Krystal Newsflash (24th Feb 2023)

Krystal Wallet

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Krystal Wallet

4 min readFeb 24, 2023

Welcome to our recap of the major stories in the crypto world! Here’s what has happened over the past week:

Huge news for Hong Kong 🇭🇰

A brand new crypto hub could be just around the corner, as Hong Kong is looking to lift the ban on retail trading of cryptocurrencies.

Crypto exchanges that provide services to Hong Kong citizens would require to be licensed, and Huobi is one of the exchanges that have indicated its interest.

Moreover, this initiative seems to have received support from China, which will help to reduce friction in its implementation.

Hong Kong has also set aside $50 million HKD (US$6.4 million) to build a Web3 ecosystem in the country,

While this brings positive news about the greater retail adoption of crypto, there are concerns that the West is losing its dominance in this new sector.

The US and the SEC have experienced a lot of barriers to regulating the cryptocurrency industry, and Asia could be the one to look out for.

Tencent Cloud announces major partnerships 🤝

Another major development in Asia came with Tencent Cloud’s Web3 Build Day, where they are now collaborating with some of the big names in crypto.

This includes a Memorandum of Understanding with Ankr, to develop a suite of blockchain API services, as well as other blockchain networks like Avalanche, Scroll and Sui.

Scroll is an up-and-coming zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM), and you can find out why zkEVMs could be the next big thing in our article here.

Ankr has been on a tear recently with it announcing a partnership with Microsoft to integrate its blockchain infrastructure with Microsoft’s cloud solutions.

Ankr provides a wide array of services, and we have partnered with them to offer their liquid staking services directly on our platform.

Stake BNB, AVAX, ETH, MATIC and FTM and use the ankr-tokens on various decentralised applications to earn even more yield!

End of the algorithmic stablecoin? ❌

The current state of stablecoins seems to be rather murky.

The issuer of the BUSD stablecoin, Paxos, was ordered to halt the issuance of any new BUSD last week, which severely impacted the third largest stablecoin.

Meanwhile, the algorithmic stablecoin FRAX has just passed a proposal to become fully collateralised, instead of being partially backed by an algorithm.

Algorithmic stablecoins are no longer popular as they used to be ever since the crash of Terra, and most of them have slowly changed course or been deprecated.

USDD has switched to become an over-collateralised stablecoin, while others like USN have winded down after being unable to maintain its peg due to a shortfall in its collateral.

Interestingly enough, the Cardano-based algorithmic stablecoin, DJED, was recently launched and it’ll be interesting to see how it fares compared to all of its competitors.

Are NBA Top Shot NFTs really securities? 🤔

The SEC has been coming down hard on certain crypto projects that they believe to be securities, and even recently fined Kraken for providing staking services for these cryptocurrencies.

It seems that NFTs may be next on the target board, where Dapper Labs is facing a lawsuit against its NFT collection, NBA Top Shot Moments.

A judge in Manhattan rejected Dapper Labs’ bid to dismiss this lawsuit which alleged that the NBA Top Shot NFTs are securities.

One of the reasons behind this allegation was that these NFTs operated on the Flow blockchain, which could be considered a private network as compared to other public blockchain networks like Bitcoin.

Based on this definition, it could suggest that the court does not view all NFTs as securities, particularly those sold on public blockchains like Ethereum or Polygon.

Do you want a comprehensive overview of every NFT you own? Download the Krystal app and import your wallet to view every NFT you own across 11 blockchain networks.

Brand new Layer 2 launches 🚀

Not wanting to miss the party, Coinbase has announced its Layer 2 solution on Ethereum, Base.

Base is an Ethereum Layer 2 that is powered by Optimism’s OP Stack, and scaled by Coinbase.

The aim of this network is to be an easy-to-use network so that its customers can get used to crypto networks.

There are many protocols and projects that have partnered with Coinbase to build up the ecosystem, including the likes of Aave, Balancer and Etherscan.

Optimism is one of the top Layer 2s on Ethereum, which offers lower fees due to its rollup technology.