Crypto

Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid has announced that its subsidiary firm, Quoine Corporation, has acquired a Type I Financial Instruments Business license under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act from the Japanese regulatory authorities. The approval will allow Liquid to commence derivatives trading on its platform, offering investment opportunities to both retail and institutional clients, although a specific date for launch was not disclosed. Founded in 2014, Liquid is one of the world’s largest crypto-fiat exchanges with in excess of 800,000 customers and a reported highest daily trade volume of $1.1 billion across 2021. The platform operates under Japan’s Payment Services Act via Quoine Corporation and has also applied for a license with the Monetary Authority of Si...

About two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal ran an expose on the number of judges who held or traded the stock of companies over which they presided in legal proceedings. The article identifies 131 federal judges nationwide who did this during the period of 2010 to 2018. Of those 131 members of the judiciary, 61 judges purportedly traded the public company stock of litigants during the case. Imagine that! It’s quite incredible, actually. Powers On… is a monthly opinion column from Marc Powers, who spent much of his 40-year legal career working with complex securities-related cases in the United States after a stint with the SEC. He is now an adjunct professor at Florida International University College of Law, where he teaches a course on “Blockchain, Crypto and Regulatory Considerations....

Bitcoin (BTC) investors will resist selling their coins for a lot longer and the bull run will continue, new analysis argues.  In a Twitter debate on Oct. 28, data analyst Mitch Klee delivered fresh evidence that the current bull run is only 50% complete. RHODL demands more upside Using the Realized HODL Ratio (RHODL) indicator, created by popular analyst Philip Swift, Klee showed that Bitcoin is still far from the classic top signals it gave at the height of previous bull markets. RHODL is based on the well-known HODL Waves tool, and its increasing size conforms to bull markets gathering pace — both then top out at once. “RHODL ratio shows seller exhaustion, and we are only halfway there,” he said as part of a Twitter comment. Bitcoin RHODL vs. BTC/USD chart. Source: Mitch Klee/Twitt...

Multichain transaction network Biconomy has concluded a public token sale of its BICO cryptocurrency, onboarding more than 12,500 new tokenholders in the process, the company announced Thursday.  The public sale, which was facilitated by token listing platform CoinList, raised a cumulative $11.5 million. More than 850,000 people registered for the sale, which was the largest waitlist on CoinList to date. The sale took place on Oct. 14 via two options of 40 million and 10 million BICO tokens. BICO will be used to power Biconomy’s ecosystem as it vies to attract more developers to the community. The so-called multichain relayer network has been designed to aid developers in building decentralized applications for Web 3.0, a broad term that describes the next phase of the internet’s evol...

The President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele tweeted earlier today that his government has taken advantage of the recent Bitcoin price drop and added 420 additional BTC to the nation’s stash. “It was a long wait, but worth it,” he tweeted, “We just bought the dip!” Shortly after he tweeted: “We’re already making a profit off the #Bitcoin we just bought.” During the time between the tweets, the value of the country’s Bitcoin grew by around 0.4% or $100K. How do we make a profit if 1 #BTC= 1 #BTC? We have a trust fund accounted in USD, but the trust is funded by both USD and BTC. When the BTC part revalues in comparison to the accounting currency (USD), we are able to withdraw some USD and leave the trust with the same total. — Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) October 27, 2021 Many onlookers ...

Reports are emerging that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has rejected one, or possibly two, recent Bitcoin exchange-traded fund applications signaling that the regulator is not quite ready for more exotic futures products just yet. Just a day or so after Valkyrie filed for a leveraged Bitcoin futures ETF and Direxion applied for an inverse fund for bears, the SEC appears to have vetoed them both. On Oct. 28, Bloomberg’s senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas referred to a Dow Jones alert indicating the Valkyrie leveraged fund had been shelved by the SEC. He added that the move was likely also to apply to the inverse fund application. Looks like the SEC not having it w the levered (and likely inverse) Bitcoin futures ETFs. Can’t hurt to try tho. Had they gone through likely billion ...

A group of high-level U.S. government attorneys has oulined their priorities for the enforcement and prosecution of individuals and companies that have committed crypto-related crimes. Enforcement officials from the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) spoke about the direction their agencies will take at a panel discussion at the American Bar Association’s annual institute on white-collar crime in Miami on Oct. 27. In addition to corporate players, lawmakers are taking a closer look at individuals according to a report of the event by Law360. Principal deputy assistant attorney general of the DoJ’s Criminal Division, Nicholas McQuaid, stated the prosecution of individuals in white-collar cas...

The wolf of nonfungible streets Erstwhile crypto skeptic Jordan Belfort has bravely outed himself as an NFT proponent amid the booming growth of the sector in 2021. Belfort is known for his dodgy antics while working as a stockbroker on Wall Street, with his story being captured in “The Wolf of Wall Street” film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The 59-year-old has slammed crypto on multiple occasions, and in 2018 he even compared Bitcoin to the level of fraud that his firm Stratton Oakmont used to engage in before he was indicted for securities fraud and money laundering in 1999. On Oct. 25, Belfort revealed to his 600,000 followers that he purchased CryptoPunk #6033, depicting a male wearing a durag and smoking a vaporizer pen. According to the transaction history on OpenSea, Belfort spent 102...

Crypto trading platform Voyager Digital has inked a deal with the Dallas Mavericks basketball team aiming to make crypto more accessible through fan engagement and other educational programs. In an Oct. 27 announcement, Voyager Digital said it would become the Mavs first cryptocurrency brokerage and international partner in a five-year deal. The trading platform will also have naming rights over the franchise’s Mavs Gaming Hub in Dallas, a venue for the Mavs NBA 2K League team. “This partnership gives us the opportunity to educate people all over the world on ways to use crypto in their everyday lives,” said Voyager Digital co-founder and CEO Steve Ehrlich. “We want to help people learn alternate ways to grow their wealth to achieve true financial freedom and build intergenerational ...