Gebo Group LLC and Crypto.com are pleased to announce that they have entered into an agreement to expand their existing relationship. Gebo will continue to support Crypto.com exchange by providing even more expanded market making services. Gebo will now make markets on Crypto.com in even more tokens and asset pairs. Gebo Group has recently launched it’s defi network launch facility, Starport (starport.io) and has announced it’s launch of the Immersive Network  – an extended reality real-world entertainment destination whose financial operations are recorded on an oracle enabled blockchain.

“We have been extremely happy with our relationship with Crypto.com to date,” said Gebo co-founder James Wines. “It’s a sophisticated and fair exchange that has made many technological and efficiency advancements in the industry that we have been excited to be a part of. We look forward to even more exciting opportunities to come.”

This announcement coincides with the recent transition of trading legend Ron Pasternak from Strategic Consultant to active Head of Gebo’s market making desk.

“Gebo is doing it right. They have the technology, the expertise and imagination to be the premier liquidity provider in the crypto space.” said Mr. Pasternak.

About Crypto.com
Founded in 2016, Crypto.com today serves over 10 million customers with the world’s fastest growing crypto app, along with the Crypto.com Visa Card — the world’s largest crypto card program — the Crypto.com Exchange and Crypto.com DeFi Wallet. Recently launched, Crypto.com NFT is the premier platform for collecting and trading NFTs, curated carefully from the worlds of art, design, entertainment, sports. Crypto.com is built on a solid foundation of security, privacy and compliance and is the first cryptocurrency company in the world to have ISO/IEC 27701:2019, CCSS Level 3, ISO27001:2013 and PCI:DSS 3.2.1, Level 1 compliance, and independently assessed at Tier 4, the highest level for both NIST Cybersecurity and Privacy Frameworks.Crypto.com is headquartered in Hong Kong with a 1,000+ strong team. Find out more by visiting https://crypto.com.

About Gebo Group
Gebo Group, LLC is a US FinCEN registered Money Service Business providing deep institutional liquidity on a principal-to-principal basis. Gebo Group offers sophisticated financial products and payment solutions using state of the art compliance and enterprise grade technology.

LCX is thrilled to be the newest Alliance Member of the Celo Foundation. LCX will be working alongside leading technology providers, nonprofits, mobile wallets, payment processors, and global investment firms in creating an easily accessible, mobile-friendly ecosystem of financial tools on the Celo open blockchain platform. Since its launch in March 2020, the Celo Foundation has been tirelessly working towards empowering anyone who owns a smartphone to effortlessly access digital assets. The goal is to create an ecosystem that fosters a fairer and more inclusive financial system. LCX strongly aligns with the Celo Foundation on our mission to bridge the gap between traditional and decentralized finance with our new-age, fully compliant products and regulated services.

Celo is an open blockchain platform that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone. The platform enables anyone to create an ecosystem of powerful mobile applications, ranging from easier cash transfer programs to peer-to-peer lending, international remittances to digital assets and wallets. Celo’s digital currency — the Celo Dollar stablecoin — provides people all over the world with a stable, secure, inexpensive, and easy way to move money and engage in financial activities that were previously inaccessible to them.

Chuck Kimble, Partner at cLabs and Head of the Alliance for Prosperity, says, “We are excited to welcome LCX on board as our newest member. It’ll be another significant step towards growing our Alliance, which has grown to more than 135 Members. LCX.com is a key player in Europe and will help us help us on our path to create prosperity.”

“Financial inclusion is vital to sustaining a healthy economy and thriving democracy, and we are proud to be collaborating with one of the leading organizations on the front lines of this effort,” said Monty Metzger, LCX’s CEO. “We’ve been impressed by the important work being done by the Celo Foundation, empowering anyone with a mobile phone to access digital assets and blockchain powered financial services.”

About the Alliance for Prosperity
The Alliance for Prosperity is an ecosystem of organizations brought together by a common vision of fostering social impact and financial inclusion by leveraging the disruptive blockchain technology. These include nonprofits, merchants, and payment processors. The Alliance provides infrastructure and educational support to the mobile-first open blockchain platform. This will enable an increasing number of people to use digital currencies — in particular, the Celo Dollar stablecoin — in the areas that need it the most. The contributions made by each individual member will enable easy movement of digital currencies across the globe and create financial tools with use cases including emittances, humanitarian aid, payments, and microlending that’ll be accessible by all on the Celo platforms.

About LCX.com
LCX.com – Innovating Capital Markets. Solutions for compliant digital assets and security tokens. LCX is a secure and compliant platform for buying, selling, transferring, and storing digital currencies. LCX is pioneering a blockchain infrastructure bridging the gap between traditional monetary systems and the fast-moving trusted technology landscape. LCX was founded in 2018 with headquarters in Vaduz (Liechtenstein) and branches in Crypto-Valley Zug (Switzerland) and New Delhi (India).

Circle, a global financial technology firm that provides payments and treasury infrastructure for internet businesses, today announced a comprehensive payments solution for non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces and storefronts that enables them to accept credit card and crypto payments alike in order to attract more mainstream audience adoption. Circle today also unveiled forthcoming features that will be made available over the coming months, including support USDC, BTC and ETH payments, NFT custodial services, and yield-generating Circle accounts for NFT market operators.

NFT marketplaces have surged in popularity over the past 12 months, but broad-based mainstream adoption is lagging due to the complexity of payment transactions, which usually require the use of cryptocurrencies. Circle’s NFT solution simplifies buying and selling by enabling platforms to accept credit card payments alongside crypto, all with a seamless user experience. This makes NFT transactions easier by encouraging greater engagement, platform expansion and support for creators worldwide through the marriage of traditional payment rails and leading digital dollar stablecoin USD Coin (USDC).

NFTs have seen a meteoric rise in recent months – as platforms like NBA Top Shot skyrocket in popularity (Top Shot has seen a 400% increase in sales over the past 30 days) and digital art becomes mainstream (iconic auction house Christie’s recently offered the first purely digital artwork with the auction of Beeple’s Everydays for $69M). In February 2021 alone, sales volume across major NFT marketplaces grew nearly 800%, to more than $200M.

“This is not only an important and valuable trend for marketplaces and creators, it represents incredible demand from customers – for collectibles, artwork, moments, and really anything that can be tokenized on the blockchain,” said Jeremy Allaire, Circle Co-founder and CEO. “Circle looks forward to supporting the industry – creators, platforms, marketplaces, storefronts and customers – with our solution for enabling a user-friendly, mainstream payments experience with the power of crypto connectivity and USDC.”

Lio Faridani, has been painting on canvas in various forms for nearly 70 of his 79-years on this planet. His works have, in fact, sold to aficionados and collectors around the world and received accolades at many an exhibition. Now the artist is proving that age is indeed a state of mind by making his entire collection available via NFTs – a promising new funding model for art and media. NF what? To put it simply, an NFT is a digital asset. It is encrypted with the artist’s signature on a digital ledger (aka the blockchain) which is at the heart of all cryptocurrencies – with probably the most recognized being bitcoin. NFTs allows buyers and sellers to verify authenticity and ownership to ensure a buyer has the original art. Maybe most notable though is that NFTs are predicted to increase the profitability of artworks for collectors and artists alike. Just look at the numbers. NFT markets have seen trading volume growth from $12 million in December to $342 million last month.

For his part, Faridani, with a little help from his son, who is CEO of an online media solutions agency, has digitally minted all of his artwork, which is now broadly available to the crypto-community – and beyond. And he has taken it one step further. Each buyer receives not only the NFT but also the physical painting, which is delivered right to their door.

“I have always embraced innovation but have also learned a thing or two about the importance of traditional methods over the past seven decades. That is why I am including the physical works as a component of my NFT sales. It is important to me that my clients have the actual original that they can touch and feel along with the NFT,” said Faridani. “I find it truly exciting that I am now combining both realms and can count myself as an early adopter of digital art sales.”

Born in 1942, Faridani is self-taught. His wide-ranging portfolio comprises various mediums from sketches to watercolors to acrylics and oils in styles ranging from abstract to realism and is especially known for his majestic over-sized pieces. His art can be found in collections around the world including Canada, Italy, Switzerland, the United States and United Kingdom.

“Modernization is making art in all its iterations more available to the general public. I fully believe that NFTs will have a monumental impact to the art world by cultivating an entirely new audience of enthusiasts,” he added.

Amid the recent NFT (Non-fungible token) craze in the cryptocurrency industry, blockchain game social platform, Ludena Protocol, officially announced their roadmap update to include the Ludena World Metaverse, complete with of NFT assets, on the 12th of March.

Ludena Protocol operates the DApp GameTalkTalk, which has recently surpassed 3.5 million downloads on the Google Play store. GameTalkTalk gives value to gamers’ daily activities, such as playing video games and uploading game-related content to the platform, by providing rewards in their native cryptocurrency, LDN.

Within the first half of this year, the company plans to gradually release NFT assets such as NFT wearables for users’ avatars and “My Room” NFT decorations, within the Ludena World Metaverse. “We will continue to lead the NFT market, including entering the NFT marketplace and NFT market through aggressive partnerships with global NFT partners in the future,” the foundation said.

According to the announcement, NFT assets in the Ludena ecosystem will consist of avatar wearables, “My Room” virtual space/land decoration, user-created NFTs, and Ludena World map spaces. In other words, gamers can customize their game characters or change their user profiles through their Ludena NFT assets, which are provided in the form of infinite digital decorations.

Playable game characters on Ludena Protocol’s P2P gaming platform, can be customized with costumes, special weapons, as well as a variety of other accessories, and are used in hyper-casual, multiplayer games. Users will be able to see either their purchased, won or created NFTs in the games they play.

Joshua Kim, CEO of Ludena Protocol, said, “Now that NFTs are becoming a mega trend in the blockchain market, we want to lead the global market by becoming Korea’s representative platform for the distribution of NFT assets based on actual demand.”

Meanwhile, news related to NFTs (Non-fungible tokens) is receiving noticeable attention in the industry recently. Earlier this month, Grimes, singer and partner of Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, made $6.5 M in 20 minutes by auctioning off her digital NFT paintings. In addition, the first Twitter post that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey posted on the auction market really showed off the NFT craze as the bidding price rose to about $2.8 M.

Huobi Charity Limited (“Huobi Charity”), a philanthropic arm and blockchain-based charity platform of Huobi Group, today announced that it has obtained approval from the Board of Charity Commissioner for Gibraltar (“the Board”) to operate as a registered and fully regulated charitable organization. As a formally recognized charity, Huobi Charity will be able to accept fiat and digital asset contributions from different entities and conduct various philanthropic activities to help create a better future globally.

Huobi Charity was intentionally formed with a broad scope to benefit the global society through a wide variety of initiatives. The firm aims to prevent or alleviate poverty; advance education; promote health and longevity; nurture communities; advance art, culture, heritage or science; further environmental protections; and provide relief to persons in need, including those with disabilities, ill health, economic hardship, etc.

“As a global charity that’s helping shape the new digital economy, we believe it is our responsibility to ensure we’re building toward a fair and equitable future for all while also preserving the culture and values that define who we are as a society,” said Ciara Sun, Vice President of Global Markets and head of social impact initiatives at Huobi Group. “By receiving formal status as a registered charity in Gibraltar, we’ll be able to collaborate with other internationally-renowned charities and have a much bigger impact on the lives of people all across the globe.”

As a registered charity, Huobi Charity will operate in full transparency under the supervision of the Board, a regulatory body governed by the Charities Act of Gibraltar. All activities of the firm such as fundraising and donations will comply with regulatory requirements established by the Board. Huobi Charity will disclose transactions and provide the Board with regular reports on the activities of the firm, undergoing annual audits to prove the legitimacy of its funding sources. By opting to operate as a registered charity, Huobi is providing donors with full visibility into its charitable activities and fund management, further building on the trust that the Huobi brand is already known for.

Huobi Charity expands on Huobi’s existing social responsibility initiatives aimed at enriching the lives of people globally through blockchain technology and digital assets. Last year during the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Huobi Group committed $1.4 million USD to source and donate hundreds of thousands of medical masks, protective suits, oximeters, and other medical supplies to over 135 hospitals and community healthcare centers in affected areas. Huobi Group also donated $50,000 USD in HT to the Indonesia-China Association of Economic, Social and Cultural Cooperation for the purchase and distribution of medical supplies to Indonesian hospitals.

Illust Space–an augmented reality NFT marketplace–will be hosting an MF DOOM crypto auction in collaboration with Rhymesayers, MF DOOM’s wife Jasmine and the estate. The auction, set to coincide with the launch of the Illust Space marketplace, will be listing a select group of signed, limited edition, MF DOOM augmented reality NFT’s. This latest auction will build on the success of MF DOOM’s initial launch in October 2020, when his collaboration with Illust Space made history as the first launch of an Augmented Reality NFT. Sign up for more information on the auction here: https://app.illust.space/

NEM Group today announces the launch of Symbol, its next-generation Proof-of-Stake+ (PoS+) Public Blockchain. Boasting enterprise-grade programmability and security, Symbol from NEM brings cutting edge technical features which can be leveraged by innovative projects building fintech, healthcare and supply chain products at the heart of the new economy. With the launch comes XYM, the native currency of the Symbol from NEM platform, used for transactions on the network.

Commenting on the launch, David Shaw, CEO of NEM Group, “We believe we are at the start of an entirely new economic and digital system that is more inclusive and accessible. Symbol is uniquely positioned at the forefront of the movement towards decentralization, digitization and tokenization. Symbol’s feature-rich platform makes it suitable for a number of industries and use cases, spanning the enterprise, financial services, regulated asset and wider blockchain spaces. NEM has a vital role to play, alongside and operating with other platforms, in creating this new value paradigm.”

Symbol from NEM is built to be interoperable; it supports public/private hybrid models, trustless cross-chain swaps and its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) easily integrate with existing systems and processes. The atomic cross-chain swaps enable trustless data and value flow across multiple different blockchains, eliminating the need for intermediaries. It also permits the creation of specialized digital assets, going beyond tokens to represent shares of stock, signatures, votes, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or other currencies. Each asset has configurable properties, and a unique identifier and can enforce logic-based account or asset-based restrictions at a protocol level. These features hold huge potential in the new economy movement, in particular for the Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Regulated Assets and Security Token Offering (STO) spaces, with Symbol already integrated with Propine, a regulated issuance and custody platform for Security Tokens.

With the public chain launch of Symbol, the NEM project now comprises two chains, with the 6-year old project, NEM NIS1 (V1) continuing to run in parallel with no downtime, security breaches or lost assets in its history. Symbol from NEM builds on the advanced security features of its first Proof-of-Importance (PoI) blockchain, which was the first blockchain to introduce on-chain multi-signature accounts. Expanding on this functionality, Symbol from NEM presents the first public blockchain to bring on-chain, multi-layer, multi-signature accounts. Sometimes referred to as the concept of “delegated financial authority,” this feature allows the co-signatory of a multi-signature account to be a multi-signature account with its own set of co-signers. This allows users to simplify the creation of complex signature requirements, which streamlines business processes such as payroll. With hardware wallet and offline signing support from day one, coupled with the advanced on-chain multi-signature support, it offers unrivaled Operational Security (OpSec) possibilities.

A distinct feature of Symbol from NEM is its hybrid chain architecture, which permits deployments of both public and private chain use cases, while supporting trustless data flow between Private-Private and Private-Public deployments bidirectionally. This allows developers to choose the ideal setup for their particular needs. Enterprise users can establish a permissioned ecosystem on a private chain to store confidential information, while also enabling communication with public chains or other permissioned chains. This presents a ‘best of both worlds’ solution, offering more flexibility in how businesses store and share data.

Kristy-Leigh Minehan, CTO of NEM Software, commented: “As a flexible platform, Symbol’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) can be seamlessly integrated by existing enterprise systems and processes, as well as other blockchains. Its multi-layer technology stack allows for trustless, peer-to-peer, multi-party asset swaps, escrows or trades. The platform has been developed with customizability as a key focus with over 120 different configuration settings, allowing for the customization of both public and private networks. Its feature sets enable the rapid development and deployment of secure solutions and expansion of features and services by development teams.”

Symbol from NEM is set to make a splash in the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) space, with LBCOIN, the world’s first blockchain-based digital collector coin issued by a Central Bank, committed to NEM platforms. LBCOIN was initially issued on the NEM NIS1 public chain in July 2020, with The Bank of Lithuania issuing 4,000 LBCOIN, equivalent to 24,000 digital tokens and 4,000 physical collector coins. With the launch, LBCOIN will transfer to Symbol chains (private and public), to take advantage of the feature-rich platform.

A new NFT art collection called CryptoBigfoot has been launched. The artwork is available at OpenSea which is the first and largest marketplace for user-owned digital goods. The collection captures the elusive mystery of Bigfoot in one of a kind hand-made NFT crypto art. CryptoBigfoot was created by enigmatic artist danosongs whose content is used in thousands of videos, podcasts, games and apps. Since the collection’s inception each work has sold within a few hours of listing. Many works already have bids for secondary sales. New pieces are released several times a week.

An NFT is a non-fungible token which is a type of cryptographic coin that represents a unique item. Non-fungible tokens cannot be exchanged for equal value. This is different when compared to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple which are fungible (fixed). NFTs are unique, mostly liquid, usable and verifiably scarce across many applications. This makes them the perfect technology for issuing original digital art.

Crypto art is a kind of art related to blockchain technology. Well known collections include CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties, Hashmasks and CyberKongz. Emerging as a niche genre of artistic work following the development of blockchain networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum in the mid to late 2010s, crypto art quickly grew in popularity in large part because of the unprecedented ability afforded by the underlying technology for purely digital artworks to be bought, sold, or collected by anyone in a decentralized manner.

Brane Inc., a leading cryptocurrency custody provider, announced today changes to its management team that position the company for rapid business growth. Effective immediately, Executive Chairman Adam Miron will serve as Interim Chief Executive Officer. At the same time, he will remain as Chairman of Brane’s board of directors as the company continues to scale its team through this growth phase. Miron is the founder and former Chief Operating Officer and Chief Brand Officer of HEXO Corp. and the author of the best-selling book Billion Dollar Startup.

“Thanks to an outstanding team of innovators, directors, and advisors, Brane is quickly establishing itself as the leading company providing world-class custody for our newest asset class,” said Miron. “In the weeks ahead, we will continue to build a team of highly qualified and experienced industry leaders who share that vision – giving Brane the best attributes of both a startup and a bank.”

Brane’s founder, Patrick McLaughlin, will continue to serve as Chief Innovation Officer, further establishing the company as a leading innovator in the blockchain and crypto sectors.

Christian Desjardins will continue to lead the development of Brane’s industry-leading solution as Vice President, Product.

Founded in 2017, Brane is a blockchain innovation company. Brane helps organizations understand and unlock the power of the blockchain and digital assets. Brane Vault, its digital asset custody service, is ISO 27001 certified – first in the world with cryptocurrency in scope, ISO 27017 certified, and NIST Tier 4 — the first company in Canada, in any industry, to receive such certification. Brane Vault offers advanced proprietary technology and processes with over 20 provisional patents and is fully insured against theft and crime. Brane partners with organizations big and small and continues to develop new products.