Cryptocurrency

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bots who were trying to perform “sandwich trades” got outsmarted by a rogue validator, leading to a loss of $25 million worth of digital assets.  In a tweet, blockchain security firm CertiK highlighted that bots trying to execute sandwich transactions — spotting when traders are trying to purchase tokens and getting

Paris Blockchain Week celebrated its fourth edition in spring 2023 against a backdrop of riots, protests and general civil malaise. The builders in the Bitcoin (BTC), crypto, and Web3 spaces were unfazed by protesters chanting and dancing on the doorstep of the conference venue.  The event took place against the backdrop of ongoing protests in

Top Stories This Week FTX EU launches withdrawal website to pay back European users The European arm of FTX has launched a website to allow customers in Europe to submit withdrawal requests. It comes nearly five months after the global trading platform collapsed and went bankrupt in early November. Meanwhile, in the United States, lawyers

A local court in South Korea denied the prosecutor’s request to issue an arrest warrant for Terraform Labs co-founder Shin Hyun-Seong, also known as Daniel Shin. This was the second attempt made by South Korean authorities to reign in Shin following the recent arrest of Do Kwon — Terra’s other co-founder. On March 23, Kwon

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments. Binance’s secret U.S. users On Mar. 27, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) charged Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao with alleged willful evasion of federal law and operating an illegal digital assets exchange. In the 74 page complaint, the

Shrapnel: The game at GDC everyone’s talking about As the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco came to a close last week, there was one game that stood out from the rest. Shrapnel, a highly anticipated first-person shooter in the Web3 space, was the talk of the conference thanks to its stunning graphics and

Seychelles-based crypto exchange OKX has signaled its intention to expand its crypto services to Australia, a country it believes is primed to take on the next wave of crypto adoption. The trading platform explained in a March 29 statement that Australia would be a key growth market for the firm moving forward. The firm states

On March 27, European cryptocurrency investment firm CoinShares published its “Digital Asset Fund Flows Report,” which revealed that digital assets continue to attract investors’ attention as concerns over the stability of traditional finance (TradFi) continues to grow.  According to the latest report, investment products in digital assets experienced inflows of $160 million last week, the largest

The show Macro Markets, hosted by Marcel Pechman, which airs every Friday at 12 pm ET on the Cointelegraph Markets & Research YouTube channel, explains complex concepts in layman’s terms and focuses on the cause and effect of traditional financial events on day-to-day crypto activity. In today’s episode, crypto analyst Pechman discusses the fundamentals of

Crypto firms setting up in Hong Kong ahead of a new licensing regime for crypto exchanges in June have reportedly found some unexpected allies in the region — Chinese state-owned banks. According to a March 27 report from Bloomberg, Chinese banks including Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, the Bank of Communications Co., and Bank of China Ltd. have

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. The surge in cryptocurrency prices occurred as the United States Federal Reserve was forced to

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