cryptocurrency
Crypto’s recovery requires more aggressive solutions to fraud
It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that our industry is facing tough times. We’ve been in the midst of a “crypto winter” for some time now, with the prices of mainstays, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), tumbling. Likewise, monthly nonfungible token (NFT) trading volumes have fallen more than 90% since their multibillion dollar peak back in January of this year. Of course, these declines have only been exacerbated by the numerous black swan events rocking the crypto world, such as the FTX and Three Arrows Capital meltdowns. Taken together, it shouldn’t be a surprise that crypto is facing a trust deficit. While the destructive actions of reckless CEOs must be addressed and the individuals responsible for these events must be held accountable, our industry cannot stop there if w...
What to expect from crypto the year after FTX
Cryptocurrency had its Lehman moment with FTX — or, perhaps, another Lehman moment. The macroeconomic downturn has not spared crypto, and as November rolled around, nobody knew that we were in for the collapse of an empire worth billions of dollars. As the rumors of bankruptcy began to take hold, a bank run was inevitable. Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried, the once effective altruist now under house arrest, continued to claim that assets were “fine.” Of course, they were not. From Genesis to Gemini, most major crypto organizations have been affected by the contagion effect in the aftermath. The problem with exchanges like Binance, Coinbase and FTX Time and time again, the feeble layer of stability has been broken down by the hammer of macroeconomic stress in an atmosphere of centralization. It can ...
10 predictions for crypto in 2023
This year has been a particularly tumultuous one for the crypto market, with many decentralized and centralized entities failing or struggling to stay afloat. It feels as though we are in the final stages of the bear market, with bad actors and practices being purged in a process that is both dramatic and necessary for the maturity of the entire system. Despite this, the Web3 technologies that emerge from this crypto winter will change everything. Web3 represents the next evolution of information exchange, with similarities to the transformation from a largely agricultural society to a more industrial one. It is a computing fabric that is designed to put humans at the very center and prioritizes privacy. Blockchain technology will bring about a new way of interacting with the interne...
Top five crypto winners (and losers) of 2022
Cointelegraph looks back on the best and worst-performing cryptocurrencies of 2022 among the top 100 assets by market capitalization. We used the highest and the lowest year-to-date (YTD) returns through the close of Dec. 25, 2022. Overall, Cryptoindex.com 100 (CIX100), an index that tracks the 100 best-performing cryptocurrencies, fell nearly 68% YTD, suggesting most top coins underperformed in 2022. CIX100 weekly price chart. Source: TradingView Stablecoins are naturally omitted from the list below. Similarly, coins tracking the value of gold and similar mainstream assets have also been ignored. Instead, the coins mentioned below include decentralized currencies, smart contract tokens, exchange tokens and others. Top five crypto of 2022 1. GMX (GMX) YTD return: 111% Sector: Decentralized...
Economic frailty could soon give Bitcoin a new role in global trade
The chaos we’ve experienced in global markets this year — global geopolitical upheaval magnified by the confluence of broken supply chains, inflation and heavy national debt loads — seems to signal the beginning of a new era. All of this is within the context of the United States dollar serving as the primary global reserve currency, currently accounting for about 40% of global exports. But monetary history tells us that multiple global reserve currencies can exist at one time. Many countries are actively seeking a reserve settlement that is insulated from global political strife. Bitcoin (BTC) may fit the bill, and if it is adopted as an alternative reserve currency — even at the margins — we will see the unleashing of Bitcoin-based trade and the rise of a new geopolitical reality. The Bi...
LARGEST CRYPTO PONZI: Sam Bankman-Fried ex Caroline Ellison, FTX co-founder Gary Wang plead guilty to fraud
Tweet Tweet Share Whatsapp reddit The charges carry a maximum penalty of up to 110 years. The ex-girlfriend of disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried and a co-founder of FTX pleaded guilty to fraud charges in the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange and are both cooperating with federal prosecutors, officials announced Wednesday night. Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund company Alameda Research, and Gary Wang, a co-founder of FTX, pleaded guilty to the criminal offenses before Bankman-Fried landed in New York to face his own charges, Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. The charges filed against the pair were “in connection with their roles in the frauds that contributed to FTX’s collapse,” Williams said. “Both Ms. Ellison and M...
Rating agencies, not regulators, can rebuild trust in crypto after FTX
The last year has been an eventful one for the crypto space. The collapse of the Terra ecosystem and its TerraUSD (UST) algorithmic stablecoin saw $50 billion wiped off the market in a flash. And more recently, FTX, an exchange many thought was “too big to fail,” came crashing down. There’s been no shortage of drama in the space, which has seen name-stay businesses and projects disappear along with investors’ funds. Given the events of this year, it’s inevitable that serious government attention is coming for the space, in every major jurisdiction — and on the time scale of a few months to at most a few years, not decades. This was fairly clear to most industry observers even before the recent FTX debacle, and now it has become glaringly obvious. There is much debate in the space abo...
4 legislative predictions for crypto in 2023
If you saw the returns in my crypto portfolio this year, you would take a pass on my predictions for the direction of the cryptocurrency market. So, I will stick to what I know and share some regulatory predictions for the crypto industry. Few legislative changes A few minor victories will logroll small legislative fixes into “must pass” bills like the defense authorization or omnibus spending bills. The top candidate would be a de minimis exemption for smaller crypto transactions to exempt users from capital gains tax liability every time they purchase a coffee with crypto. The protection for noncustodial crypto providers in Republican Representative Tom Emmer’s bill might make it in as well. On the outside, a bipartisan stablecoin bill may be possible, though Senate Democrats are still a...
The Federal Reserve’s pursuit of a ‘reverse wealth effect’ is undermining crypto
The Federal Reserve’s strategy to hike interest rates may continue, making it difficult for the crypto industry to bounce back. For crypto assets to become the hedge against inflation, the industry needs to explore ways to decouple crypto from traditional markets. Decentralized finance (DeFi) can perhaps offer a way out by breaking away from legacy financial models. How Federal Reserve policies are affecting crypto In the 1980s, Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, introduced the interest hiking policy to control inflation. Volcker raised interest rates to over 20%, forcing the economy into a recession by reducing people’s purchasing capacity. The strategy worked, and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) went down from 14.85% to 2.5%. Even now, the Federal Reserve continues t...
Cryptocurrency has become a playground for fraudsters
News involving crypto and fraud is ubiquitous in the white-collar crime sphere and, perhaps more worryingly, these fraudulent activities in the crypto sector are not limited to a single type of crime. Diverse and distinct yet with one common thread, these crimes involve real money and crypto investors are the victims. Many people have placed their life savings into crypto and, on a larger scale, private equities, pension schemes and even nation-states are principal investors and losers. There are con artists who will try and entice their targets to invest in a get-rich scheme that turns out to be a Ponzi. On Nov. 21, officials announced that two Estonian citizens were arrested in a $575 million cryptocurrency fraud and money laundering scheme. Additionally, in September, United States...
Programming languages prevent mainstream DeFi
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is growing fast. Total value locked, a measure of money managed by DeFi protocols, has grown from $10 billion to a little more than $40 billion over the last two years after peaking at $180 billion. Total value locked in DeFi as of Nov. 2022. Source: DefiLlama The elephant in the room? More than $10 billion was lost to hacks and exploits in 2021 alone. Feeding that elephant: Today’s smart contract programming languages fail to provide adequate features to create and manage assets — also known as “tokens.” For DeFi to become mainstream, programming languages must provide asset-oriented features to make DeFi smart contract development more secure and intuitive. Current DeFi programming languages have no concept of assets Solutions that could help reduce DeFi’s pe...
Crypto Nerds Built Elon Musk a $600,000 Statue of His Head on a Doge Riding a Rocket
Despite scaring off Twitter’s advertisers weeks after his purchase of the platform, Elon Musk has managed to keep some fanboys on lock, especially in the cryptocurrency world. In fact, the crypto company EGTPRO — which stands for Elon Goat Token — so wants Musk’s attention that it raised $600,000 from the “super fans” of the entrepreneur and built him a statue depicting his head on the body of the Doge coin Shiba Inu dog riding a rocket. “Elon GOAT Token has really stepped outside the box and did something no other Crypto project has dared to do,” EGTPRO said on its website. “We built Elon Musk a $600,000 monument on the back of a semi trailer in honor of his many accomplishments and commitment to Cryptocurrency!” According to Interesting Engineering, the project was designed by Danny...
