Business

Crypto impacts on business models and financial tech.

28

Tuesday

2023 / 11

Nu Holdings, the parent company of Brazilian bank Nubank, previously invested by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, has soared 93% this year.

Berkshire began injecting $500 million into Nu Holdings in June 2021, and invested an additional $250 million in the cryptocurrency-friendly bank when the company went public in December 2021.

As of June this year, Berkshire held about 107 million shares in the company, with a shareholding ratio of about 2% and a value of $845 million.

ZeroSync project leader Robin Linus announced in a white paper titled “BitVM: Computing Anything on Bitcoin” on October 9 that BitVM can implement Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts without changing the Bitcoin consensus rules.

With BitVM, the “logic” of Bitcoin contracts will be executed off-chain, but verification will occur on Bitcoin, similar to Ethereum’s optimistic rollup.

BitVM’s architecture is based on a fraud proof and challenge response model, where “provers” can make claims and verifiers can perform fraud proofs to punish the prover when false claims are made.

Linus explained that Bitcoin in its current form is limited to basic operations such as signatures, time locks, and hash locks, but can now be extended through BitVM, which can compute many interesting applications.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in the opening statement of the trial of FTX founder SBF that the entire cryptocurrency empire of FTX founder SBF is a house of cards built on lies.

SBF’s defense team countered that the former FTX founder acted in good faith even though his business grew too fast and collapsed dramatically through no fault of his own, SBF’s lawyers said.

They placed some of the blame on one of his employees, his former lover Caroline Ellison, and said she failed to take safeguards.

Ellison has pleaded guilty and will testify during the trial. SBF’s criminal trial on fraud and conspiracy charges begins at 12:30 pm in New York on Wednesday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Rehn told the 12-person jury that the government will present evidence and expert witnesses to prove that the former cryptocurrency king lied to his clients and used their money to buy himself money, power and influence.

Binance was granted an extension on September 26 to respond to a court order in a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

U.S. District Court Judge Zia M. Faruqui for the District of Columbia granted motions by BAM Trading and BAM Management for an extension of time to respond to two previous court orders.

The first order requires the defendants to explain why certain documents related to the SEC’s motion to compel discovery should continue to be sealed or redacted, and the second order requires the defendants to justify the sealing of documents related to the SEC’s response to its motion to compel discovery.

BAM Trading and BAM Management now have until September 27 to respond to the show-cause order. The SEC did not oppose their request to extend the deadline.

Separately, BAM Trading and BAM Management filed an unopposed motion to postpone an Oct. 12 status conference. The two companies were the only defendants asking for more time to respond.

Greeks.live stated that last night, a total of 4,500 units of selling ETH-28JUN24-4000-C/buying ETH-29MAR24-1900-C were traded, with a nominal value of up to $15 million in diagonal spread block transactions.

Among the blocks compared this time, the long-term options expiring in March next year are particularly prominent. It is rare for such a large-scale transaction to occur in long-term options.

It is worth noting that 27OCT23-1700-C/29SEP23-1750-C, a total of more than 50,000 transactions with a nominal value of nearly US$100 million, appeared on the screen. It seems that whales intend to trade through the order book to avoid Open block order monitoring.

Comprehensive order flow information shows that whales are buying call options in large quantities across all major maturities. After buying $150 million in call options two days ago, they are buying call options in large quantities again.

Data from CCData shows that in August, Binance.US’s monthly trading volume dropped 98% from January 2022, and is expected to decline further in September.

According to CCData, from the beginning of September to September 15, Binance.US had a turnover of $115.7 million, while the volume in August exceeded $286 million.

Most of the decline has occurred since March, when the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission accused Binance of violations.

The SEC sued Binance.US, CZ and Binance in June, accusing them of a series of violations, including misrepresenting trading controls and supervision on the Binance.US platform. The SEC accused Binance.US in a filing on Monday of failing to clarify the facts.

PINS, the first project after LBank restarted Launchpad, is now trading at $0.0100149, an increase of 25% in 24 hours.

Since its launch on September 1, the total increase has reached 2003%.

Based on the hard-top individual subscription of Launchpad of US$1,000, early investors who participated in Launchpad subscription have received a maximum profit of over US$20,000.

PINs Network is a content social network that uses multi-role play to create a plot-driven metaverse. Its total token supply of PINS is 10 billion, of which 2% is distributed through Launchpad.

Data from Tronscan shows that Justin Sun’s address minted $815 million in TUSD on the Tron blockchain.

Starting at 11:45 AM, $815 million in TUSD was minted to the Tron blockchain through a series of 10 transactions.

Each mint is sent to a new address, which then immediately sends the funds to the Huobi 2 hot wallet. Prior to these transactions, the last time TUSD was minted to Tron was 7 days ago.

Shortly after these deposits, approximately $815 million in TUSD from the Huobi 2 address was sent to an address managed by Justin Sun, which was subsequently transferred to an unmarked minterproxy contract, which sent $865 million in TUSD to another address and burned.

The burning of TUSD happened to coincide almost exactly with the minting of stUSDT, with $865 million worth of stUSDT being minted to Sun’s address through 10 transactions, and Sun depositing stUSDT into the Tron-based lending platform JustLend through six transactions.

Deposits currently account for half of Sun’s $1.5 billion JustLend position, according to Tronscan data.

Options data: 22,000 BTC options are about to expire, with a put ratio of 0.74, a maximum pain point of $26,000, and a notional value of $560 million.

156,000 ETH options are about to expire, with a put ratio of 1.09, a maximum pain point of $1,650, and a nominal value of $250 million.

Greeks.live stated that the intraday fluctuations of BTC and ETH were very small, with only significant fluctuations around Tuesday. It is common for recent fluctuations to be concentrated on only one or two days a week, and the market hot spots are relatively small. There is almost no valid news for Token 2049.

The above situation has led to a sharp decline in the bullish positions of BTC for delivery this week, a significant increase in the bearish positions of ETH, and Skew has gradually returned to near zero, continuing to bet on the continuation of low fluctuations, but the trading intensity has declined this week.

Sarah Breeden, the incoming deputy governor of the Bank of England (BOE), said that the encryption industry does not pose a major risk to financial stability for the time being, but if its connection with the financial world deepens,

Especially when stablecoins are used for payments, it can pose a significant risk.

It is reported that Sarah Breeden has worked for the BOE for a long time. She will help guide the UK to formulate regulatory encryption methods and play a role in deciding whether to issue a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Breeden supports CBDC, believing it will become the anchor for all currencies in the digital world.

A court filing in bankruptcy court by FTX’s current management revealed a detailed list of the celebrities, businesses and sports teams it has promoted over the years.

Among them, FTX paid nearly US$750,000 to former NBA star O’Neal and approximately US$308,000 to tennis star Naomi Osaka.

Nearly $206,000 was paid to Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence and about $271,000 was paid to former Boston Red Sox player David Ortiz.

The company acknowledges that the list itself may not reflect an exhaustive list of all deposits and repayments, but is working to identify all outstanding payments from previous years to see how much of them can be recovered to repay debt.

As previously reported, on September 9, a financial consultant hired by FTX stated that FTX was studying whether it could recover promotion fees paid to sports stars such as O’Neal.

Grayscale’s legal team, along with attorneys for Davis Polk & Wardwell and Munger Tolles & Olsen, wrote to the SEC on Tuesday that there was no reason for the other party to refuse to convert its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) into a spot ETF.

Grayscale’s legal team said in the letter that GBTC’s Rule 19b-4 submission has been pending for almost three times as long as Section 19(b) of the Exchange Act would have allowed the Commission to take action.

Therefore, we hope regulators agree that the best use of resources now is for the Commission to issue an order approving NYSE Arca’s Rule 19b-4 filing and authorize staff to work with Grayscale and NYSE Arca to finalize a swift listing of the Trust’s shares. We believe the trust’s nearly million investors deserve this level playing field as quickly as possible.

American biographer Walter Isaacson is about to release a biography of Elon Musk of the same name. According to Isaacson, in the new book, Elon Musk’s secret relationship with the cryptocurrency Dogecoin will be made public.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of the encrypted asset exchange Binance, previously stated that he was surprised by the stable operation of Dogecoin since its creation, and suspected that there was Musk’s support behind it. His remarks were also widely recognized by the crypto world.

There is speculation that Isaacson’s new book may further confirm that Musk has been secretly funding the development of Dogecoin for a long time.

Christine Kim, a Harvard legal scholar and professor of law at Yeshiva University, recently published a research paper detailing the arguments for not just taxing virtual universes, but seeing them as laboratories for experimenting with cutting-edge policies.

In the paper, dubbed simply Taxing the Metaverse, Kim argues that the Metaverse allows participants to create and accumulate wealth entirely within its ecosystem.

The paper goes on to explain that the virtual world’s ability to record all digital activity and track personal wealth means that the government can track and tax income as soon as it is received, which could change the status quo of US tax law.

At Korea Blockchain Week KBW2023, Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech saying that clients have to store more and more things.

The first solution is to stop storing historical data, that is, adopt EIP-444 (enforce bound historical data in the client), the second solution is to transfer state storage responsibility to dedicated nodes, and the third solution is to transfer The old object is moved out of state.

EIP-444 means that the client must stop providing historical headers, bodies, and receipts on the p2p layer for more than one year, and the client can delete (prune) these historical data locally.

Following Grayscale’s victory in its lawsuit against the SEC, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may have no choice but to approve multiple spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications, JPMorgan said.

JPMorgan analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote in a note Friday that Grayscale’s victory means the SEC will have to retroactively revoke its previous approval of a futures-based bitcoin ETF in order to uphold its rejection of Grayscale. A proposal to convert its bitcoin trust into an ETF.

As such, it seems more likely that the SEC will be forced to approve spot bitcoin ETF applications that several asset managers have not yet approved, including Grayscale’s.

Data from crypto market intelligence platform Kaiko suggests that XRP was the best performer among the top 10 altcoins by market size on Coinbase during the recent decline.

Except for XRP, the average trade size for all identified altcoins is below $400, Kaiko said.

A screenshot of the 7-day moving average of all listed cryptocurrencies shows that XRP’s average trade size is higher than it was at the time of the Ripple vs. SEC case ruling.

Bitcoin has led the cryptocurrency market’s price plunge over the past 72 hours, losing about 8.7% of its value, according to TradingView.

The drop sent bitcoin prices below key support levels, retesting recent lows of $25,350.

Ethereum experienced a similar situation, losing 7.36% of its value during the crash. ETH also broke below a key support level before finding a local bottom at $1,602.

According to Shibarium Scan, the Shibarium network has more than 1 million wallets participating.

In total, these users executed more than 783,000 trades, with an average daily trade volume of approximately 73,640 trades. Notably, the blockchain’s total block count currently stands at 421,736.

Despite the surge in transaction volume, this has yet to translate into a significant increase in total assets locked on the bridge.

Currently, the figure is only $1.16 million. DeFillama data shows that the main players on the network are decentralized exchanges, mainly DogSwap and MARSWAP.

These platforms accounted for about $1 million of total TVL.

Exploits, hacks, and scams will steal nearly $1 billion in 2023, according to a report shared by blockchain security firm CertiK.

According to CertiK, more than $997 million has been lost so far in 2023 due to exploits, hacks and scams.

These include approximately $261 million in losses due to flash loan attacks, over $137 million in losses due to exit scams, and over $596 million in losses due to exploits.

Malicious actors targeting the cryptocurrency space stole more than $45 million in digital assets from victims in August alone, it was reported yesterday.

Some experts say the Grayscale and Uniswap rulings send a strong message to U.S. lawmakers that regulatory changes may be necessary.

The judicial logic of the two court cases, especially with Democratic-appointed judges, has special significance.
Grayscale judges Sri Srinivasan, Neomi Rao and Harry Edwards made the ruling, Rao wrote the opinion, and Srinivasan was an appointee of President Barack Obama and a relatively close Moderate Democrats.

Both Srinivasan and Edwards sided with Grayscale, which could send a signal that the SEC could lose to many Democratic judges.

Justin Slaughter added that the D.C. Circuit is considered the second most important court in the United States because it hears cases related to rulemaking and is also considered the SEC’s home court due to the Democratic majority.

John Aughenbaugh, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said that what is really impressive about the Grayscale verdict is not that the judges were appointed by different presidents, but that the judges were appointed by presidents of different political parties.

They’re basically sending the same message to the SEC that you need to make some sound decisions and you can’t keep treating the same class of bitcoin products differently.