Bitcoin Daily: Morgan Stanley Doubles Shares in GTBC; R3 to Debut Privacy Solution for Blockchain

Morgan Stanley has doubled the ownership it has in Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) shares since April, AMBCrypto reported.

The bank, in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said its Morgan Stanley Europe Opportunity Fund owned 58,116 shares of the GBTC as of the end of July, according to the report. Earlier this year, that number was 28,289 for the fund.

The asset manager has been adding more crypto to its arsenal for the past year, with the bank announcing in April its addition of bitcoin exposure to 12 institutional funds through Grayscale and Futures. Those funds currently have 6.5 million GBTC shares, the report stated.

In other news, R3, which operates the Corda blockchain, is rolling out a private, permissionless network as a layer 2 solution on ethereum, Ledger Insights reported.

R3 will be issuing a regulatory compliant utility token to power the Obscuro network, according to the report. Obscuro, announced Tuesday (Sept. 28) at the CordaCon 2021 conference, is powered by R3’s Conclave confidential computing technology.

There’s a need for these solutions, with demands for privacy necessitating a way to deal with the front-running activity on public blockchains, the report stated. Critics say decentralized finance (DeFi) can’t enter the mainstream without more privacy. Privacy demands conflict, however, with the need for transparency on public blockchains.

Meanwhile, Angle Labs, a DeFi startup looking to build derivatives-backed stablecoins, has announced a funding round for $5 million, Decrypt reported. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz.

With the funding, the company will bring its protocol to market, grow its employee base and enable the adoption and integration of agTokens, as the stablecoins will be called, according to the report.

AngleLabs has said its intent is to open a new era of DeFi that will not be tied to the U.S. dollar, which the company said leads to “many undesirable effects” for those whose home currency is not the dollar, the report stated.