Stock-trading platform Robinhood is diving deeper into the cryptocurrency realm with the acquisition of crypto exchange Bitstamp.
With Bitstamp under its wing, Robinhood says that it will be better positioned to target retail and institutional crypto investors across Europe, Asia, and the U.S., with Bitstamp currently holding more than 50 licenses and registrations to operate in these markets.
“The acquisition of Bitstamp is a major step in growing our crypto business,” Robinhood’s crypto general manager Johann Kerbrat said in a statement.
“The Bitstamp team has established one of the strongest reputations across retail and institutional crypto investors.
Through this strategic combination, we are better positioned to expand our footprint outside of the U.S. and welcome institutional customers to Robinhood.”
The New York Stock Exchange said Monday it will immediately suspend trading shares of EV startup Fisker and is moving to take the company off of its stock exchange.
The exchange said Monday that Fisker’s stock is “no longer suitable for listing” because of “abnormally low” price levels.
The decision comes a month after Fisker was warned by the NYSE that its stock price had spent 30 days trading below $1, putting it out of compliance with the exchange’s rules.
The suspension caps a tumultuous day for Fisker, which saw shares fall more than 28% before trading was halted.
The suspension comes just hours after Fisker announced it lost a potential deal with a large automaker, reported to be Nissan — a development that has also endangered a recently-announced attempt at securing emergency funding.
Rails, a decentralized crypto exchange, has raised $6.2 million in attempts to fill the void FTX left behind after crashing in 2022, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Satraj Bambra exclusively told TechCrunch.
The crypto community is watching Rails because it’s attempting to straddle the divide in crypto exchanges by building out both centralized and decentralized underlying technology.
The capital is earmarked for engineering team hiring and expanding its licensing and regulatory strategy to make the exchange “fully compliant,” Bambra said.
That centralized computing was something Rails saw with FTX as “being really, really good,” but when it came to decentralized exchanges like dYdX that exist today it wasn’t as solid, Bambra thinks.
But being a hybrid of decentralized and centralized is better than being fully one side or another, he added.
Crypto exchange OKX is ceasing services for users in India, it said in an email to customers Thursday, advising them to withdraw their funds by April-end.
The move follows Apple and Google pulling the eponymous app of OKX in the country after an Indian government agency said many crypto exchanges were operating illegally in the South Asian market.
Financial Intelligence Unit, the government agency, named Binance, Kraken, Huobi and Gate.io among apps operating “illegally” in India but hadn’t named OKX in its public statement.
OKX has advised customers in India to close all their active margin positions and withdraw all funds by April 30.
While India-based crypto exchanges continued to require rigorous know-your-customer verifications before onboarding new users, the same hasn’t been true of many global platforms.
Have you ever needed a copy of your medical imaging to take to your doctor or another healthcare provider and received the images on a CD?
Many radiologists still use this ancient format to transfer patients’ imaging files.
A startup called PocketHealth has built an medical image exchange platform to digitize the process for every patient and healthcare provider, making it more intelligent and personalized, no CDs involved.
PocketHealth isn’t the only company offering medical imaging sharing for patients in the MedTech space.
Ambra Health, based in New York, offers solutions for medical image sharing, and EnvoyAI, based in Massachusetts, develops a medical imaging AI marketplace.
How crypto exchange Backpack climbed its way to success after its major investor FTX died Backpack hit $27.5 billion in total trading volume during its beta phaseBackpack’s founders, who are building a crypto exchange and wallet, have experienced strong growth since launching in 2022.
There’s a bunch of lessons to learn from FTX, Ferrante said.
This is done in hopes that there’s no single point of failure and that the operations of the Backpack crypto exchange can be split up across multiple entities.
At the end of February, Backpack raised $17 million at a $120 million valuation in a Series A round led by Placeholder VC.
But product distribution is top of mind for the exchange as it hopes to get into every country around the world.
Today on The Exchange, we’re digging into continuation funds, counting down through some of our favorite historical Exchange entries, and discussing what we’re excited to report on for the rest of the year!
It is also a very topical one: “The greatest source of liquidity now is going to be continuation funds,” VC Roger Ehrenberg predicted in a recent episode of the 20VC podcast.
If you have been following the last few months of venture capital activity, the “why now?” is easy to answer.
“It’s a viable strategy for a decent swath of the venture industry,” Ehrenberg told 20VC host Harry Stebbings.
We went from tallying monster rounds and a blizzard of IPOs to watching venture capital dry up and startup exits become rarer than gold.
Bulk Exchange, a startup building a marketplace that lets construction companies and contractors buy and dispose materials in bulk, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.
If Bulk Exchange can get enough providers on to its platform, estimators may be able to execute their work more quickly.
Second, once contracts are signed, Bulk Exchange can convert estimates into sales by linking buyers and sellers on the platform.
Instead, Bulk Exchange intends to charge for its services similar to a SaaS model.
If Bulk Exchange can scale and collect lots of data, it could have a second business and revenue stream in time.
Like a tenacious balloon, no matter how hard crypto gets knocked down, it tends to float back up again.
I’ve found that to be true in all the years I have covered the decentralized market and economy since 2013.
After a lengthy downturn — a crypto winter, if you want — blockchains and their constituent tokens and services seem to be on a rebound.
Data paints the picture: Spot trading volumes reached a 12-month high earlier this month, the total value of crypto tokens has appreciated materially in recent months, and even NFTs are showing signs of life.
Yet, despite the run of positive news, venture capitalists’ interest in web3 startups continued to decline in Q4 2023, dipping further underneath a severely depressed third-quarter figure.
Alternative sources of liquidity are therefore top of mind — there’s a towering pile of private companies in need of an exit, or a bailout.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Note that TechCrunch, like many publications, focuses only on private unicorns while Cowboy Ventures is also counting those that have gone public.
But the good news is that some untraveled and overgrown exit paths have a chance of opening up this year.
Let’s talk private equity, startups, and their possible marriage this year.
