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Crypto, Bitcoin and Blockchain News Admin: @wanwangg More Crypto News: @BitcoinBreaking
💰 Polygon co-founder launches web3 startup accelerator Beacon
Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon and Symbolic Capital, has launched a web3 startup accelerator. the New York City-based accelerator said it will support early-stage crypto projects through mentorship and financing.
Beacon is part of Nailwal's Symbolic Capital, a crypto venture capital firm he launched in August with a $50 million fund. Nailwal runs Beacon with Kenzi Wang, co-founder of Symbolic Capital, Prateek Sharma, former vice president at Sequoia Capital, and Uri Stav, former chief security officer at Digital Currency Group, among others.Beacon offers a 12-week program to mentor and finance startup founders.
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⚡️ Mad Money's Jim Cramer: I Trust My Money More in Draftkings Than I Would Binance
The host of Mad Money, Jim Cramer, has cast doubt on the trustworthiness of crypto exchange Binance. “Why can’t people in charge just admit that Binance has no real legitimacy after what happened to FTX?”.
The crypto exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Nov. 11, and an estimated one million customers and investors lost billions of dollars from its collapse. Bankman-Fried has been arrested in the Bahamas and the U.S. government and several regulators have brought fraud charges against SBF and the crypto exchange.
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📣 Mazars to pause all crypto exchange proof-of-reserves reports
Accounting firm Mazars is temporarily ceasing all work for its crypto exchange clients, including proof-of-reserves reports for the likes of Binance, KuCoin and Crypto.com. A Binance spokesperson says Mazars has stopped working with crypto clients.
Mazars has been working with crypto exchanges to publish proof-of-reserves reports since last month's collapse of FTX. These reports show the platform’s crypto holdings as a means of proving whether their reserves are adequately collateralized. While exchanges say these reports help to improve transparency, critics say it is not enough as they do not provide details about a platform's liabilities.
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🇺🇸 15% of US citizens made crypto transactions as of mid-2022
JP Morgan’s recent report revealed that almost 15% of individuals in the U.S. have issued transfers into crypto accounts, according to numbers from mid-2022. The detailed demographic data. The detailed demographic data also indicates that Men, Asians, and higher-income youth have the highest.
According to the numbers, the Millennials have the highest crypto adoption, with 20%. Generation X and Baby Boomers follow the Millenials as the second and third, with 11% and 4%, respectively.The racial statistics are focused only on the millennials since they constitute the majority of crypto users in the sample.
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🇯🇵 FTX Japan Has Until March 2023 to Cease All Operations
The Kanto Local Finance Bureau will supposedly halt FTX Japan’s activities on March 9, 2023. The Japanese authorities reportedly extended the business suspension order to FTX Japan until March 9, 2023.Initially, the company had to cease all services on December 9.
According to recent coverage, the Kanto Local Finance Bureau will grant FTX Japan three more months before halting all its activities. The authorities further claimed that FTX Japan’s trading system continues to be out of order. The Japanese subsidiary of the bankrupt exchange vowed to resume customer withdrawals by the end of 2022 by developing new infrastructure.
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💰 Bankman-Fried rejects claims that Alameda crashed luna to sink 3AC
Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon and the co-founders of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital have alleged that Alameda Research kickstarted the demise of luna. telling Three Arrows Capital to focus on its own problems.
One of the biggest claims is that crypto trading firm Alameda Research — the sister firm to FTX — deliberately crashed the cryptocurrency luna and its sister token TerraUSD in order to bring down Three Arrows Capital (3AC). It’s an allegation that has sparked a market manipulation inquiry by U.S. prosecutors. the founders of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.
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🪙 ApeCoin Up 6% as Holders Stake $32M in Ethereum Bored Ape Token
ApeCoin’s staking rewards are just around the corner, set to begin emitting on December 12, and the official staking contract has already taken in nearly $32 million worth of APE in one day—along with a wealth of Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape NFTs.
More than 7.6 million APE have been deposited into the contract to date, along with a number of NFTs. That price has been ticking up since Horizen Labs launched the official staking contract on Monday, and now is up 6% over the last 24 hours at a current price of $4.16.ApeCoin, the Ethereum-based token created for the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem.
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🇺🇸 Sam Bankman-Fried may not testify before US Congress on Dec. 13
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried may not testify before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services on Dec. 13 because he is still “learning and reviewing what happened” at the bankrupt exchange.SBF has maintained that he knew nothing about what caused FTX collapse, attributing it to mistakes detected late.
According to him, he would testify when he has enough clarity on what led to the implosion of his exchange. FTX founder has granted several interviews to media houses and journalists, which included the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, and multiple Twitter spaces.
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⚡️Three Arrows Liquidators Seize $35M, Seek $30M More for 'Much Wow' Superyacht
Liquidators for collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) today said they seized $35.6 million in cash held by the failed firm in Singaporean banks. and want clearance from a court to get $30 million from the sale of the firm's "Much Wow" superyacht.
In a Friday filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, court-appointed liquidator Teneo said they started to take control of assets held by 3AC or its pre-appointment lawyers. Liquidators added that they also recovered $2.8 million from forced redemptions of investments—as well as an unspecified amount of 60 different crypto tokens and NFTs.
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🪙 Ethereum accumulation trend hits new highs following FTX implosion
Ethereum whales and sharks have been accumulating Ether (ETH) at a record rate since the FTX crash, Santiment reported on Nov. 30. The market intelligence platform revealed that wallets holding between 100 and 100,000 ETH had reached a 20-month high.
Santiment highlighted the accumulation pattern leading to Ethereum Merge. According to the chart, Ethereum whales and sharks acquired more ETH in the weeks preceding the Merge, which pushed the asset’s value up but dumped immediately after the Merge. The blockchain analytics firm noted that the addresses dumped between October and November.
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🪙 Binance’s bailout fund is a welcome backstop for crypto
Last week, the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance formally unveiled a $1 billion “industry recovery fund” to help contain the damage dealt to the industry by the spectacular implosion of FTX. Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao had played a pivotal role.
Though Zhao has since dismissed “conspiracy theories” that he had orchestrated FTX’s demise and that of its sister trading firm Alameda Research, the irony of Binance playing both doomsayer and redeemer in the same month has not been lost on observers. “You sort of giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other,”.
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🪙 Bitcoin Holders’ Number Sets All-time High As Bottom Is Near
According to on-chain analytics portal Glassnode, the number of Bitcoin holders with a position size between 0.1 and 10 has beaten its historical values and reached new heights. Thus, the number of wallets holding more than 0.1 BTC.
Bitcoin analyst Willy Woo has noted that the bottom of the main cryptocurrency market is close. Woo bases his statements on the Max Pain model, according to which the BTC price reaches the bottom of the cycle when 58%-61% of all tokens are underwater, i.e., bought at a loss. Bitcoin is trading — though you could say stopped trading — at $16,500.
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💰 Justin Sun says Huobi and Poloniex could merge in future: Exclusive
Poloniex will merge with Huobi, citing sources familiar with the matter. But Sun said the two companies are independent and "haven't had any plan to merge yet." However, when asked if a deal could happen in future, he said it "could be" possible.
A similar situation occurred last month when Huobi announced the sale of a majority stake to Hong Kong-based investment company About Capital Management. At the time, Wu reported that Sun is the "real buyer" of the Huobi stake sale. But Sun denied the claim and said he is only an advisor to Huobi. Sun, however, has been at the forefront of recent changes at Huobi.
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🪙 Polkadot-based protocol t3rn raises $6.5 million: Exclusive
Polychain Capital led the round, with Huobi Ventures, Figment Capital, Blockchange Ventures, Lemniscap and others participating, t3rn announced Thursday. The funding was secured via a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT), t3rn founder and CTO Maciej Baj told The Block.
t3rn started in 2020 to offer cross-chain transactions across Polkadot's ecosystem and beyond. Baj said t3rn is under development as a parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem. He added that it will soon be launched on mainnet, supporting blockchains across consensus mechanisms and programming languages, including Ethereum Virtual Machine, Solidity and Ink.
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🇺🇸 U.S.-listed Eqonex latest crypto firm to seek court protection after cash crunch
The court filing was made under provisions for insolvency, restructuring and dissolution, the firm said in a separate U.S. regulatory statement. Eqonex had been in negotiations with potential investors to obtain equity financing through the issuance of new shares.
Eqonex's Hong Kong units, Diginex Ltd. and Eqonex Capital Pte. Ltd., are in the process of being placed into voluntary liquidation. The group's Digivault Ltd. and Bletchley Park Asset Management were not involved in the insolvency proceedings. Digivault will commence a controlled voluntary wind-down with the view of finding an alternative solution, Eqonex said in the regulatory statement.
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💰 Bitcoin mining jumps 3.27% after substantial dip
Bitcoin mining difficulty in October had its highest spike since last summer, when China cracked down on the industry and forced mining firms to flee to other countries. Meanwhile, its lowest ebb since then was just a few days ago.
A probable explanation is the switching on and off of machines depending on spot energy prices and profitability, with more efficient models also being deployed. But it also might be a case of luck, said Daniel Frumkin, director of research at Braiins. The difficulty adjustments are based on what is the average block time for that epoch.
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🇺🇸 60% of Americans Believe Crypto Investing is Highly Risky (Survey)
CNBC’s “Your Money Survey” estimated that 60% of the American participants consider the risk of investing in cryptocurrencies to be high. Just 5% of the respondents believe it is entirely safe to allocate some wealth to the asset class.
The decline of the cryptocurrency market, as well as the various adverse events in the sector, have had an impact on the sentiment among many Americans. CNBC’s latest research found out that 60% of the US respondents think of crypto investing as highly risky, while this figure was 45% in August 2021. 26% think delving into bitcoin and alternative coins hides a “moderate” risk, while only 5% consider it to be totally safe.
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⚡️ CFPB not planning crypto crackdown, says Bureau Director Chopra
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not planning an immediate crypto crackdown, its director said today, while choosing his words carefully.“Crypto is not a product. Certain electronic consumer transactions are,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra told The Block after an hours-long congressional hearing.
Digital asset policy came up frequently during a regular appearance by Chopra before the House Financial Services Committee, including further prodding around whether a recently published consumer alert bulletin related to crypto meant the bureau would step up enforcement on crypto companies. which led to the company’s announcement that it would gradually leave the U.S.
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⚡️ Waters 'disappointed' Bankman-Fried will no longer testify before Congress
House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters, D-Calif., says she’s “disappointed” and “surprised” at the timing of Sam Bankman-Fried’s arrest, due to his scheduled appearance before her committee tomorrow.
Although Mr. Bankman-Fried must be held accountable, the American public deserves to hear directly from Mr. Bankman-Fried about the actions that’ve harmed over one million people, and wiped out the hard-earned life savings of so many,” the statement from Waters continued. “The public has been waiting eagerly to get these answers under oath before Congress.
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⚡️ SEC Urges Firms to Disclose Crypto Exposure in New Letter
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has unveiled new guidelines for companies making financial disclosures, which call on them to provide a more detailed record of their exposure to the crypto industry in the wake of recent market chaos.
The letter also includes guidelines on exposure to third-party crypto market participants, risks related to firms’ liquidity, their ability to obtain financing, as well as risks relating to “legal proceedings, investigations, or regulatory impacts” within the crypto markets.SEC is now asking firms about any relevant exposure to the chaotic crypto industry.
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🇺🇸 U.S. banking committee says SBF ‘must answer for the failure’ of FTX
The US senate banking committee in a Dec. 7 letter to Sam Bankman-Fried said he must answer for the failure of his crypto firms in a hearing scheduled for Dec. 14. SBF failed to honor the invitation, he would be issued a subpoena.
Meanwhile, the committee chair for the House Committee on Financial Services, Maxine Waters, also said SBF could be issued a subpoena if he failed to voluntarily appear at the Dec. 13 hearing. The lawmakers’ readiness to subpoena SBF was after the FTX founder claimed he was not ready to appear before Congress until he has all the facts about what happened.
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🇺🇸 Senators want more info on Silvergate's 'egregious failure' on FTX
A bipartisan group of senators want more information from Silvergate Bank, a bank that caters to crypto and fintech clients, about the bank's current financial wellbeing, while also taking the company to task for its management of FTX and Alameda funds.
Warren and Kennedy both sit on the Senate Banking Committee, while Marshall is a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, which is debating legislation to reform regulations on some digital assets and crypto exchanges due to that committee's oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. U.S.-based junctions for crypto firms looking to get access to fiat bank accounts.
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📉 BlockFi's bankruptcy is the latest blow for a bleeding Bitcoin mining industry
BlockFi is one of the largest lenders in the mining industry. As if crashing crypto assets, high energy prices and increasing difficulty in mining weren't enough, now Bitcoin miners face the fallout from BlockFi's bankruptcy protection filing.
BlockFi was the second biggest lender in the space after NYDIG, according to public information laid out by The Block Research in June. On top of that, BlockFi debtor Core Scientific — ie, the largest mining company in the world — is itself close to filing for bankruptcy. Core had $54 million in outstanding debt to BlockFi in September and late in October said that it would not make payments by end of the month.
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🇺🇸 U.S. Trustee asks bankruptcy court to appoint FTX trustee
The U.S. Trustee has asked a Delaware bankruptcy court to appoint an examiner in the ongoing FTX bankruptcy case. It is a common step for the government to request one in a complex bankruptcy like the Chapter 11 bankruptcy most of the FTX-affiliated companies are now in.
FTX Digital Markets, the trading arm based in the Bahamas, has also filed bankruptcy there. The Bahamian government has indicated it does not plan to cooperate with requests to fully move that process, so as to consolidate all proceedings. FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Nov. 11. Since then, statements and filings have revealed.
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🇯🇵 Binance acquires Japan-based licensed crypto exchange SEBC
Crypto exchange operator Binance has entered Japan by acquiring the locally licensed exchange Sakura Exchange BitCoin (SEBC). The acquisition marks Binance’s first license in East Asia, the company announced Wednesday. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The deal marks Binance's re-entry into Japan. Last year, JFSA issued another warning against Binance, saying that the company is still operating in the country without registration. Binance, at the time, said it "does not currently hold exchange operations in Japan, nor do we actively solicit Japanese users.". Binance said it will not accept new users in Japan to its main Binance.com website, effective today.
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🇸🇬 Singapore Government Faces Intense Scrutiny Over FTX Collapse: Report
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Deputy Prime Minster Lawrence Wong are facing intense scrutiny from the parliament over FTX investor losses and the due diligence undertaken by state-owned investor Temasek Holdings.
The opposition – Workers’ Party – has reportedly filed over a dozen of questions about Temasek’s investment while questioning the Singaporean government’s credibility in monitoring losses incurred by retail investors and also the city-state’s stance towards crypto investments in general. Questions were also raised with respect to due diligence or measures undertaken before investments in platforms such as FTX.
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💰 Op-Ed: FTX killed crypto, long live Bitcoin
The FTX collapse has revived the narrative that “Bitcoin maximalists were right all along.”. Given the size of the troubled exchange and the number of entities caught up in its web, the FTX scandal has dominated headlines of late.
Behind the veil of high-profile sporting and celebrity endorsements, FTX managed to build a trusted reputation within its relatively short three-and-a-half years of existence. Although skeptics said the red flags were always there, that is no consolation to those who banked on FTX and lost big. The net result of the scandal is the loss of billions and an industry scrambling to preserve.
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⚡️ Applied Digital sees buying opportunities as mining hardware selling for dirt cheap
Applied Digital sees the new fund as an opportunity to grow its hosting customer base. As the market tightens for some of the biggest bitcoin mining companies, hosting provider Applied Digital is going after distressed assets with a new independent fund. It aims to raise $100 million.
The new fund, Highland Digital, is a joint venture with one of Applied Digital's clients, GMR Limited. It will pool together funds from investors, who will have ownership of the mining machines and be charged a fee to be split by the two companies. Applied Digital potentially would benefit from an increase in revenue as it hosts those newly acquired machines.
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🪙 ‘Boring’ Litecoin makes play for top 10 amid market meltdown
Litecoin has been climbing the crypto market cap ranking and currently stands at rank 15 with a market cap of as of press time. Meanwhile, the shake-up sees Solana move in the other direction, sliding from its top 10 position at the end of October to place behind Litecoin at 16th.
On Oct 30, Litecoin was languishing in the 21st spot, sandwiched between Cosmos and Chainlink. However, recent events have turned the crypto industry upside down, with some commentators warning that the FTX contagion is yet to run its course. Ray painted a grim picture for creditors, saying he had no confidence in the financial statements due to the lack of cash management systems and poor reporting mechanisms.
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