity and community, and we’re excited to grow our brand which was fully formed in the metaverse.”
Yuga Labs, creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), acquired the intellectual property (IP) of the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections from Larva Labs.
CryptoPunks and Meebits are popular non-fungible token (NFT) collections on the Ethereum blockchain.
CryptoPunks is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection on the Ethereum Blockchain. The experimental project was inspired by the London punk scenes, the cyberpunk movement, and electronic music artists Daft Punk. The crypto art blockchain project was an inspiration for the ERC-721 standard for NFTs and the modern crypto art movement, which has since become a part of the cryptocurrency and decentralized finance ecosystems on multiple blockchains.
The Meebits are 20,000 unique 3D voxel characters, created by a custom generative algorithm, then registered on the Ethereum blockchain.
As part of the acquisition, Yuga Labs owns the copyright for both the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections, as well as 423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits. With this acquisition, they will own the CryptoPunks and Meebit brands and logos, and as they’ve done with their own BAYC collection, the company will transfer IP, commercial, and exclusive licensing rights to individual NFT holders.
Holders of CryptoPunks and Meebits should expect to receive new terms and conditions for their NFTs soon, granting them IP and commercialization rights.
Microsoft was founded a few months after what may have been the first use of the term “internet.” In some ways the two have grown up together. Now, Microsoft wants to enter its next stage of life in lockstep.
Microsoft announced that it acquired Activision Blizzard, one of the biggest California-based video game holding companies in the world. Microsoft announced that the deal would bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone across every device.
Are you trying to guess the figures? Microsoft did a transaction of $68,7 Billion, which is the biggest purchase made by this company.
The acquisition of Activision would help Microsoft to enter inside the metaverse too since one of the first and major applications of this would be Play to earn Games.