Bitcoin (BTC) opened the trading week marginally higher, trading above $41,000. Ether (ETH) was also up slightly, trading above $2,100. Data from Coinglass have been $103.5 million in liquidations of token-tracked futures in the past 12 hours, and $95 million of them have been longs, or bets on higher prices. Of the $103.5 million in total liquidations, $33 million in bitcoin positions were liquidated, with $29 million of those being long bitcoin positions.
Lucy Hu, a Senior Analyst with Hong Kong-based digital asset management firm Metalpha says the broader market continues to hold up quite well despite the recent Ledger hack with rate cuts on the horizon and things like ordinals driving more interest in bitcoin. “The massive Ledger hack did swing some sentiment in the DeFi space and raises important questions on wallet security," she said in an email interview. “Besides, the stellar rise of Bitcoin Ordinals continues to fuel enthusiasm for Bitcoin miners, who have been heavily rewarded. We expect the long-term growth momentum of Bitcoin to remain on track." #BTC #
Ex-FTX lawyer Can Sun is leading the way with Trek Labs, a Dubai-based startup that received a license to offer cryptocurrency services in the region in late October. Backpack Exchange is the name under which Trek Labs will offer those services.
Sun will receive support from ex-FTX employee, Armani Ferrante, who serves as CEO of Trek’s holding company in the British Virgin Islands, according to a Nov. 11 report by the Wall Street Journal. Ferrante also runs Backpack, a cryptocurrency wallet which is integrated in Backpack Exchange.
Sun’s former legal deputy at FTX, Claire Zhang, who is also Ferrante’s wife, is also on Trek’s executive team. However, once Trek raises an investment round, Zhang plans to transition out of the company as she has been working without pay to “help bootstrap the exchange," WSJ said.
Sun and Ferrante iterated they wanted to use the lessons learned from FTX’s failure to protect customer funds. Backpack’s technology offers a self-custody solution which integrates a multiparty computation (MPC) technique to ensure funds remain secure. MPC typically involves several parties approving a transaction before funds are moved.
Conflux multichain protocol shuts down after two years
ShuttleFlow, the ecosystem multichain protocol operated and maintained by Conflux Foundation — also known as the Shanghai Tree-Graph Blockchain Research Institute — will shut down after two years.
The ShuttleFlow technology stack will be transferred to Web3 studio Zero Gravity, which will continue to develop the protocol under a new brand. “All user funds are secure and will be migrated from ShuttleFlow to Zero Gravity,” the project wrote, adding, “Users who have previously bridged through ShuttleFlow and completed the claim of their bridged assets on the destination chain do not need to undergo any additional operations for the migration.”
Crypto lender Hodlnaut is officially entering liquidation, according to the company's interim judicial manager. Over $100 million in digital assets were transferred from a wallet belonging to crypto exchange Poloniex in what security firms believe to be a massive hack. Meanwhile, asset manager BlackRock has officially entered the race for a spot Ethereum exchange-traded fund (ETF) after a 19b-4 filing by Nasdaq was submitted to the securities regulator.