- Crypto Lender Celsius Network Exploring Options to ‘Preserve and Protect’ Assets
Crypto lending platform Celsius is exploring options to “preserve and protect assets,” following its mid-June turmoil, according to an announcement published on the firm’s blog on Thursday.
“Across Celsius today, we are focused and working as quickly as we can to stabilize liquidity and operations, in order to be positioned to share more information with the community,” the post reads.
These actions could include “pursuing strategic transactions” and “restructuring its liabilities” among other strategies, the company said. “These exhaustive explorations are complex and take time, but we want the community to know that our teams are working with experts from many different disciplines,” Celsius wrote.
- Report: Crypto Market Crash Wipes Millions of Dollars From North Korea’s Kitty of Stolen Cryptocurrencies
The recent crash of the crypto market may have wiped out millions of dollars in value from North Korea’s fund of stolen cryptocurrency, digital asset investigators have said. The drop in value of the crypto assets could supposedly threaten the country which reportedly relies on stolen digital assets to fund its programs.
According to a Reuters report, which quotes unnamed sources in the South Korean government, the bearish market will likely complicate North Korea’s ability to fund its weapons programs. The Seoul-based Korea Institute for Defense Analyses estimates that Pyongyang has spent as much as $620 million on missile tests this year alone.
The blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, which is reportedly monitoring crypto assets that were allegedly stolen by North Korea-backed hackers, believes the value of the stolen digital assets has plunged from $105 million to $65 million since the start of the year.
- Bitcoin Just Posted Its 2nd Worst Quarterly Performance Since Inception
Bitcoin (BTC) has posted its steepest quarterly loss in 11 years as the price of the leading cryptocurrency plummeted as much as 56.27% between April and June, according to data from blockchain analytics Skew.
It’s the worst quarterly performance since Q3 2011, when Bitcoin fell by 66.62%—from $15.40 to $5.14, which is also beating the drastic price slumps of the first and the fourth quarters of 2018, when BTC lost 49.89% and 42.54%, respectively.
https://7a54ea124ee281c6c75cf65195b14e81.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html After a relatively calm first three months of 2022, which saw Bitcoin fall by just 1.46%, the benchmark cryptocurrency plummeted from above $45,000 at the start of April to levels below $20,000 on June 30—slipping underneath $18,000 in the process.
Bitcoin was trading at $19,594 by press time, up 1.89% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
https://decrypt.co/104230/bitcoin-just-posted-2nd-worst-quarterly-performance-since-inception
- Messari Research: DCG’s Barry Silbert Wins from SEC ETF stalemate, but Investors Lose
As the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) discount — the value of the shares versus the underlying asset — continues to trade in the double-digits, the Securities and Exchange Commission has rejected the company’s application to convert it into an ETF. While Grayscale has filed a lawsuit against the SEC to try to force their hand \to change this, Messari Research’s Ryan Selkis has laid out a few scenarios in a note that he sees as possible outcomes for this quagmire.
Grayscale is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which owns CoinDesk.
Should GBTC be converted to an ETF, it would be a massive loss in fee revenue for Grayscale as the firm takes a 2% fee on the underlying assets regardless of the discount.
“A ‘winning’ case and ultimate ETF conversion would eviscerate Grayscale’s revenue by more than 50%. An ETF would mean an open redemption window, and a likely reduction in fees in order to retain AUM (assets under management). We’re talking about $200 million+ per year in profit reduction for DCG,” Selkis wrote.
https://www.binance.com/en/news/top/7141133
- Ethereum fork a success as Sepolia testnet gears up to trial the Merge
The difficulty bomb-delaying Gray Glacier hard fork went live on Ethereum on Thursday without a hitch according to the network’s core devs including Ethereum Foundation’s Tim Beiko.
The Sepolia testnet is also set to run through its Merge trial over the next few days and is the second last testnet to go through the trial before the official Merge.
According to Etherscan, the Gray Glacier hard fork was initiated on block number 15050000 at roughly 6:54 am ET, June 30. The hard fork will now delay the difficulty bomb by roughly 700,000 blocks or 100 days, giving devs until mid-October to complete the long-awaited Merge.
Ethereum Foundation community manager Tim Beiko promptly went to note on Twitter later that day that at 20 blocks past the fork, all monitored notes remained in sync, stating:
“20 blocks past the fork and it’s looking good: all monitored nodes except @OpenEthereumOrg, which doesn’t support the fork, are in sync. No blocks on the old chain so far!”
- VanEck Files New Application for Spot Bitcoin ETF
Investment giant VanEck has filed a new application for a spot bitcoin ETF with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
VanEck’s filing for its VanEck Bitcoin Trust comes just eight months after the SEC rejected its previous application and just a day after it denied the spot bitcoin ETF applications of Grayscale Investments and Bitwise. Grayscale Investments is a subsidiary of CoinDesk parent Digital Currency Group.
The SEC has repeatedly cited concerns about applicants’ ability to prevent market manipulation and protect investors, although the agency has approved multiple bitcoin futures ETFs.
“Spot commodities and currency markets for which it has previously approved spot ETPs are generally unregulated and that the Commission relied on underlying futures market as the regulated market of significant size that formed the basis for approving the series of Currency and Commodity-Based Trust Shares, including gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper, and other commodities and currencies,” VanEck noted in its filing.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/07/01/vaneck-files-new-application-for-spot-bitcoin-etf/
- Terra’s Crypto Tokens UST and Luna Classic Mysteriously Pumped This Week, UST Climbed by 470%
It’s pretty well known in the world of digital currencies that some crypto assets never die. That seems to be the case with the two notorious crypto assets luna classic (LUNC) and terrausd (UST), a former stablecoin that is sometimes referred to as terraclassicusd (USTC).
LUNC took the name luna classic because Terra’s new token is now referred to as LUNA. UST was once stable and held the $1 parity from October 2020 up until May 9, 2022. When UST depegged it dropped below a U.S. penny, and tapped a low of $0.006 per unit on June 18, 2022.
However, since the $0.006 per unit low, UST has jumped 617.5% from that range. UST swelled by 472.4% this week to $0.0926 per unit on June 29. While UST dropped in value after that rise, it still held a 24-hour trading range of around $0.04217516 to $0.081822 on Thursday, June 30.
- CFTC Cites $1.7 Billion MLM In Its ‘Largest Fraud Scheme Case Involving Bitcoin’
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a lawsuit today against Cornelius Johannes Steynberg and Mirror Trading International Proprietary Limited (MTI), charging them with fraud and registration violations.
The complaint accuses Steynberg of engaging in an international fraudulent multilevel marketing (MLM) scheme that brought in 29,421 BTC, worth over $1.7 billion. The agency says Steynberg also used his company MTI in the scheme, which ran for nearly three years from May 18, 2018, through March 30, 2021.
The civil action was entered at the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas.
“The little trading that Defendants did was unprofitable, and they misappropriated essentially all of the at least 29,421 Bitcoin accepted from participants,” said CFTC Commissioner Kristin Johnson in a press release. “Fraudsters often take full advantage of new technology, global connectivity, and perceived lack of a cop on the beat to perpetrate their scams.”
- Messari Research: DCG’s Barry Silbert Wins from SEC ETF stalemate, but Investors Lose
As the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) discount — the value of the shares versus the underlying asset — continues to trade in the double-digits, the Securities and Exchange Commission has rejected the company’s application to convert it into an ETF. While Grayscale has filed a lawsuit against the SEC to try to force their hand \to change this, Messari Research’s Ryan Selkis has laid out a few scenarios in a note that he sees as possible outcomes for this quagmire.
Grayscale is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which owns CoinDesk.
Should GBTC be converted to an ETF, it would be a massive loss in fee revenue for Grayscale as the firm takes a 2% fee on the underlying assets regardless of the discount.
“A ‘winning’ case and ultimate ETF conversion would eviscerate Grayscale’s revenue by more than 50%. An ETF would mean an open redemption window, and a likely reduction in fees in order to retain AUM (assets under management). We’re talking about $200 million+ per year in profit reduction for DCG,” Selkis wrote.
https://www.binance.com/en/news/top/7141133
- Coinbase denies reports of selling customer data to the US government
Crypto exchange platform Coinbase denied reports alleging that the company is selling its customer information to the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency that works under the country’s Department of Homeland Security.
On Thursday, news that Coinbase has been providing geolocation data to the ICE has circulated online. Because of this, Twitter users like Solobase Mac were shocked and noted that they “didn’t sign up for that.” They tweeted:
In a statement on Twitter, Coinbase clarified that the firm “does not sell proprietary customer data.” The exchange highlighted that its foremost priority is giving a safe and secure experience to the users of the platform.
Additionally, the crypto platform has also explained that its Coinbase Tracer tools are created to comply with government requirements. Coinbase noted that this is used to investigate finance-related crimes such as terrorist financing and money laundering. According to the exchange, the information they provide to the government comes only from public sources and not from Coinbase user data.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-denies-reports-of-selling-customer-data-to-the-us-government
