Coins.ph Suffers 12M XRP Exploit

Crypto infrastructure, mining and investment firm Phoenix Group, a company based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and publicly listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX), has established a $150 million crypto treasury.Photo by Jievani Weerasinghe on UnsplashFirst ADX-listed firm to establish crypto treasuryThe development emerged as the company released its results for Q2 2025. Phoenix Group explained in a press release that its activities in Q2 led to it becoming the first ADX-listed company to establish a strategic crypto treasury with Bitcoin (BTC) and Solana (SOL) holdings valued at $150 million. Phoenix asserted that unlike its competitors which are burdened by debt, it has a healthy balance sheet, with debt of just $16 million. This has enabled it to pursue the establishment of a strategic crypto reserve. The company is also expanding into AI-related activities, with plans to repurpose part of its U.S. infrastructure. That adjustment will allow the firm to establish a multi-use compute facility, enabling it to build out its AI vertical. Phoenix Group Co-Founder and CEO Munaf Ali said that Phoenix is working towards building out one gigawatt of hybrid infrastructure by 2027. Ali also commented on the pursuit of a crypto treasury, stating:“Holding Bitcoin and other strategic digital assets isn’t just about exposure. It’s about alignment. We believe in the long-term value these networks represent, and our treasury strategy reflects that belief.”DWF Ventures, the ventures arm of crypto market maker DWF Labs that relocated its headquarters from Singapore to Abu Dhabi earlier this year, released a report in June revealing that publicly-listed companies that have adopted a crypto treasury strategy have amassed holdings of $76 billion in crypto. Phoenix Group has disclosed that to date, it has accumulated 514 Bitcoin and over 630,000 Solana with a view towards holding these digital assets in the long term. Earlier this year, American digital asset investment firm Sarson Funds outlined that the UAE is playing a significant role in advancing Bitcoin adoption at a corporate level in the context of the ongoing trend towards the pursuit of a Bitcoin corporate treasury strategy. Miners accumulatingPhoenix Group isn’t the only company involved in crypto mining to establish a crypto corporate treasury recently. In June, American miner BitMine Immersion Technologies disclosed that it was raising $18 million through a public share offering to buy Bitcoin. Since then, it has been accumulating Ether (ETH). As of July 24, the firm held over 300,000 ETH, with plans to raise $4.5 billion to fuel further ETH purchases. MARA Holdings, a publicly-listed American Bitcoin miner, has also confirmed that its treasury now extends beyond Bitcoin that it mined itself. Phoenix Group confirmed that it mined 336 BTC in Q2, with 689 BTC mined over the course of H1 2025. Founded in 2017, the firm debuted on the ADX in December 2023 with its stock immediately surging by 50% from its initial public offering (IPO) launch price. The firm’s share price has also performed well in 2025, surging 72% from April to June.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the Chinese autonomous territory’s central bank, has launched a scheme which subsidizes projects endeavoring to issue tokenized bonds. Grants of up to $321KThe objective behind the initiative, which was announced in a statement published to the HKMA website on Nov. 28, is to nurture moves towards tokenization within Hong Kong’s capital markets. The initiative, titled the Digital Bond Grant Scheme (DBGS), can be accessed by financial services firms for up to two digital bond issuances. The grant may cover up to 50% of what the HKMA describes as “Eligible Expenses” incurred in the process of issuing and establishing the digital bond. A maximum grant level of HK$2.5 million ($321,000) has been established. Digital bond issuers are entitled to the full grant where both basic requirements and additional requirements have been met. A half grant of up to HK$1.25 million ($160,600) has been established for those issuers who have met the basic requirements. The scheme has been opened to applicants from Nov. 28 onwards, with it having been set out to run for an initial period of three years. To fulfill the basic requirements, a bond must be issued in Hong Kong and either be issued on a decentralized ledger technology (DLT) platform, or the project itself must be based in Hong Kong while being involved in the running of a DLT platform.Photo by Fidel Fernando on UnsplashAdditional requirementsThe HKMA has listed four items under additional requirements. These include a need for a digital bond to be issued on a DLT platform run by an entity that is not an associate of the issuer. The bond issuance, whether effected in one instance or in tranches, must account for a value of greater than HK$1 billion ($128.5 million).  The bond must be issued to greater than five investors who are not connected with or associates of the issuer. Finally, the bond must be issued on either the Hong Kong Stock Exchange or a virtual asset trading platform (VATP) licensed and regulated by the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC). Project EvergreenIn 2021, the HKMA launched Project Evergreen, an initiative geared towards exploring how DLT could enhance processes and efficiency within capital markets. On Nov. 28 the HKMA published an update on the project, outlining that since its foundation, tokenization had gained considerable momentum, with $10 billion in tokenized bonds having been issued globally within the last decade. The Hong Kong government carried out two tokenized bond issuances as part of the project. Due to the second issuance being seven times larger than the first one, the HKMA believes that this accounted for institutional investors being attracted to the bond issuance.  In the update, the HKMA outlined that going forward, the plan is to promote wider adoption of what is viable, within the confines of what is possible. The central bank asserted that the DBGS was established on this basis. The update stated: "To fully reap the potential of DLT, we need to keep pushing the boundaries and explore further innovation." In a related development, a report published by the Financial Times on Nov. 28 suggests that the Hong Kong government is considering offering crypto tax breaks to hedge funds and private equity funds.

Gate Ventures, the investment arm of Gate.io, a global cryptocurrency exchange with its origins in China, has gotten together with Thailand’s Boon Ventures and Movement Labs, to launch a $20 million fund aimed at supporting projects that utilize the Move programming language, as well as interoperability with the Ethereum ecosystem.  Accelerating Move-based blockchain adoptionMovement Labs is a developer of modular Move-based blockchains. A press release published on PR Newswire on Oct. 13 outlined that the firms intend to direct the fund towards a number of key areas. Firstly, its objective will be to accelerate the adoption of Move-based blockchain solutions. Secondly, the fund will be directed towards supporting projects which enhance security and performance in decentralized networks. A further objective is the extension of support to projects which bridge Move and Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) ecosystems. The final key objective has been set out to drive innovation in Web3 infrastructure and applications. Gate Ventures Managing Partner Kevin Yang claimed that the $20 million fund “marks a significant milestone in [the company’s] mission to drive forward-thinking solutions in the Web3 ecosystem.” Yang added that in collaborating with Movement Labs and other forward-thinking entities within the Web3 sector, the company is “paving the way for the future of decentralized technology.”Photo by Nino Steffen on UnsplashMentorship & hackathonsWeb3 startups supported by the fund will be given access to a mentorship program, while hackathon events will also be organized. Furthermore, there will be an opportunity for selected startups to participate in a research grant program relative to blockchain interoperability. Gate Ventures garnered attention within the industry recently, with the announcement in August that it had entered into a partnership with Abu Dhabi’s Blockchain Center. That collaboration has led to the establishment of Falcon Gate Ventures, a $100 million Web3 innovation fund.Last month, the company participated in the Series A funding round of Kroma, an Ethereum layer-2 network project. While interoperability is singled out as a key objective of this fund, Movement Labs has been working towards that goal recently. Last week, the firm appointed an omnichain interoperability protocol project, LayerZero, as an interoperability provider. It’s envisaged that the partnership will enable developers using the Move programming language to create decentralized applications that can run across various blockchain networks, including EVM. While Facebook parent company Meta developed the Move programming language, Movement Labs has worked towards developing its use further. Earlier in the year, Movement partnered with Aptos Labs, a firm that was founded by ex-Meta employees that has built out a network based on Move, in another effort to bring about blockchain interoperability relative to EVM and non-EVM networks. A spokesperson for Movement Labs told Cointelegraph that “the ultimate goal is to create an integrated blockchain environment where developers can build across platforms without sacrificing security or performance.” Back in April, Movement raised $38 million in a Series A financing round which was led by Polychain Capital. At the time, Movement Labs Co-Founder Rushi Manche said that he and his co-founders “started building Movement to increase the velocity of innovation in crypto where the next Facebook can be built on-chain by developers who do not have the resources for large development teams and expensive auditors.”