DBS Bank

DBS Bank to offer cryptocurrency trading in Hong Kong

As Hong Kong has been opening up to crypto, major financial institutions such as DBS Group are targeting new crypto services in the Chinese territory.

Singapore state-owned megabank DBS Group is planning to expand its cryptocurrency services to Hong Kong as the Chinese territory pushes to become a digital asset hub.

DBS Bank plans to apply for a license to allow it to offer crypto trading services to Hong Kong customers, Bloomberg reported on Feb. 13.

“We are planning to apply for a license in Hong Kong so that the bank could sell digital assets to our Hong Kong customers,” DBS Bank Hong Kong CEO Sebastian Paredes said.

Paredes noted that DBS welcomes new crypto-related policies in Hong Kong and is also “very sensitive” to the risks associated with digital assets. The bank is willing to become one of the first lenders offering crypto in Hong Kong once the regulations are fully clear and DBS “understands exactly the framework,” he added.

DBS Bank made a massive move into the cryptocurrency industry a few years ago, launching its institutional crypto exchange in Singapore in late 2020. The company has also been working to expand its crypto platform to retail investors and applying decentralized finance technology to joint projects with Singapore’s central bank.

The news comes amid DBS announcing that its net profit rose 20% to a record 8.19 billion Singaporean dollars (SGD), or $6.7 billion, in 2022. Total income increased 16% to 16.5 billion SGD ($12.4 billion), crossing 16 billion SGD for the first time in history.

DBS Bank’s plans to expand to Hong Kong come amid China’s special administrative region continuing to reaffirm its pro-crypto stance. In January, Hong Kong’s financial secretary, Paul Chan, declared that the Hong Kong government is open to collaboration with crypto and fintech startups in 2023. The official also said that a lot of industry firms expressed willingness to expand operations in Hong Kong or to go public on local exchanges.

As previously reported, Hong Kong lawmakers passed legislation to set up a licensing system for virtual asset service providers in December 2022. The new regulatory framework is designed to provide the same degree of market recognition to crypto exchanges as the one that is currently applicable to traditional financial institutions.

While Hong Kong authorities have been opening up to crypto recently, Singapore has taken a more stringent approach to the crypto industry in the aftermath of major industry failures in 2022. In October, the Monetary Authority of Singapore proposed to ban all forms of cryptocurrency credit following the bankruptcy of the Singaporean crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

JPMorgan executes first DeFi trade on a public blockchain: Finance Redefined

MakerDAO co-founder Nikolai Mushegian’s death opened a new Pandora’s box of conspiracy theories, based on some of his recent tweets.

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week.

The first week of November saw the institutionalization of DeFi markets as major international banks and financial institutions executed and completed their first DeFi transactions.

The global financial giant JP Morgan completed its first-ever cross-border transaction using DeFi on a public blockchain with the help of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian. DBS Bank started a trading test of foreign exchange (FX) and government securities using permissioned DeFi liquidity pools.

Apart from JPMorgan and DBS Bank, the Bank for International Settlements also said that automated market-making technology in DeFi can serve as a “basis for a new generation of financial infrastructure.”

In other news, the Team Finance hacker returned $7 million of the $14.5 million stolen and intends to keep 10% of the stolen amount as a bounty. Additionally, MakerDAO co-founder Nikolai Mushegian was found dead at 29 in Puerto Rico, which started several conspiracy theories.

Looking at the weekly DeFi market performance, the majority of the DeFi tokens in the top 100 started the first week of November on a bullish note. The Fed rate hike helped a majority of the tokens to post double-digit weekly gains.

JPMorgan executes first DeFi trade on a public blockchain

Multinational banking firm JPMorgan has successfully executed its first-ever cross-border transaction using DeFi on a public blockchain. The trade was facilitated by the MAS’s Project Guardian on Nov. 2.

The pilot was another step into examining how traditional financial institutions can use tokenized assets and DeFi protocols to conduct financial transactions, among other use cases.

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Bank for International Settlements will test DeFi implementation in forex CBDC markets

According to an announcement on Nov. 2, the Bank for International Settlements, or BIS — along with the central banks of France, Singapore and Switzerland — will embark on a new initiative dubbed “Project Mariana” in their exploration of blockchain technology. Project Mariana intends to use DeFi protocols to automate foreign exchange markets and settlements.

This includes using DeFi protocols to stimulate the hypothetical exchange of cross-border transactions between the Swiss franc, the euro and the Singapore dollar wholesale central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs.

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Singapore bank DBS uses DeFi to trade FX and state securities

DBS Bank, a major financial services group in Asia, is applying DeFi to a project backed by Singapore’s central bank. DBS has started a trading test of FX and government securities using permissioned, or private, DeFi liquidity pools, the firm announced on Nov. 2.

The development is part of Project Guardian, a collaborative cross-industry effort pioneered by the MAS. Conducted on a public blockchain, the trade included the purchase and sale of tokenized Singapore government securities, the Singapore dollar, Japanese government bonds and the Japanese yen.

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MakerDAO co-founder Nikolai Mushegian dies at 29 in Puerto Rico

Nikolai Mushegian, the co-founder of the cryptocurrency lending platform MakerDAO and decentralized Dai (DAI) stablecoin, was found dead in Puerto Rico last week.

Mushegian died due to drowning after being dragged by sea currents on the Condado Beach in San Juan, local newspaper El Nuevo Día reported. Mushegian had no vital signs by the time his body was rescued. The Condado Beach is considered one of the world’s most dangerous places for swimmers, reportedly taking the lives of at least eight people in 2021.

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Team Finance hacker returns $7M to associated projects after exploit

Four projects have received some $7 million worth of tokens from the hacker behind the $14.5 million Team Finance exploit on Oct. 27. Over the weekend, the attacker confirmed in a series of messages that they would keep 10% of the stolen fund as a bounty and return the other tokens to the affected projects.

The exploiter — a self-described “whitehat” — drained assets from Team Finance through the Uniswap v2-to-v3 migration

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DeFi market overview

Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value registered another weekly surge, rising to $52 billion. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView show that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a bullish week, with the majority of the tokens trading in the green on the seven-day chart.

Fantom (FTM) was the biggest gainer over the past week with a 25.38% surge, followed by Chainlink (LINK) with a 19.05% surge. The Graph (GRT) surged over 17%, while Basic Attention Token (BAT) registered a 15.66% weekly surge.

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.

DBS bank reports 4x growth in Bitcoin buys on DDEx exchange in June

Crypto investors bought four times more Bitcoin on DBS Bank’s DDEx in June than in April 2022 as BTC price dipped below $20,000.

A major cryptocurrency selloff in June 2022 has sparked more interest in Bitcoin (BTC) from institutional investors, according to data from one of the biggest banks in Singapore.

The total number of trades on DDEx more than doubled in June 2022 as compared to April 2022 amid investors’ growing appetite for digital assets like Bitcoin and Ether (ETH). Buy orders on DDEx accounted for 90% of all trades in June as cryptocurrencies traded at notable discounts in mid-2022, DBS said.

Compared to April 2022, the amount of Bitcoin purchased on DDEx in June saw a fourfold increase, while the quantity of ETH grew 65%, DBS reported.

“With the digital asset industry experiencing unprecedented volatility, investors who believe in the long-term prospects of digital assets are gravitating towards trusted and regulated platforms,” the bank said in the statement.

According to DDEx CEO Lionel Lim, the digital asset industry has seen a “great reset” as the investment narrative has been moving away from chasing for yield. “Investors today are instead seeking out safe harbours to trade and store their digital assets amid the ongoing market volatility,” Lim noted.

As previously reported, June 2022 became the worst month for the Bitcoin price since September 2011, as its monthly losses mounted to 40%, with BTC price tumbling below $20,000. The ongoing crypto winter has been largely attributed to the crisis of algorithmic stablecoins and the subsequent catastrophe in cryptocurrency lending as crypto lenders ran out of liquidity.

“Every participant needs to respect the risks involved and the fact that there are no bailouts in the space, so if a borrower fails to repay, a lender has to accept their loss. There is no risk-free yield, and often the yield is not worth the risks,” Trezor crypto analyst Josef Tětek said.