Standard Chartered Bank Acquires Virtual Land at The Sandbox, Finland to Donate Seized Bitcoin to Ukraine, Sky Mavis Aims to be a Zero Trust Organization

Standard Chartered Bank, one of the largest banks in the world, has acquired virtual land at The Sandbox, a virtual world powered by blockchain technology. Their subsidiary, Standard Chartered Bank Hong Kong (Ltd), partnered with The Sandbox. They aim to create a metaverse experience at the Maga City District - a culture hub inspired by Hong Kong talent.

SC Ventures, Standard Chartered Group innovation and investment arm, initiated the project. The bank aims to explore co-creation opportunities and build new experiences for its clients. Other big banks and financial services firms that have entered the metaverse include JPMorgan, HSBC, and Fidelity Investments. HSBC also partnered with The Sandbox to step into the metaverse, while JPMorgan and Fidelity chose Decentraland.

Finland to Donate Seized Bitcoin to Ukraine

The Finnish government is planning to donate Bitcoin to aid Ukraine. Finnish Customs seized a total of 1981 Bitcoins from investigations related to drug trafficking. The government is still considering whether to give the Bitcoin directly or first convert it to Euros first. The potential value of the donated Bitcoin is 73M EUR at current prices. 

In February, Finland donated EUR 14 million in aid to Ukraine, including humanitarian aid and development cooperation funds. The total amount of Bitcoin would be six times the amount Finland granted to Ukraine, when Russia invaded the country.

Sky Mavis Aims to be a Zero Trust Organization

Sky Mavis, the creators of Axie Infinity, released a postmortem report on Wednesday detailing how they plan to beef up security. This follows after the $600M hack they suffered in March. “Our goal is to become a fully antifragile, zero-trust organization. Zero trust is a framework that assumes that Sky Mavis is always at risk to external and internal threats,” says the report. 

In their efforts to rebuild, they have hired cyber security experts, CrowdStrike and Polaris Infosec. They plan to increase their validator nodes from 9 (at the time of the attack) to 100. In addition, they will launch a Bug Bounty Program of up to $1M, so that white hat hackers can help secure their ecosystems from vulnerabilities.

 

Written by Lindi Miti © Crypto University 2022