8/5/22 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.
Corporate
Coinbase
Coinbase ask to stall lawsuits
Coinbase has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stall two ongoing lawsuits being launched against the crypto exchange by account holders just after appealing the cases in Federal court, per a report by Bloomberg.
Coinbase is being sued by two customers, with one looking to get back $31,000 in losses after unknowingly giving access to his account to a hacker.
The exchange argues that it has protection under its user agreement, stating that customers must proceed with arbitration.
This is not Coinbase's first run-in with the legal system as it is currently being investigated in connection to the corp potentially listing multiple cryptocurrencies that should have been registered as securities.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is leading the investigation, which began last month; Coinbase claims it has violated no law.
Read more on Info Hub (Premium)
Coinbase partners with BlackRock
Coinbase has partnered with the world’s largest asset manager to offer BlackRock institutional clients access to crypto, also causing the stock to skyrocket 35%, causing a halt on trading via the stock as well with the opening of equity markets.
By connecting BlackRock’s investment platform, Aladdin, and Coinbase Prime, the companies are providing crypto trading, custody, prime brokerage and reporting capabilities to clients of both Aladdin and Coinbase, according to a Thursday blog post by Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, and Greg Tusar, vice president of institutional product.
Read more on Info Hub (Premium)
MicroStrategy
Michael Saylor Steps Down From CEO Position
Micheal Saylor announced on August 3 that he would be stepping down as CEO of Cloud software company MicroStrategy.
Saylor, a Bitcoin maximalist, has worked at the company since 1989, serving as the company's chief executive; his departure will not see him leave the company but move into a new position as executive chairman.
According to Saylor, the new CEO, Phong Le, who formally served as the company’s president, will take the role starting August 8th. The move allows Saylor to dedicate more of his effort toward the company's Bitcoin holdings.
Adoption
Japan Pushing to Become More Crypto Friendly
Two crypto advocacy groups in Japan have come together and released a tax reform request to lower taxes for individuals on crypto profits. The 2023 tax reform request proposes a 20% tax for individual investors and includes provisions to carry losses for three years. Japan currently taxes crypto as miscellaneous income which can be taxed up to 55%.
Japan is also bringing back Bitcoin ATMs (BTMs) which have been in Tokyo as early as 2014 but were taken out of circulation in the “crypto winter” of 2018. Japanese crypto exchange firm Gaia Co. announced that they would soon roll out Bitcoin ATMs with support for BTC (Bitcoin), ETH (Ethereum), BCH (Bitcoin Cash), and LTC (Litecoin).
Regulated Crypto Mining In Paraguay
Paraguay approved a bill that calls for regulation on crypto mining and trading last month. The bill was first introduced in December 2021, but was passed with modifications during the initial approval process, so it had to return to the upper chamber. The bill was originally introduced with the intent of attracting international miners with low electric rates (around 5 cents per kilowatt-hour). The national average electric rate in the US is $0.15/kWh.
The new law states that individual and corporate miners must request authorization for industrial electricity consumption AND then apply for a license. The bill will also create a registry for any person or business seeking to provide crypto trading or custody services.
The National Electricity Administration asked for higher rates for crypto mining companies
This administration is responsible for enabling energy supply for authorized miners and other crypto services. Some miners were reportedly paying between 80 and 160 times less than the amount for their real energy consumption.
Mining
Prominent Crypto Miner Will Attempt a PoW ETH Fork
Ethereum is approaching its Merge to proof-of-stake, which will replace the mining with staking to process transactions. This will render many Ethereum mining operations useless unless they find a different coin to mine with their current hardware setups.
ETH miner Chandler Guo, who was also involved in the fork that resulted in Ethereum Classic (ETC) in 2016, announced that ethpow would be coming soon. The miner intends to fork the network so that it never goes through the upcoming merge. This would allow current ETH miners to simply switch over to the forked cryptocurrency/network
Hacks
Solana Wallets Drained
According to Solscan, a total of 15,220 wallets have been affected, and a total of $4.46 million in tokens, primarily SOL and USDC, have been compromised.
Phantom and Slope, two Solana-based wallet services, initially flagged the attack on their social media platforms, alongside a host of cryptocurrency influencers, blockchain analytic and security firms and victims of the hack as it continued to unfold. Solana, one of the key Ethereum competitors, started experiencing a minor service outage, according to its status page. This came after the network suffered a widespread private key compromise.
Read more on Info Hub (Premium)
$190 Million Stolen from Crypto Bridge Nomad
The Nomad bridge is a protocol that gives users the ability to move digital assets between blockchains, such as Milkomeda C1, Avalanche (AVAX), Ethereum (ETH), and Moonbeam (GLMR).
This is biggest hack since Axie Infinity's Ronin Bridge Sidechain was compromised back in March, and has just plagued the Nomad token bridge which allowed malicious actors to steal around $190 million.
Market
Market Cap: $1.093 T; down from $1.101 T last week
24h Volume: $69.9 B; down from $100.1 B last week
BTC Dominance: 40.6%; down from 41.5% last week
ETH Dominance: 18.9%; down from 19.1% last week
None of our posts or newsletters are meant to be taken as financial advice.
