📰 Weekly Crypto Meta: Bitfinex Responded to New York Attorney General's Actions, Goldman Sachs, Binance and Coinbase Held a Closed Meeting and more
A few news notes for the evening.
Bakkt Has Acquired Digital Asset Custody Company (DACC)
Bakkt, currently intending to obtain a CFTS license and, as previously reported, has a long and not very clear dialogue with the regulators, announced that it acquired the custodian company Digital Asset Custody Company (DACC). Now the custodian supports 13 blockchains and over 100 assets.
Another partner, BNY Mellon, will provide the physical security of private keys. The Bank of New York Mellon is noted as The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial Corporation result of merge with trillion assets operating.
According to some sources, the CFTC postpones the launch approval of Bakkt, the same thing happens with getting a NY BitLicense.
Huobi Global Launches its New IEO Platform Prime Lite
Huobi Global already has its own IEO platform, Huobi Prime. However, this is still not enough, according to exchange — and therefore, it decides to launch a much faster 'Huobi Prime Lite'. According to the exchange, a new place for the IEO have some improvements regarding listing and providing opportunities for customers.
Differences of new Huobi Prime Lite:
- upgraded listing process;
- changed trading limits;
- all HT tokens used in campaigns will be burned.
Projects must also comply with Smartchain v2.0., as before (the internal evaluation model of projects by Huobi).
ThunderCore (TT) will be the first project to appear on Prime Lite on May 9.
Analysts Connected Bitcoin Downtrend With the Actions of the NY Prosecutor’s Office Regarding Bitfinex Exchange
On Friday, April 26, the cryptocurrency market moved down.
Among altcoins, the largest decline registered for Bitcoin Cash price (TOP-10). At the time of this writing, Bitcoin and others have acquired a negative connotation from -1% to -4% (TOP-10). When details on Bitfinex/US regulator case were revealed, the rate of the first cryptocurrency decreased by $500, as analysts have claimed*; more problems with regulators may reduce the chance of possible bullish trend in the market.
At the same time, it is not always possible to detect the connection between news and the market. So, for specific markets, that is, for each altcoin currency, to put it in newspaper terms, this correlation will usually be more transparent*.
Bitfinex Responded to New York Attorney General's Actions
The Bitfinex/Tether story is a long process.
Bitfinex, one of the largest exchanges in terms of trading volume, as well as one of the few exchanges that is located in Hong Kong and receives a lot of attention from U.S. services, is accused of concealing the fact of losing $850 million using Tether funds. Investigators of the prosecutor's office in New York claim that the lost money belonged to both the trading platform and its clients. Prosecutors argue that problems that the exchange began to experience from 2018 are associated with this fact.
According to prosecutor iFinex transferred $850 million to Crypto Capital Corp., then the exchange used Tether' reserves to cover the deficite, information about this step was not disclosed.
To note, the news flow was very active in this regard. Attention to Bitfinex continues today, the price of an asset has dropped from $1 per token to $0,85 once, and people in general want to know why. This is what one of the active media broadcast, TheBlock:
a senior Bitfinex executive bluntly wrote to his external payments partner: 'Please understand all this could be extremely dangerous for everybody, the entire crypto community. BTC could tank to below 1k if we don't act quickly.'.
Coming back to business, the exchange moves away from a direct dialogue with the regulator and responds (not for the first time):
The New York Attorney General’s court filings were written in bad faith and are riddled with false assertions, including as to a purported $850 million 'loss' at Crypto Capital. On the contrary, we have been informed that these Crypto Capital amounts are not lost but have been, in fact, seized and safeguarded. We are and have been actively working to exercise our rights and remedies and get those funds released. Sadly, the New York Attorney General’s office seems to be intent on undermining those efforts to the detriment of our customers.
In turn, Coindesk publishes statements by unofficial attorneys from the Zhao Dong, a Bitfinex shareholder, he argues that the exchange is solvent.
Thus, we have the exchange, the regulator, third-party providers with kind of stuck money in anamnesis, and some people, as always, which are close to the matter, and whose opinions are being broadcasted to us.
Goldman Sachs, Binance and Coinbase Held a Closed Meeting. 'We see this as getting the crypto market into shape in order to absorb the entry of traditional finance firms'
The result of the meeting was a plan to create a cryptoderivate clearing house, Liquidity Offset Network. According to the same information, this chamber can begin work in July of this year and will be regulated according to Singapore law.
According to Bloomberg, the organizer of the Singapore meeting is Hoe Lon Leng, one of the leaders of Standard Chartered, transnational financial corporation. Representatives of the crypto market such as Galaxy Digital, Coinbase and Binance also took part in this meeting.
Simon Nursey (Co-Founder, CORA Network) commented:
'We see this as getting the crypto market into shape in order to absorb the entry of traditional finance firms, We are witnessing the emergence of a new asset class.'
Nike Registers Cryptocurrency Patent
Nike, Inc. seen in the desire to obtain registration of 'Cryptokicks' trademark. Following the text of the application, it means a line of crypto-oriented online products for clients, such a cryptocurrency wallet, services for mobile platforms and so on, including the utility token itself.
The document also states that Nike has plans to create an electronic trading platform where it will be possible to buy the company's products. The company itself does not provide any information about the case at the moment, so it is impossible to evaluate the use of the token in the platform. It would be interesting to see.
French Lender Societe Generale Issues $112 Mln Bond on Ethereum
Societe Generale, one of the biggest French financial conglomerates in Europe, with headquarter in Paris, issued the first covered bond in form of security token. The company declares that the blockchain is used to reduce the time for conducting financial transactions related to the issuance and placement of instruments for raising capital.
Legal entities at various levels use bonds on the blockchain, and this behavior is noted for the largest of them. The bond market is part of the security market. Within the market, mid-term and long-term debts are made, and bonds are usually here. Companies are actively using blockchain solutions in this area.
However, even the states did this: the Austrian government had previously stated that it would use the Ethereum blockchain to issue government bonds worth $1.35 billion, evolving local banks in the process.
🛠 Waves launches Waves Incubator: devs and dev teams can recieve up to 100 000 WAVES per project | Samsung SDS announces the launch of enterprise blockchain platform
💱🔷 MITH is the first listed asset on Binance DEX | ATOM/BNB, ATOM/BTC and ATOM/USDT trading will be launched on Binance on April 29 | OKB will be launched on the ERC20 network on April 29
💱🔶 Credit card payments for BTC, ETH, XRP , LTC and BCHABC are now available with Binance Android App | BNB is now on Ledger Nano S
🏛 Circle's SeedInvest received FINRA's ATS license | 'recognizing the validity of distributed ledger technology' Act is now in law in Washington State | ErisX began limited testing (more on launch of spot and futures contracts with timeline) | Lightning app by Lightning Network launched in alpha on Bitcoin mainnet
👁 Reuters: Jaguar Land Rover is testing IOTA-based rewarding system for drivers | Regular Tom Lee (CNBC): ‘crypto winter’ is over | Rumors: TD Ameritrade is quietly opening Bitcoin trading