LONDON

MisterChauncyButtons

Literally the whole article: LONDON, July 14 (Reuters) - A committee in Britain's parliament has told payment firms Visa and Mastercard to justify recent rises in their card transaction fees after the country's payments regulator expressed concerns. The Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) told the Treasury Committee last week that the increases in card fees showed the market was "not working well", according to correspondence published by the committee on Thursday.

pdn443

THE OWNER OF ALL THESE SCAM IS Gurhan Kiziloz HIS FATHER NAME BE THIS Gursel Niyazi LET SHUT THIS MF DOWN > HE WORKIN OUT OF LONDON AND WANT TO SHARE WIVH ANYONE WHO NEED. THE ADDRESS I SCAMMED OF MY HARD MONEY WE MUST GET HIM AND MONEIS BACK

Mcgillby

Paywalled Content: Museums Are Cashing In on NFTs There’s money to be made, though most institutions are wary of getting involved. By Scott Reyburn March 25, 2022, 11:31 a.m. ET LONDON — “To wake up to one of these things is pretty special — to have a Leonardo at home,” said Joe Kennedy, the director of the contemporary art dealership Unit London, enthusing recently about an elaborately framed LED screen with a digital replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Portrait of a Musician” glowing on his gallery wall. The original was 800 miles away in the Ambrosiana museum in Milan. The Leonardo was one of six ultra-high-resolution copies of famous paintings from across the centuries in Unit’s moodily lit “Eternalizing Art History” exhibition, which closed on Saturday. The show was the latest attempt by cash-poor museums to generate money by selling nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Last year, NFTs, usually pegged to the high-flying but volatile Ethereum cryptocurrency, took the market for art and collectibles by storm, with sales estimated in the tens of billions. Pandemic-related lockdowns and reprioritized government spending have put the world’s public museums under financial pressure. Yet so far, despite the formidable sales figures being achieved by NFTs, few institutions have explored this digital asset as a fund-raising mechanism. Unit and its Florence-based technology partner Cinello forged licensing agreements with several prominent Italian museums to create a hybrid offering of limited edition LED reproductions in period-style wooden frames, each accompanied by a unique NFT. Same-size digital versions of the Leonardo portrait, Caravaggio’s “Bowl of Fruit” (also in the Ambrosiana) and Raphael’s “Madonna of the Goldfinch” (in the Uffizi in Florence) were offered in editions of nine, ranging in price from 100,000 euros to €500,000 per piece (around $110,000 to $550,000). Fifty percent of sales proceeds went back to the licensing museums. By the Friday after the show closed, seven sales had been confirmed up to €250,000, which included at least one of the Leonardo NFTs. The collaboration between Unit and the Italian museums follows earlier attempts by other European institutions to get on the NFT bandwagon. Among those are the State Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, Russia, which last September held an auction of NFT replicas of five of its best-known paintings that raised $444,000. The Belvedere museum in Vienna has fractionalized the digitized image of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” into a one-off drop of 10,000 NFTs. This was released on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, priced at 0.65 Ethereum, or €1,850, each. Earlier this week, Irene Jaeger, a media relations officer at the Austrian museum, said around 2,400 of these Klimt NFTs had been sold, generating about €4.3 million. Producing NFTs uses a lot of energy, particularly on the Ethereum blockchain. According to one estimate, the computing power required to mint one NFT generates the same amount of greenhouse gas as a 500-mile journey in a gasoline-powered car. Nonfungible tokens can make money for a museum, but they also have the potential to create image-damaging environmental issues. A more eco-friendly offering of 50 NFTs based on a William Blake print, individually priced at 999 units of the “green” cryptocurrency tezos (about $3,290 at current values), has so far attracted eight sales for the Whitworth museum in Manchester, England, since its release in July, according to Bernardine Brocker Wieder, the chief executive of Vastari, the project’s technical partner. Environmental issues are one reason barely a dozen museums have so far experimented with NFTs as an alternative revenue stream. The instability and opacity of unregulated cryptocurrencies, the difficulty of finding trusted tech partners and the cost of such partnerships are also cited by museum professionals as reasons for hesitancy. “American museums are nonprofit organizations that work in the public trust,” said Tina Rivers Ryan, a curator specializing in digital art at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo. “This means that legally and morally they are bound to move slowly.” Ryan added, however, that many American museums are currently having internal discussions about how NFTs might be incorporated into their mission. “The market is changing so rapidly,” she said. “There are legal, environmental and other ramifications that have to be thought about very carefully.” One institution that has wasted no time in embracing NFTs as a fund-raising tool is the British Museum in London. Chaired by George Osborne, a former British finance minister, the museum entered into an exclusive five-year partnership in September with the Ethereum-based NFT platform LaCollection. The museum has since made several token drops, in editions varying in size from two to 10,000, using digital copies of works by Katsushika Hokusai and J.M.W. Turner. Prices ranged from $500 to $40,000. Aware of the environmental sensitivity of large-scale token drops, LaCollection said on its website that “for each minted NFT, we plant a tree” that “more than offsets” the activity’s carbon footprint. Last month, sales reached “seven figures,” said Sophie Reid, spokeswoman for the project, in an email. The British Museum itself declined to comment. Suse Anderson, an assistant professor of museum studies at George Washington University, said she was skeptical about museums becoming involved in the mania for NFTs. “It risks being a gimmick rather than focusing on the work itself. We should be making resources as available to the public as we can,” Anderson said. Yet she acknowledged that there was currently a market for NFTs from museums. “It may not last long, but this is a moment where there is a possibility for fund-raising and visibility,” she said. At the moment, that market is relatively small. Publicly funded galleries are wary of cryptocurrencies, and, for those immersed in that world, digitalized old art doesn’t have the speculative cool of “native” NFTs, like CryptoPunks or Bored Apes, which can sell for millions. As yet, no museum NFTs have achieved attention-grabbing profits on resale platforms, such as OpenSea. But what if the reproduction of a masterpiece is so good it looks just like the original, hanging in a beautiful frame on a wall? Don’t those have the potential to sell for millions, or at least hundreds of thousands? On the final day of the Unit “Eternalizing Art History” show, Eve Smith, a lawyer, seemed impressed. “This is the second time I’ve been. I was completely astonished,” said Smith, gazing at a backlit ultra-high-resolution digital copy of Francesco Hayez’s 1896 painting of embracing lovers, “The Kiss,” in the Pinacoteca Brera museum in Milan. “It looks like satin. It looks like there’s texture in what you’re looking at, but there isn’t,” Smith said. “Will I still want to go to the Brera? Of course.” But would she be prepared to pay Unit London’s asking price of €180,000 to own one of the edition of nine, plus its NFT? “It depends how much you like repro,” Smith said.

autotldr

This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.reuters.com/business/lme-suspends-nickel-trading-day-after-prices-see-record-run-2022-03-08/) reduced by 86%. (I'm a bot) ***** > LONDON, March 8 - The London Metal Exchange was forced to halt nickel trading and cancel trades after prices doubled on Tuesday to more than $100,000 per tonne in a surge sources blamed on short covering by one of the world's top producers. > China's Tsingshan Holding Group, one of the world's top nickel and stainless steel producers, had been building a short position in nickel since last year, betting prices would fall, three sources familiar with the matter said. > The LME raised margin requirements for nickel contracts by 12.5% to $2,250 a tonne and suspended nickel trading on all venues for at least the rest of the day. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/ta17dt/london_metal_exchange_lme_artificially_halted/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~630902 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **nickel**^#1 **LME**^#2 **trade**^#3 **market**^#4 **prices**^#5

hateschoolfml

LONDON METAL EXCHANGE SAYS CANCEL ALL NICKEL TRADES EXECUTED ON OR AFTER 00:00 UK TIME ON 8 MARCH 2022 IN THE INTER-OFFICE MARKET AND ON LMESELECT Fiat standard manipulation 101 https://twitter.com/deitaone/status/1501167834008797189?s=21

ConcertPlenty

European Markets down today (Tuesday) also, from CNBC: "LONDON — European stocks closed firmly lower on Tuesday amid reports that a significant Russian convoy is heading toward Ukraine’s capital Kyiv."

kirtash93

TLDR; REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo LONDON, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Britain's financial watchdog said on Wednesday it planned to curb the marketing of cryptoassets and other high-risk investments, a move that comes amid a boom in crypto ads and endorsements from celebrities. read more FCA Graphic on High Risk Investments 'CLEAR, FAIR AND NOT MISLEADING' The draft rules, put out to public consultation, also prepare the ground for Britain to bring promotions of cryptoassets under the watchdog's remit for the first time, following a finance ministry announcement on Tuesday. Retail investors too often follow the advice of influencers on social media without researching products or their risks, she said. The FCA will set out final rules in the summer.

the_investigator-

Article to save you the click: LONDON, Nov 8 (Reuters) - Little could James Christie have known some 240 years ago, as he sold masterpieces by Rembrandt and Rubens to Catherine the Great, that his auction house would one day offer virtual apes to a crypto company for over $1 million. Nor would Sotheby's founder Samuel Baker, auctioning hundreds of rare books for about $1,000 in 1744, have envisioned selling a copy of the original source code for the web, as a non-fungible token (NFT), for north of $5 million. Times change. "Everybody wants to sell an NFT," said Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby's global head of science and popular culture. "My inbox is just absolutely clogged." Sotheby's has sold $65 million of NFTs in 2021, while arch-rival Christie's has sold more than $100 million of the new type of crypto asset, which uses blockchain to record who owns digital items such as images and videos, even though they can be freely viewed, copied and shared like any other online file. read more Those sales figures for the world's leading auction houses account for about 5.5% of their contemporary art sales, according to Art Market Research data. It's a leap, given NFTs have only taken off in the last year. Many buyers are from a new category of wealthy clientele: people who made their fortunes through cryptocurrencies, art specialists involved in NFT sales at major auction houses told Reuters. In a Sotheby's online NFT sale in June which brought in $17.1 million, nearly 70% of the buyers were newcomers. Indeed the three NFTs of crude cartoon apes which were snapped up for 982,500 pounds ($1.3 million) at Christie's in London last month were bought by Kosta Kantchev, who runs a cryptocurrency lending platform called Nexo. The cartoons, from a set called Bored Ape Yacht Club, were Christie's first NFT sale in Europe and were offered up at its biggest in-person auction since the start of the pandemic. In a sign of the changing times, Kantchev was rubbing shoulders with art collectors bidding on works by David Hockney, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Bridget Riley. Antoni Trenchev, who runs Nexo with Kantchev, said their purchase of the apes was less for their aesthetic value than a bet that the market for NFTs would continue to grow, fuelled by the rise of the "metaverse" of online worlds where virtually anything can be bought or sold, from avatars and clothes to land and buildings. read more Indeed digital art is just one part of the explosive sales growth for NFTs, which topped $10 billion in the third quarter of this year alone, up eightfold from the previous three months. read more "We're working on exciting new financial tools for NFTs that will stimulate adoption of the asset class," Trenchev said, referring to the possibility of Nexo selling financial products based on NFTs as the underlying asset. They're not the only ones betting on the metaverse. Facebook - a company worth almost $1 trillion that has rebranded as Meta on the calculation that increasingly-immersive virtual environments and experiences are the future. read more TRADITION UPENDED Whether Mark Zuckerberg is prescient or not remains to be seen. The NFTs boom is nonetheless dragging auction houses hundreds of years older than Silicon Valley into a new world. To hunt their new breed of buyers, big auction houses are taking to social media. Noah Davis, head of digital art sales at Christie's, said his potential NFT buyers were happy for him to ditch the formalities normally involved in attracting art collectors, adding that he recently negotiated a contract over the messaging platform Discord and registered buyers for an auction via Twitter. "That's where it happens, that's where client services are done," he told Reuters, adding that it was remarkable how much quicker this process compared with traditional methods. In another big digital shift, auction houses are often sourcing NFTs directly from the crypto artists – in many cases, little-known, pseudonymous figures. In the physical art market, by contrast, artists' primary sales are normally run by galleries, while auction houses traditionally focus on secondary market sales. "For me the biggest surprise is that the artists want to work with the auction houses directly. We've always been in the secondary market," said Rebekah Bowling, senior specialist of 20th century and contemporary art at Phillips, another global auction house. "The traditional structure has been upended," said Bowling, who uses Twitter and Clubhouse to reach artists. WHY CRYPTO'S RISKY Yet these newcomers to an untamed metaverse also confront a new sphere of risk, particularly around cryptocurrencies, which crypto-rich buyers often prefer to use to pay for NFTs. Auction houses can face legal risks in terms of know your customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) requirements, said Max Dilendorf, a cryptocurrency lawyer and partner at Dilendorf Law Firm in New York. "These products could be securities and when a gallery is picking up an artist or product they better do their own due diligence," he said, adding that money laundering via cryptocurrencies was a "known fact." Sotheby's did not comment on its KYC or AML procedures. Christie's said its KYC and AML standards in NFT sales were the same as those for physical artworks, though declined to go into detail. Phillips said it checked that buyers had sufficient funds in their crypto wallet. Another issue is that while NFTs are marketed as a way of indisputably recording ownership of a digital asset, problems can still arise. A Sotheby's NFT sale in June - in which a buyer spent $1.5 million on what was marketed as the first-ever NFT, a simple geometric animation called "Quantum" by Kevin McCoy - was complicated by a claimant emerging saying they owned an earlier, original version of the same NFT, the buyer and claimant told Reuters. They said the dispute over which could truly could be called the first NFT meant the transaction was delayed, and blockchain records show the purchase was not transferred until several weeks after the sale. Separately, after a Sotheby's auction of an NFT representing the World Wide Web source code, which fetched $5.4 million, observers noticed errors in the included video version of the code. Sotheby's did not respond to a request for comment on either sale. Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, a Miami-based collector who buys both NFT and physical art, said the steps that auction houses had taken into the digital sphere had been very positive. "I think they're normalising the ecosystem, and I think that very soon they'll find the right path," he said. "But the curation challenge and the technology challenge are major ones," he added, referring to auction houses acting as galleries by handling primary sales. On Tuesday, Christie's will sell a new NFT by Beeple, the artist whose NFT fetched $69 million at Christie's in March. That was the first time a major auction house had sold a piece of art that does not physically exist. read more However this time round his work will be sold in physical, as well as NFT, form. At Christie's at least, the real world still holds some appeal.