Friday, February 11. As the week comes to an end, we can focus on the highlights of the crypto industry over the past few days.
PayPal creates a cryptocurrency advisory council
The global payments company PayPal announced that it will be establishing an interdisciplinary advisory council on blockchain and digital assets.
This decision aims to provide support for the company’s “current and future products” in the crypto industry, PayPal officials have stated on their Newsroom.
The company pointed out that cryptocurrencies have the potential to provide “increased access to financial services” and it is crucial to work with “the world’s best leaders” to ensure these opportunities.
Among the council members are:
- Peter L. Briger, Jr. (Co-CEO, Fortress Investment Group)
- Chris Brummer (Georgetown University Law Center Research Professor)
- Shafi Goldwasser (Weizmann Institute of Science Professor)
- Timothy Massad (former chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission)
- Neha Narula (Director, MIT Digital Currency Initiative)
- Antoinette Schoar (MIT Sloan School of Management)
Blockchain project Aleo raises $200M
Aleo, a privacy-oriented platform that builds decentralized apps, closed a $200 million Series B funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Kora Management.
As a result of the deal, SoftBank and Kora received one seat each on Aleo’s board of directors. At the present time, seats have not been allocated to specific company representatives, Aleo’s CEO and CTO Howard Wu said in a commentary to The Block.
The main goal of the project is to facilitate the creation of zero-knowledge-proof technology that is used for privacy and data security.
Aleo is an in-house ecosystem that goes beyond simply creating another application to protect user privacy, such as a virtual private network. The mainnet is scheduled to launch in Q3 2022.
The first-ever metaverse wedding took place in Decentraland.
Earlier this month, in the Decentraland meta-universe, an Arizona couple got hitched. The event was attended by a court representative, witnesses, and about 2,000 guests.
In real life, Ryan and Candice Hurley, of Phoenix, have been married for 14 years. They hired the Rose Law Group, a law firm, to register their marriage in the metaverse. As explained by the president Jordan Rose, experts have developed a “Virtual Premarital Agreement”, which the bride and groom have signed and that identifies them and their digital assets as recorded on the blockchain. The marriage certificate was rendered as an NFT.
A rare NFT from the CryptoPunks collection was sold for 2501 ETH
An anonymous user purchased the NFT CryptoPunk token #5577 for 2,501 ETH. It was the third-largest deal in the history of the collection.
Twitter users congratulated Compound DeFi protocol founder Robert Leshner for the purchase of the NFT.
However, Leshner himself has not confirmed the purchase of CryptoPunk #5577, and there is also no evidence of his participation in the deal.
In 2017, the Larva Labs team released a CryptoPunks collection of 10,000 NFT images measuring 24×24 pixels. Initially, most of the project’s NFTs were distributed for free.
To recap, in December 2021, an unknown person purchased a rare NFT CryptoPunk #4156 for 2,500 ETH