National Australia Bank to Create a Stablecoin, Customers Sue Compass Mining, NYX Professional Makeup Announces a DAO

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
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Stablecoin news

• The National Australia Bank has become the second of the major banks to create a stablecoin, called the AUDN, the Australian Financial Review reported, citing Howard Silby, NAB’s chief innovation officer. This will allow its business customers to settle transactions on the blockchain in real-time using Australian dollars, it said. AUDN will launch on the Ethereum and Algorand blockchains later this year.

Legal news

• Customers are suing US-based Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto mining company Compass Mining for over $2 million, alleging fraud, after the company cut ties with Russian crypto mining firm BitRiver. The company, they allege, failed to return customers’ Bitcoin machines. According to a court document filed on January 17, Compass Mining “failed to protect its customers’ interests through subterfuge and misrepresentation to BitRiver regarding the actual ownership of its customers’ miners.”

NFT news

• NYX Professional Makeup today announced GORJS, a beauty decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) developed on the Ethereum blockchain, which serves as a decentralized incubator for digital creators. Non-fungible token (NFT) enthusiasts, collectors, and individuals can pre-mint the FKWME NFTs and access GORJS in the allowlist sale on January 31, with the full NFT drop scheduled for February 1, it said.

Gaming news

• Gaming-optimized blockchain Oasys announced the launch of its new decentralized governance framework, which it said “will empower project stakeholders to play a leading role in determining the future of the Oasys blockchain and drive growth of the blockchain gaming ecosystem.” It will implement its governance framework in a series of strategic phases, said an announcement, starting in Q1 2023 and continuing until Q2 2024, which will allow Oasys and its partners to address security and centralization risks.

Music news

• PIXELYNX, a music metaverse gaming platform founded by musicians and technologists deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman) and Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), announced a partnership with Vita Motus, founded by production design veteran Heather Shaw. PIXELYNX plans to leverage the VitaVerse platform IP in their forthcoming debut game ELYNXIR, which “creates immersive, playable experiences that bring fans closer together to their favorite artists in the music metaverse,” said the press release.

Investment news

• The zkSync developer Matter Labs announced that it would be collaborating with Espresso Systems, and that it’s planning phases to bring Espresso’s privacy technology CAPE to zkSync 2.0. With CAPE, individuals and regulated enterprises will be able to transact on zkSync 2.0 without exposing sensitive data to the public domain, while still relying on the security of Ethereum, said the announcement.
• Cypher, a multichain non-custodial wallet, announced a $4.3M seed financing round led by YCombinator, Samsung Next, Orange DAO, Tribe Capital, GoodWater Capital, Rebel Fund, and Picus Capital, in addition to angel investors like Balaji Srinivasan, Prasanna Sankar, MetaKovan, Aarthi Ramamurthy, and others. With the additional funding, Cypher plans to expand to more blockchains, invest further into consumer on-ramping technology, and grow internationally, said the announcement.
• Koinos Group, the team of developers behind the Koinos blockchain, announced a seed round of $500,000 led by the Blockchain Founders Fund, with participation from the blockchain gaming company Splinterlands. Having successfully launched the Koinos mainnet, the seed investment will enable Koinos Group to develop Koinos Pro – a subscription product that helps developers build and scale decentralized applications with no barriers to entry, said the press release.
• Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) acceleration hardware company Ulvetanna announced a $15M seed round led by Paradigm and Bain Capital, with participation from Jump Crypto. Ulvetanna is focused on building enterprise-grade hardware that provides essential blockchain scaling and privacy to make ZKPs accessible to all Web3 applications, it said.
• =nil; Foundation raised $22 million in the round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Blockchain Capital, Starkware, Mina Protocol, and angel investors including Hasu. Per an announcement, the funds will be used to further the roll-out of the Foundation’s zero-knowledge Proof Market protocol and build solutions to improve the speed, security, and reliability of data accessibility of Ethereum, L2s, and other L1 blockchains.