June 27 (Cointime) - London has been ranked as the third-best global hub for cryptocurrencies, due to its high crypto adoption score and ease of doing business. The city's extensive traditional finance infrastructure, including the world's oldest and most trusted stock and foreign exchanges, also positions it as a global hub for trading of liquid assets, including crypto.

June 26 (Cointime) - As we approach the release of second quarter data, it's important to keep an eye on the trends in web3 and unicorn funding. While the last venture boom saw a fervor for investing in web3 startups, early data suggests that many venture investors are now hesitant. In fact, there has been a decline in the value of venture investment in unicorns and companies close to reaching unicorn status, with the metric nearing record lows. 

June 20 (Cointime) - Binance's venture capital and incubation arm, Binance Labs, has invested in the five best-performing projects of Season 5 of its Incubation Program. More than 900 projects applied for participation this season, with less than 2%of them being admitted into the program. The curriculum was tailored to meet founder needs and enhanced with exclusive ecosystem resources and fireside chats with market leaders.

June 18 (Cointime) - Seven cryptocurrency startups raised a total of $46 million this week, with Bit2Me, a Spanish exchange, receiving the largest investment of $15 million to expand into Latin America. Two startups focused on streamlining crypto payments, Poko and BoomFi, raised $4.5 million and $3.8 million respectively. Other notable fundraises included Connext, ResearchHub, Mnemonic, and Collectibles.com. This news comes after Coinbase and Binance faced scrutiny from the SEC for allegedly selling unregistered securities, but Bit2Me's services are not available in the United States.

According to Eric Dale, CEO of Northern Lightning conferences, the Bitcoin community in Europe is actively addressing social issues and conflicts on the continent. Dale believes that the community's ideals and the plethora of startups and companies building tools for Bitcoin make it uniquely positioned to combat social and economic injustice. He hopes to see Bitcoin become part of a peaceful monetary revolution, taking inspiration from the Czech Republic's fight against Nazism and communism.

Venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, has argued for the need to allow big AI companies to develop the technology aggressively, but not to establish a government-protected cartel. He believes that startups should be allowed to compete freely with market-leading companies to encourage innovation. Andreessen also championed open-source AI and called for governments to engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society's defensive capabilities.

X Ventures, a German impact investment fund, is hosting a two-day conference called Proof of Talk in Paris on June 14th and 15th. The summit will bring together more than 85 influential figures from the Web3 ecosystem, including thought leaders, CEOs, founders, investors, and regulatory authorities.

Chinese tech giant Baidu is launching a 1-billion yuan ($145 million) venture capital fund to support AI startups. The fund will also promote Baidu's own AI product through a developer competition. Baidu's initiative reflects the growing popularity of AI technology, with China and the US leading in large-language model releases. Baidu's Ernie chatbot, developed on its ERNIE LLM, has advanced features and has already attracted over 650 companies for various use cases.

Shahar Madar, the head of security products at Fireblocks, spoke with Cointelegraph at the Israel Crypto Conference about the importance of security for Web3 startups. Madar emphasized that many startups prioritize growth over developing a security protocol, but this approach is not effective in a Web3 world with a focus on finance. He stressed the need for companies to have a security framework and to ask important questions about access control and infrastructure testing. Madar recommended that startups start small and imagine how they would hack themselves in order to create a game plan for security.

Justin Bieber has come a long way since that baby-faced look when he was 15 years old.