Top stories in the Crypto Roundup:

• Coinbase acquires Xapo Custody for $55 million
• Ripple’s incubator arm grants a blockchain startup $258 million worth of XRP
• Binance CEO expects Binance US to launch in “a month or two”

The BTC/USD pair bounced strongly off the 100-day exponential moving average (EMA) at $9,520 yesterday; pushing above $10,000 toward a local high of $10,410. Bitcoin (BTC) has since retraced back under $10,000 and is currently trading at $9,993.44 (0.79%) with a daily volume of $6.28 bn. As for ether (ETH) it is trading at $182.0 (+2.7%) with a daily volume totaling $1.59 bn. The MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 10 Index is currently tracking at 3,235.8 (–1.9%).

Coinbase’s $55 Million Xapo Custody Acquisition

One of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges operators, Coinbase, announced on Thursday that its subsidiary Coinbase Custody had acquired Xapo’s institutional custody business for $55 million.

Now the “largest, most globally recognized and most trusted institutional custodian in the world,” Coinbase Custody maintains over $7 billion in assets under custody. This total—which it revealed in its blog post on Thursday—is “stored on behalf of more than 120 clients in 14 different countries.”

Xapo will continue to focus on its core business, a retail-facing exchange for buying and selling bitcoin. It will also continue operating its Switzerland-based bitcoin vault, according to Fortune.

Ripple’s Incubator Arm Gives One-Billion-XRP Grant to Blockchain Startup

Blockchain startup Coil announced Thursday it had received a grant from Xpring—the incubator arm of blockchain technology giant Ripple—totalling one billion XRP to drive adoption of XRP and the Interledger Protocol “by growing Coil’s monetization platform through mainstream adoption of Web Monetization, an open web standard built on Interledger that enables streaming micropayments in any currency, including XRP.”

With the U.S. dollar-denominated value of XRP totalling $0.258 at time of writing, the value of the one billion XRP granted by Xpring to Coil is equal to roughly $258 million. Common users of Coil’s platform are content creators such as writers, podcasters, musicians, and artists.

Binance CEO: Binance US Ready In ‘A Month Or Two’

Speaking in an interview with Cheddar, Binance chief executive and co-founder Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao revealed that he expects Binance US to commence operations within the next two months.

“I don’t want to promise any fixed dates,” he told Cheddar, “but there’s a lot of work being done and there’s a lot of things going on in flux, but I would say in a month or two (is when Binance US will be ready).”

In more immediate news for Binance, it today celebrated the return of its eponymous iPhone application to Apple’s App Store. Over the past two years, Binance—like many cryptocurrency-related companies—has had an on-again-off-again relationship with Apple, with the consumer tech giant having listed and delisted its app multiple times.

State of the Crypto by Top Tier Exchange Volume

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