BRIEFINGS

Cryptoasset custodian and financial services provider Anchorage has raised $80M in a Series C round led by GIC. Other participants included 16z, Blockchain Capital, Lux, and Indico. The raise brings Anchorage’s total funding to $137M. Anchorage became the first federally charted digital asset bank in January of this year.

Ethereum scalability project Optimism has raised $25M in a Series A round led by a16z. The project previous raised $6.5M in a seed round. Optimism went live last month following the launch of a testnet in September.

Cryptoasset exchange Coinbase has filed a Form S-1 with the US Securities and exchange commission. The filing was made in advance of Coinbase’s planned Nasdaq direct listing. Shares will trade under the ticker, COIN.

Cryptoasset exchange Coinbase has begun to allow users to join a waitlist for its Ethereum 2.0 staking service. The exchange will take a 25% commission on staking rewards generated with users’ ETH. The service will go live prior to the Ethereum 2.0 network becoming fully operational, allowing users to earn staking rewards on the network’s...

San Francisco-based cryptoasset exchange Coinbase has reached an implied value of $77B, based on the price of shares currently trading on the Nasdaq Private Market. Weekly transaction closed on Friday with a clearing price of $303 per share. Coinbase is currently preparing for a direct listing, which is set to occur in the first half...

Flow developer Dapper Labs, which also created the popular NFT-based games Cryptokitties and NBA Top Shot, has raised $250M in a round led by Coatue Management. The round valued Dapper Labs at $2B. The firm has reportedly generated over $100M in NFT sales to date.

Cryptoasset exchange Bitfinex announced that it has repaid $550M of the more than $600M loaned to it by its associated firm and stablecoin issuer Tether. Tether, which issues stablecoins reportedly backed 1:1 by U.S. dollars, revealed in 2019 that its reserves held only 74% of the value of circulating USDT in actual dollars, with the...

Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla disclosed Monday that it has purchased $1.5B worth of Bitcoin. The company has also indicated that it plans to begin accepting BTC payments for its electric vehicles. The move comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promoting Bitcoin and other cryptoassets, including Dogecoin, on Twitter.

DeFi payments protocol Celo has completed a $20M funding round led by Andreesen Horowitz, with participation from Greenfield One and Electric Capital. This brings Celo’s total fundraising to around $65M. Velora, a peer-to-peer and remittance application, launched Febuary 10th, becoming the first to do so on Celo’s platform.

On Tuesday, February 2nd, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization shot past $1,500. This new record comes just days after ETH’s previous record-setting high of $1,420 on January 19th. At the time of writing, ETH sits at $1,551 with a market cap of $177,445,104,228.