Mastercard, the world’s second-largest credit card company, is adopting crypto. 

Mastercard announced the update on Wednesday, pointing out that digital assets have become “an important part of the payments world.” 

Nexo has announced a partnership with Ledger that will see the firm use Ledger Vault to secure $4 billion in cryptocurrency holdings.

Balancer Labs has raised $5 million from two cryptocurrency VC funds, according to a recent blog post from the project.

Three Arrows Capital and Defiance Capital contributed a total investment of $5 million to Balancer Labs. The investment involved the purchase of BAL tokens from Balancer Labs’ treasury.

Twitter made two noteworthy cryptocurrency decisions today. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey personally donated $1 million to the blockchain think tank Coin Center, while Twitter CFO Ned Segal discussed the possibility of a corporate Bitcoin investment.

Coin Center executive director Jerry Brito revealed Dorsey’s $1 million donation on Twitter earlier today.

Thank you for your incredible work!

A new Monero proposal has raised $150,000 in hopes of encouraging non-profit groups to tweet their support for Tesla. However, the publicity stunt has created a rift in the community.

The Monero community raised 890 XMR, worth approximately $150,000, as part of an initiative that will ask Tesla Inc. to accept the cryptocurrency as a method of payment on its website.

Tezos NFTs will now be available on OpenSea—the largest online NFT marketplace that previously only supported Ethereum tokens. The recently launched FA2 standard on Tezos, similar to Ethereum’s ERC-1155 standard, has seen a growing interest from the community.

NFT volumes have surged since mid-January, ranging over $4 million daily. OpenSea is the leading marketplace dominating the space with more than 30% volume share. 

Aave has passed a governance proposal and launched a Balancer pool. Users who provide liquidity to this pool will earn AAVE and BAL tokens along with trading fees. The staking APY is currently over 300%.

The governance proposal earned 498,757.966 votes in favor and 2,519.079 votes against, with 62 addresses participating in the process.

Ethernity is launching a charity-focused NFT collection, attracting various celebrities to participate. 

Ethernity, a new project committed to donating proceeds from tokenized digital art to charity, has pulled in a group of major celebrities for its first collection. 

Institutional and corporate investment has led to significantly higher Tether inflows, pushing the stablecoin’s market cap across the $30 billion milestone.

The USDT market cap is now at $30.3 billion, with Tether ranked third by market cap in the crypto space.

According to one analyst, the U.S. government will “regulate the hell out of Bitcoin” if it starts to see the $BTC as a threat to the dollar.

However, the faster companies and wealth managers adopt, the more difficult it will become for the government to intervene.