💡💡💡 Binance, the largest shareholder of the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange GOPAX, sold the asset claims of GOPAX victims for less than half their face value.
Initially, Binance had promised 100% compensation for the losses (70bn KRW) incurred by the suspension of GOPAX's GOFi service.
Instead, Binance acquired Gopax shares at a significantly discounted price and became their largest shareholder.
However, it has been revealed that Binance did not compensate the victims with its own funds but by selling the victims' asset claims at a low price. This move was essentially a "robbing Peter to pay Paul" strategy.
After Binance sold the victims' asset claims, the prices of crypto assets soared, increasing the amount of damages.
GOFI’s debt is estimated to amount to approximately 100bn KRW as of today, excluding existing repayments.
The Normie team accepted the exploiter’s offer to return 90% of the exploited ETH and allowed the hacker to keep 10% as a reward. The team also agreed to use the 600 ETH from the Normie dev wallet to fairly launch a new token that is used to reimburse NORMIE holders.
Base memecoin Normie got exploited and its price plummeted by more than 99% in one minute, with its market cap falling from $41.87m to as low as $34.86k. The attacker used a loophole in the contract's tax mechanism to conduct a flash loan attack.
Former CEO of Heartland Tri-State Bank, Shan Hanes, pleaded guilty to embezzling $47.1m for personal cryptocurrency purchases, leading to the bank’s collapse in 2023. He faces up to 30 years in prison.
The price of Ethereum is largely remaining flat following the historic approval of Ethereum ETF.
Ethereum hit $3,856 within minutes of the confirmed approval then dipped down. It is up a little more than 1% on the day, but over the past seven days, it soared a massive 30%.
Ethereum reached an all-time high of $4,878 in November 2021.
A key aspect of the newly approved FIT21, which aims to set a clear regulatory framework including the roles of the CFTC and SEC, is the five-prong decentralization test determining if an asset is a digital commodity or not.
⚫️Prong 1: Power Rule No single person can control or change the code, or prohibit others from using the system in the past 12 months.
⚫️Prong 2: Ownership and Voting No issuer or affiliated person can own or direct 20% of the asset or its voting power, and the asset shouldn't include voting power in the past 12 months.
⚫️Prong 3: Code Changes Code changes must be limited to maintenance, bugs, and vulnerabilities in the past 3 months, or must be adopted through consensus of a decentralized governance system.
⚫️Prong 4: No Marketing as an Investment Asset must not have been marketed as an investment in the past 3 months.
⚫️Prong 5: Rules of Inflation Token issuance must be end-user distributions through the blockchain system in the past 12 months.
Bitcoin has established itself as a serious competitor to gold. Bitcoin’s market capitalization is currently at 8.4%, quickly approaching 10% of gold as institutional interest soars. Bitcoin is currently valued at $1.4tr compared to gold’s $16tr market cap.
A key distinction between Bitcoin and gold is their supply dynamics:
⚫️Bitcoin’s supply is fixed, with 94% of its total 21m coins already mined, translating to a circulating supply of 19.7m. ⚫️In contrast, gold’s supply continues to grow steadily and is projected to reach 250,000 tonnes by 2030,.
The newly passed FIT21 clarifies the boundaries for regulatory roles of the CFTC and SEC among others.
⚫ CFTC — Regulates digital assets if the associated blockchain or digital ledger is both functional and decentralized. ⚫ SEC — Regulates assets and securities if the blockchain is functional but not decentralized.
U.S. House approves crypto FIT21 Bill with a very strong support from House Democrats.
The bill marks the industry's most significant legislative accomplishment in Congress, aiming to establish a clear regulatory framework for digital assets rather than relying on 90-year-old securities law written before the Internet existed.
President Biden opposed the bill with a policy statement, though he didn't say he'd veto the bill. SEC Chair Gary Gensler also strongly opposed the bill.