Connect with us

Crypto

This Week in Coins: Virtually Every Top 100 Cryptocurrency Sinks as LUNA Scrapes Bottom – Decrypt

Published

on

This Week in Coins: Virtually Every Top 100 Cryptocurrency Sinks as LUNA Scrapes Bottom – Decrypt
This week in cash. Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

A cursory look on the Decrypt residence web page this week would have been sufficient to see that the worldwide crypto trade is a hive of panic.

Crypto’s craziest week noticed some $200 billion of complete market capitalization evaporate between Wednesday and Thursday, whereas trade leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum crashed to lows not seen since 2020, placing institutional whales like Elon Musk and Michael Saylor again underwater. What’s extra, in response to analysts at Huobi, we haven’t reached the underside.

Terra’s main cryptocurrency LUNA—final week one of many prime 10 on the earth—fell to zero. LUNA posted an all-time excessive of $118.19 solely final month, and it is now buying and selling for a fraction of a penny.

LUNA’s demise was pushed by the collapse of Terra’s different main coin, the greenback-pegged UST, which bottomed out at 13 cents on Friday, in response to CoinMarketCap. It rose barely at the moment to 19 cents, as of this writing.

The week’s numbers

It’s now the sixth consecutive week of market decline as just about each prime 100 cryptocurrency by market capitalization begins the weekend down by double-digit percentages. Bitcoin is down 20% from final week, buying and selling at $28,809, and Ethereum fell by 27% to $1,968.

Among the many week’s largest losers: Cosmos sank 43% to $9.68, Algorand dropped 43% to $.42, NEAR Protocol fell 43% to $6.05, Polygon fell 40% to $.62, and Avalanche plummeted 48% to $29.83.

Advertisement

The one prime 100 coin that gained this week was Maker, the forty second largest cryptocurrency by market cap at $1.4 billion, which rose 7.1% to $1,419. 

The week’s information

Apart from Terra’s meltdown, the information cycle carried on a lot as the previous couple of months, albeit with heightened speak of stablecoin regulation.

On Monday, Instagram introduced it’s testing NFT connectivity with a handful of U.S.-based collectors and creators. The pilot permits testers to hyperlink crypto wallets to their accounts and show verified collectibles. Dad or mum firm Meta additionally stated Fb NFT assist is anticipated quickly.

Economist and former no-coiner Nouriel Roubini has begun engaged on an inflation-proof dollar-pegged stablecoin, in response to a Bloomberg report on Monday. Roubini’s Atlas Capital has tapped Andreessen Horowitz-backed Web3 developer Mysten Labs to develop tech for the “United Sovereign Governance Gold Optimized Greenback.” The undertaking is a complete about-turn for Roubini, who in 2018 delivered a 37-page speech calling crypto the “Mom of All Scams.”

Additionally on Monday, Salvadoran dictator Nayyib Bukele bought 500 BTC at round $15.3 million. This took the entire variety of El Salvador’s Bitcoin stash to 2,300, or round $66 million—at present $6.25 million (9%) shy of its worth when Decrypt reported the acquisition. In complete, Bukele is $37 million within the gap at the moment.

Advertisement

On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen highlighted Terra’s collapse for instance of why stablecoins have to be imminently regulated. On Thursday, Yellen talked about crypto once more, this time to say that the trade’s $1.23 trillion market cap poses no systemic danger to the U.S. monetary system, and by extension, neither do stablecoins, “however they’re rising very quickly and current the identical type of dangers we’ve identified for hundreds of years from financial institution runs.”

Securities and Change Fee chair Gary Gensler leveled sharp criticism at cryptocurrency exchanges and stablecoins throughout an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday. Taking challenge with the truth that many massive exchanges run custody, market making, and buying and selling providers with out separating them as conventional exchanges are required to, Gensler accused them of “buying and selling towards their prospects actually because they’re market-marking towards their prospects.”

That very same day, Germany’s federal finance ministry (BMF) issued the nation’s first steering on the earnings tax therapy of cryptocurrencies. Parliamentary State Secretary Katja Hessel stated in an announcement that the sale of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum is now tax-free for people after one 12 months of proudly owning the property.

Need to be a crypto professional? Get one of the best of Decrypt straight to your inbox.

Get the largest crypto information tales + weekly roundups and extra!

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Crypto

Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon will face fraud charges in the US | TechCrunch

Published

on

Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon will face fraud charges in the US | TechCrunch

Do Kwon, the co-founder of collapsed cryptocurrency startup Terraform Labs, will be extradited from Montenegro to the U.S. to face federal fraud charges, as first reported by Bloomberg.

Kwon faces charges in both the U.S. and South Korea; Terraform Labs’ TerraUSD and Luna cryptocurrencies crashed in 2022, causing investors to lose over $40 billion.

Terraform and Kwon were found personally liable for fraud following a civil trial on U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission allegations in April. Terraform agreed to pay $4.5 billion to settle the case with the SEC.

Kwon was arrested in March 2023 at the airport in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, while preparing to board a flight to Dubai. It’s unclear when Montenegro plans on releasing Kwon to the U.S. and whether the government’s latest decision supersedes its order in August to extradite Kwon to South Korea.

Continue Reading

Crypto

Here's a heartwarming holiday crypto story (no, seriously)

Published

on

Here's a heartwarming holiday crypto story (no, seriously)

In a true Christmas miracle, a viral crypto stunt actually seems to be doing some good in the world.

Siqi Chen, an investor and startup founder, took to X on Christmas Eve to share a GoFundMe campaign he created to fund research into a rare brain tumor afflicting his 5-year-old daughter. His daughter, Mira, was diagnosed in September with adamantinomatous craniopharyngioma — a benign tumor that is usually not fatal but causes severe side effects. 

Chen said the family is working with Dr. Todd Hankinson at the University of Colorado on treatments to slow the tumor’s growth. Because this cancer is so rare, he said, research is sparse and funding is lacking. “this christmas, i am humbly asking for your help to support dr. hankinson’s research,” he tweeted.

His online fundraiser raised more than $233,000 of its $300,000 goal in two days. But the most heartwarming part had nothing to do with GoFundMe.

Late in the evening on Christmas Day, Chen took to X again — this time in surprise. 

Advertisement

“uh so some random guy 20 minutes [ago] made a SOL memecoin called $MIRA to help with research fundraising and sent me half the entire supply and it’s now worth like $400K and i literally don’t know what to do,” he wrote.

The memecoin — internet parlance for a cryptocurrency created on a lark, often based on a joke — skyrocketed in value as crypto enthusiasts traded it among themselves. Chen started selling off small portions of his holding Wednesday evening, promising to donate 100% of the proceeds to Hankinson’s laboratory. “CAN SOME PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW THIS MAGIC INTERNET MONEY WORKS I AM LOSING MY MIND,” he wrote less than half an hour after his initial tweet, when the value of his holdings soared to nearly $6 million. 

Chen continued tweeting his disbelief as the value soared to $11 million, then $14.7 million, then $18.8 million. By Thursday morning, he had sold enough of the token to send at least $1 million to Hankinson’s lab, he said. “yi, mira and i are so unbelievably grateful to you all — each and every one of you,” he wrote. “christmas magic was made real this year thanks to all of you. forever grateful.”

Perhaps no one was more surprised than Hankinson, who learned of the memecoin Thursday morning via excited texts from friends and coworkers. “This entire area of the world — Bitcoin and NFTs and stuff — I do not know a single thing about it,” he told The Standard. “So when all this stuff started going on, I was like, ‘What?’” 

Hankinson said he has studied adamantinomatous craniopharyngioma for more than 15 years, and his lab is the only one in North America dedicated to its treatment. He said funding is hard to come by both because the condition is rare — fewer than two in a million people are diagnosed with AC every year — and because it does not grow as aggressively as some other tumors. Still, he said, the side effects can be devastating: stunted growth; vision impairment; and difficulty regulating hunger, thirst, and temperature.

Advertisement

If the Chen family did contribute $1 million, he said, it would be by far the largest donation the lab has ever received.

“Even if it ends up being a small fraction of what people have talked about, it would still be a complete game changer for the scale on which we can do things and the sophistication with which we do things,” he said. “This would be the most insane Christmas gift our research has ever gotten.”

Hankinson and Chen weren’t the only ones surprised by the use of a memecoin to fund medical research. These trend-based tokens are primarily known as risky, volatile investments — more of a gag than a serious asset. (The creators of a memecoin tied to Hailey Welch, better known as the “Hawk Tuah” Girl, are being sued by investors after its value dropped 95% in a single day.) They are sometimes used in crypto scams known as “rug pulls,” in which founders create a token, convince people to invest in it, then rapidly sell all their holdings.

Chen said repeatedly on Twitter that he was trying to avoid a “rug pull” situation by selling off his holdings in the “MIRA” coin slowly. He said Thursday that he would sell $1,000 worth of the token every 10 minutes until it runs out. Still, the value of the coin has dropped significantly from its overnight high. 

That crash — coupled with the fact that early sellers of the coin likely made a tidy profit — made some observers uneasy. But Chen said he didn’t mind.

Advertisement

“if you made a lot of money, i’m genuinely happy for you — but please consider donating some of your profits to hankinson lab,” he tweeted. “if you lost a lot of money, i’m very sorry —  but magic internet money is magic internet money.”

Chen is a well-regarded figure in Silicon Valley who founded and sold two startups and worked at several others before his current venture, a finance software company called Runway. Among those responding to his tweets were Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, and X CEO Linda Yaccarino.

In a Twitter Space on Wednesday night, Chen explained that his daughter initially presented with a headache, which he and his wife thought little about until they brought her to a pediatrician who suggested an MRI. Doctors have since placed Mira on an arthritis medication that could slow the growth of the tumor, and they are weighing the benefits of surgery. “Our strategy right now is just to try everything we can to buy as much time as possible,” he said.

Continue Reading

Crypto

Bitcoin rally loses steam in final days of record-breaking year

Published

on

Bitcoin rally loses steam in final days of record-breaking year
A bitcoin rally is fizzling in the final days of a record-breaking year for the digital asset, as investors assess the remaining impetus from US president-elect Donald Trump’s embrace of the cryptocurrency sector.

The largest token changed hands at US$96,200 as of 2pm Friday in Hong Kong, partly paring a retreat of almost 3 per cent from a day earlier. Smaller rivals including ether and dogecoin, a favourite of the meme crowd, oscillated in tight ranges.

The crypto market is also braced for the expiry of a substantial quantity of bitcoin and ether options contracts on Friday – one of the biggest such events in the history of digital assets, according to prime broker FalconX.

The notional value of the bitcoin contracts on the Deribit exchange – one of the largest for digital-asset derivatives – exceeds US$14 billion, while the equivalent figure for ether is about US$3.8 billion.

Sean McNulty, director of trading at liquidity provider Arbelos Markets, flagged the risk of a “choppy market” amid the expiry of the derivatives positions.

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending