Bitcoin Daily: Paxos Files For Clearing Agency License; Chinese Lottery Firm 500.com Buys Bitcoin Miner Maker For $100 Million

Paxos, a cryptocurrency firm, said it will apply for a formal clearing agency license from the U.S. Securities regulator now that a pilot test has been completed, Reuters reported.

In the pilot test, Credit Suisse and Instinet had used the platform for same-day trade settlements, according to Reuters. Paxos said the trades marked the first time a live application of blockchain technology for equities markets had taken place in the U.S.

While it currently takes two days to settle a trade, the time has been in need of shortening for some investors since earlier this year when many retail investors were able to boost up stocks like GameStop.

In other news, 500.com announced in a press release this week that it has entered into a shareholding agreement with Bee Computing in order to issue around 45.8 million aggregate shares for $2.18 per share.

The agreement will allow 500.com to engage in mass production of bitcoin mining machines, along with successful development of ETH and LTC ASIC mining machines, the release stated.

Meanwhile, South Korean prosecutors have sold bitcoin that was taken from criminals for the first time in the country’s history, CoinDesk reported.

The sale came with a profit of around 12.3 billion won (about $10.9 million), which the report said was transferred to the national treasury.

The government took bitcoin from the operator of an illegal porn site, who went by the username Ahn. The authorities originally took 216 bitcoin from Ahn, although only 191 were determined to be of criminal origin.

Lastly, new Signal betas have rolled out as of Tuesday (April 6), according to a company blog post.

The new betas will come with performance enhancements, a number of bug fixes, improvements to the mute settings and, for U.K.-based users, a new feature called Signal Payments, which allows for the sending and receiving of privacy-focused payments as simply as an instant message, the post stated.

The Signal Payments feature makes it so MobileCoins are able to be linked to Signal, allowing for payments to be kept track of and for balances to be observed, according to the post.