Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.
Top Stories This Week
Musk’s deal for Twitter looks set to go with original $44B price tag
Elon Musk is back on track to buy Twitter. The billionaire originally decided to buy the social media network back in April 2022, settling on a price tag of roughly $44 billion. He subsequently attempted to cancel the agreement, claiming inadequate transparency from Twitter regarding the firm’s financial health as well as fake account and spam bot prevalence on the platform. Musk now intends to complete the original $44 billion deal, according to a legal filing.
EU regulators ban cross-border payments from Russian crypto accounts
In light of recent escalations in the Ukraine-Russia war, the European Union has banned crypto activity between member regions and Russia, no matter how small the transaction. The ban covers “all crypto-asset wallets, accounts, or custody services, irrespective of the amount of the wallet,” according to an Oct. 6 statement from the European Commission. Russia, on the other hand, has taken the opposite stance, evident in its approval of cross-border crypto activity in recent weeks.
SWIFT says it has reached a ‘breakthrough’ in recent CBDC experiments
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a key cog in the global payments system, unveiled a successful test related to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In short, the test proved interoperability between CBDCs globally. “For CBDCs, our solution will enable central banks to connect their own networks simply and directly to all the other payments systems in the world through a single gateway,” SWIFT chief innovation officer Tom Zschach said in an Oct. 5 statement. SWIFT’s other test pertained to tokenized assets.
Middle East and North Africa are fastest-growing crypto markets: Data
The Middle East and North Africa, known as the MENA region, took the cake for fastest crypto growth this past year. Between July 2021 and June 2022, the volume of crypto transactions in the region hit $566 billion, a 48% increase from the year prior, according to a Chainalysis report. Crypto usage in the MENA region ranged from capital preservation and remittance payments to institutional activity. Latin America took second in terms of growth at 40%, and North America came in third with 36%.
FTX and Visa partner to permit crypto payments in 40 countries
Crypto exchange FTX unveiled that it has teamed up with Visa to produce a reportedly feeless debit card. Launching such a card has been a long-standing goal of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. The FTX Visa card will reportedly be available in 40 countries. The card’s website states the card is als
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