“The financial markets are a sea of red on Friday as worries over a new coronavirus variant appear to have zapped risk appetite. While bitcoin is trading 6.7% lower on the day near $55,000, the S&P 500 futures are nursing a 2.3% loss.
The cryptocurrency was better bid on Thursday and appeared set to cross the resistance at $60,070. That would have confirmed a double bottom breakout on the 4-hour chart. However, renewed COVID fears have played spoilsport.”
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“The Senate is poised to reject the White House’s choice to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the federal agency charged with overseeing the country’s banks. She appears to have no path to confirmation as five Democratic Senators have told the White House they will not vote for her.
The impending rejection is significant for the crypto industry since the nominee, Saule Omarova, has been an outspoken critic of crypto. In recent months, she has described crypto as benefiting from a “dysfunctional” financial system, and shared a Financial Times story that framed Bitcoin as a symbol of American decline.
The Senate opposition to Omarova, a Cornell law professor, is not rooted specifically in her position on crypto. Instead, Senators have called attention to her academic writing, which has called for “hemming in” banks and giving citizens direct access to accounts at the Federal Reserve.”
“Major crypto mining pools including Binance Pool, F2pool, Poolin and ViaBTC are reporting connectivity problems. Binance Pool’s bitcoin hashrate is down 14% in the last 24 hours. F2pool has dropped almost 8% and ViaBTC has fallen by 7%.
The issue is caused by domain name system (DNS) “pollution,” Binance Pool and Poolin said on their Chinese Telegram channels. F2pool also said the pool’s domain name is not being properly resolved. DNS poisoning can occur when a hacker redirects traffic from the domain name to an imposter website. De La Torre thinks the Chinese government is likely interfering with the mining pools.
The connectivity issues appear to be primarily affecting Chinese miners.
Binance Pool, F2pool, and Poolin advised users to modify their DNS to solve the issue. Binance Pool said that a long term solution is to use a VPN to circumvent the country’s telecoms carrier.”
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“The new German government has cited crypto in its coalition agreement, advocating for an equal playing field between traditional finance and “innovative business models.”
Elsewhere on the continent, the European Council, which guides the EU’s political agenda, adopted two proposals named the “Regulation on Markets in Crypto Assets” (MiCA) framework and the “Digital Operational Resilience Act.”
While MiCA still needs to be ratified by the European Parliament, if enacted, it will subject crypto asset issuers to more stringent requirements, but nonfungible tokens and utility tokens will fall outside the scope of the regulation.
Because of the ‘Brussels Effect,’ there is a very good chance these rules will become international standards in the end. While everyone is focused on the US and China, the EU is casually leading the way.”
“DappRadar, a popular platform that provides analytics and portfolio tracking for the decentralized application (DApp) and nonfungible token (NFT) markets, has announced an upcoming company restructuring to a decentralized business model, in addition to releasing a native governance token, RADAR.
Founded in 2018, the site currently boasts over 4 million global users, 600,000 of which are uniquely active on a monthly basis, as well as playing host to over 8,300 DApps and 27 protocols. The purpose behind the evolution is to expand DappRadar’s ecosystem to a global audience and establish itself as one of the world’s leading DApp stores.“
“Yaron Shalem, the chief financial officer of cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius, was one of the seven people arrested in Tel Aviv this month in connection with Israeli crypto mogul Moshe Hogeg. It is not clear what charge(s) Shalem was arrested on.
While this is in no way related to the employee’s time or work at @CelsiusNetwork, the employee was immediately suspended. We have also verified that no assets were misplaced or mishandled.
Shalem joined Celsius earlier this year. From January 2014 to March 2018 he worked as CFO for Singulariteam, a venture capital firm launched by Hogeg.”
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