Cryptocurrency

Top Stories This Week Coinbase could face SEC enforcement action for ‘potential violations of securities law’ Crypto exchange Coinbase received a Wells notice from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suggesting an upcoming enforcement action. According to Coinbase, the “legal threat” could potentially target its staking program, listed digital assets, wallet or Coinbase

A nonfungible token (NFT) from the CryptoPunks collection worth 77 Ether (ETH) was sent to a burn address to be permanently destroyed. However, the collector’s intent was just to borrow some money against it to buy another NFT. NFT collector Brandon Riley added CryptoPunk #685 to his collection on March 13 by paying 77 ETH,

Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon has been charged with fraud by United States prosecutors in New York, just hours after he was reportedly arrested in Montenegro. The 31-year-old entrepreneur was charged with eight separate counts, including securities fraud, commodities fraud and wire fraud, according to a March 24 report from Bloomberg. What appears to be the

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments. Chinese crypto billionaire sued by SEC On Mar. 22, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, announced charges against Chinese blockchain personality and billionaire Sun Yuchen — better known as Justin Sun — and three of his wholly-owned companies Tron Foundation

Regulators and industry players highlighted a number of implications and potential impacts of the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation at the Paris Blockchain Week 2023. A panel titled ‘MiCA: How is the EU Regulating Crypto?’ delved into the proposed MiCA regulation which is expected to take effect in 2024. The 400-page regulatory guideline

Crypto executives have expressed irritation over the latest White House economic report — which notably features an entire chapter dedicated to casting doubts on the merit of digital assets. The Economic Report of the President, released March 20, marks the first time the White House has included a section on digital assets since it first

The Crypto.com customer who was accidentally sent $6.95 million (10.4 million AUD) from the exchange in 2021 and then allegedly went on a spending spree has been granted bail despite $2 million funds still unaccounted for. In the Victorian County Court, prosecutors on March 20 tried to convince the judge that imprisonment would be the only way

Bitcoin (BTC) is on track to close the week with gains of more than 23%. The banking crisis in the United States and Europe seems to have boosted buying in Bitcoin, indicating that the leading cryptocurrency is behaving as a safe haven asset in the near term. All eyes are on the Federal Reserve’s meeting

Top Stories This Week Sam Bankman-Fried petitions court to prioritize reimbursing his legal fees Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is seeking to use FTX’s corporate insurance policies to cover his legal expenses, according to a court filing on March 15. As per the filing, the policies provide “priority of payment” to insured individuals such as Bankman-Fried. The

After a recovery on March 16, the United States equities markets are again down on March 17. Investors remain concerned about the vulnerability of banks in the U.S. and Europe. A silver lining for cryptocurrency investors is that Bitcoin (BTC) has remained decoupled from the equities markets and has risen to its highest level since

The total crypto market capitalization increased by 26% in seven days, reaching $1.16 trillion on March 17. Bitcoin (BTC) was the biggest winner among the top 20 coins, up 31.5%, though some altcoins gained 50% or more during the period. Total crypto market cap in USD, 12-hour. Source: TradingView The surge in cryptocurrency prices occurred

The hacker responsible for the $196 million attack on Euler Finance has begun moving funds into crypto mixer Tornado Cash, only hours after a $1 million bounty was launched to uncover the hacker’s identity. Blockchain analytics firm PeckShield tweeted on March 16 that the exploiter behind the flash loan attack on the Ethereum noncustodial lending

Stablecoin issuer Circle says it has cleared “substantially all” of the redemption and minting requests for its stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC). In a March 15 operational update, Circle said between the morning of March 13 to the close of banking business in the United States on March 15, it had redeemed $3.8 billion USDC and

The investment arm of major cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin is moving to support new stablecoin initiatives by backing a Chinese yuan-pegged stablecoin issuer. KuCoin Ventures has led a $10 million investment into stablecoin issuer and blockchain-based payment service provider known as CNHC. Announcing the news on March 16, KuCoin Ventures said that the funding round included

The depegging of USD Coin (USDC) and Dai (DAI) from the United States dollar prompted a frenzy of loan repayments over the weekend, allowing debtors to save a total of more than $100 million on their loans. Following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on March 10, the USDC price dropped to lows of $0.87 on March

Top Stories This Week Silicon Valley Bank shut down by California regulator, holding over $5 billion for prominent crypto VCs Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was shut down by California’s financial watchdog on March 10 after announcing a significant sale of assets and stocks aimed at raising additional capital. The California watchdog appointed the Federal Deposit

Several USD Coin (USDC) holders have fled to other stablecoins since March 10 amid fears surrounding its solvency following the disclosure that a small portion of USDC’s collateral was held at Silicon Valley Bank. However, not all of them had success during panic selling. One user paid over 2,000,000 USDC to receive $0.05 of Tether

The death spiral of the Terra (LUNA) and TerraUSD (UST) ecosystem served as a catalyst to the 2022 bear market — causing losses in the millions, damaging investor sentiment and intensifying the regulatory spotlight over cryptocurrencies. However, the recent depegging of Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) led Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao to believe that traditional

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s latest salvo against “shitcoins” has ended up with him simply being sent more of it. Only days ago, the Ethereum developer made moves to sell over $700,000 of tokens previously airdropped to him, causing the price of these tokens to fall.  Buterin has since continued his war on apparent “shitcoins.” In

Hedera, the team behind distributed ledger Hedera Hashgraph, has confirmed a smart contract exploit on the Hedera Mainnet that has led to the theft of several liquidity pool tokens. Hedera said the attacker targeted liquidity pool tokens on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that derived its code from Uniswap v2 on Ethereum, which was ported over for

On March 7, United States Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned that interest rates might remain higher for longer than previously anticipated. This boosted expectations of a 50 basis point rate hike at the Fed’s March meeting to about 70%, from 30% a week earlier, according to FedWatch Tool data. The U.S. dollar shot up

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has gone on a shitcoin selling spree, exchanging nearly $700,000 worth of tokens previously airdropped to him for Ether (ETH). According to Etherscan, a wallet belonging to Buterin on March 7 offloaded 500 trillion SHIKOKU (SHIK) for 380.3 ETH ($595,448), nearly 10 billion Cult DAO (CULT) for 58.1 ETH ($91,021), and

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has hinted that the firm’s new layer-2 blockchain network Base may be subjected to transaction monitoring and Anti-Money Laundering measures at launch. In an interview with Joe Weisenthal on Bloomberg Radio on March 6, Armstrong acknowledged that Base has some centralized components today, adding that “it will be more and more

American rapper and actor Snoop Dogg has been revealed as one of the co-founders of a Web3-powered live streaming app called “Shiller” — adding to yet another Web3 partnership for the well-known hip-hop artist.  The app is described as a “live broadcast platform” that aims to combine Web3 technology with real-time live-streaming content. The rap star

Digital asset investment firms poured $2.7 billion into decentralized finance projects in 2022, up 190% from 2021, while investments into centralized finance projects went the other way — falling 73% to $4.3 billion over the same timeframe. The staggering rise in DeFi funding was despite overall crypto funding figures falling from $31.92 billion in 2021

ConsenSys has announced the upcoming release of its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) rollup to a public testnet on March 28, allowing for stress testing of the layer-2 scaling technology. ConsenSys’ research and development team has been working on its zkEVM rollup over the past four years. The zkEVM is touted to offer fast finality,

Bitcoin (BTC) is leading the cryptocurrency markets lower, and the matter is being exacerbated by Silvergate Banks’ ongoing issues. This week, the cryptocurrency-focused bank said it needed additional time to file its annual 10-K report and warned that it might not make it another 12 months. Reacting to this news, several cryptocurrency companies announced they would

Binance USD’s (BUSD) market cap has fallen below $10 billion for the first time in almost two years amid a United States regulatory crackdown on its token issuer and a planned delisting from a major crypto exchange. BUSD’s market cap has been on a steep downward trajectory since its all-time high market cap of $23.49

Trading platform Robinhood has launched its Web3 wallet on Apple’s App Store, becoming available to iOS users in over 130 countries. Robinhood shared the news in a Mar. 1 post, stating that users would no longer need to sit on a waitlist to access the new multi-chain, self-custody wallet. It added that it will be

In a new blog post published on Feb. 28, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin documented the continued need to improve the network to better facilitate Ether (ETH) as a means of payment. Buterin shared how he tried to pay for tea for himself and friends at a coffee shop in Argentina in 2021 but had to