Monat: September 2023

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Celsius (CEL) price remains strong even as ex-CEO assets get frozen

  • At the time of writing, Celsius was trading at $0.1439, up 13.87% in a day.
  • The former Celsius CEO, Alex Mashinsk, was arrested on July 13 this year.
  • Alex Mashinsk is facing criminal and civil charges for his involvement in the now-defunct platform.

Celsius (CEL) price is rising despite negative news about its former CEO, Alex Mashinsk, who was arrested on July 13, 2023. The Celsius founder’s bail was set at $40 million shortly after his arrest.

Alex Mashinsk is being investigated for his involvement in Celsius which is currently defunct since it filed for bankruptcy. The CEO resigned from Celsius in September after the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July 2022.

In July 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission slapped Celsius Network with $4.7 billion fine just hours after the United States SEC filed a lawsuit against Celsius Network and its former CEO Alex Mashinsky.

In August 2023, the US Bitcoin Corp (USBTC) mining company announced a deal with Celsius seeking to manage Celsius assets. This came barely a month after Celsius reached two key settlements related to its bankruptcy proceedings and potential reimbursement of customer assets.

The frozen Alex Mashinsky Assets

Following a request from the US Justice Department, a federal judge has ruled that certain bank accounts and properties linked to the former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky be frozen.

The judge signed off a motion to unseal a restraining order pertaining to Mashinsky’s assets, according to a Sept. 5 filing in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Accounts at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch in the names of holding companies, as well as accounts at First Republic Securities, SoFi Bank, and SoFi Securities in Mashinsky’s name, were all frozen by the Justice Department.

The injunction also covered Mashinsky’s Austin, Texas, property that he and his wife Kristine bought in 2021.

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Coinbase-incubated Base suffers an outage, team says user funds are safe

Key takeaways

  • The Ethereum Layer-2 network Base suffered an outage during the early hours of Wednesday.

  • The team assured users that their funds were not at risk.

Base suffers an outage

Base, the Ethereum Layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase suffered an outage during the early hours of Wednesday. The team revealed this on X (formerly Twitter) a few hours ago.

The outage lasted half an hour, and the network was restored 30 minutes after the team identified the problem. The Base team assured users that their funds were not at risk following the outage. 

The development team reported that Base users may have issues submitting transactions at 5:36 p.m. ET on Tuesday. However, they identified and fixed the problem a few minutes later. 

By 6:09 p.m., the network had resumed block production and gossip. Gossip is a technical term for node-to-node exchange of state information.

Base is gaining widespread adoption

The Coinbase-incubated network was launched less than a month ago and is already gaining adoption within the crypto space. So far, more than 100 decentralised applications have been launched on the network.

Data obtained from DeFi Llama also revealed that Base has so far generated roughly $6 million in protocol fees, thanks to its popularity with meme tokens. 

Last week, Base announced native support of Circle’s USDC stablecoin. Base has also integrated with Ledger Live and PancakeSwap DEX. The outage today is the first major technical challenge for Base

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Falling US Treasury returns might help the cryptocurrency market

  • US deficits keep rising despite the economy growing
  • US Treasury returns dropped for the past three years in a row
  • A weakening dollar might cause cryptocurrencies’ next step higher

In previous articles published here, I’ve argued that the next move in the cryptocurrency market will likely be driven by the US dollar rather than crypto-related news. Given the current interest rate levels, the surging deficit makes raising money difficult for the US government.

Hence, one way to make it easier is to lower the rates.

The Federal Reserve will never tell market participants that rates cannot move much higher. The moment it does that, inflation expectations are not anchored anymore.

However, one might take time to understand what the bond market tells. For the first time in the history of the United States, US Treasury returns dropped three years in a row.

A vicious circle could spark the US dollar’s weakness

The price of a bond is inversely related to its yield. Lower bond prices mean higher yields and one way for bond prices to bounce back is for yields (i.e., interest rates) to decline.

But the deficit poses a huge problem. Deficit spending is one of the reasons why bonds underperform.

Because deficits surged even as the economy grew, more bonds are issued to pay for it. However, issuing more bonds means issuing more debt, but interest rates are not low anymore as they were in the past years.

Therefore, interest rate expenses would increase, offsetting the revenue collected from selling the bonds.

One way to solve this problem is to let the dollar slip. The starting point might be a signal that the Fed has already reached the terminal rate.

If the dollar starts weakening, its decline should be generalized and also have ramifications for the cryptocurrency market. Therefore, if Bitcoin is about to make a move higher, one should keep an eye on the US deficit and the dollar.

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Standard Chartered-backed Zodia Markets approved as a crypto broker in Abu Dhabi

  • The in-principle approval was given by the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM).
  • Abu Dhabi launched a $2 billion effort to boost Web3 projects in February.
  • Abu Dhabi will give Zodia Markets a chance to expand into the Middle East region.

In some exciting crypto news, Zodia Markets, a platform for digital assets supported by Standard Chartered Ventures, has received approval in principle to operate as an over-the-counter (OTC) cryptocurrency broker-dealer in Abu Dhabi

The approval was given by the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), a global financial hub in the United Arab Emirates that has been making an effort to entice enterprises involved in the cryptocurrency industry. The third stage of a five-stage application process is considered to be the in-principle level. According to the ADGM instructions, the following steps entail receiving final approval and passing through an “operational launch” test.

According to the CEO of ADGM Authority, Salem Mohammed Al Darei:

“The harmony of traditional and new-age finance in Abu Dhabi with an international leading digital asset firm such as Zodia Markets that is backed by the well-established Standard Chartered will contribute to further enhancing the attractiveness of ADGM as a preferred destination for global entities.” 

The ADGM was one of the first regulators to propose a special licensing system for providers of virtual asset services.

Among other approvals, the regulator has given virtual asset platform M2 and the crypto exchange Rain was granted licenses.

According to reports, Zodia Markets chose Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE, as a strategic expansion to give institutional investors in the Middle East and Africa access to cryptocurrency. Last year, Abu Dhabi hosted the Inaugural Middle East Blockchain Awards to recognise and reward outstanding efforts within the blockchain and Web 3.0 fields.

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