Injective has announced that the Injective Pro relayer has been launched.

https://twitter.com/InjectiveLabs/status/1450835129702748160?s=20

Polkadot-based privacy project Manta Network has raised $5.5M to continue scaling decentralized finance (DeFi) use cases by boosting blockchain privacy.

Investors: crypto hedge fund CoinFund, ParaFi Capital, Web 3. investment fund LongHash Ventures, CMS Holdings, Divergence, Spartan Group, Global Coin Ventures, SkyVision Capital, Zee Prime and SNZ, Digital Currency Group, Consensys, Bitcoin.com.

Angel investors included SushiSwap’s semi-anonymous core contributor 0xMaki, Dragonfly Capital’s Kevin Hu, ParaFi general partner Santiago Santos and others.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/polkadot-based-privacy-project-manta-network-raises-5-5m

Lazio Fan Token trading has started on Binance.
LAZIO is now trading at ~27x from the IEO price (1$).

https://www.binance.com/en/trade/LAZIO_USDT

The price of bitcoin suffered a flash crash, falling from $65,500 to as low as $8,200 on crypto exchange Binance.US.

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/121601/bitcoin-price-flash-crashes-to-8200-on-binance-us-in-possible-trading-mishap

FTX has raised $420M in a Series B-1 funding round.

Sixty-nine investors – including BlackRock and Tiger Global – joined the fast-growing crypto conglomerate.

Investors valued the exchange at $25 billion.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/21/ftx-raises-420690000/

Australia needs to introduce new regulations for digital asset miners, such as tax discounts and a licensing regime for crypto exchanges, to be “competitive with Singapore, the UK and the U.S.”, an Australian Senate report said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N2RH018

Sports-focused collectible NFT firm Candy Digital has raised $100 million in a Series A financing round, bringing its value to $1.5 billion.

Insight Partners and Softbank Vision Fund 2 co-led the funding round.

Investors: former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning, Connect Ventures, Will Ventures, Gaingels, Com2Us, and Athletes Syndicate through a partnership with Chaos Ventures.

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/121632/nft-startup-candy-digital-raises-100-million-in-series-a-round

Assemble Protocol (ASM) is now available on Coinbase.

https://blog.coinbase.com/assemble-protocol-asm-is-now-available-on-coinbase-5411d68dfd2b

Playboy launches new NFT project, Rabbitars.

Playboy Rabbitars will be available for purchase for 0.1953 Ethereum on the official Playboy Rabbitar site using crypto or U.S. dollars (USD) via three different sales:

A pre-sale for whitelisted Eth-paying collectors will take place Sunday, October 24th-Tuesday, October 26th.

The public sale for Fiat/USD-paying collectors will take place Tuesday, October 26th (following the end of the whitelist sale).

The public sale for Eth-paying collectors will take place Wednesday, October 27th.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/10/20/2317683/0/en/Playboy-launches-new-NFT-project-Rabbitars.html

Binance will list Tranchess (CHESS) in the Innovation Zone and will open trading for CHESS/BNB, CHESS/BTC, CHESS/BUSD and CHESS/USDT trading pairs at 2021-10-22 06:00 UTC.

https://www.binance.com/en/support/announcement/75ee0166b3ec43aba2266ef98893dd56

Sotheby’s joined a $20 million seed round investment in Delaware-based NFT studio Mojito.

Other investors: Future Perfect Ventures, Creative Artists Agency and NEA’s Connect Ventures.

The investment values the firm at $100 million.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabelcontreras/2021/10/21/sothebys-makes-first-crypto-investment-backing-nft-startup-using-ethereum-blockchain/

The Associated Press will make its trusted economic, sports and race call datasets available to leading blockchains via Chainlink, the world’s largest decentralized network of oracles, enabling smart contracts on any blockchain to securely interact with the AP's real-world data.

https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2021/ap-chainlink-to-bring-trusted-data-onto-leading-blockchains

Animoca Brands has raised $65M at $2.2B valuation.

Investors in the round included Liberty City Ventures, Ubisoft Entertainment, Sequoia China, Dragonfly Capital, Com2uS, Kingsway Capital, 10T Holdings, Token Bay Capital, Smile Group, Tess Ventures, MSA Capital, Octava Fund, Adit Ventures, Summer Capital, Sigitech Holdings, Black Anthem Ltd, Mirana Corp, and Justin Sun.

https://www.animocabrands.com/animoca-brands-raises-usd65000000-at-usd2200000000-valuation

Immutable X has announced that as of 22 October 2021 midnight UTC, they are performing a supply split of IMX pre-launch so that every 1 token is now worth 100.

https://immutablex.medium.com/important-announcement-imx-token-split-640771a6f999
https://etherscan.io/token/0xf57e7e7c23978c3caec3c3548e3d615c346e79ff

Valkyrie Funds launches the Valkyrie Bitcoin Strategy ETF (Nasdaq: BTF) focused on Bitcoin futures.

https://www.wflx.com/prnewswire/2021/10/22/valkyrie-funds-launches-valkyrie-bitcoin-strategy-etf-btf-focused-bitcoin-futures/
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/funds-and-etfs/btf

Beniamin Mincu, founder and CEO of Elrond Network, has announced that the Maiar DEX is launching in November.

https://twitter.com/beniaminmincu/status/1451475321316855809?s=20

Parallel, an NFT sci-fi card game, has raised $50M at a $500M valuation from Paradigm.

Previous investors include Chad Hurley (Co-Founder of YouTube), Focus Labs, OSS Capital and Yunt Capital.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/21/nft-sci-fi-card-game-parallel-raises-at-500m-valuation-from-paradigm/

Proximity Labs, a research and development firm, announced the creation of a $350 million grants vehicle to help build decentralized-finance applications on the NEAR blockchain, where it is focusing its efforts.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/a16z-backed-blockchain-gets-350-million-grants-vehicle-for-defi

FTX has listed ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO).

https://twitter.com/FTX_Official/status/1451544758657060877?s=20
https://ftx.com/trade/BITO/USD

Timeswap, a fully decentralized AMM based money market protocol, has published the article about its new project and it has also announced its seed round led by Multicoin Capital with participation from Mechanism Capital and Defiance Capital.

https://medium.com/@TimeswapProtocol/introducing-timeswap-fully-decentralized-amm-based-money-market-protocol-e95910739c8e

Genopets, an NFT game powered by Solana, has raised $8.3m in seed funding round to bridge the physical and digital world.

This round of seed funding was co-led by Konvoy Ventures and Pantera Capital, with participation from Old Fashion Research, Alameda Research, Solana Capital, Xoogler Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Collab+Currency, Spartan Group, Animoca Brands, OliveX, Hyper, CMT Digital, DeFi Alliance, Eniac Ventures, CMS Holdings, GBV Capital, Yield Guild Games, Merit Circle, Bitscale Capital, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Evernew Capital, Fundamental Labs, Valhalla Capital, Cinchblock, Raptor Capital, and Magnus Capital.

https://medium.com/@genopets/genopets-raises-8-3m-in-seed-round-funding-to-bridge-the-physical-and-digital-world-d884adc2cc97