Companies

Celsius Network may have misled its investors and spent customer funds, an independent examiner said in a Tuesday court filing.

Alameda Research has sued bankrupt digital assets lender Voyager Digital to reclaim US$445.8 million worth in loan payments before FTX filed for its own bankruptcy.

There’s always the possibility of a bigger scam or a bigger hack this year than the ones we saw in 2022. So what can the crypto industry do to survive 2023?

Tighter regulations are necessary but not enough. The industry also needs to address its issues with custody and transparency, writes Chen Zhuling of RockX.

Laws to prevent another FTX blowup, crackdowns on crypto tax cheats, and a ruling on Ripple are likely imminent. A bull’s eye is also on DeFi, writes Gergo Varga of SEON.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother and brother are not cooperating with the FTX legal team’s investigations into the Bahamans-based exchange’s bankruptcy and misappropriation of customer funds

BlockFi said it needed bonus payments to keep employees from fleeing the company. But creditors argue the plan is excessive when compared to other crypto bankruptcies.

Bitcoin this week broke through the US$23,000 price ceiling for the first time since Aug. 2022. Can the benchmark cryptocurrency maintain its momentum? Industry commentators share their views with Forkast on what the market is telling investors and the signals from the U.S. Federal Reserve on interest rates.

Prosecutors raided the Bithumb crypto exchange on Thursday on allegations of price manipulation and fraudulent transactions in local tokens,

The Dutch central bank (DNB) has fined U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase €3.3 million (US$3.6 million) for failing to obtain correct registrations

The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting has come to an end. What key takeaways were there for the crypto industry?

Lawyers for the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, FTX.com, filed a document with a list of its institutional creditors on Thursday, which included major technology firms, publications and government bodies.  

Cryptocurrencies post the Terra-Luna, FTX failures were a debated topic at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in the week through Jan. 20, with some authorities calling for a doubling down on regulations. Others had a more nuanced view.

Cryptocurrency exchange Luno, the London-based trading platform owned by venture capital firm Digital Currency Group (DCG), will let go of 35% of its global workforce

Bankrupt BlockFi reportedly had over US$1.2 billion of assets tied to FTX.com and its sister trading firm Alameda Research

Top blockchain and crypto news: Genesis bankruptcy begins. FTX chief ponders a reboot. China’s CBDC gets a smart-contract upgrade.

Binance Holdings Ltd., the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, acknowledged it mistakenly stored customer funds in the same wallet holding collateral for its Binance-pegged tokens, known as B-Tokens

Regulators should not legitimize “purely speculative” activity in crypto markets following the collapse of FTX, said Monetary Authority of Singapore Chairmen.

Genesis Global Capital’s lawyers are confident about resolving their disputes with creditors this week, with the goal of emerging from Chapter 11 in May.

India announces its full year budget on Feb. 1, the last before general elections in 2024, and the cryptocurrency and digital asset industry is lobbying the government for changes in tax rules, among others.

Signature Bank will not handle transactions of less than US$100,000 for crypto exchange customers starting in February, according to exchange giant Binance.

Binance Charity Fund, the philanthropic arm of the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance Global Inc., has announced it is funding 30,665 Web3 scholarships in 2023.

According to on-chain data, the trading arm of bankrupt crypto lending firm Genesis is still moving funds around on the blockchain.

Despite 2022’s turbulent impact on the crypto industry, Immunefi CEO Mitchell Amador believes this year could encourage better Web3 security.

Crypto lender Nexo Capital has agreed to pay US$45 million in a settlement with the SEC and the NASAA, over allegations of failing to register its lending product,

India’s crypto tax laws have caused local trading volume to plummet and the industry is hoping for better news in the upcoming budget session.

Bitcoin slipped below US$21,000 in Friday afternoon trade in Asia while prices of other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies were mixed. 

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the United States Department of the Treasury that combats financial crimes, has named Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, as one of the top three receiving counterparties of Bitzlato Ltd. 

FTX is exploring options to revive its bankrupt international cryptocurrency exchange, FTX.com, CEO John Ray told the Wall Street Journal.

Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson said he is considering acquiring CoinDesk, the media arm of the struggling Digital Currency Group.

Crypto brokerage firm Genesis Global Capital filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Thursday in the Southern District of New York.

Founder and former chief executive of FTX U.S., Sam Bankman-Fried, has rejected claims by the company’s current leadership made in a presentation on Tuesday that the team has only recovered US$181 million worth of funds from the exchange.

Singapore-based digital asset manager Amber Group has cut its Hong Kong staff by half to 40 to weather a slump in cryptocurrency prices and a cascade of bankruptcies in the industry.

Crypto brokerage firm Genesis Global Capital is preparing to file for bankruptcy as early as this week, Bloomberg reported.

Coinbase Global Inc., the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange by trade volume, has asked customers in Japan to withdraw crypto and fiat holdings by Feb. 16, as it halts operations “to conduct a complete review” of its business in the country.

Top blockchain and crypto news: SEC frowns on Genesis, Gemini. Solana soars. Will China tighten its embrace of WeChat Pay and Alipay to push its CBDC?

U.S.-based cryptocurrency bank Silvergate Capital Corp., which saw clients withdraw more than US$8 billion late last year, on Tuesday reported a US$1 billion loss for the fourth quarter of 2022, a slump it attributed to a “crisis of confidence” in the sector resulting from several large bankruptcies.

Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX told creditors that it lost around US$415 million worth of cryptocurrencies to hacks since it filed for bankruptcy.

Hong Kong’s new digital asset-friendly policies could set the city up as the home for secondary NFT marketplaces from China as trading of ‘digital collectibles’ remains a gray area on the mainland.

Climate action and Ukraine were key discussion points on the first day of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos.

The Singapore High Court has extended the creditor protection period for crypto lender Vauld to Feb. 28, as the firm has yet to come up with a revival plan

Web3 media company Forkast.News and blockchain data analytics firm CryptoSlam are merging to establish Forkast Labs, a media intelligence platform for the digital economy that will combine on-chain data analytics and journalism.

Tokyo-based online brokerage Monex Group Inc. indicated it may join the bidding for the Japan subsidiary of the failed FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

Creditors of Singapore-based crypto lending and borrowing platform Hodlnaut have rejected a proposed restructuring plan and wish to liquidate the company.

Alameda Research liquidators were liquidated for US$72,000 from an on-chain position on decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform Aave while trying to consolidate funds

South Korea’s attempts to extradite the founder of the collapsed Terra-Luna stablecoin will remain hamstrung while the courts in Seoul dispute the charges against him.

Crypto.com will lay off 20% of its workforce, its co-founder and chief executive officer Kris Marszalek said Friday in a Twitter post.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday charged cryptocurrency lender Genesis Global Capital and crypto exchange Gemini Trust with offering and selling unregistered securities to retail investors.

Coinbase, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange by trade volume, is cutting jobs and closing down most of its operations in Japan.

Cryptocurrency lender Nexo’s office in Bulgaria was raided by local authorities on Thursday over suspicion of money laundering, tax offenses, computer fraud and banking without a license.

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has received regulatory approval from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority to operate as a financial institution to manage and trade in virtual currency, as part of the exchange’s continuing expansion in Europe.

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, is planning to increase staff by as much as 30% this year.

National Basketball Association (NBA) team Miami Heat’s home arena will soon be renamed after a Florida judge ended the naming rights agreement between the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, FTX.com, and Miami-Dade County

The names of the crypto exchange’s 9 million customers and creditors will remain sealed from the public for at least three months.

Some 90% of user assets at WazirX, India’s largest crypto exchange by volume, are held in wallets at Binance while the remaining 10% are stored in hot and warm wallets, revealed WazirX’s proof of reserves that the company released on Wednesday.

Binance’s U.S. wing has received court approval to buy Voyager Digital’s crypto platform for US$20 million, as part of Voyager’s plan to liquidate in bankruptcy.

Top blockchain and crypto news: DCG under investigation. Lido DAO surges as Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade looms. Hong Kong burnishes crypto credentials.

Indian cryptocurrency exchanges faced a flurry of taxes on trading last year that saw volumes across most platforms drop as much as 90%, slashing income from trading fees. What’s a crypto exchange to do? Maybe sell mutual funds?

Barry Silbert of the Digital Currency Group wrote to shareholders on Tuesday to explain loans from its subsidiary Genesis Global Capital.

Binance Global, the world’s largest crypto exchange, has acknowledged flaws in its systems that allowed its BNB Smart Chain-based BUSD stablecoin to be under-collateralized by up to US$1 billion on at least three occasions, according to a Wednesday report from Bloomberg.

ConsenSys, the Ethereum software firm behind cryptocurrency wallet MetaMask, is reportedly planning to lay off at least 100 employees.

Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., will be letting go of about 950 employees, or about 20% of its current workforce, as part of “a further restructuring plan,” which is expected to be “substantially complete” by the second quarter of 2023. 

Microsoft is reportedly in talks to place a US$10 billion bet in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT

India’s Decimal Point Analytics (DPA), a research and data analytics firm, has received grant funding of up to US$750,000 from The Hashgraph Association, a Switzerland-headquartered non-profit organization, to develop an asset tokenization platform on Hedera’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) network. 

Wyre Payments, a San Francisco-based crypto payments firm, will implement withdrawal limits for user accounts, it said in a Twitter statement on Jan.7.

Federal prosecutors have issued subpoenas to several U.S. hedge funds that have dealt with the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance Global Inc.

U.S. prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have started to investigate cryptocurrency-focused conglomerate Digital Currency Group (DCG), Bloomberg reported on Saturday, citing unnamed sources.

Ripple expects a SEC ruling on a two-year-old suit and what regulations it could bring about.

Seychelles-based crypto exchange company Huobi plans to lay off about 20% of its staff, according to a Friday report from Reuters.

Bitcoin and Ether dipped in Friday afternoon trading in Asia, with nearly all other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies slipping. Dogecoin was the biggest loser, while Cardano’s ADA was the sole gainer in the top 10 cryptos.

The U.S. SEC has objected to Binance’s U.S. affiliate’s proposed US$1 billion purchase of bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital’s assets.

Animoca Brands Corp. has scaled down the target amount for its Web 3.0 and metaverse investment fund to US$1 billion.