The past week (30 September to 7 October 2022) was a reasonably good one for the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin (BTC) rose by 3% and a number of altcoins, such as Polygon (MATIC) and Ripple (XRP) rose by even more than 10%.

In terms of new developments, it was not a bad week for cryptocurrencies either, as a number of positive news items came out. These include multinationals T-Mobile and McDonald's getting more involved in the crypto industry. Read along below for all the most important crypto news of the past week!

McDonald's starts accepting Bitcoin and Tether in Swiss city

Multinational fast-food chain McDonald's has started accepting Bitcoin (BTC) as a payment method in the 63,000-strong town of Lugano in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, which is becoming a hotspot for cryptoadoption in Western Europe.

A one-minute video of ordering food on McDonald's digital kiosk and then paying at the regular checkout using a mobile app was uploaded by Bitcoin Magazine on Twitter on 3 October.

The Tether (USDT) logo could be spotted next to the Bitcoin symbol on the credit ATM, which is not surprising as the city of Lugano announced in March 2022 to accept Bitcoin, Tether and the LVGA token as legal tender.

Parent company of T-Mobile launches Ethereum staking validator

Deutsche Telekom (DT), the parent company of wireless network operator T-Mobile, has announced that its subsidiary T-Systems MMS will support the Ethereum blockchain network through infrastructure in the form of validator nodes.

In a press release, the German tech giant revealed that T-Systems will also offer liquid Ether (ETH) staking services through a partnership with ETH strike service provider StakeWise.

Through this partnership, DT's subsidiary will participate in the governance of the decentralised application (dApp) as it has joined StakeWise's decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO).

According to DT, the move aims to strengthen the company's presence in the blockchain space while contributing to the transparency of the second-largest blockchain network.

The move is also meant to show support for the Ethereum network's transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. T-Systems MMS already maintains other "sustainable blockchain networks" such as Flow, Celo and Polkadot.

Record label of Madonna and Ed Sheeran partners with OpenSea

Warner Music has partnered with OpenSea.The idea of the collaboration is to give Warner Music artists early access to new products on OpenSea and put them at the forefront when they publish new stuff on the marketplace.

Artists will also get help from the OpenSea team to raise their profile in the world of Web3 and get their existing fan base into the NFT world. In this way, it will be a mutually beneficial collaboration.

OpenSea benefits from the huge fan base of artists like Madonna, Cardi B, Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran, while they in turn benefit from Web3's expertise and OpenSea's large user base.

"Our partnership with OpenSea makes Web3 tools available that enable our artists to connect more deeply with their fans and give them new forms of access and ownership," said Oana Ruxandra, Chief Digital Office of Warner.

The first project that Warner Music and OpenSea will undertake together is the launch of NFT Label Passes for Probably A Label, the Web3 record label that Warner Records launched last month.

Emurgo invests €200 million in further development of Cardano

Cardano development lab Emurgo will invest more than €200 million to support the ecosystem's growth over the next three years, founder Ken Kodama told IANS.

Emurgo is the founding entity of the Cardano protocol and is developing products, services and applications designed to support the growth of the network.
The funds, which come from Emurgo's own capital, will be provided to projects that build directly on Cardano and to projects from other networks that build products that integrate Cardano's network alongside their own.

Kodama said 100 million euros will be earmarked for investments in Africa under Emurgo's African investment initiative. He explained that a key growth driver in the region is the use of lending and borrowing crypto services intended for everyday life, as opposed to speculative purposes.

Kodama acknowledged that the growth of the Cardano network was relatively slow compared to other networks. However, he added that Cardano was now ready with the infrastructure needed to safely expand and grow the network in the coming years.

Earlier this month, Cardano's long-awaited Vasil hard fork went live. The fork will enable the use of smart contracts and decentralised applications (dapps), which run on a blockchain system without a central administrator, on the network.