cryptocurrencies
Crypto community weighs in on SBF’s ‘apology tour’
The former CEO of FTX, Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried, has seemingly begun to embark on an apology tour to redeem his image a month after the sudden implosion of FTX, which revealed that the exchange had been improperly using customer and investor funds. OnNov. 30, Bankman-Fried made his first live public appearance since the collapse of FTX — answering a number of questions during the DealBook Summit in New York. During the interview, Bankman-Fried claimed to have “unknowingly commingled funds” between Alameda and customer funds at FTX. He shared: “I unknowingly commingled funds. […] I was frankly surprised by how big Alameda’s position was, which points to another failure of oversight on my part and failure to appoint someone to be chiefly in charge of that.” In another interv...
How to keep your cryptocurrency safe after the FTX collapse
The fall of the FTX crypto exchange forced many to reconsider their overall approach to investments — starting from self-custody to verifying the on-chain existence of funds. This shift in approach was driven primarily by the lack of trust crypto investors have in the entrepreneurs after being duped by FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). FTX crashed after SBF and his accomplices were caught secretly reinvesting users’ funds, resulting in the misplacement of at least $1 billion of client funds. Efforts to regain investor trust saw competing crypto exchanges proactively flaunting their proof-of-reserves to confirm users’ funds’ existence. However, community members have since demanded that the exchanges show their liabilities to safeguard the reserves. With SBF,...
DeFi ecosystem still haunted by FTX contagion: Finance Redefined
Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week. The FTX contagion that started in the second week of November is still haunting various crypto protocols in the DeFi ecosystem. The latest to fall prey to the contagion includes the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Serum, of which Alameda and FTX were backers. Another DeFi crypto trading firm Auros Global missed its principal repayment on a 2,400 Wrapped Ether (wETH) DeFi loan. Looking at some other key news in the DeFi ecosystem, popular DEX protocol Uniswap launched its nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace aggregator, allowing users on the platform to trade NFTs. Ankr became the latest victim of an explo...
Thai VC fund acquires troubled exchange Zipmex for $100M: Report
After weeks of negotiations on a potential buyout of Zipmex, venture capital fund V Ventures has reportedly reached a deal to acquire the embattled cryptocurrency exchange. V Ventures, a subsidiary of Thoresen Thai Agencies (TTA) public company, is looking to purchase a 90% stake in Zipmex crypto exchange, Bloomberg reported on Dec. 2. The VC fund is about to acquire Zipmex for about $100 million in digital assets and cash, anonymous sources familiar with the matter claimed. Citing a court hearing on Friday in Singapore, the report says that Zipmex was offered $30 million in cash and the rest in crypto. According to the court hearing, Zipmex is planning to use cryptocurrency assets received from the transaction to unlock frozen customer accounts on the exchange by April 2023. The acquisiti...
P2P Financial Systems panel: Crypto core values and transparency are critical for DeFi
As one of the main growing sub-sectors in the crypto industry, decentralized finance (DeFi) has faced a challenging year amid market dynamics, cyberattacks and regulatory uncertainty. Its future demands more transparency and clarity in the regulatory landscape, according to a panel discussion at the International Workshop on P2P Financial Systems 2022 on Dec. 1. Moderated by Cointelegraph’s editor-in-chief Kristina Cornèr with Gaspard Pedruzzi, CEO of APWine; Daniel Perez, co-founder of Mero; Hugo Philion, CEO of Flare, and Niall Roche, CTO-in-residence at the University College London School of Management as panelists, the discussion focused on the DeFi future among a disruptive landscape worldwide. Perez emphasized the need for transparency for DeFi’s long-term success, as we...
MATIC attack: How smart crypto traders “got out” before a 35% price drop
Disparities in information access and data analytics technology are what give institutional players an edge over regular retail investors in the digital asset space. The core idea behind Markets Pro, Cointelegraph’s crypto-intelligence platform powered by data analytics firm The Tie, is to equalize the information asymmetries present in the cryptocurrency market. Markets Pro bridges the gap of these asymmetries with its world-class functionality: the quant-style VORTECS™ Score. The VORTECS™ Score is an algorithmic comparison of several key market metrics for each coin utilizing years of historical data that assesses whether the outlook for an asset is bullish, bearish or neutral at any given moment based on the historical record of price action. The VORTECS™ Score is d...
Axie Infinity is toxic for crypto gaming
Blockchain gaming is only four years old — a toddler compared to the rest of the industry. It has a lot of growing up to do, particularly when it comes to play-to-earn games. I’m a 28-year game industry veteran. I’ve produced 32 titles in that period of time on everything from Sega Genesis to Oculus Rift. Some of them were great. Many were forgettable. I didn’t hear much chatter about blockchain gaming from traditional developers and players until Axie Infinity began to take off. Cut to the peak of 2021, and the game had nearly 2 million players logging on daily. Most people outside the crypto community at the time were (and still are) extremely skeptical about blockchain’s ability to add anything meaningful to games. They see Axie as an example of the low production values and...
Axie Infinity is toxic for crypto gaming
Blockchain gaming is only four years old — a toddler compared to the rest of the industry. It has a lot of growing up to do, particularly when it comes to play-to-earn games. I’m a 28-year game industry veteran. I’ve produced 32 titles in that period of time on everything from Sega Genesis to Oculus Rift. Some of them were great. Many were forgettable. I didn’t hear much chatter about blockchain gaming from traditional developers and players until Axie Infinity began to take off. Cut to the peak of 2021, and the game had nearly 2 million players logging on daily. Most people outside the crypto community at the time were (and still are) extremely skeptical about blockchain’s ability to add anything meaningful to games. They see Axie as an example of the low production values and...
Uniswap launches NFT marketplace aggregator
According to a new post on November 30, decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap announced that users can now trade nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, on its native protocol. As told by Uniswap, the function will initially feature NFT collections for sale on platforms including OpenSea, X2Y2, LooksRare, Sudoswap, Larva Labs, X2Y2, Foundation, NFT20, and NFTX. “To bring users the first-rate experience they’ve come to expect with Uniswap, we built the aggregator to deliver better prices, faster indexing, more unassailable smart contracts, and efficient execution.” Uniswap developers claim that users can save up to 15% on gas costs compared to other NFT aggregators when using Uniswap NFT. unifies ERC20 and NFT swapping into a single swap router. Integrated with Permit2, users can swap...
Secret Network resolves network vulnerability following white hat disclosure
On Nov. 30, Guy Zyskind, CEO of privacy smart contract blockchain Secret Network, said that developers had patched a privacy-related vulnerability and users’ funds remain secure. In a document dated Nov. 29, Secret Network wrote that users or developers required no action and that all active nodes were upgraded to correct the exploit on Nov. 2. 2/ You can read the post for the main details, but the important part is that the vulnerability was mitigated and unlikely to have been exploited. Most importantly, funds were never at risk, because Secret intentionally does not rely on SGX for correctness – only privacy. — Guy Zyskind (@GuyZys) November 29, 2022 The sequence of events, unveiled late yesterday by the Secret Network developers, began when a group of white-hat computer sci...
Binance acquires regulated crypto exchange in Japan
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance plans to reenter the Japanese market after acquiring a 100% stake in a licensed crypto service provider in the country, Cointelegraph Japan reported. In an official public announcement on Nov. 30, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said the crypto exchange was committed to re-entering the Japanese market under regulatory compliance. The acquisition of Sakura Exchange BitCoin (SEBC), a Japan Financial Services Agency-licensed business, would mark the re-entry of global exchange in the Japanese market after four years. #Binance Acquires JFSA Registered Sakura Exchange BitCoin, Committed to Enter Japan Under Regulatory Compliancehttps://t.co/xfdnaY2hiO — CZ Binance (@cz_binance) November 30, 2022 Talking about the importance of the latest acquisition, a Binance spokesp...
Non-whale Bitcoin investors break new BTC accumulation record
Some non-whale Bitcoin (BTC) investors seem to have had zero issues with the cryptocurrency bear market as well as fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) around the fall of FTX, on-chain data suggests. Smaller retail investors have turned increasingly bullish on Bitcoin and started accumulating more BTC despite the ongoing market crisis, according to a report released by the blockchain intelligence platform Glassnode on Nov. 27. According to the data, there are at least two types of retail Bitcoin investors that have been accumulating the record amount of BTC following the collapse of FTX. The first type of investors — classified as shrimps — defines entities or investors that hold less than 1 Bitcoin, $16,500 at the time of writing, while the second type — crabs — are a category of addresses h...
