“A bipartisan bill introduced earlier this month in the United States Senate could be applied in broad and unexpected ways if it becomes law, including to threaten crypto, the think tank Coin Center has warned.
The act would give the Commerce Department new powers that would ‘comprehensively address the ongoing threat posed by technology from foreign adversaries‘ by allowing it to ‘review, prevent, and mitigate information communications and technology transactions that pose undue risk to our national security.‘
The bill foresees penalties of imprisonment for 20 years and fines of $250,000. Legal experts say the act is vaguely worded and could be used to restrict a range of technologies, including virtual private networks, or VPNs.
The RESTRICT Act creates blanket authority, with few checks, to ban just about anything linked to a ‘foreign adversary’. Its potential implications for the cryptocurrency space cannot be ignored.”
See Also: U.S. CFTC Chief Behnam Reinforces View of Ether as Commodity
“In a March 29 hearing of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee exploring federal regulators’ responses to recent bank failures, Gruenberg said the deposits that were not included in the bid from a New York Community Bancorp subsidiary for Signature would be returned “by early next week.”
According to Gruenberg, Signature’s payments platform Signet — which, along with the digital asset deposits, was not included in the NYCB bid — was “in the process now of being marketed” to potential buyers.
Nellie Liang, under secretary for domestic finance at the U.S. Treasury Department, said she didn’t believe crypto “played a direct role” in the failure of either Signature or Silicon Valley Bank.
See Also: Top U.S. Treasury Official Says Crypto Had No ‘Direct Role’ In Bank Failures
“The exit of FTX and the regulatory issues for Binance may end up leaving sizable market share up for grabs in international derivatives trading. The platform would specifically offer perpetual futures, a type of derivative that is banned in the U.S. for retail traders.
Indeed, in addition to the Gemini plans, it was reported earlier this month that leading U.S.-based exchange Coinbase (COIN) was looking to launchan overseas platform in order to offer perpetual futures.”
See Also: Binance concealed ties to China for years, even after 2017 crypto crackdown: Report
See Also: Coinbase Aims to Stay in Canada; Binance Could Be Poised to Exit Amid Regulatory Shakeup
“The bullish impulse stems from Ripple’s case vs. the SEC, where optimism for Ripple’s win seems to be becoming more dominant.
XRP has rallied 57% since March 22, reaching a 10-month high of about 58 cents. Since the rally began, the notional open interest, or the dollar value locked in unsettled and active contracts trading on futures and perpetual futures exchanges, has increased by nearly 90% to $843 million, the highest since December 2021.
An increase in open interest coming alongside an increase in price typically suggests an influx of new money on the bullish side and is said to confirm the uptrend.”
See Also: DeFi Platform Lido to Cease Staking on Polkadot, Kusama in August
“Four of Warhol’s famous works were “partially acquired” from well-known art collectors, and each work will be available as shares in the form of security tokens. The collection plans to launch in May, though interested collectors can join the waitlist now. According to the website, the starting price for each tokenized lot will vary from $250 to $860.
Freeport will utilize Vertalo to tokenize the artworks so they can be bought and sold on decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms. The platform cleared a regulatory hurdle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday, allowing it to fractionalize shares of fine artworks in the form of security tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
As more and more value moves on-chain, fractionalized art is increasingly being sought after.”
“An unknown person or group may be collecting the IP addresses of Bitcoin (BTC) users and linking them to their BTC addresses, violating the privacy of these users, according to a blog post from pseudonymous Bitcoin app developer 0xB10C. The entity has been active since March 2018.
An entity I call LinkingLion, active since 2018 and on a Monero banlist, is opening connections to many clearnet Bitcoin nodes. Its presumably attempting to link transactions to node IPs.
To help protect the community from this privacy threat, 0xB10C has produced an open-source ban list that nodes can implement to ban LinkingLion from connecting to them. However, they also warned that the entity could get around this ban list by changing the IP addresses it uses to connect. In 0xB10C’s view, the only permanent solution to the problem is to change the transaction logic within Bitcoin Core, which developers have so far been unable to do.
The vulnerability exposed in the post seems to primarily affect users running their own Bitcoin nodes.”