Kategorie: Crypto Markets

• BlockFi filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 28.
• Some Califonia users continued to repay their loans between November 11 and November 22
• Users were not notified until November 22 that they could stop repaying their Loans “until further notice.”

California’s financial watchdog, the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI), had previously suspended BlockFi’s lending license for 30 days from November 11, 2022, before later revoking BlockFi’s CFC license on December 15, 2022.

BlockFi halted client withdrawals on November 2022 and requested clients to deposit funds to BlockFi wallets or Interest Accounts for lack of clarity around the FTX collapse. The crypto lender later voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy on November 28, 2022, alongside its eight other subsidiaries.

The DFPI claimed that BlockFi failed to “provide timely notification to borrowers that they could stop repaying their BlockFi loans.” The watchdog claims that the crypto lender did not notify borrowers until November 2022 that they could stop repaying their BlockFi loans “until further notice.”

About 111 California BlockFi users to get refunded

According to a statement issued by DFPI on March 27, investigations showed that at least 111 BlockFi borrowers from California continued paying their loans between November 11 and November 22, 2022. These borrowers paid back about $103,471 in loan repayments between the said periods.

BlockFi requested permission from the bankruptcy court to return the payments to the borrowers in a motion filed on February 24, 2023. The crypto lender has agreed to refund more than $100,000 to the California customers that continued repaying their crypto loans even after trading halted operations on November 10, 2022.

The hearing for the request to refund the customers is scheduled for April 19, 2023. The refunds will go ahead if the motion is approved by the bankruptcy court.

In the meantime, BlockFi has agreed to an “interim suspension” of its California Financing Law (CFL) license while “the bankruptcy and revocation actions are pending.”

The post Bankrupt BlockFi to refund over $100K to California clients appeared first on CoinJournal.

• Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) made a surprise lawsuit against Binance.
• The lawsuit has labelled Bitcoin, Ether, Binance USD, Tether and Litecoin as commodities.
• CFTC also made allegations of market manipulation and a lack of compliance efforts.

Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao has rejected the allegations made by Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) against Binance and himself in the March 27 lawsuit.

On March 27, the US CFTC issued a 74-page complaint labelling Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Binance USD (BUSD), Litecoin (LTC), and Tether (USDT) as commodities and also accused Binance and Changpeng Zhao of market manipulation and lack of compliance.

CFTC has also accused Binance of not cooperating with the investigative subpoenas while also obscuring the location of its executive offices.

CZ calls CFTC’s claims incomplete recitation of facts

Binance’s CEO published a blog post arguing that the cryptocurrency exchange:

“Binance.com does not trade for profit or “manipulate” the market under any circumstances. Binance “trades” in a number of situations. Our revenues are in crypto. We do need to convert them from time-to-time to cover expenses in fiat or other crypto currencies. We have affiliates that provide liquidity for less liquid pairs. These affiliates are monitored specifically not to have large profits.”

In the lawsuit, the CFTC has accused Binance of trading on its own platform using 300 “house accounts” without properly disclosing the information to its customers in its Terms of Use. The CFTC says that the exchange has instead kept the information as a “top secret” and even refused to respond to the commission-issued investigative subpoenas looking for information about the said trading activity.

CZ also went ahead to disclose that he has two accounts with Binance: one for the card and one for crypto holding. He says in the blog post:

“Personally, I have two accounts at Binance: one for Binance Card, one for my crypto holdings. I eat our own dog food and store my crypto on Binance.com. I also need to convert crypto from time-to-time to pay for my personal expenses or for the Card.”

The post Binance’s CZ refutes CFTC’s claims of improper compliance procedures and trading appeared first on CoinJournal.

• Disney had picked Polygon for the metaverse project.
• Disney was targeting NFTs for its next-generation storytelling and consumer experiences.
• The company is currently in the process of streamlining its business.

Disney started developing a metaverse strategy in mid-2022 and announced that they would tap the Polygon blockchain for the project. Earlier in October 2021, Citi released a report saying that Disney, Electronic Arts, and WWE were set to become some of the biggest beneficiaries of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The company further appeared to ramp up resource deployment by posting a job post for an expert in-house counsel for DeFi and NFTs in September 2022. The person Disney was looking to hire was required to be an experienced corporate attorney who would “work on transactions involving emerging technologies, including NFTs, blockchain, metaverse, and decentralized finance.”

However, according to the Wall Street Journal, Disney’s metaverse plans appeared to be still unclear a year later.

Streamlining business

Disney is currently in the process of laying off about 7,000 employees as it tries to control costs and develop what the CEO Bob Iger calls a “streamlined business.” The layoff will affect the 50 metaverse project employees.

Disbanding the next-generation storytelling and consumer experiences shows Disney is questioning the continued value of Web3.

The post Disney disbands its metaverse team amid large layoff appeared first on CoinJournal.

• Investors put $160M into crypto investment products amid concerns around traditional finance.
• Bitcoin recorded the largest inflows of $128 million as a six-week streak of outflows ended.
• Digital assets manager CoinShares also says Solana, Polygon and EXP recorded inflows.

Inflows into digital asset investment products totaled $160 million last week, with the latest market report from digital assets manager CoinShares showing the largest share of inflows went into Bitcoin.

CoinShares’ Digital Asset Fund Flows Weekly Report published Monday 27 March also highlighted that crypto investment products had ended a six-week streak of outflows.

Digital asset investment products saw largest inflows since July 2022

According to CoinShares Head of Research James Buttefill, crypto investment products had recorded outflows totaling $408 million over the past six weeks. 

However, last week saw institutional investors put the most funds into crypto-related products for the sector to register its largest weekly inflow in eight months. The last time more institutional flows hit the crypto investment space was in July 2022.

The inflows come a while after Bitcoin rallied to highs near $29,000, with prices of Ethereum and other altcoins also witnessing significant upsides. However, BTC has shed some of the gains and remains below $28k.

Butterfill notes that inflows came “relatively late” compared to the rest of the crypto market, noting this is likely a reaction by investors to the recent chaos within the traditional financial markets.

Bitcoin recorded $128 million in inflows, but Ethereum saw a 3rd week of outflows

Bitcoin saw the most inflows last week, with $128 million poured into BTC investment products as some CoinShares clients expressed sentiment of BTC being a safe haven. However, Bitcoin also continued to attract negative sentiment, with short-bitcoin inflows hitting $31 million last week.

Meanwhile, Ethereum recorded outflows for the third consecutive week, with $5.2 million exiting Ether investment products. CoinShares believes there are jitters around Ethereum’s highly anticipated network upgrade Shanghai, which is expected around 12 April.

Among altcoins, the top three coins to see inflows were Solana ($4.8 million), Polygon ($1.9 million) and XRP ($1.2 million).

The post Crypto saw $160 million in institutional inflows last week appeared first on CoinJournal.

• Komodo is a leader in blockchain interoperability and atomic swap technology.
• It is the company behind the AtomicDEX app.
• Making AtomicDEX Mobile source code open-source makes it more trustless, secure, and interoperable.

Komodo has announced that it is open-sourcing its AtomicDEX Mobile codebase in an effort to make the application more trustless, secure and interoperable.

By making it open-source, the app will be freely available and can be modified and distributed by anyone.

The AtomixDEX app

AtomicDEX is a non-custodial cryptocurrency wallet, crypto bridge, and cross-chain decentralized exchange combined into one application that is available on three GUIs (AtpomicDEX Web, AtomicDEX Mobile, and AtomicDEX Desktop).

AtomixDEX Mobile will be one among a few of the decentralized applications that are open source contrary to blockchain protocols like Ethereum, which are open source. It is also important to note that most mobile crypto wallets in the market today use closed-source source codes meaning end-users or third-party developers can’t change their source code.

Komodo previously open-sourced AtomicDEX Desktop and the project now wants to create additional opportunities for developer collaboration and ecosystem expansion with AtomicDEX Mobile going open source.

Why make AtomicDEX Mobile open source?

Komodo wants to build technologies that anyone can use freely. Users will be able to verify for themselves in real-time that AtomicDEX is truly secure. Open-source developers can now also use the AtomicDEX API as well as the AtomicDEX Mobile codebase to create their own dApps that utilize AtomicDEX’s wallet feature and/or peer-to-peer (P2P) atomic swap technology for cross-chain trading.

Commending about the move, Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann said:

“This move allows us to prove that AtomicDEX is truly transparent, trustless, and secure. We’re setting a new industry standard now that AtomicDEX is one of the very few mobile crypto wallets on the market that is 100% open source. We challenge all other mobile crypto wallets to follow in our footsteps by going 100% open source.”

Users can currently download the AtomicDEX Mobile on Google Play for Android users and TestFlight for iOS users. 

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