8 October

Tether Has Loaned $1B to Celsius Network: Report

“Celsius Network CEO Alex Mashinsky said the company pays an interest rate of 5%-6% to Tether, Bloomberg reported Thursday as part of an investigation into the stablecoin provider’s reserves. The investigation found that Tether had loaned billions of dollars to crypto companies using bitcoin as collateral.

Bloomberg’s investigation also found that Tether’s reserves include billions of dollars of short-term loans to large Chinese firms, something that has been speculated on widely.

Last month, Celsius Network received a cease-and-desist order from Kentucky’s securities regulator over interest earned on certain crypto accounts. The regulator says the accounts violate the state’s securities laws.

In response, Tether described Bloomberg’s investigation as ‘a one-act play the industry has seen many times before.’

This article does nothing more than attempt to perpetuate a false and aging story arc about Tether based on innuendo and misinformation, shared by disgruntled individuals with no involvement with or direct knowledge of the business’s operations.”

SEC Approves ETF for ‘Bitcoin Revolution Companies’, Portfolio Includes Tesla and Twitter

“The SEC approved an ETF consisting of companies holding large amounts of Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Park said the Bitcoin Revolution Fund will be less volatile than pure crypto plays since a plunge in the price of Bitcoin does not have a major affect on the shares of firms like Tesla or PayPal.

Volt said 25% of the fund’s assets would be made up of stock in MicroStrategy. Park added that the fund will consist of shares in approximately 30 companies, including Tesla, Square, Coinbase, and PayPal. He also said Volt decided to include Twitter, which recently made Bitcoin tipping part of its operations, and Bitcoin mining companies like Marathon that also hold the currency in their corporate treasuries.

A year ago, an ETF like this wouldn’t have been possible. We hope this is a crack in the dam.”

Bitcoin’s Technical Bias Flips Bullish as Price Climbs Above Descending Trendline

“Bitcoin ran through key technical resistance levels on Wednesday, strengthening a bullish bias. The cryptocurrency jumped above $55,000 yesterday, breaching the downtrend line. Buyers also flipped the horizontal resistance at $53,000 into support.

The breakout has exposed highs near $60,000 registered in the first half of May – more so, as the recent bullish move is backed by a pickup in trading volumes and accumulation by whales.“

New Chainalysis Report Reveals Who’s Leading the World in Crypto Adoption

“In August, Chainalysis published its second-ever global cryptocurrency adoption index which reported an 880% rise in global crypto adoption, driven by P2P trading and usage in emerging markets such as Africa. The Chainalysis team tracked data across 7,000 crypto service providers and found ‘meaningful crypto activity’ in 158 countries.

Despite the big moves made by institutional investors such as MicroStrategy and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Square in the U.S., Vietnam topped the Chainalysis adoption index, followed by India and Pakistan. Six out of the top 20 countries in the index are African nations.

There are a lot of extremely large institutional size transfers that really bias our data upward. And so really, all the things that we did in terms of weights and metrics introduced, were to try to capture that day-to-day grassroots activity among your everyday shop owner, or your everyday person who’s accepting a remittance payment rather than capturing those really large transfers.”

MakerDAO Founder’s Plans to Address Climate Change and Pivot Back to ETH

“Christensen asserts that MakerDAO should strive to ensure that all of its collateral comprises ‘sustainable and climate-aligned assets that consider the long-term impacts of financial activity on the environment.’

Christensen also expresses the need for MakerDAO to reestablish its commitment to decentralized collateral, advocating that the protocol return to relying on the Ethereum network and Ether (ETH) token.

Today we already have everything we need to begin scaling our RWA exposure to hundreds of billions of USD and beyond, securely and in full compliance with financial regulation, by using the trustee-based model of real-world assets that the community developed over many years.”

Dapper Labs Taps Chainalysis to Fight NFT Money Laundering

“Chainalysis said Thursday that Dapper Labs will use Chainalysis’s KYT (Know Your Transaction) and Reactor compliance tools, which flag suspected criminal activity and enable deeper investigations into those transactions, respectively.

Dapper expects illicit activity could ramp up as NFTs hit mainstream adoption.”

The Disrupt

In Cryptography We Trust