7/1/22 FAL Weekly Digest
The FAL Weekly Digest is a source for this week’s biggest cryptocurrency-related news and updates. This newsletter features excerpts and links to this past week’s biggest news articles written by members of FAL Consulting’s writing team or gathered from other listed sources.
Crypto Mining Firms
Some of the largest crypto mining companies are experiencing troubles beyond the bear market. Compass Mining and Marathon Digital Holdings are two crypto mining firms that publicized a couple issues this week. With the lows from the past few months, BTC mining was not profitable for many mining machines for some time. Reports from Arcane Research shows that public Bitcoin miners sold 100% of their May mining earnings.
Compass Mining
Compass Mining recently had disputes with the owners of one of their mining facilities, Dynamics Mining. On June 27, Dynamics Mining tweeted that they were terminating the hosting agreement due to 6 late payments and 3 non-payments from Compass.
The following day, Compass Mining announced that the Board of Directors has accepted the resignations of their Chief Executive Officer and the Chief Financial Officer. They temporarily appointed their Chief Technology Officer and Chief Mining Officer as co-Presidents and CEOs while the board searches for permanent candidates.
On the 29th, Compass Mining officially denied the allegations made by Dynamics and claims to have “performed all of its obligations under its contracts with Dynamics, including its financial obligations.” They have also filed a lawsuit with a request for expedited relief to protect its interests and the interest of its customers.
Read more on Daily Reads
Marathon Digital Holdings
Marathon Digital Holdings is another leading crypto mining company that is going through unforeseen difficulties. A significant portion of Marathon’s operations have been without power since a severe storm damaged structures in the power facility that supplies Marathons power. The storm passed through the town of Hardin, Montana and resulted in power loss of all 30,000 miners in the area. This reportedly makes up for 75% of Marathons entire active miners. The issue is expected to merely be partially resolved by the first week of July.
Read more on CryptoPotato
Argentina Customs Seizes $21 Million in Mining Machines
The import to Argentina consisted of around 2,233 Whatsminer brand cryptocurrency mining machines. Antminer and Whatsminer are two of the most recognized brands of Bitcoin miners.
The import was seized due to irregularities: it was invoiced by a foreign LLC based in Florida and for higher than market values. The investigation revealed that the invoice was overvalued for $5 million USD over market price in a tax fraud attempt. The invoice tried to claim an average unit value of $10,000, while the models actually cost between $5,700 and $7,700 each. The machines arrived in Ezeiza, Argentina and was heading for the Free Trade Zone in La Plata.
Free trade zones are locations where goods can be imported, exported, manufactured, handled, and reconfigured without involvement of customs agencies.
The import attempt is a typical triangulation maneuver where goods are over-invoiced to a foreign company to take advantage of free trade zone customs operations. Customs has been taking action recently to suppress these import maneuvers.
View original article on Ambito
Three Arrows Capital Provided False Information To Exceed Asset and Investor Thresholds
Three Arrows Capital is finally publicly falling apart as well according to the most recent press release of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Three Arrows Capital provided false information and exceeded the assets under management threshold for the regulator and their investors.
The regulator's answer was an official reprimand issued to the fund, which is not allowed to carry more than $250 million and have no more than 30 qualified investors. Three Arrows Capital ignored this rule and attracted significantly more funds and investors. Last, but not least, is the prolonged breach of the abovementioned AUM threshold since TAC exceeded its management allowance of not more than $250 million, reportedly having more than $18 billion in management.
Some more overall information that summarizes some of their issues.
The central bank alleged that the beleaguered crypto hedge fund provided misleading information and also surpassed the assets under the management (AUM) threshold permitted for a registered fund management company (RFMC).
Furthermore, 3AC also did not notify the regulator regarding changes in the directorships and shareholdings of its directors within the required timeline, the MAS said.
The organization revealed that it will now investigate if 3AC was involved in any further breaches of its regulations.
Once a high-profile crypto entity and a darling of last year’s bull market, 3AC has run into difficulties following the sharp sell-off in the market in the past months.
It had been significantly invested in a number of troubled projects, including Terra.
Crypto broker Voyager Digital issued a default notice after 3AC failed to make payments on a loan of 15,250 BTC and $350 million worth of USDC.
The latest development comes after a British Virgin Islands court ordered the Singapore-based crypto hedge fund into liquidation.
Cardano 1.35.0 Released
Cardano node has officially pushed version 1.35.0 over the weekend with some important notes. The first line of the release notes state that “this is not final release notes”.
x.x.0 versions are typically updated to x.x.1 very quickly. A large portion of this update is to prepare node operators for the upcoming Vasil hard fork. This icludes node and CLI support for the following:
Plutus v2 primitives and the associated new cost model
This update does include various breaking changes to address any issues left from the Babbage era. The Babbage era was an update following the Alonzo Era and named after mathematician Charles Babbage.
View the entire release notes (likely to be updated soon).
Market
Market Cap: $865 B; down from $954.76 B last week
24h Volume: $73.635 B; up from $66.9 B last week
BTC Dominance: 42.6%; same as 42.6% last week
ETH Dominance: 14.7%; down from 15.4% last week
None of our posts or newsletters are meant to be taken as financial advice.
