Jesse Coghlan
The number of companies holding cryptocurrency in Brazil has reached new record highs as of August, amid an increased trust in cryptocurrencies and high inflation rates.
According to local media reports, the country’s taxation authority, Receita Federal do Brasil (RFB), also known as the Federal Revenue of Brazil, recorded 12,053 unique organizations declaring crypto on their balance sheets in August 2022.
The number is a 6.1% increase from the 11,360 companies in July and is the month with the highest recorded number of companies with crypto holdings to date.
The RFB noted that Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency held by institutions, followed by stablecoin Tether.
However, the number of individual Brazilian investors holding crypto fell from the prior month, down to 1.3 million in August.
The value of the total declarations also experienced a slight decline, likely due to the condition of the crypto markets, with August seeing a total of $2.1 billion (11 billion Brazilian reals), down from $3.4 billion in July.
The United States dollar-pegged stablecoin USDT had the most value transacted, with over $1.42 billion moved across nearly 80,000 transactions in August, averaging roughly $17,500 per transaction.
BTC was second with almost $270 million transacted but took first place for number of transactions, clocking in over 2.1 million in the same month at a much lower average transaction amount of $130.
It was noted the stablecoin USD Coin dropped from third to fifth place from July to August in regard to value transacted, losing out to Ether and Brazilian Digital Token (BRZ), a Brazilian real-pegged ERC-20 token.
Brazilians’ trust in cryptocurrency remains high according to a September Bitstamp “Crypto Pulse” report, with 77% stating they trusted digital assets.
Multiple financial companies in the country have started offering cryptocurrency services, such as brokerage giant XP Inc and payment application PicPay both integrating crypto exchange services in August. Crypto exchange Binance has also increased its efforts in the country, doubling its team since March and opening two new offices on Oct. 4.
Brazil’s inflation rate hit a 26-year high of 12.1% in April but has since cooled slightly to 8.7% in the latest August figures, according to the data from the country’s statistics agency.
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Stephen Katte
The chief financial officer of nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea, Brian Roberts, has become the latest high-profile Web3 executive to depart their role amid the current bear market, leaving after just 10 months in the role.
In an Oct. 7 post on LinkedIn, the former CFO of ride-share platform Lyft and OpenSea said it was time for him to “come ashore” from the “open seas,” but didn’t state the exact reasons for the change, only that he would be staying on as an adviser to the company moving forward.
Roberts was appointed as the OpenSea chief financial officer in December 2021 after working at Lyft for seven years. He also has had previous stints in corporate roles at United States retail giant Walmart and technology company Mircosoft.
Roberts was among a long line of tech veterans who jumped to Web3 over the last few years, including Google’s former vice president Surojit Chatterjee, who became Coinbase’s chief product officer in 2020, and Amazon’s Pravjit Tiwana, who became chief technology officer of Gemini in Jan 2022.
One of his core responsibilities during his time at OpenSea was to grow the finance team. In his Linkedin post, Roberts noted:
“I had the rare opportunity to build a team literally from the ground up and handpicked game changers.”
According to his statement, he has been working closely with CEO Devin Finzer and vice president of strategic finance Justin Jow to ensure a “smooth transition,” possibly indicating that Jow will step up and take over the newly vacant executive role.
Despite the departure from the chief financial officer role, Roberts maintains he is still “incredibly bullish on web3.”
Notably, Roberts’ departure came on the same day another OpenSea executive announced his resignation.
In an Oct. 7 LinkedIn post, Ryan Foutty, vice president of business development of OpenSea announced his departure from the firm after 18 months.
Foutty said the company had come a long way since working out of co-founder Alex Atallah’s basement and wished his “crewmates” well.
Both Roberts and Foutty are just the latest crypto executives to depart from their current roles amid the market downturn.
NFT trading volume has plunged 98% from the $6.2 billion witnessed around the end of Jan to $114.4 million.
The NFT marketplace has suffered setbacks as well, including cutting down 20% of its staff in July, and significant plunges in daily trading volume.
The whole market took a sharp fall off a cliff in May with the start of an ongoing crypto bear market.
Other high-profile executives announcing departure from their firms include FTX US president Brett Harrison, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor and Genesis Trading CEO Michael Moro.
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Jesse Coghlan
The chief operating officer for the Helium Foundation, Scott Sigel has claimed there is “no basis” for cryptocurrency exchange Binance to delist several trading pairs of its cryptocurrency — Helium Network Token (HNT).
Sigel’s comments come after an Oct. 6 notice by Binance saying the exchange is removing the cross isolated margin and spot trading pairs for HNT and Binance USD (BUSD), Tether and Bitcoin.
Binance “strongly advised” users to close any positions in its listed pairs as user positions will be forcibly closed, and any pending orders canceled on Oct. 12 with only spot trading for the HNT/BUSD pair remaining.
Jessica Jung, a Binance spokesperson, said in a statement to Forbes that the exchange periodically reviews its listed cryptocurrencies to ensure they continue “to meet a high level of standard.”
If an asset doesn’t meet the standard or “there are changes in the industry” it will delist it “in order to protect our users,” she explained.
Sigel, in response, stated, “there is no basis for Binance to delist several HNT pairs. There has been no change to the integrity of HNT and it continues to meet all of the standards the exchange sets.”
“There are dozens of other exchanges that continue to support HNT. We hope Binance reverses course and re-lists the other HNT trading pairs soon,” he added.
Helium was founded in 2013 as an Internet of Things (IoT) focused blockchain and is building a decentralized peer-to-peer wireless telecommunications network. On Sept. 22, it said it would migrate its blockchain to Solana, which it said was for more ecosystem support among other reasons.
Questions as to why Binance is partially delisting HNT has sent traders speculating, with some claiming it was in response to Binance’s mix-up of Helium ecosystem tokens in September where an accounting bug saw the exchange allegedly lose around $19 million worth of crypto.
It’s reported that Binance confused HNT with a much lower-priced token used by Helium to pay hosts of its 5G hotspot network called MOBILE and paid out around 4.8 million HNT, causing a massive sell-off of the token, temporarily dropping its price.
Criticism has also been leveled at Helium for its revenue numbers despite significant funding rounds. In July, data suggesting the project makes only $6,500 per month from its data usage revenue was revealed, despite the company raising hundreds of millions from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), FTX Ventures and Tiger Global.
In August, Helium was caught listing partners on its website, namely e-bike business Lime and software company SalesForce, which both denied either working with the firm or having an active partnership. Helium removed the mentions of both organizations on its website soon after.
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This Daily Dose was brought to you by Cointelegraph.
