Thomas White, a British administrator of the infamous darknet market Silk Road, has been ordered to forfeit hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin. Thomas White has been ordered to hand over $667,000 (£490,000) worth of Bitcoin by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), per Sky News.

White, 26, ran the Silk Road darknet market following the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the original creator of the website, in 2013. After the website was shut down by law enforcement, White dropped out of an accounting degree to work on its successor site, Silk Road 2.0. Source

Swivel Finance has added another $3.5 million to continue building out its tokenized cash-flow and fixed-rate lending service. In DeFi’s volatile lending and borrowing sector, fixed-rate lending services are fast gaining attention. Swivel Finance is the latest to turn investors’ heads.

Multicoin Capital again participated in Swivel Finance's latest $3.5 million funding round and was joined by trading desks GSR Markets, SCC Investments, and CMT Digital. OKEx Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, IOSG Ventures, and SevenX Ventures also contributed to the latest round. Source

The popular bug bounty and security services platform for DeFi has raised $5.5 million in funding. Immunefi, a bug bounty system for smart contracts and decentralized finance (Defi) projects, has announced it raised $5.5M in funding.

Investors participating in the fundraise included Blueprint Forest, Electric Capital, Framework Ventures, Bitscale Capital, P2P Capital, IDEO Colab, The LAO, BR Capital, 3rd Prime Ventures, North Island Ventures, and other individual investors. Source

After a downturn in September, Solana’s summer surge looks to be back in full swing as SOL hits a new peak price.
Solana’s late summer surge was interrupted by September’s network outage, which appeared to slow the smart contract platform’s upward momentum. But with the overall crypto market on the rise, Solana is rising rapidly again—and has set a new peak price.

Today, Solana’s native SOL cryptocurrency hit a new all-time high price above $219, per CoinGecko, which is a step up from the previous peak above $213. While only a modest uptick from the previous high, it suggests that Solana’s upswing is back in action following the recent downturn. Source

NBA Top Shot proved out the sports NFT concept, and leagues like the NFL and LaLiga are buying into Dapper's successful formula. It's been just one year since Dapper Labs launched NBA Top Shot, the online collectibles marketplace that arguably kicked off the first mainstream NFT boom. At that time, the term NFT (non-fungible token) was relatively unknown outside of crypto circles. CryptoKitties, the collectible cats so popular in 2017 that they clogged up the Ethereum blockchain, were also NFTs (and also a Dapper creation), but that acronym wasn't being widely used yet. Source

The President's Working Group on Financial Markets, convened by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, is reportedly ready to release its report. Earlier this year, as questions swirled around the growing prominence of Tether and other stablecoins within the crypto industry, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called a snap meeting of financial regulators. The goal was to develop a game plan for regulating the $130 billion asset class.

It appears as though it has one. Source

Rumors that China will reverse its Bitcoin mining ban are based on a misreading of the country's political system and policy goals. Today, Crypto Twitter influencers and media began circulating rumors that China was regretting its crackdown on crypto after Bitcoin surged to new all-time-highs in the past week. As has been well documented, China’s Bitcoin mining ban caused an exodus of miners out of China, which once controlled more than 50% of Bitcoin's global Bitcoin hashrate. Source

Ethereum competitor NEAR has launched an $800 million fund to support initiatives targeting the ecosystem’s growth.
The team behind the NEAR Protocol, called the NEAR Collective, has thrown its hat into the ring of the burgeoning decentralized finance (DeFi) space by announcing $800 million in funding for the ecosystem’s developers and startup grants.

NEAR Collective is a globally distributed group of teams and individuals contributing to the research and development of the NEAR protocol. Source