Investigation Archives • Page 4 of 7 • SynQ

Category: Investigation

November 2020 – Weekly Recap 3

Weekly Recap

November 16th, 2020 - November 23th, 2020

Welcome to our 3rd weekly recap for November.

Overview 

Crypto News

 

  • The dollar has lost significant value against the Chinese Yuan (CNY) since May of this year.

    It has dropped from $1 buying you 7.2 CNY to now just 6.5 CNY, its lowest level in two years.

    Crypto investors who register their XRP in an eligible account will receive free Spark tokens in a 1:1 ratio when the Ripple-backed blockchain company holds its “snapshot day” on December 12th. Recipients will retain ownership of their XRP holdings while receiving the new tokens.

    In a newly published report, crypto investment firm Pantera Capital says a Bitcoin shortage is at the heart of the recent price surge and that the majority of newly minted BTC is being scooped up by PayPal.

    Some 3.2 million testnet eth and more than 100,000 validators are now staking on it, showing significant demand to test the new Proof of Stake ethereum blockchain which is expected to go out imminently.

    His nomination by President Trump still requires the Senate to confirm him before he becomes the official Comptroller of the national bank regulator.

    Before his nomination appears before the Senate house, he has to first scale through the confirmation hearing of The U.S. Senate Banking Committee which oversees the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).

    Bitfinex’s derivatives platform is in the news today after it announced the launch of its perpetual contracts for IOTA, Chainlink, and Uniswap. Each of these contracts will offer users maximum leverage of up to 100x, leverage that is typical of such contracts and they will be settled in Tether (USDt) tokens.

    Jay Clayton, the current chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), announced he will be stepping down from his position by the end of 2020.

    During his tenure, Clayton has blocked all proposals for a Bitcoin ETF and waffled on whether tokens like XRP are indeed securities.

November 2020 – Weekly Recap 2

Weekly Recap

November 6th, 2020 - November 13th, 2020

Welcome to our 2nd weekly recap for November.

Overview 

Crypto News

In a research note published Friday, JPMorgan analysts said Grayscale’s bitcoin trust saw cumulative inflows through October, whereas gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs) saw “modest outflows” since mid-October. “This contrast lends support to the idea that some investors that previously invested in gold ETFs such as family offices, may be looking at bitcoin as an alternative to gold,” said the analysts.

A former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Gensler was tapped to lead the agency review team for the Federal Reserve, banking and securities regulators, the Biden campaign formally announced Tuesday, following reports last week he was a contender.

Per its updated announcement, PayPal ended its waitlist for customers looking to use cryptocurrency in the U.S. Trading features a limit of $20,000 per week, which is double the originally announced $10,000.

Bitcoin was recently promoted on national television by the incoming Wyoming senator Cynthia Lummis. She is the first woman to have been elected to this position.

 

November 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

November 1st, 2020 - November 6th, 2020

Welcome to our 1st weekly recap for November.

Overview 

Crypto News

The RBA has partnered with Australia’s two largest banks and leading Ethereum software company ConsenSys that is spearheaded by Joseph Lubin, one of the cryptocurrency’s co-founders. The findings of the project are expected to be presented in early 2021.

Rumors are spreading the Chinese authorities have put under investigation Zhu Jiawei, the COO of Huobi, a Chinese run exchange with a flourishing Over the Counter (OTC) market that serves China.

In Monday’s quarterly earnings call, PayPal executives confirmed that they’d seen so much interest in the feature that they would raise buying limits from $10,000 to $15,000.

Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 has now been formalized for launch at some time around Dec. 1. The deposit contract is live and can collect the necessary funds to trigger staking.

An update by the Ethereum Foundation released on Wednesday explains how the genesis process is expected to happen.

Everything is up—Bitcoin, stocks, gold, the yuan, and the euro—except for the U.S. dollar.

 

Related News

While the United States prepares for the results of the 2020 Presidential Election, a number of data points and traders expect some significant cryptocurrency price fluctuations this week. Statistics from skew.com show bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility has increased to 59% while 3-6 month stats jumped over 62%.

According to a press release, after two years of effort, Gazprombank’s subsidiary in Switzerland has been authorized to offer crypto custody and trading against fiat currencies to selected institutional and corporate customers.

According to a bombshell Forbes report dated Oct. 29, there is some “speculation” that Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, is currently being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

October, 2020 – Monthly Recap

Monthly Recap

October, 2020

Welcome to our monthly recap for October.

Overview 

Crypto News

The American FBI and CFTC are going after the largest Bitcoin derivatives exchange BitMEX for operating an “illegal” exchange.

CFTC and the U.S. Attorney for the District of New York have charged BitMEX for operating an unregulated exchange and non-compliance with KYC and AML guidelines.

Crypto exchange Coinbase is now offering “instant” withdrawals in nearly 40 countries, including the U.S. and the U.K.

The new feature is being facilitated via Visa and Mastercard.

The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has today officially banned the sale of cryptocurrency derivatives and exchange-traded notes to retail users, more than a year after first proposing such a ban.
The ban will come into effect on January 6, 2021.

In a press release shared with U.Today exclusively, Block.one unveiled that the global cloud monster Google Cloud intends to join the EOS community and become a Block Producer on the EOS network. Google Cloud joining in is a major milestone for EOS Google Cloud intends to become a block producer (BP) candidate on the EOS network and, after joining it, this branch of the global IT heavyweight will leverage EOS as it is taking steps to become one of its BPs.

Square, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s payment company, has purchased $50 million worth of bitcoin.
The investment represents approximately 1% of Square’s total assets as of Q2 2020.
Square has become the second publicly-listed company after MicroStrategy to invest in bitcoin.

The authorities in China’s province of Shenzhen are planning to airdrop the soon-to-launch Chinese CBDC to its local residents. Reportedly, this will mark as the largest campaign initiated as part of the pilot program for the Chinese digital currency.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, citizens have been able to enter a lottery to receive the digital funds, of which coins worth 10 million yuan ($1.47 million) will be awarded to promote their use in roughly 3,400 designated stores in the Luohu district.

XRPL Monitor spotted gargantuan amounts of XRP moved by the blockchain behemoth Ripple. Meanwhile, large XRP movements have been noticed on various Ripple ODL partner exchanges, and the Binance giant transacted 13 mln XRP to the San Francisco-based tech company.

Grayscale Investments has announced a record quarterly performance, raking in $1.05 billion in investments, mostly from institutional investors. The company also sees “unprecedented demand” for bitcoin cash.

Schnorr signatures and Taproot, formally the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP) 340 and 341, are two of the biggest changes to Bitcoin since the activation of Segregated Witness (SegWit)—an implementation which increased Bitcoin’s blocksize limit—in 2017. Schorr itself is based on the SegWit mechanism.

PayPal has finally decided to embrace crypto and will soon offer its U.S. customers the ability to buy, hold, sell, and use various virtual currencies, having obtained a New York license permitting it to do so.

Hackers obtained USDT and USDC stablecoins worth $24 million from Harvest Finance’s stablecoin and BTC pools.
Harvest’s governance token FARM plummeted 60% following the revelation of the hack.
$400 million in total liquidity have been drained out of Harvest Finance as liquidity providers (LPs) flee the platform.

Dubbed “DBS Digital Exchange,” the trading platform would allow users to trade in four crypto assets — bitcoin (BTC), bitcoin cash (BCH), ether (ETH), and XRP — against Singapore dollar (SGD), Hong Kong dollar (HKD), Japanese yen (JPY) and U.S. dollar (USD).

As cryptocurrency analyst Jason Deane explained in his recent coverage of these price milestones, the fact that BTC/lira has hit an all-time high, while BTC/USD has not, indicates that the lira’s purchasing power against the world reserve fiat currency has weakened.

JPMorgan Chase announced that its native digital currency offering — the JPM Coin — has finally been deployed for mainstream use by one of the firm’s technical associates. The token is designed to facilitate JPMorgan Chase’s various cross-border monetary transactions.

 

Related News

Financial institutions and money service providers using the San Francisco startup’s XRP-powered, cross-border payment product, On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), can borrow Ripple’s native currency for a one-time fee via an approval system that will move faster than legacy financial options, according to a press release.

According to data shared by the XRPL Monitor bot, San Francisco-based tech behemoth Ripple has conducted several large transactions, transferring approximately 100 mln XRP between its wallets and sending part of the money to its ODL corridor in Europe.

September 20th, 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

September 13th- September 20th, 2020

Welcome to our 4th weekly recap for September.

Overview 

Crypto News

  • As members of the U.S. Federal Reserve plan to convene this week, both gold and bitcoin (BTC) markets have started to climb in value ahead of the meeting. Bitcoin prices rose over 4% during the afternoon’s trading sessions and gold jumped 0.76% as well. The price of one ounce of fine gold is $1,956.24 at the time of publication.

    Meanwhile, after a brief upswing in value, the U.S. dollar has started to show signs of weakness again after losing massive amounts of value this year.

  • BitPay, the Atlanta-based cryptocurrency services provider, has recently released blockchain payment statistics that show how the market performed in 2020. Among other interesting points, the data signals strong support from U.S. consumers for the company that announced its first Mastercard branded card just a few months ago.

  • Regulators in 49 U.S. states have agreed to a single set of supervisory rules for money services businesses, including cryptocurrency service providers. State regulators supervise 79% of all U.S. banks.

  • The Indian government has not made any announcement regarding its plans for cryptocurrency, which has led to rumors and speculation. Several reports indicate that the government is planning to ban cryptocurrencies as outlined in the draft bill submitted by the Garg committee.

  • Kraken announced Wednesday that it has received a U.S. bank charter. “The state of Wyoming has approved Kraken’s application to form the world’s first Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI), tentatively called Kraken Financial.

September 13th, 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

September 6th- September 13th, 2020

Welcome to our 3rd weekly recap for September.

Overview 

Crypto News

  • Online food ordering platform Just Eat has begun accepting cryptocurrencies for over 15,000 restaurants in France. The Just Eat group operates in 13 countries. Its website for France has recently undergone a significant makeover following the acquisition of Just Eat Plc by Takeaway.com. The latter has been accepting bitcoin for quite some time.

  • Global payments company Mastercard announced Wednesday the launch of its “proprietary virtual testing environment” for central banks to evaluate use cases of their central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

  • According to the report, the regulation will seek to tackle bitcoin’s high volatility as well as “risks posed by systemic ones, like libra” by creating a “new college of supervisors” involving existing national and continental regulatory agencies – and one new additional body – all chaired by the European Banking Authority (EBA).

  • Bitcoin miners are finding it difficult to obtain next-generation application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining rigs after a number of firms have sold out. Semiconductor goliaths like Samsung and TSMC have been struggling to keep up with the demand that was sparked by the Covid-19 outbreak.

  • Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has been struggling to get some functionalities approved for its iOS app, CEO Brian Armstrong detailed his company’s experience dealing with Apple Inc. on Friday. “In the wake of other companies struggling with Apple’s App Store restrictions, I want to share a bit about Coinbase’s own struggle here,” he began, elaborating:

September 6th, 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

August 30th- September 6th, 2020

Welcome to our 1st weekly recap for September.

Overview 

Crypto News

August 30 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

August 23rd- August 30th, 2020

Welcome to our 4th weekly recap for August.

Overview 

Crypto News

August 23 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

August 16th- August 23rd, 2020

Welcome to our 3rd weekly recap for August.

Overview 

Crypto News

 

August 16 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

August 10th- August 16th, 2020

Welcome to our 2nd weekly recap for August.

Overview 

Crypto News

  • A single malicious entity controls nearly a quarter of all nodes used on the anonymous internet provider Tor Network and is using its position to steal bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

  • The Bolivarian Council of Mayors in Venezuela signed the so-called “National Tax Harmonization Agreement” for 305 municipalities in the country, including the Petro (PTR) as a means to collect payments of taxes and sanctions.

    The cryptocurrency is becoming increasingly widely used as the result of a new campaign.

  • Both bitcoin and gold have risen sharply throughout 2020, driven by relentless fiat money printing by governments and central banks, keen to keep their economies afloat in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

    BTC hit a yearly high of $12,000 just as gold soared to a record high of $2,000 per ounce.

  • In a blog post on August 13, Coinbase unveiled its new crypto lending business, which places it into competition with the likes of Nexo and Blockfi. The service charges an annualized interest rate of 8% for borrows that are one year or less.
  •