The CRM software firm Salesforce focuses on a suite of tools that standardizes customer engagement for large firms, and is now adding NFTs to their scope, courtesy of a partnership with the Polygon blockchain.

According to active data from independent researcher Mike Sonders, Salesforce is the biggest SaaS (software-as-a-service) company on a U.S. stock exchange to date – leading the pack over other recognizable software providers like Adobe, Intuit, and Shopify.

More info: https://bit.ly/3JMvfM3

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation denied it would require any purchaser of Signature Bank to divest its crypto activities.

The FDIC responded to a Wednesday Reuters report which said “any buyer of Signature must agree to give up all the crypto business at the bank,” citing two unnamed sources. An FDIC spokesperson denied this to Reuters.

More info: https://bit.ly/3n1wpdX

The Cardano (ADA) network has been seeing increased interest from institutional investors and whales on its network, with the volume of large transactions exceeding $100,000 recently rising significantly.

More info: https://bit.ly/3ZVyBCc

BlockSec, a smart contract audit firm, prevented a hacker from stealing 2,900 ether ($5 million) from the NFT lending project Paraspace amid a major vulnerability, it said.

More info: https://bit.ly/3Lvl4g8

The Cardano Node version 1.35.6, the update that mainly relates to the P2P support, delivers dynamic P2P functionality to the Cardano Node, and promises to offer more resilience to the network, was recently launched on the mainnet, according to the team’s GitHub entry from March 16.

More info: https://bit.ly/3JmNs1r

Former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan has made a millionaire bet on Bitcoin’s price over the next 90 days, predicting the cryptocurrency will reach $1 million by June 17.

The wager was initiated on March 17, when pseudonymous Twitter user James Medlock offered to bet anyone $1 million that the United States would not experience hyperinflation. A few hours later, the former Coinbase executive accepted the bet.

More info: https://bit.ly/3yPJqtz

A pseudonymous employee of DefiLlama, 0xngmi, forked a version of the blockchain data platform after accusing the company's founders of launching a token without support.

"There is an ongoing attempt to launch a token that does not represent us," 0xngmi said on Twitter, while verifying on-chain that their account had not been hacked. "We don't want to be associated with it."

More info: https://bit.ly/3LwG9H1

Bitcoin has outpaced traditional investment assets and sectors, such as technology and gold, in year-to-date (YTD) absolute returns and risk-adjusted performance, according to recent data from Goldman Sachs.

The leading cryptocurrency has gained 51% in YTD absolute returns, surpassing information technology (+16%), communication services (+15%), consumer discretionary (+11%), Russell 1000 Growth (+10%), gold (+4%), and the S&P 500 (+4%).

More info: https://bit.ly/42qDhSg

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) revealed that Americans parted with over $10 billion last year due to online fraud.

Despite the predominantly bearish year for the cryptocurrency industry, 2022 was fruitful for criminals. They stole nearly $2.6 billion from American consumers using investment schemes related to bitcoin and other digital assets. In contrast, such fraud resulted in “just” $907 million in 2021.

More info: https://bit.ly/40aFWgW

Schiff believes that one option likely to be embraced by global economies will be digital gold but expressed skepticism about Bitcoin’s ability to become one of the digital currencies in the future, he said in an interview with Mike Adams on March 17.

More info: https://bit.ly/3FBnMx5

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis introduced new legislation conformant with Florida’s Uniform Commercial Code to shield residents from a national central bank digital currency.

DeSantis has called upon like-minded governors to combat “surveillance and control” from the federal government and adopt similar legislation under its commercial codes.

More info: https://bit.ly/3TulSE2

According to data from on-chain analytics firm Santiment, first shared by popular cryptocurrency analyst Ali Martinez, there are 50 new whale addresses on the XRP Ledger, holdings between 10 million and 100 million XRP, worth between $3.8 million and $38 million.

More info: https://bit.ly/42ntHj7

The credit line was reportedly offered to the USDC issuer last week after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The bank contained $3.3 billion of Circle’s reserve deposits that backed the world’s second largest stablecoin.

More info: https://bit.ly/3LEmrtg

Ethereum scaling project Polygon and web3 gaming blockchain project Immutable are working together to launch a Layer 2 blockchain network called Immutable zkEVM.

The network aims to leverage ZK-Rollup technology for compatibility with Ethereum apps while operating separately from Immutable's existing StarkEx-based Layer 2 chain, Immutable X.

More info: https://bit.ly/3ZbHtm8

American multinational financial services firm Mastercard Inc has entered into a strategic partnership with Stables, an Australian fintech startup to help advance stablecoin adoption in the APAC region.

The partnership will see users of the Stables platform make payments for goods and services using their USD Coin (USDC) anywhere Mastercard is accepted.

More info: https://bit.ly/3yWjjB8

Nexon, one of the largest game publishers across Asia, is creating a new Web3 game based on its popular pixelated 2D role-playing franchise, called MapleStory Universe—and it’s launching a private Supernet on Polygon for the new game, Nexon announced Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

More info: https://bit.ly/3JYqwXO

According to the index, cryptocurrency investors are currently in a state of “greed,” with a score being at 68.

The rise in the index comes at a time in which the price of the flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin has been surging, significantly outperforming other risk assets such as equities. BTC is above $28,000, after rising more than 30% over little more than a week.

More info: https://bit.ly/2Jc5GGx

XRP is trading at $0.45, a value representing gains of 20.54% in the last 24 hours. On the weekly chart, XRP is up 16%.

The price of XRP has broken away from the general cryptocurrency market, with the token finding renewed bullish catalysts from the long-standing legal battle between Ripple and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).

More info: https://bit.ly/3JCj577

US President Joe Biden released the government’s economic report on Monday, in which Bitcoin plays a major role. BTC is mentioned as many as 75 times in the report, which attempts to denigrate Bitcoin and promote a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) of the United States as the better solution.

In the section titled “The Perceived Appeal of Crypto Assets,” the White House spends many pages describing how Bitcoin works before denying the leading cryptocurrency the function of money by definition. Notably, BTC allegedly fails to fulfill two out of three characteristics of money.

More info: https://bit.ly/3FJ6vC6

Gaming project Aavegotchi revealed plans to launch its own blockchain called Gotchichain. The network will leverage Polygon Supernets, which is Polygon's service that allows projects to create their application-specific chains.

More info: https://bit.ly/3FMmuPJ

The cryptocurrency exchange Bitzlato revealed that users could withdraw a maximum of 50% of their assets previously frozen by the authorities. Those willing to do so should use the Telegram bot – bz_phoenix_bot – to move funds to another exchange or an external wallet.

More info: https://bit.ly/3TG2eF9