Revenues from cryptocurrency trading have dried up at Revolut.
The UK’s flagship digital banking app features cryptocurrency trading tools which contributed 30-35% of its revenue in 2021, according to CEO Nikolay Storonsky.
He told Bloomberg TV that this proportion dropped to just 5% in 2022.
Storonsky described the drop as “quite sad from my point of view… I think crypto has a lot of potential for financial systems”.
However he said the company plans to continue to grow its crypto offering after increasing the number of tokens users can invest in through the app to 100.
Revolut, which has 20 million customers and 250m monthly transactions, recently also made it possible for users to pay for everyday purchases using their cryptocurrency balance.
It is not alone. Robinhood, a US-based crypto and stock trading platform, has reported a 12% fall in both crypto monthly active users and crypto revenue in Q3, with the latter at $51m.
It also said it would continue investing into the crypto space, including an international retail-focused wallet and NFT features.
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JP Morgan executes first cross-border DeFi trade
JP Morgan has executed its first cross-border transaction using decentralised finance on a public blockchain.
The DeFi trade yesterday was executed on Ethereum layer-2 network Polygon, using a modified version of AAVE protocol’s smart contract code.
Facilitated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian, it featured Singapore’s largest bank DBS, Tokyo-based banking firm SBI Digital Asset Holdings and business leadership platform Oliver Wyman Forum.
Cryptocurrency shorts
Tezos co-founder Kathleen Breitman says the ongoing crypto winter is “only going to get worse”. Speaking to CNBC at Web Summit, she said: “A lot of this was inflated on cheap money… VCs trying to pump. There was a lot of easy money going into the system and I think it was artificially stoking a number of different things, mainly valuations of these companies.”
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao told Web Summit that central bank digital currencies are not a threat to his company or the crypto sector. Softening his previous stance against them, he said CBDCs would validate blockchain technology and build trust: “I very much think that the more we have, the better.”
Crypto exchange Coinbase’s chief product officer Surojit Chatterjee has stepped down amid a restructuring of its product, engineering and design teams.
Géraldine Pamphile, who spent a decade as vice president at the NBA before joining the executive board of augmented reality company Magic Leap in 2021, has joined Neal Stephenson’s Layer 1 blockchain and metaverse company Lamina1 as chief business development officer.
Social media giant Instagram will soon allow digital creators to mint and sell non-fungible tokens directly from its platform.
Crypto prices
The overall market cap of the 21,600 coins is at $1.01 trillion at the time of writing (7am UK), a 0.5% decrease in the last 24 hours.
For round-ups of recent cryptocurrency news developments, click here.
For crypto valuations of the top 100 coins by market cap in US dollars, plus 24-hour price change, see below.