LIVE AT LAST: Trading of bitcoin futures on ICE’s long-awaited Bakkt exchange got off to a slow start Monday. The first contract changed hands (at $10,115) a few minutes after the platform went live (12:00 UTC), followed by another four settling within the first hour. Ten hours later, 28 contracts had been traded, with only one falling below $10,000. Experts speculated that brokers were not quite ready for launch, but they expect the pace of trading to pick up in the days ahead. Full story

MATH MAGIC: Also on Monday, blockchain research and development startup Matter Labs announced a $2 million seed round led by Placeholder VC to develop a new scaling initiative atop the ethereum blockchain. Matter's technology is based on a novel form of cryptography known as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). By leveraging this “mathematical magic,” says co-founder Alex Gluchowsk, transactions on ethereum can be significantly sped up and cheaper to deploy. Full story

‘SPECULATION’: China’s central bank has denied that it plans to launch a national digital currency in November. News sources including Forbes made the suggestion in late Augustl. But the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) said on Saturday that the November date was “inaccurate speculation,” as were details of institutions said to be participating in the project, Chinese daily Global Times reported. Full story

BLOCK OVER: Binance.US, the American arm of cryptocurrency exchange giant Binance, says it will start offering fiat-crypto and crypto-crypto trading pairs on Tuesday. The platform will list seven cryptocurrencies immediately, including bitcoin, Binance coin (BNB), ethereum, XRP, bitcoin cash, litecoin and Tether’s USDT. In June, Malta-based Binance barred U.S. traders from its global platform Binance.com. Full story

SMART CHAIN: Networking giant Cisco Systems is partnering with SingularityNET, developer of a decentralized AI platform, to host its Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) project. AGI is a branch of AI that focuses on a computer’s ability to learn intellectual tasks. Dr. Ben Goertzel, SingularityNET CEO, said, “The scale of the AGI deployments needed by a partner like Cisco is going to be tremendous, and we are working hard to make sure our AGI tools and our blockchain-based platform is up to the task.” Full story