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Spanish Football League Laliga partners with Globant to support new Web3 and Metaverse initiatives

Laliga, the top soccer league in Spain, announced a partnership with Globant, an Argentine software giant, to bring Web3 and metaverse experiences to its fans. The association will combine Globant’s technological resources with Laliga’s technology division to create products that expand the organization’s reach in the digital world.

Laliga asks Globant to help him build his metaverse stack

Large sports organizations are approaching the digital world as a way to reach new fans and offer new interaction possibilities for their users. Laliga, the main football league in Spain, recently announced a partnership that will serve to expand the company’s digital reach. The organization has partnered with Globant, a software giant based in Buenos Aires, to create metaverse and Web3 experiences for current fans and new users.

These new additions would complement the current digital offer of Laliga’s technology division, which currently includes fantasy games, web design and development, among other areas. The press release outlining the deal hints at possible game development using these new technologies. However, no specific products were announced directly as a result of the partnership.

Oscar Mayo, CEO of Laliga, stated:

LaLiga Tech was created to help sports and entertainment accelerate their digital transformation, and the increase in demand we have seen shows that it remains a core priority for the industry. Partnering with Globant will allow us to continue this growth on a global scale while creating the most immersive and valuable technologies for our customers.

Laliga metaverse movements

Laliga is one of the sports league organizations that has been making several moves to digitize part of its operations. This month, the company partnered with Ethereum-based metaverse platform Decentraland to offer licensed IP experiences in one of the packages available in its metaverse. In addition, the organization recently launched its own application, called MAS, which includes blockchain technology to protect the identity of its followers.

Additionally, the company is entering the traditional game asset market by offering licensed products in Mojang’s Minecraft block game. In the game, users will be able to purchase a pack of skins to equip any character with jerseys from the different teams present in the Laliga squad.

Laliga has also featured NFT-based projects before. In 2021, it partnered with Dapper Labs, makers of NBA Top Shots and Cryptokitties, to issue NFTs depicting the greatest moments in league history.

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Financial Giant State Street Sees Cryptocurrency Demand From Institutional Investors

Investment management firm State Street says that institutional clients are not deterred from investing in cryptocurrencies despite falling prices. “There is a belief that the asset class is here to stay,” said a State Street executive.

State Street in institutional demand for cryptocurrencies

State Street, a leading investment management firm, sees persistent institutional demand for cryptocurrencies despite market selloffs, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Monday.

Irfan Ahmad, State Street Digital’s product leader for the Asia-Pacific region, said institutional clients of the banking giant are still interested in cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology. He was quoted as saying:

During the June and July period, when things got very hot in terms of activity, we saw institutional clients not necessarily double down, but they weren't really deterred from making strategic bets on the asset class itself.

“The advantage of this is that, I think, there is a belief that the asset class is here to stay,” the executive emphasized.

State Street (NYSE: STT) operates in more than 100 geographic markets globally and employs approximately 40,000 people worldwide. The financial services giant had $38.2 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration and $3.5 trillion in assets under management as of June 30.

The company’s digital arm, State Street Digital, offers solutions for a variety of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, digital money, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), according to its website.

Ahmad noted that several large investment firms such as Goldman Sachs have started offering crypto products and are likely to make more forays into the crypto space. In April, Goldman Sachs offered its first bitcoin-backed loan.

The world’s largest asset manager, Blackrock, launched a private bitcoin fund in August. “Despite the sharp decline in the digital asset market, we are still seeing substantial interest from some institutional clients,” the company said.

The State Street executive further shared that institutional clients inquired about the crypto product launch, explaining:

Certainly our customers have been talking to us more pragmatically about how they can launch products or what our capabilities might be in the future to help them support the launch of those products.

In July of last year, State Street announced the expansion of its cryptocurrency service, citing growing demand for traditional funds.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are also experiencing increasing demand from institutional investors. Bitstamp’s chief executive said in August that his trading platform is seeing “huge interest in crypto” from institutional clients. In June, Binance launched a new platform for VIP and institutional crypto investors to increase support for institutional clients.

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Payments company Bolt cancels deal to acquire cryptocurrency company Wyre

California-based online payments company Bolt pulls out of a deal to buy cryptocurrency provider Wyre. News of the scrapped deal, which was agreed earlier this year, comes amid plummeting valuations in the cryptocurrency and fintech sectors.

Bolt Abandons Wyre’s $1.5 Billion Acquisition Plan

Bolt Financial, a San Francisco-based U.S. technology company, said on Friday that it had canceled a deal to buy cryptocurrency infrastructure provider Wyre Payments, Reuters reported Saturday. The e-commerce platform announced in early April a definitive agreement to acquire Wyre for $1.5 billion.

The deal was considered one of the biggest acquisitions of cryptocurrency companies this year. After a funding round in January, Bolt was last valued at $11 billion. The report notes, however, that high-tech valuations are under more pressure as investor confidence has been hit by recession fears and negative stock market developments.

Payment processor Stripe and fintech firm Klarna Bank also made significant valuation cuts, Reuters noted. Industry valuations have also dropped significantly in the cryptocurrency sector during the market slump in recent months.

In a statement released, Bolt emphasized that he will continue his partnership with Wyre. The online payments company explained that remaining independent would allow it to focus on its core areas of business. The company’s CEO, Maju Kuruvilla, was quoted as saying:

We will continue our existing business partnership with Wyre to pave the way for the integration of cryptocurrencies into our ecosystem, bringing Wyre's innovative cryptocurrency infrastructure to the world.

Wyre offers blockchain-connected payment APIs and fiat ramps for cryptocurrency, forex and cryptocurrency liquidity to users of various cryptocurrency projects. It was created in 2013 and, like Bolt, which was founded a year later, is based in San Francisco.

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Coinbase Partners with BlackRock to Offer Cryptocurrencies to Institutions

Coinbase, one of the world’s largest and most popular digital currency exchanges, is partnering with investment giant BlackRock to offer its clients the opportunity to trade digital assets.

Coinbase and BlackRock team up

Joseph Chalom, Global Head of Strategic Ecosystem Partnerships at BlackRock, explained in a recent interview:

Our institutional clients are increasingly interested in gaining exposure to digital asset markets and are focused on how to efficiently manage the operational lifecycle of these assets. This connectivity will allow clients to manage their bitcoin exposures directly within their existing portfolio management and trading workflows for a portfolio-wide view of risk across all asset classes.

It’s interesting to see BlackRock make this change. Larry Fink, the company’s president, said about five years ago that bitcoin was the “money laundering index.” He didn’t trust cryptocurrencies, nor did he have any desire, it seems, to get involved with them.

However, it looks like things have changed not exactly for Fink, but also for the company’s clientele. They are starting to realize the true prowess of digital assets and want to get involved. They are eager to take advantage of digital currency offerings and expand their portfolios beyond the standard investment tools they have been exposed to.

For this reason, it appears that BlackRock feels they have no choice but to continue offering digital currencies to customers, regardless of how Fink feels. Executives know there is business to be lost if they don’t change with the times, and offering cryptocurrencies is likely to please everyone sitting at the BlackRock table.

Owen Lau, analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., gave his thoughts on the new partnership, commenting:

After this validation, Coinbase will be able to partner with more traditional financial industries. This shows that even with BlackRock’s size, they will be partnering with a native cryptocurrency company rather than developing their own features.

The move comes at a pretty interesting time, given how poorly the crypto space has been doing lately. Bitcoin, for example, is down over 60% from its all-time high of over $68,000 per unit last November. At the moment, the asset is struggling to maintain a position in the $20K range, with the entire crypto space losing around $2 trillion in overall valuation.

A lot of controversy surrounding the exchange

The fact that the space is in such a weak state and yet so many institutions still want to take advantage of it is proof that digital currencies are becoming much more mainstream and legitimate in people’s eyes, even as prices fall.

Coinbase has been at the center of a lot of controversy lately. The company is under SEC investigation and a former employee has been accused of insider trading.

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Trading App Giant Robinhood Launches Support for Ethereum Rival Cardano (ADA) Ahead of Network Updates

Retail giant Robinhood is kicking off the new month by adding a top 10 crypto asset to its trading list.

In a new announcement via Twitter, the company says that Cardano Scalable Decentralized Blockchain (ADA), driven by customer demand, is now available on the Robinhood platform.

Cardano is a competitor to Ethereum (ETH), and this month both projects will institute major network upgrades.

Earlier this week, Cardano creator Bob Hoskinson provided an update on the long-awaited Vasil hard fork, saying that developers are making steady progress towards the event that should take place in the coming weeks.

“Things are moving very fast. The community is still doing extensive testing and so are we. There is a lot of integration work going on behind the scenes, so all of this infrastructure is looking good.

Sometime in September is what it looks like, unless something is discovered or we have a substantial slowdown somewhere.”

The Ethereum Foundation also announced last week an updated timeline for the Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Consensus Engine project merger, starting with the Bellatrix update on September 6, followed by the transition formal Sometime between September 10 and 20.

Cardano experienced a week of price fluctuation, falling 1.74% to trade at $0.44 at the time of writing.

Ethereum is also in the red at 1.31% and is currently changing hands at $1,536.

While Robinhood continues to add new digital assets to its trading platform, the company has suffered from the negative effects of the long cryptocurrency bear market and in early August laid off 23% of its workforce.