Crypto trading/market thread

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... stealing ... from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). ...
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Stealing from the IRS.

Hard to get my mind around it to be something other than worthy of some sort of praise.
 
...
“Coinbase’s premium brand, position as an onshore/regulated entity, scale, and healthy balance sheet should enable it to weather the industrywide fallout from FTX’s collapse, but the immediate impact is decidedly negative with trading volumes facing incremental pressure,” Jefferies analysts wrote in a note on Monday.

The analysts started coverage of Coinbase COIN, +16.46% at hold Monday, with a price target of $35. Shares of Coinbase rallied 15.7%, and were last trading at 38.46.

“We expect COIN to regain a portion of its share losses from the past 2+ years, but still see a steep climb to Street estimates in FY25, which we believe embed a bitcoin recovery to ~$25k,” they continued.
...

 
looks like the El Salvador Volcano Bonds are one step closer to become a reality

no dates that i could find as to when they will be made available to the public


El Salvador Passes Law Paving the Way for 'Volcano Bond'​

The digital asset bill in the Legislative Assembly obtained 62 votes in favor and 16 against.​




Miss El Salvador



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The BIS is scared. Crypto is a legit threat to the current financial/monetary order.


The government can NOT compete with the private market creations. They seem to think the CDBC's will be their savior.... But they will just be another crypto to the average Joe and a VASTLY inferior one at that. So why on Earth would someone choose a CDBC over all of the new creations in the marketplace?
 
... So why on Earth would someone choose a CDBC over all of the new creations in the marketplace?
Legal tender laws. The same reason folks aren't using physical gold and silver instead of FRNs right now.
 
...
Last week, at a crypto conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland, CNBC spoke to industry insiders who painted a picture of 2023 as year of caution. Bitcoin

is expected to trade within a range, be sensitive to the macroeconomic situation such as interest rate rises and continue to be volatile. A new bull run is unlikely in 2023.

However, experts are looking to next year and beyond with optimism.
...
Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer at CoinShares, said bitcoin is likely to be rangebound trading at the lower end between $15,000 and $20,000 and on the upper end between $25,000 to $30,000.

She said a lot of the "forced selling" that happened in 2022 as a result of collapses in the market is now over, but there isn't much new money coming into bitcoin.

"I don't think there's a lot of forced selling remaining, which is optimistic," Demirors told CNBC Friday. "But again, I think the upside is quite limited, because we also don't see a lot of new inflows coming in."
...
In CNBC's interviews, several industry participants spoke about historical bitcoin cycles, which happen roughly every four years. Typically, bitcoin will hit an all time high, then have a massive correction. There will be a bad year and then a year of mild recovery.

Then "halving" will happen. This is when miners, who run specialized machines to effectively validate transactions on the bitcoin networks, see their rewards for mining cut in half. Miners get bitcoin as a reward for validating transactions. The halving, which happens every four years, effectively slows down the supply of bitcoin onto the market. There will ever only be 21 million bitcoin in circulation.

Halving usually precedes a bull run. The next halving event takes place in 2024.

Scaramucci called 2023 a "recovery year" for bitcoin and predicted it could trade at $50,000 to $100,000 in two to three years.
...

 
Made the front page of today's local paper.

North Carolina crypto mine drives residents away over 'insane' noise, electric grid concerns​

Story by Bailee Hill • 2h ago

One rural North Carolina town is bearing the brunt of a cryptocurrency mine, sending some residents packing over concerns about the deafening noise and impact on the electric grid.

Murphy, N.C., resident Mike Lugiewicz joined "Fox & Friends First" Monday to discuss his concern surrounding the mine -- which sits about 500 ft. from his front door -- and why he has decided to relocate.

"The noise is insane and if you're on the mountaintop above the crypto mine, it's even worse," Lugiewicz told Carley Shimkus. "I don't know if there's much we can do about it right now, but what we're trying to do as a community is get it out to the public that if they see crypto mines coming up in their area, they need to do everything possible to ban them and not allow those to get on their grid."

More:

 
This doesn't look good. The trap is going to shut.



 
It looks like this is an issue with a specific bank. I didn't see where SWIFT announced a broad policy.

 

"Dad, can I borrow $10 worth of bitcoin?"​

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"Borrow $11.62? ... What the hell do you need $7.45 of bitcoin for?"
 
Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, will suspend U.S. dollar deposits and withdrawals, the company said Monday, without providing a reason for the decision.

"We are temporarily suspending USD bank transfers as of February 8th," a Binance spokesperson told CNBC. "Affected customers are being notified directly." The company said "0.01% of our monthly active users leverage USD bank transfers," and added that "we are working hard to restart service as soon as possible."

Binance US, a unit of the company that's regulated by the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), said in a tweet that it's not impacted by the suspension. Thus, the move applies only to non-U.S. customers who transfer money to or from bank accounts in dollars.
...

 
Kraken, the third largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by volume, is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) according to a Bloomberg report published Wednesday, and it might be the subject of a major SEC announcement later on Thursday.

The SEC probe is aimed at determining whether the San Francisco based exchange offered unregistered securities to its U.S. customers. According to the inside source quoted in the report, the investigation “is at an advanced stage” and there could be a settlement in the coming days.

While the report doesn’t specify which financial products the regulator is scrutinizing, SEC Chair Gary Gensler has said on multiple occasions that he considers most tokens to be securities, and Kraken offers over 180 of them.

In a 2022 insider trading case against Kraken competitor Coinbase, the SEC named nine digital assets it considered securities: AMP (AMP), Rally (RLY), DerivaDEX (DDX), XYO (XYO), Rari Governance Token (RGT), LCX (LCX), Powerledger (POWR), DFX Finance (DFX), and Kromatika (KROM).

On Sept. 22, Kraken’s incoming CEO Dave Ripley said the exchange had no plans to delist tokens the SEC labeled as securities, or to register with the agency as a market intermediary. This likely did not sit well with Gensler, who told Bloomberg in December that “the runway is getting shorter” for crypto firms to register with the agency.

According to FOX Business journalist Eleanor Terrett, Kraken might be the subject of a major SEC announcement later today. Terrett tweeted late yesterday evening that an inside source told her something big was in the works at the regulator ...

 
Well, fudge...


Looks like Americans won't be able to stake coins on exchanges any more.
 
They wouldn't let you go to work or walk around your neighborhood but they'll be fine with you messing with the money. Sure.


 
...
“Companies like Kraken can offer investment contracts and investment schemes but they have to have full, fair, and truthful disclosure. This puts investors in a better position,” said Gensler. “They were not complying with that.”
...
... Kraken knew how to register, other firms know how to register. It’s just a form on our website,” said Gensler. “If they want to offer staking, we’re neutral. Come in, register. Because investors need that disclosure. What are you doing with the tokens? Are you trading against the tokens? Are you borrowing against the tokens? Are you using them for your own purposes?
...


Sounds like it might not be quite the death knell for exchange staking service that it was being made out to be. Exchanges just need to get their ducks in a row.
 
Linked by the article above:
Commissioner Hester M. Peirce
Feb. 9, 2023

Today, the SEC shut down Kraken’s staking program and counted it as a win for investors. I disagree and therefore dissent.

Kraken operated a service through which its customers could offer their tokens up for staking. The customers earned returns, and the company earned a fee. The Commission argues that this staking program should have been registered with the SEC as a securities offering. Whether one agrees with that analysis or not, the more fundamental question is whether SEC registration would have been possible. In the current climate, crypto-related offerings are not making it through the SEC’s registration pipeline. An offering like the staking service at issue here raises a host of complicated questions, including whether the staking program as a whole would be registered or whether each token’s staking program would be separately registered, what the important disclosures would be, and what the accounting implications would be for Kraken.

We have known about crypto staking programs for a long time. Although it may not have made a difference, I should have called for us to put out guidance on staking long before now. Instead of taking the path of thinking through staking programs and issuing guidance, we again chose to speak through an enforcement action, purporting to “make clear to the marketplace that staking-as-a-service providers must register and provide full, fair, and truthful disclosure and investor protection.”[1] Using enforcement actions to tell people what the law is in an emerging industry is not an efficient or fair way of regulating.[2] Moreover, staking services are not uniform, so one-off enforcement actions and cookie-cutter analysis does not cut it.[3]

Most concerning, though, is that our solution to a registration violation is to shut down entirely a program that has served people well. The program will no longer be available in the United States, and Kraken is enjoined from ever offering a staking service in the United States, registered or not. A paternalistic and lazy regulator settles on a solution like the one in this settlement: do not initiate a public process to develop a workable registration process that provides valuable information to investors, just shut it down.

More transparency around crypto-staking programs like Kraken’s might well be a good thing. However, whether we need a uniform regulatory solution and if that regulatory solution is best provided by a regulator that is hostile to crypto, in the form of an enforcement action, is less clear.[4]

[1] Press Release Announcing Action, https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-25

[2] For a longer discussion of this issue, see Hester Peirce, Outdated: Remarks before the Digital Assets at Duke Conference (Jan. 20, 2023), available at: https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/peirce-remarks-duke-conference-012023.

[3] For a discussion of this point, see Jessica S. Hart, Note: Policing Proof-of-Stake Networks: Regulatory Challenges Preserved by Staking-as-a-Service Providers and the Need for a Tailored Regime, 23 Col. Science & Tech. Rev. 192, 206-7 (2021) (discussing in variations in staking service provider business practices). See also Nicholas E. Gonzalez, Does Cryptocurrency Staking Fall Under SEC Jurisdiction?, 27 Ford. J. Corp. & Fin’l Law 557-58 (2022).

[4] Solutions need not come from a regulator. See, e.g., Proof of Stake Alliance, POSA Advances Staking as a Service Industry Driven Solutions (May 14, 2020) .


 
...
There are " increasing signs that the market bottomed last November and has turned bullish," Vijay Ayyar, vice president of corporate development and international at crypto exchange Luno, told CNBC.

"We are gaining in momentum here and any bad news is being shrugged off, typical signs that the market believes the worst is over."
...
Bitcoin's price on Thursday sat at its highest level since mid-August 2022. Last year, nearly $1.4 trillion was wiped off the crypto market after turmoil which saw bankruptcies, failures of projects and companies. All that was topped off by the collapse of major exchange FTX.

Yuya Hasegawa, an analyst at Japanese crypto firm Bitcoin Bank, said there is a shift from so-called altcoins, or alternative coins, to bitcoin in the wake of the regulatory action.

"Wednesday's crypto rally was a bit of a surprise but one thing stood out: it was led by bitcoin," Hasegawa told CNBC.

"The current regulatory environment surely looks like a headwind for the crypto market, but it seems like some money is moving from altcoins to bitcoin, since bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that is labeled 'commodity' by the SEC chair. Consequently, bitcoin's market dominance is on the rise."
...

 
...
Hong Kong’s plan to allow citizens to trade crypto may soon become a reality according to Twitter user NoodleofBinance, who tweeted on Wednesday that, beginning June 1st, Hong Kong will officially make buying, selling and trading cryptos fully legal for all citizens.

“Expect a huge influx of big money from the East,” NoodleofBinance said, adding, “Asian currency based stablecoin coming out of HK will be a certainty as well.”

Under the current rules, crypto trading in Hong Kong is limited to professional investors, which are defined as individuals with a portfolio of at least HK$8 million (US$1.02 million).
...
The possibility of Hong Kong citizens gaining access to trading crypto has been in the works for months, ever since the government first announced that it was exploring the topic in October. On Monday, DBS Group, the largest bank in Singapore, revealed that it is planning to apply for a license that would allow it to offer crypto services to Hong Kong residents as part of the Chinese territory’s push to become a digital assets hub.

 
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...
Hong Kong is warming up to crypto, and a licensing regime for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) – the local term for crypto exchanges – kicks in on June 1.

Does this mean crypto is going "fully legal" then in the city for everyone, as a tweet suggests? Not at all.

While the situation may change later, for the time being the VASP framework for licensing exchanges, which just finished a multiyear consultation, allows them to provide access only to accredited professional investors. Retail investors are excluded.

The Hong Kong government has indicated that the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), its securities regulator, may consider retail access to virtual asset services in the future, after further consultation.
...

 
(Kitco News) - Amid a crackdown on the crypto industry in the U.S. with a focus on cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase is reportedly in talks with stock exchange platform IEX to create a federally approved digital asset marketplace, according to people familiar with the matter.

 
Crypto markets likely facing some significant headwinds thanks to unraveling fraud and/or government regulators choking out business.

Silvergate Capital (SI) was downgraded to “Underweight” from “Neutral” by JPMorgan (JPM) after the crypto bank said that it was evaluating its ability to continue as a going concern and delayed the filing of its annual report on Wednesday.

The crypto-friendly bank said it needed to delay the filing of its annual 10-K for the 2022 fiscal year, and would take an additional two weeks to complete it.

The Wall Street giant also withdrew its price target for the stock, which was $14 a share previously. Silvergate shares fell 47% to $7.18 in premarket trading.

Silvergate’s rating was also downgraded to “Hold” from “Buy” by Canaccord Genuity. The broker also cut its price target on the stock to $9 from $25.

JPMorgan notes that in the recent quarter Silvergate realized a $886 million loss from selling underwater securities, resulting in tangible book value (TBV) being cut more than half to $12.93.

“With the company having sold additional securities (beyond what was guided) as a loss in January/February, this reflects that the company is facing continued liquidity challenges,” JPMorgan analysts led by Steven Alexopoulos wrote.
...


A bipartisan grouping of three US Senators has written to Binance asking for details on its money laundering controls, accusing the crypto exchange of being a "hotbed of illegal financial activity," according to the Wall Street Journal.
...
The exchange is reportedly bracing itself for significant fines for past conduct. A Binance spokesperson did not immediately respond to CoinDesk's request for comment.


...
Robinhood has just disclosed in a regulatory filing on Feb. 27 that it had been subpoenaed by the regulator regarding its crypto activities.

"In December 2022, shortly after FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11, 2022, and following the bankruptcies of several other major cryptocurrency trading venues and lending platforms earlier in 2022, including Three Arrows Capital, Ltd., Voyager Digital Holdings, Inc., and Celsius Network LLC (“Celsius”) (collectively, the “2022 Crypto Bankruptcies”), we received an investigative subpoena from the SEC regarding, among other topics, RHC’s cryptocurrency listings, custody of cryptocurrencies, and platform operations," the company said.

Robinhood Might Stop Offering Crypto Services

As a result, the brokerage firm warned that if the SEC or a court concludes that cryptocurrencies or certain cryptocurrencies are "securities," the platform would simply "ceasing support for such cryptocurrencies on our platform."
...

 
The wild west is getting wilder.
 
Major digital assets plunged as the business day began in Hong Kong on Friday.

Bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) both dropped more than 5% as customers fled crypto bank Silvergate, whose stock tumbled 58% during U.S. trading Thursday. Most of the other 10 largest cryptocurrencies by market cap saw declines similar to BTC and ETH's.
...

 
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