💧ICODROPS WEEKLY NEWS DIGEST

Last week's Hot Altcoin events

⚡️EtherDrops bot has added support for Opensea

⚡️Meta is beginning to test tools for selling digital assets and experiences within its virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds, a key part of its plan for creating a metaverse

⚡️Binance has received its In-Principle Approval (IPA) for a Financial Services Permission (FSP) from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (the FSRA) of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) to operate as a broker-dealer in virtual assets

⚡️Solana NFTs have been added to OpenSea

⚡️Binance.US has raised more than $200M in the seed round at a $4.5B valuation

⚡️Circle has announced it entered into an agreement for a $400M funding round with investments from BlackRock, Inc., Fidelity Management and Research, Marshall Wace LLP and Fin Capital.

⚡️Mastercard filed 15 NFT and Metaverse trademark applications

⚡️Forbes expands into Metaverse

⚡️HSBC starts the Metaverse fund for Private Banking clients in Asia

⚡️LEGO Group and Epic Games are entering a long-term partnership to build a place for kids to play in the Metaverse

⚡️CME Group and CF Benchmarks plan to launch 11 New Cryptocurrency Reference Rates and Real-Time Indices on April 25

⚡️Sweden’s central bank completes second phase of e-krona testing

⚡️Uniswap Labs has announced the launch of Uniswap Labs Ventures

⚡️Animoca Brands acquires Eden Games, developer of Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, F1® Mobile Racing, Gear.Club, and others

⚡️USDN price has recovered from $0.65 to $0.99. WAVES price has dropped from the max price of $60 to $22.

Recently Alexander Ivanov, CEO and founder of the Waves Platform, has accused Alameda Research for manipulating the WAVES price and organizing FUD campaigns to trigger panic selling.

But Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX and Alameda Research, disapproved the charge.

⚡️Indian gaming startup MPL is in talks to raise capital from a number of investors including the crypto exchange FTX

⚡️UFC starts paying bonuses to fighters in cryptocurrency

⚡️The United Kingdom's Economic and Finance Ministry has said it intends to amend its existing regulatory framework to incorporate stablecoins used as a means of payment

⚡️Fidelity Investments, the asset management company, announced the launch of two new thematic exchange-traded funds (ETFs): Fidelity Crypto Industry and Digital Payments ETF (FDIG) and Fidelity Metaverse ETF (FMET)

🔎Coinbase has announced digital assets that are under consideration for listing in Q2 2022

💲IOST Foundation, a smart contract platform, has launched a $100M Exclusive Incentive Fund for EVM developers.

💲Hedera Hashgraph is eyeing the metaverse with its latest venture fund, saying that will put $250M in HBAR tokens toward its development

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🚀ICOs/IEOs news

💵BreederDAO (BREED) has announced the public sale — Token Launch Auction (TLA) on Copper.

Start date: April 26, 14:00 UTC

End date: April 29, 14:00 UTC

Token Pool Allocation: 75,000,000

Starting rate: $1.5

💻Mines of Dalarnia is launching its mainnet on April 26

💰Near Protocol has raised $350M in a funding round led by Tiger Global.

Also, Near Protocol is set to launch a stablecoin called USN

💰Binance Labs makes a strategic investment in STEPN

💰Binance has announced that it has led a $150M USD funding round of Sky Mavis, the creator of Axie Infinity. Investors: Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, Paradigm and Accel

💰Binance Labs led the seed round for Sender Wallet, a non-custodial wallet built on NEAR Protocol. In addition to Binance Labs, Metaweb Ventures also participated in this investment round

💰Improbable, a British company focused on building tools for virtual experiences, has raised $150M. Andreessen Horowitz and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the funding round, with additional participation from Mirana, Digital Currency Group, CMT, SIG and Ethereal Ventures

💰Genies, a non-fungible token (NFT) platform, raised $150 million in its recent funding round led by private equity company Silver Lake. The investment values the company at $1 billion

💰CertiK, a blockchain security firm, has raised $88M in a Series B3 round. CertiK was valued at $2 Billion. This B3 round of funding was led by Insight Partners, Tiger Global, and Advent International, with participation from Goldman Sachs and existing investors such as Sequoia and Lightspeed Venture Partners

💰Lightning Labs has raised $70M in a Series B funding round led by Valor Equity Partners

💰Coin Metrics has raised $35M in Series C financing

💰lemon.markets, a stock trading API startup, has raised $17M in seed funding in a round.

💰Community Gaming, a gaming platform, has closed a $16M Series A funding round led by SoftBank’s Latin America Fund.

💰Trisolaris, a decentralized exchange on the Near protocol, has announced a strategic investment led by Electric Capital. The investment in the DAO totaled $4.5M

💰Boba Network has secured $45M USD in Series A funding, valuing the project at $1.5b USD.

💰Parallel Finance, a Polkadot-based lending and staking protocol, has announced a $5M strategic funding round at a $500M valuation.

💰Hivemapper, a crypto-enabled mapping startup, has raised $18M in a funding round led by Multicoin Capital

💰Polemos, a GameFi platform and play-to-earn guild, has announced a $14 million seed round

💰MoonPay, a cryptocurrency payments startup, has raised $87 million from more than 60 high-profile investors

💰Nomad, a novel approach to blockchain interoperability that leverages an optimistic mechanism to increase the security of cross-chain communication, has raised $22M at a $225M valuation in its seed round. The round was led by Polychain and with participation from 1kx, Ethereal, Hack VC, Circle Ventures, and others

💰BloXroute, a company that facilitates faster decentralized finance(DeFi) transactions, completed a $70 million Series B funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Financial service provider Lightspeed, crypto investment firms Dragonfly and ParaFi Capital and digital asset trading firm GSR were among other investors that participated.

📌Clearpool has announced the launch of its next single borrower pool for FBG Capital, a digital asset management company

📌Bounce Finance is launching its Freelancing platform for Web 3.0 freelance work quite soon

📌CLV (formerly Clover Finance) together with Etherscan launched CLV chain explorer dubbed CLVscan

📌Lithium Finance introduced the New Pricing Mechanism and the Reputation Scoring System

📌Biconomy and Cere Network has announced their integration that will cut gas fees for Cere Network builders and users, as well as drive wider adoption of lower-priced NFTs

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