The U.S. Department of Justice says that law enforcement seized $3.36 billion of bitcoin from a man who unlawfully obtained more than 50,000 bitcoin from dark-web market Silk Road over a decade ago.
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York says that James Zhong of Gainesville, Georgia, pleaded guilty on November 4 to committing wire fraud in September 2012. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
The statement says the plea came almost a year after law enforcement seized 50,676.17851897 bitcoin, then valued at more than $3.36 billion, from Zhong’s home
U.S. Attorney Damian WIlliams says the whereabouts of this massive amount of bitcoin was a mystery for almost 10 years.

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South African retailer, Pick n Pay has announced that it has successfully completed the first phase of a new pilot that allows customers to pay for their purchases using cryptocurrency on their smartphones and will be rolling out the service to more stores across the country.
In this pilot, the retailer tested a payment service technology that enables customers to buy groceries with cryptocurrency at till points with any Bitcoin Lightning-enabled app, such as BlueWallet or Muun.
The retailer ran the pilot in 10 Western Cape stores with pre-selected testers over the past five months and has now extended the pilot to a further 29 stores for testing with customers, with the intention to roll it out to all stores in the coming months.

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South African retailer, Shoprite Group has joined a group of investors, led by Buffet Investments and KLT, in an undisclosed expansion round in Omnisient, Africa’s first privacy-preserving data collaboration platform provider.
Chief of Strategy & Innovation at ShopriteX, Shoprite Group’s data and customer technology unit, Neil Schreuder, says the decision to invest in Omnisient is the result of a considered effort to invest, partner, and collaborate with start-ups as we continue to create a smarter Shoprite, while remaining resolute in our commitment to being Africa’s most accessible and affordable retailer.
Omnisient, CEO and co-founder Jon Jacobson says this round of investment will be used to support our continued geographic expansion, as well as the ongoing development of our platform into the world’s leading source of consumer intelligence that fully complies with global consumer privacy regulations.

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Satgana has closed a €30 million fund to fund startups that tackle climate change problems in Africa. The fund will do so by investing up to €500K in the pre-seed and seed stages of startups across Europe and Africa.
The VC will leverage the network of its team and some of its investors to help founders with direct operational and strategic support.
Satgana will concentrate on food, agriculture, energy, mobility, industry, buildings, carbon removal, and the circular economy as it works to decarbonize all areas of the economy.
The fund has invested in 3 climate tech startups: Orbio Earth, a German startup building methane intelligence software to help energy providers monitor and reduce methane emissions with the use of satellites; Mazi Mobility, a Kenyan startup building a network of electric motorbikes and battery-swapping infrastructure in East Africa; and Yeasty, a French startup building an alternative protein leveraging beer yeast with a circular model.

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Yassir, a San Francisco-based Algerian super-app offering on-demand services and financial services, has closed a $150 million Series B funding to power its expansion across Africa and the rest of the world.
The investment was led by BOND, with participation from DN Capital, Dorsal Capital, Quiet Capital, Stanford Alumni Ventures, and Y Combinator, among other prominent strategic global investors.
The company confirmed that it is now the most valuable startup in the region, although it did not disclose its valuation.
It also claims to be one of the highest-valued companies in Africa and the Middle East. Yassir plans to further deepen its footprint in the northern African region and the rest of the world.

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Jumia, the African eCommerce giant, has announced a few changes in its management with the appointment of a new management board and the departure of co-founders Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec as co-CEOs.
Francis Dufay has been appointed as acting CEO by the supervisory board while the search for a permanent CEO continues.
The supervisory board has also promoted Antoine Maillet-Mezeray who was previously Jumia’s group CFO, to executive vice president of finance & operations.
These two changes are only the first out of many other senior management changes that the company will be making over the next few months.
The company says it will provide additional information on this announcement and business priorities on its Q3 earnings call scheduled for November 17, 2022.

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Amazon Web Services announced the opening of its first office in Lagos, Nigeria. The opening of the Lagos office comes five years after its first office in Johannesburg was opened in 2017.
The Lagos office is AWS’s latest investment in Africa as it’ll house teams of AWS account managers, partner managers, solutions architects, and other roles that support Nigerian customers.
Amrote Abdella, regional manager of Sub -Saharan Africa at AWS says Lagos offers a highly skilled and creative talent pool, and the area is home to many fast-growing startups and notable Nigerian enterprises leading the way in digital innovation.

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Netflix has acquired Spry Fox, a Seattle-based independent gaming studio focused on cozy games.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Spry Fox is now Netflix’s sixth in-house games studio.
Amir Rahimi, the vice president of game studios at Netflix, says that the acquisition will help Netflix accelerate its creative development in another popular genre.
Rahimi says their games journey has only just begun, but they are proud of the foundational work done to build out their in-house creative capacity so that they can deliver the experience of the best possible game including no ads and no in-app purchases to members as part of their membership.

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Twitter’s new CEO reached out to the European Union last week to assure local lawmakers that the platform will comply with an incoming flagship reboot of the bloc’s rules on digital governance around illegal content.
A move that will, self-evidently, demand a beefed-up legal, trust, and safety function inside Twitter if Musk is to actually deliver compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act at a time when Musk is sharpening the knives to cut headcount.
The comprehensive EU framework for regulating information society services and intermediary services across the bloc spans 93 articles and 156 recitals and is due to start applying as soon as next year for larger platforms.

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The Indonesia Stock Exchange has signed a memorandum of understanding with Metaverse Green Exchange, a Singaporean startup that specializes in digital exchange technology.
The intended collaboration centers around IDX’s emission trading scheme that is slated to launch in 2025, and MVGX’s job is to help IDX build a carbon registry and exchange with blockchain as the infrastructure layer.
Bo Bai, executive chairman and co-founder of MVGX, says using blockchain in carbon trading solves what’s called the double-counting problem where two entities or an entity and a country lay claim to the same climate action.

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