Judith BannermanQuist
Mastercard has launched customizable nonfungible token (NFT) debit cards, allowing some cardholders who own avatars from select NFT collections to add the artwork onto the payment card.
The debit cards are made available through a Monday partnership with the European cryptocurrency exchange platform hi, allowing its Gold members to personalize their debit cards with an NFT they verifiably own.
Gold membership with the platform is obtained by staking a minimum of 100,000 hi Dollar’s (HI), the platform’s native token, a sum worth around $4,600, according to data from CoinGecko.
The cards will allow spending in fiat, stablecoins or any cryptocurrency the user holds and is accepted wherever Mastercard is available. Other features such as hotel credits, cash back incentives and rebates on Netflix and Spotify subscriptions are also touted as benefits of certain membership levels.
Mastercard’s crypto and fintech enablement vice president, Christian Rau, said with consumer interest in NFTs and crypto growing the payments provider was “committed to making them an accessible payments choice for the communities who wish to use them.”
A limited range of NFT collections will be supported including CryptoPunk, Moonbirds, goblintown, Bored Ape and Azuki, owners of these NFTs will have to become Gold members with hi and verify their NFT ownership with the platform to receive their custom cards.
Additionally, the cards are available only within 25 European Economic Area (EEA) countries and the United Kingdom.
With the wider downturn in crypto markets over the last few months, most of the “blue chip” NFT collections took a price hit, but data by NFTGo shows the performance of blue-chip NFTs growing steadily since Sept. 12 possibly bringing renewed interest to the largest collections.
Mastercard has helped crypto payments go mainstream with its support for the assets, even allowing Mastercard holders the ability to purchase NFTs through partnering with multiple NFT marketplaces in June.
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Ana Paula Pereira
After the mining failure involving its stablecoin, aUSD, the Acala Network announced on Monday that it had resumed its operations following a referendum allowing liquidity pools (LPs) to withdraw liquidity from pools or unstake LP tokens.
In August, a misconfiguration of the iBTC (IBTC)/aUSD liquidity pool led to a 3.022 billion aUSD to be erroneously minted, taking its price to less than $0.01 from its United States dollar peg. Acala is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform built on the Polkadot ecosystem.
The wallet addresses that had received the minted aUSD have been identified via on-chain tracing, allowing the recovery of 2.97 billion aUSD mistake mints from 16 addresses. Other thirty-five accounts were identified as having acquired 12.38 million erroneously minted aUSD.
According to the incident report, 16 IBTC/aUSD LP contributors received the error mints, and some of them repeatedly added more liquidity to the pool, claiming more aUSD error mints and resulting in more aUSD being erroneously minted. It noted:
“Some of these users repeatedly swapped more aUSD error mints as the imbalance of pools grew. They then transferred a significant amount of aUSD error mints to other XCM-connected chains and CEXs.”
The cause of the incident “was a vulnerability in the DEX saving code that is part of the incentives pallet,” said the company, which also announced a security roadmap to strengthen the security of the Acala network.
The report revealed the full extent of the event. Reportedly a total of 3.022B aUSD errors were minted, 2.97 billion aUSD were found in the addresses of the 16 identified LP contributors and 12.38 million aUSD error mints were found on the top 35 accounts that acquired a significant amount of aUSD error mints or were linked to the accounts that acquired it. A remaining 52.068 million aUSD error mints, error mint-swapped tokens and addresses involved in the incident were identified.
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Jesse Coghlan
Cryptocurrency exchange FTX US has secured the winning bid for the assets of crypto brokerage firm Voyager Digital with a bid valued at approximately $1.4 billion, according to Voyager.
Voyager said the bid was made up of the fair market value of its crypto holdings “at a to-be-determined date in the future” estimated to be around $1.3 billion along with $111 million of what it says is “incremental value,” but did not provide further details.
Little information was given regarding what will happen to Voyager customers still awaiting access to their crypto holdings, with Voyager stating additional information about crypto access “will be shared as it becomes available.”
Voyager only mentioned that the FTX US platform “will enable customers to trade and store cryptocurrency after the conclusion of the company’s chapter 11 cases.“
Cointelegraph contacted FTX and Voyager Digital for further comment but did not immediately hear back.
The sale of the assets is set to be completed after a chapter 11 plan and an asset purchase agreement is submitted for approval by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on Oct. 19.
Cointelegraph earlier reported that crypto platforms Binance and CrossTower also submitted bids alongside FTX to acquire Voyager’s assets, each proposing their own terms.
A source claimed Voyager customers would receive their pro rata share of crypto assets and transition to the FTX platform if its bid was successful.
Voyager entered into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 5, sometimes called a “reorganization” bankruptcy, it allows a firm to retain control of its assets and continue operating whilst it plans to restructure or sell the business.
The filing was for an insolvency worth over $1 billion after crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) defaulted on a $650 million loan from the firm, Voyager says its claims against 3AC remain with the bankruptcy estate.
The company maintains its chapter 11 filing was “aimed at returning maximum value to customers” and also considered a reorganization, but stated the sale to FTX US was the “best alternative for Voyager stakeholders.”
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This Daily Dose was brought to you by Cointelegraph.
