Today in Crypto: Crypto Startup Funding Drops 37% in Q3 YOY; Ark Investment Stands by Bitcoin $1M Prediction

Ripple has announced its first On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) customer in France as it teams with Parisian payment provider Lemonway, a press release said.

The partnership will let Lemonway use the Ripplenet ODL, leveraging XRP for crypto-enabled payments to bolster its treasury payment processes. The partnership will let Lemonway drive operational efficiencies, as it won’t have to pre-fund accounts abroad – and they’ll have the opportunity to use previously trapped pre-funded capital to grow business.

It comes as France has been embracing more crypto technology.

Meanwhile, the Financial Stability Board has published a framework for international crypto regulation.

The recommendations are based on the principle of “same activity, same risk, same regulation” in that crypto assets should be treated like the traditional finance sector, along with addressing various financial stability risks.

In additional crypto news, The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has leveled a civil money penalty against Bittrex for violating the Bank Secrecy Act as the company allegedly didn’t maintain an effective AML program, a press release said.

FinCEN Acting Director Himamauli Das said Bittrex’s AML program unnecessarily exposed the U.S. financial system to threat actors, and allowed for exposure “to high-risk counterparties including sanctioned jurisdictions, darknet markets, and ransomware attackers.”

Furthermore, venture capital investment in crypto is at its lowest level in more than a year as of Tuesday (Oct. 11), with startups faltering because of the year’s large selloffs of digital currencies, Bloomberg wrote.

VC firms globally invested $4.44 billion in crypto startups in a quarter, a fall of 37% from the same period last year, per PitchBook stats.

The pullback also comes as there’s been a downturn in general tech investing, though crypto investing has seen a sharper decline because of the higher risks.

Finally, Ark Investment Management analyst Yassine Elmandjra has said he’s still sticking to a prediction from the company that bitcoin’s price could surpass $1 million, even with the selloffs this year, Bloomberg wrote.

Cathie Wood, the fund manager behind Ark’s ETFs, had said earlier in the year that bitcoin could hit $1 million or more by 2030 — but that was before the mass-selloffs that came this year amid the economic turmoil globally.

Elmandjra said there’s still an opportunity, though, and said there’s numerous use cases and when “you stack every use case one on top of another, you come to about a 28 trillion-dollar opportunity, which translates to more than a million dollars per Bitcoin.”