Today in Crypto: Deutsche Bank Applies for German Digital Asset Custody License, Scam Trezor App Warning, Japan’s Crypto Exchanges Urge Regulators to Relax Margin Trading Restrictions, New Banking Restrictions for Australian Exchanges

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
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Investment news

• Deutsche Bank AG applied for regulatory permission to operate a custody service for digital assets such as cryptocurrencies, Bloomberg reported. “We’re building out our digital assets and custody business,” David Lynne, who runs the lender’s commercial banking unit, said at a conference on Tuesday. “We just put our application into the [Germany’s financial regulator] BaFin for the digital asset license,” he was quoted as saying.

Security news

• Rafael Yakobi, a managing partner at US-based The Crypto Lawyers, warned that the first search result for the popular crypto wallet ‘Trezor‘ in Apple‘s AppStore is “a malicious application that will request your seed phrase, allowing its operators to steal all of your crypto.” The app is called ‘Trezor Wallet Suite’ and has been up for weeks, said Yakobi. “Although the total number of victims is unknown, it could easily be in the hundreds or thousands,” he said.

Regulation news

• Japan’s cryptocurrency exchanges are urging regulators to relax margin trading restrictions on popular cryptocurrencies, despite last year’s global digital-asset market crash, Bloomberg reported. Many people in the industry want permitted leverage for retail investors of four to 10 times whereas currently customers can at most double exposure via borrowing, per the Japan Virtual & Crypto Assets Exchange Association. “Reforming the leverage rule could make Japan more attractive for crypto and blockchain companies,” the association’s Vice Chairman Genki Oda was quoted as saying. 

Payments news

• Payments provider Cuscal, through its partner Zepto, brought new banking restrictions on Australian crypto exchanges, according to a statement from Blockchain Australia. “Blockchain Australia supports efforts to enhance and promote secure digital transactions while still preserving users’ freedom to decide how to spend their own money and use their own assets,” the industry body said, criticising this latest move.

Exchange news

• Gemini announced its expansion plans in APAC, saying that the exchange’s leadership team recently visited the region. Over the next 12 months, it plans to increase its headcount to more than 100 in Singapore. The Singapore office will serve as a hub for the larger APAC operations, while the APAC expansion will also include an engineering base in India, the press release said. 

Web3 news

• A Hong Kong government study said that there are worries that the region is lagging behind East Asian and Gulf countries when it comes to Web3 development. It stated that: “There are concerns over the progress of developing other web3 technology domains and hence Hong Kong’s competitiveness vis-à-vis its Asian and Gulf counterparts, as the latter are harnessing their own strengths to develop web3 and explore its potential on a wider variety of application scenarios.” Nonetheless, Hong Kong can draw on the experience of these regions as policy guides, it said.

Blockchain news

• Neo, an open-source blockchain platform for developers, announced the launch of O3 Swap on the Neo N3 blockchain. This move will facilitate seamless token swaps between Neo and the other mainstream EVM chains already supported by O3 Swap, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Polygon, and more, said a press release. 

DeFi news

• AugmentLabs DAO announced that it recently launched AugmentDEX, a decentralized exchange with “a combined liquidity of over 3,000,000 USDT,” it said. It also launched a staking program, as well as the USC Visa Debit Card, designed with “a strong focus on lifestyle-related use cases” to enable users to “have the flexibility to deposit both USC and USDT, allowing them to manage their digital assets according to their preferences,” the DAO said.