For all the news about dips and reds and hacks and glitches this month, here's a piece of news pointing out some real usecases of cryptocurrencies in the Philippines. 

Enter Valora, a fintech app that offers cross-border remittance leveraging cUSD or Celo Dollars, the stablecoin operated on the Celo network for as little as 48 centavos.

48 centavos.

Recently, blockchain startup cLabs, the makers of Valora, announces new funding of $20 million from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), Greenfield One, and Electric Capital. This is in addition to the initial $65 million from backers including Polychain Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Jack Dorsey, Coinbase Ventures, and Valor Capital.

What can you do with Valora?

1. Participate in the CELO Rewards program*
2. Spend cUSD or CELO tokens on Beam and Go and partner merchants*
3. Transfer money to friends and love ones
4. Cash out in the form of gift cards from partner shops like 7-Eleven, OTTO Shoes, Landmark, and Zalora

cUSD or Celo Dollars, as well as the CELO token are also available on two licensed virtual currency exchanges in the Philippines -- CoexStar and Bloom. From our communications with Eric Cristobal, cLab's Philippine lead, he expects more people to be cashing out their cUSDs.

Check out the following articles:

• Startup cLabs Receives Fresh $20 Million Funding Following App’s Successful Philippine Trial
• How to Buy and Sell Celo and cUSD on Local Exchanges in the Philippines

Here's Luis Buenaventura, co-founder of BSP-licensed BloomX, on what he has to say about Celo, cLabs, and the Celo Foundation:

"We have long believed that there is a lot of space for innovation and optimization in the areas of money transfer and remittances. We are excited about the customer cost-savings as we grow $CUSD usage together in the Philippines,  and Bloom looks forward to several years worth of new apps, tools, and services built collaboratively with the Celo Foundation."

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PDAX suffered a major outage, cited glitch in the system.

You might have already heard what happened to PDAX, the licensed BSP exchange that experienced a major outage this February and claimed to have suffered a glitch that allowed users to buy Bitcoin for less than the expected market rates. In a press conference last week, CEO Nichel Gaba discussed the issue as well as answered the questions from BitPinas staff. 

BSP updated its guidelines for virtual asset service providers (VASPs).

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has updated its virtual currency exchange (VCE) guidelines to make it more inline with the rules and recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global anti-money laundering body. In this new “Guidelines for Virtual Asset Service Providers,” the BSP said it recognizes virtual assets (VA)’s potential to revolutionize the way the current financial services are being done, providing a faster and cheaper way to transfer funds and support financial inclusion. At the same time, the BSP also said there are risks involved with higher degrees of anonymity, the velocity of transactions, price volatility, and cybersecurity risks.

By the way, we were also able to interview the BSP about their position regarding cryptocurrencies.

Tweet of the Month 

We have written about how gamers are earning money through Axie Infinity. At some point this week, the price of SLP, the crypto earned in the game is Php 4. It is very easy to get 100 SLP in the game every day, and for those who do, they earn Php 400 daily, which is higher than the minimum basic salary:

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