Here's your Tuesday edition of Cryptonews Crunch, featuring the latest stories with the SEC busting a crypto pyramid & ponzi scheme that raised over USD 300m, cross-chain messaging protocol Nomad loses USD 150m in a security exploit, and AMP nosedives due to Binance.US delisting the coin after the SEC claimed it was a security.
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Source: CoinMarketCap.com
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- The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged 11 individuals for their roles in an alleged crypto pyramid and Ponzi scheme that raised over USD 300m from millions of investors worldwide, including in the United States. The watchdog filed a civil complaint on Monday against blockchain networking platform Forsage, which claimed to be a decentralized smart contract platform allowing investors to enter into transactions via smart contracts that operated on the Ethereum, Tron, and BNB Smart Chain blockchains.
- AMP, the native token of the Amp blockchain, has extended losses following news that Binance.US, the US arm of major crypto exchange Binance, would delist the coin due to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)'s claim that it is a security.
- Cross-chain messaging protocol Nomad, which allows users to send and receive tokens between different blockchains, was drained of at least USD 150m after experiencing a security exploit that allowed bad actors to spoof messages. The project had USD 190m in total value locked (TVL) just before the exploit began, according to DeFi tracking platform DeFi Llama. However, in a matter of hours, all the funds were drained.
- The office of the Attorney General (AG), Letitia James, published a press release yesterday, urging people to contact the AG’s office’s Investor Protection Bureau if they thought they had been duped by a crypto operator. She also asked individuals who had found themselves frozen out of their accounts to step forward. James called upon crypto industry insiders to turn whistleblowers should they notice any wrongdoings at their companies. She claimed that all whistleblower-type complaints would be treated with confidentiality, and that the anonymity of informants would be upheld.
- In the first half of 2022, market participants spent ETH 963,227, worth about USD 2.7bn, on NFT minting on the Ethereum blockchain, with 50.7% of the raised crypto staying with NFT projects, and the remainder circulated to non-entity wallets, according to a report by Nansen. At the same time, the volume of the raised ETH circulating to non-entity wallets decreased from the 52.3% reported 11 months ago to 45.7%.
- James Howells, a computer engineer who claims he mistakenly threw away a hard drive that contained some 7,500-8,000 Bitcoin during house cleaning in 2013, has pledged to use 10% of this lost stash if/when recovered and turn Newport, UK, into a cryptocurrency hub. Howells also said that he plans to give EUR 50 (USD 51) worth of BTC to every Newport citizen and install crypto-based terminals in all shops. At the current rate of USD 22,715 per coin, Howells' lost BTC 8,000 is worth around USD 181.7m. The stash was worth nearly half a billion dollars during Bitcoin's peak in mid-April last year.
- A more than week-long prosecution raid of South Korean crypto exchanges and companies linked to Terraform Labs has finally come to an end, with officers admitting that finding the information they were after was challenging.
- Crypto awareness is on the rise in Brazil, a new survey has found – particularly among higher-earning individuals. The survey, which was reported by Globo, was conducted by the JPMorgan-backed neobank C6, in conjunction with the data provider Ipec. The parties spoke to 2,000 individuals based all over the country. The individuals all belong to the A, B, and C earning classes. The A-E class system is used by the Secretariat of Intelligence and Strategic Affairs and the Brazilian Association of Research Companies, which sorts people into earning groups. The lowest group, E, earns up to twice the minimum wage, with as earning x20 or more times the value of the minimum wage. The survey was conducted in July this year and found that 84% of respondents claimed they were aware of cryptoassets, with only 16% unsure about what tokens like Bitcoin were.
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- The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) imposed a USD 30m fine on the crypto trading unit of online brokerage Robinhood, Robinhood Crypto LLC, for alleged violations of anti-money-laundering and cybersecurity regulations, in the department’s first crypto enforcement action, The Wall Street Journal reported. As part of the consent order, Robinhood will also be required to retain an independent consultant to evaluate its compliance with NYDFS’s regulations and its remediation efforts.
- Coinbase Prime announced that they are launching Ethereum (ETH) staking to US domestic institutional clients. Institutional customers have the ability to stake their ETH to begin generating yield, as well as Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT), Cosmos (ATOM), Tezos (XTZ), Celo (CELO), and more.
- OKX introduced their “new-and-improved” P2P (peer-to-peer) Trading platform, which allows users to trade between one another, and makes P2P trading available to “a far broader range of users,” said the exchange. P2P Trading enables users to become their own marketplace by issuing ‘advertisements’ in order to trade with one another and better control the price they buy and sell at, they added. OKX also does not charge any fees for its P2P Trading service.
- Crypto investment and research firm CoinShares announced financial results for its second quarter of 2022. It reported: total revenue for the quarter of GBP 14.2m / USD 17.35m (Q2 2021: GBP 19.6m / USD 23.95m); adjusted EBITDA loss of GBP 8.2m / USD 10m (Q2 2021: GBP 28.6m / USD 34.94m) following a one-off loss of GBP 17.7m / USD 21.6m from the liquidation of the company’s holdings in TerraUSD (UST); and total comprehensive loss for the quarter of GBP 0.1m / USD 122,130 (Q2 2021: income of GBP 26.6m / USD 32.5m).
- Blockchain platform Waves said that the vast majority of its community has fully supported a new proposal to "reset" lending protocol Vires.Finance. The protocol has been struggling with a liquidity crisis over the past months. Per their announcement, after the proposal comes into effect, Vires.Finance accounts with more than USD 250,000 in value (in both USDT and USDC stablecoins) will be able to choose between two options. The first one will allow them to exchange their positions for USDN (Waves-based stablecoin Neutrino) with a 365-day vesting period and an additional 5% liquidation bonus. Another option would be to remain on the platform, albeit with 0% APY on all funds above USD 250,000 in USDT or USDC, wherein Waves founder Sasha Ivanov will continue liquidating USDN and repaying those debts depending on market conditions, they added.
- Crypto payments processor BitPay announced support for ApeCoin (APE) and Euro Coin (EUROC), so the consumers can now buy, store, swap, and spend these coins within the BitPay Wallet app. Luxury fashion brand Gucci will become the first merchant to accept APE through BitPay.
- Two US men from Orange County were each sentenced on Monday to federal prison terms for conning more than 2,000 investors into purchasing a cryptocurrency that purportedly provided exclusive access to a profitable trading program, and then pocketing most of the USD 1.9m raised, the US Department of Justice announced. The two also each pleaded guilty in August 2021 to one count of securities fraud.
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