Bitcoin has set yet another new all-time high — $73,835 on Coinbase BTC-USD on March 14. This means bitcoin is good now! All our past objections are resolved. Going forward, we only deal in Finances U Desire.
Sound and fury, signifying nothing
What’s interesting is that while the price is back up, the bitcoin trading market has not recovered. If anyone says “the market is back!” that’s an incorrect claim.
Market volume is one-eighth of what it was in November 2021, the last time the price was this high.
We get that number from Coinbase retail trading fee income, which is 2% of the volume. Coinbase is the largest actual-dollar exchange and it’s not allowed to lie in SEC filings — so for once in crypto, we have numbers we can trust a bit.
The retail trade volume against actual dollars on Coinbase went down in seven of the past eight quarters. Here’s a table from Q4 2021 to Q3 2023. Q4 2023 didn’t show any improvement.
Even as the price went up through 2023, every day people wanted bitcoins less and less. Coinbase gives us the numbers showing this.
(This is why we prefer to just quote the Coinbase price — the skew between exchanges can be hundreds of dollars when anything interesting is happening.)
BTC-USDT on BitMEX flash-crashed from $66,000 to just $8,900 on Monday, March 18. Starting at around 22:40 UTC, someone dumped 1,000 BTC as fast as possible at whatever the market would pay for it. [CoinDesk; Twitter, archive]
By the time the flash crash flowed through to Coinbase, it was a mere $2,000 drop.
BitMEX has much less bitcoin liquidity than Coinbase BTC-USD or Binance BTC-USDT — so we suspect this was a very urgent seller who felt that FinCEN didn’t need his details.
We’re not sure why our trader didn’t use OKX, HTX (formerly Huobi), or Bitfinex, which would have had more liquidity and thus less price slippage — hence our impression that they were really in a hurry. And now they have to put all that USDT somewhere.
ETFs will save bitcoin!
BlackRock says its spot bitcoin ETF has reached $10 billion in assets. But Grayscale’s GBTC has seen over $11 billion in outflows because nobody wants to pay their 1.5% fee. (Everyone else is around 0.3%.)
Bitcoin ETFs aren’t hitting the institutions they were hoping for — pension funds and so on. (Thankfully.) For all of BlackRock’s helpful ETF marketing advice, financial advisors are being very careful about recommending these things. [WSJ, archive]
The money flowing into the ETFs seems to be from individual investors. It’s not clear whether these are new investors or just existing holders dumping their bitcoin for ETFs because they’re tired of being their own bank.
This Financial Times article starts with BlackRock talking up its bitcoin ETF and the fabulous future of the blockchain … then details every way in which crypto is utterly incompatible with sane finance and doesn’t work. [FT, archive]
The hot air crypto bubble
Meanwhile, Tether has printed 11 billion tethers just since the start of 2024. It’s at 103 billion tethers and counting.
We very much doubt that most of these billions of tethers are being bought with real US dollars. Why would you send real dollars to an unregulated offshore wildcat bank to buy bitcoins when you could just put them into a US-regulated bitcoin ETF?
We suspect the tethers are being printed out of thin air and accounted as loans — the fresh USDT is “backed” by the loan itself.
This supports our theory that the present pump is not real money flooding into bitcoin. It’s stablecoins on Binance — tethers and FDUSD. The volume on Binance completely swamps the volumes on Coinbase or ETF trading.
The bitcoin price chart looks very like someone’s trying to pump the price. You’ll see the price slowly getting walked up, as if someone’s wash-trading it up … then it hits a round number of dollars, someone tries to cash out, and the price drops several thousand.
Fake dollars going up, real dollars going down.
So we’re not in a bubble. We’re in a balloon, one being pumped full of hot air. It’s fun going up — but the trip down can be very quick.
What do I do with my holdings?
Back in November 2022, when exchanges were suffering urgent unplanned maintenance left, right, and center, we went so far as to say that if you insisted on investing in bitcoins, you should not risk storing your coins on an exchange. Holding private keys is ridiculously fraught and the tech is still unusable trash — but it’s still not as bad as trusting bitcoin exchanges.
If you must hold bitcoins in the hope of getting dollars for them one day, the least-worst option is to buy into an ETF. That way you’re in a regulated market and your only risk is Coinbase Custody getting hacked.
If you’ve bought into crypto, please at least cash out your principal — the cash basis that you paid to buy in. Then everything you make from then on is pure profit. When the price crashes, you won’t have lost anything.
Our real recommendation, of course, is not to touch this garbage.
Back in the snake pit
Bitcoin suffered a year of its media coverage being “Sam Bankman-Fried is a crook.” Crypto pumpers tried to make out that FTX, the second-largest exchange, being a massive fraud was a mere aberration on the part of Bankman-Fried, and everyone else in crypto was a good guy.
Then the first-largest exchange, Binance, got busted too. So price discovery for bitcoin — what determines where the number goes — happens on an exchange that literally admitted a few months ago to being a criminal conspiracy. Binance’s founder and former CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, is in the US awaiting sentencing.
We find, over and over, that normal people keep assuming that crypto isn’t just a completely criminal snake pit. Because US dollars are able to touch it in any way, so surely it’s regulated. Right?
Finance and finance journalism seem to have collectively forgotten what a hellhole unregulated markets always were.
The way crypto works is:
Actual dollars flow from retail suckers to a few rich guys;
There’s lots of fancy bafflegab to obscure the very simple flow of actual dollars.
Crypto is an unregulated mob casino and the regulated exchanges are just the cashier’s desk.
You can absolutely make money in crypto — we would never say that you can’t. But you have to be a better shark than all the other sharks who built the shark pool.
Trade carefully.
Media stardom
Billy Bambrough wrote about the bitcoin price for the Sunday Times and spoke to David. In a rare moment for journalistic coverage of the number, Tether was mentioned! [Sunday Times, archive]
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Boy, those ETFs were the juice bitcoin really needed, eh?
The SEC approved 11 bitcoin spot ETFs on Wednesday, January 10, with media widely reporting what a boon this would be for the coiners. Surely this would lure piles of fresh dollars into bitcoin!
Not quite. The bitcoin price held around $46,000 — but just for long enough for the whales to start cashing out.
What the crypto world needs to understand is that bitcoin ETFs are not bitcoins. They’re a traditional finance product with bitcoin flavoring.
Except for the risk — that bit is completely bitcoin.
Number go down
The first big post-ETF price drop came on Friday, January 12. Bitcoin slipped from $46,000 to $43,500 in two hours — only one hour after the day’s printing of a billion tethers was released. A few hours after that, another dump took the price from $43,500 to $41,000.
The bitcoin market is fake and in tethers. The retail securities market is real and in actual dollars. You can’t pump bitcoin ETFs with tethers.
After years of being severely discounted from the price of the bitcoins in the fund, Grayscale GBTC finally reached net asset value. This turned out to be not so great — it looks like long-frustrated GBTC holders are finally dumping now that they can. [CoinDesk; Bloomberg, archive]
Coinbase (Nasdaq: COIN) stock went down as well. It was up as high as $186 at the end of December. It dropped to $130.78 on January 12.
ETFs have put bitcoin on steroids! Asthmatic and with shrunken balls.
Bitcoins: not so great
Bitcoins are still an awful investment for ordinary people who aren’t true believers in Satoshi and just want to grow their dollars.
The ETF S-1 filings go into considerable detail on the risks — none of which should be news to anyone here.
The main risk the ETF trusts see is that the base asset is still a completely terrible investment. Crypto is insanely volatile. A pile of crypto companies went broke from being run by crooks — the filings go into some detail on this. Everyone hates bitcoin miners. The regulators, from the White House down, increasingly just despise everything about crypto. And very few people like bitcoin anyway.
Securities broker Vanguard thinks the bitcoin ETFs are such trash that they’re not only not offering these spot bitcoin ETFs — they’re withdrawing the crypto futures ETFs they presently offer. [Axios]
What happens if the ETF bitcoins are stolen?
Unlike a bitcoin futures ETF, a spot ETF is based on actual bitcoins — and these have to be stored somewhere.
Most of it, including $29 billion face value of GBTC bitcoin, is stored by Coinbase Custody. VanEck is storing their ETF coins at Gemini. Fidelity is storing their ETF coins at their own custody subsidiary.
So what happens if a hacker gets into the digital fortress and takes all the bitcoins?
In short: too bad. Sorry, your money is gone!
Coinbase Custody advised BlackRock that it has insurance covering up to $320 million losses of custodied crypto — but that’s for all its customers’ $144 billion (face value) of cryptos in custody. That’s a whole 0.2% coverage. [SEC]
The ETF trusts themselves do not have FDIC or Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) insurance.
The ETF trusts specifically disclaim liability for lost backing assets. Valkyrie, for example, says: “Shareholders’ recourse against the Trust, Trustee, Custodian and Sponsor under New York law governing their custody operations is limited.” [SEC]
Investors would likely sue anyway. BlackRock and Fidelity could cover such a loss, though it would sting. Grayscale would be utterly unable to cover it.
If Coinbase were to go bankrupt, it’s not clear legally if crypto stored in Coinbase Custody would belong to the individual customers or would be thrown into the bankruptcy estate!
The custodian just losing all the bitcoins is not a trivial risk — two crypto custodians, Prime Trust and Fortress, went bankrupt in 2023 just from losing customer coins.
We spoke to Frank Paiano, who teaches finance and investing at Southwestern Community College, about what would happen if a bitcoin ETF’s backing assets vanished. [Frank Paiano]
He thinks that customers “will be fooled into thinking” that the ETF assets are protected, even though they absolutely are not. “That is mostly why Fidelity has set up their own trustee. I would guess that companies such as BlackRock would do the same.” (BlackRock is so far just using Coinbase.)
Loss of ETF-backing assets happens quite a lot, said Paiano. “A simple Internet search for ‘gold investments stolen’ yields several examples. Then there are the age-old anecdotes of people being duped into buying lead painted or plated with gold.”
Paiano thinks bitcoin ETFs are profoundly unwise investments: “prudent, long-term oriented investors should stay far away from these abominations”— but they’ll find customers.
“If there are foolish, greedy individuals willing to part with their hard-earned money, there will be scoundrels happy to oblige them.”
Other bitcoin ETF fallout
The day before the SEC announced its approval of 11 spot bitcoin ETFs, the official @SECGov Twitter posted a fake notice saying a bitcoin ETF was approved. SEC Chair Gary Gensler issued a statement on the fake tweet, saying that an unauthorized party got hold of the phone number connected to the account but didn’t get access to any SEC internal systems. [SEC]
What happens next?
The new narrative we’ve seen is that the real bitcoin pump is in 90 days when financial advisors are finally ready to push bitcoin ETFs on their customers, for some reason. Probably the halvening, or sunspots maybe.
We don’t expect the number to go up just from bitcoin ETFs existing — anyone who wanted bitcoins could already buy them, and “anyone” numbers one-eighth of what it did in the recent bubble.
We do expect downward pressure on the bitcoin price to continue from the GBTC holders who can finally cash out near par.
Tether pumps only work if nobody tries to cash out into the pumped-up price. Unfortunately, that only works as long as nobody wants real dollars. It turns out they do.
With these ETFs, bitcoin is the dog that caught the parked car.
Media stardom
David was quoted by Cointelegraph on bitcoin ETFs. A bitcoin ETF is a terrible idea, but we don’t think the threat model includes the issuers stealing the bitcoins. [Cointelegraph; Cointelegraph; Cointelegraph]
David spoke to Davar about bitcoin ETFs and our friends at Tether. (“Basket fund” is the local term for “ETF.”) [Davar, in Hebrew, Google translate]
David went on Logan Moody’s podcast The Contrarian just before the ETFs were approved to talk about the state of crypto as of early 2024. [YouTube]
As predicted, the SEC today approved several spot bitcoin ETFs — Grayscale GBTC, Bitwise, Hashdex, BlackRock iShares, Valkyrie, ARK 21Shares, Invesco Galaxy, VanEck, WisdomTree, Fidelity Wise Origin, and Franklin.
Fees are cut throat, some less than a quarter of a percent. These companies can run the ETFs as loss leaders for a while, but eventually they’ll have to raise the fees or quit.
Today’s post is over on David’s blog. [DavidGerard]
“My survey of three card monte tables suggests they’ve always got at least one patron but you won’t see anyone playing at the big casinos which just shows the system is rigged.”
Crypto venture capital investments have gone full crypto collapse, from $21.6 billion in 2022 to just $0.5 billion so far in 2023. This Fortune article includes the funniest graph of the week: [Fortune, archive]
Investors are leaving the crypto sector without any plans to return. [Bloomberg]
Crypto trading is at its lowest level since October 2020. The Block puts the volume for May 2023 at $424 billion. For comparison, May 2021 was $4.25 trillion and May 2022 was $1.4 trillion. [The Block]
Volume numbers are considerably less if you take into account that unregulated crypto exchanges are known for faking their volumes. Crypto trading is all but dead. We know this because exchanges run by normal finance guys don’t see any trading. [Bloomberg]
Traditional finance groups want to start their own crypto exchanges run in a non-clown-shoes manner. A nice ambition — but that was Gemini’s pitch and even they still had to resort to risky garbage. [FT]
The Winklevoss twins marketed Gemini as an exchange that played by the rules — one that serious money people could trust. But after the failure of FTX and the Genesis bankruptcy — in which Gemini is the largest creditor — they lost that trust. Maybe they could pivot to AI? [Bloomberg]
Crypto.com halted services for institutional traders in the US on June 21. The exchange cited “limited demand” as the reason. [news.bitcoin.com]
The rest of crypto is also desperate. Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian is still pushing play-to-earn games and touts Axie Infinity as a huge success. Gamers hate play-to-earn and think it’s vacuous horse hockey. [Twitter, archive]
Universe.xyz is the latest NFT market to shut down, taking all the images on the site with it. As more NFT markets shut down, your apes are in danger of going blank forever. [Twitter, archive]
TechMonitor asks: “Is crypto finally dead?” We should be so lucky. With quotes from David. [TechMonitor]
Coinbase: We didn’t do it, nobody saw us, and it wasn’t even a thing
Coinbase has responded to the SEC’s complaint with 177 pages of chaff. [Doc 22, PDF]
Paragraph 2 makes the claim that in approving Coinbase’s original S-1, the SEC approved Coinbase’s business. Let’s quote again this line from the S-1, signed off by Brian Armstrong: [SEC]
Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission nor any other regulatory body has approved or disapproved of these securities or passed upon the accuracy or adequacy of this prospectus. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offense.
Coinbase argues that Congress is looking into cryptos, therefore existing laws don’t matter. Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s general counsel, has told Bloomberg how Coinbase’s big hope is that new laws will save their backsides. This is correct — Rep McHenry’s new crypto markets bill is indeed Coinbase’s only hope. [Bloomberg]
Coinbase claims that with this complaint, the SEC is working well outside its remit and that its ideas about whether crypto tokens are securities are entirely novel. Never mind the SEC’s repeated wins in court whenever a crypto issuer is dumb enough to take the matter that far. [Doc 23, PDF; CoinDesk]
Earlier, Coinbase filed a writ of mandamus demanding that the SEC consider its proposal for new crypto regulations. The SEC says it’ll have something to report within 120 days. Judge Cheryl Ann Krause expects a decision on Coinbase’s proposal from the regulator by October 11. [Doc 30, PDF; Doc 32, PDF]
Tether: Yes! We have no Chinese commercial paper
CoinDesk finally got access to documents from the New York Attorney General related to Tether’s reserves from March 31, 2021. [CoinDesk; CoinDesk, PDF; CoinDesk, PDF; CoinDesk, PDF; CoinDesk, PDF; Bloomberg]
The NYAG claimed that Tether had been lying about its reserves — which it had been. Tether and Bitfinex settled with New York for $18.5 million in February 2021.
The settlement required Tether to publish a breakdown of its reserves quarterly for two years. But what the public got to see in May 2021 were two skimpy pie charts, showing where Tether had parked its alleged $41 billion in backing reserves at the time. [Tether, archive]
CoinDesk then filed a Freedom of Information request for the fully detailed version of Tether’s report to the NYAG on its reserves.
Tether fought the release of the documents for two years. In February, they lost in court and decided not to go ahead with an appeal. So the NYAG sent Coindesk the documents on June 15. New York also sent the same documents to Bloomberg and Decrypt.
In June and July 2022, Tether vigorously denied that it held money in Chinese commercial paper — loans to Chinese companies which most money market funds avoid. It also said in September 2021 that it had no debt or securities linked to Evergrande, a cash-strapped Chinese real estate company. [Tether, 2022; Tether, 2022; CoinDesk, 2021]
Bloomberg called out Tether’s wider claims of no involvement in Chinese commercial paper as nonsense. [Bloomberg, 2021]
It turns out that Tether did hold Chinese commercial paper in 2021, and quite a lot of it. It held securities issued from banks around the world — but mainly China, including debt issued by the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and Agricultural Bank of China. ChainArgos took a close look at the funds and put together a spreadsheet. [Google Docs]
The Tether press releases on the FOIed docs are a hoot. Lots of table pounding. [Tether, archive; Tether, archive]
We give CoinDesk a bit of stick from time to time. But we also read the site every day and follow the livewire feed. They get all the credit for doggedly pursuing this one.
FTX versus the venture capitalists to the stars
John Jay Ray’s team at FTX seems to have found some more truly fascinating documents. FTX is suing venture capital firm K5 Global, its managers, Michael Kives and Bryan Baum, and various related entities to recover the $700 million that Sam Bankman-Fried put into the firm.
Kives worked at Creative Artists Agency from 2003 to 2018 as a Hollywood talent agent. He left in 2018 to found K5.
In February 2022, SBF attended a dinner party at Kives’ house, with A-list celebrities, billionaires, and politicians. He was deeply impressed with Kives’ “infinite connections” and even contemplated that Kives could work with FTX on “electoral politics.”
Less than three weeks later, SBF signed a “term sheet” agreeing to give Kives and Baum $125 million each personally and to invest billions of dollars into K5 over three years:
The Term Sheet was little more than a cursory list of investment ideas, and repeatedly stated that the actual “mechanics” of these very substantial investments would be later worked out “in the long form documents.”
SBF wired $300 million to K5 the next day. No due diligence was done on any of the deals — including $214.5 million for a 38% stake in MBK Capital LP Series T, whose gross asset value was just $2.94 million as of March 2022.
K5 were very close advisors. Kives and Baum joined FTX’s internal Slack chat. SBF reserved a room for them in his Bahamas luxury apartment. In May, Alameda transferred another $200 million to K5.
Sam didn’t worry too much about the fine details. In an August 2022 internal document, he wrote that “Bryan is ~100% aligned with FTX,” that “FTX is aligned with Bryan too,” and that “if there are significant artificial up-downs between FTX and K5 as entities, I’m happy to just true it up with cash estimates.”
SBF wrote that he was:
… aligned with Bryan and K5, and treats $1 to it as $1 to FTX even though we only own 33%, because whatever, we can always true up cash if needed, but also, who cares … There are logistical, PR, regulatory, etc reasons to not just merge K5 100% into FTX but I and Bryan will both act how we would if they were merged.
… Is Bryan an FTX employee, or a random 3rd party? The answer, really, is neither. The answer is that it’s sorta complicated and liminal and unclear. Bryan lives in the uncanny valley.
FTX and Alameda employees flagged K5’s “pretty bizarre” expenses at the time, such as “over $777k in design expenses” that had been billed to Alameda.
FTX wants the $700 million back as having been avoidable transfers. It may want even more money, as Ray’s team suspects that more interesting details will come out in discovery. FTX also wants K5’s claims in the bankruptcy disallowed until this matter is resolved. [Adversary Case, PDF]
More news from Chapter 11
Cameron Winklevoss tweeted yet another open letter to Barry Silbert of Digital Currency Group on July 4, demanding back Gemini Earn customers’ money. Winklevoss accuses DCG of “fraudulent behavior” and wants them to do the “right thing” and hand over $1.465 billion of dollars, bitcoin, and ether. If Silbert doesn’t pay up, Winklevoss threatens to sue on Friday, July 7. CoinDesk, which is owned by DCG, couldn’t get a comment from their own proprietor on the story. [Twitter, archive; CoinDesk]
After the deal for Binance.US to buy Voyager Digital fell through, Voyager gave up trying to sell itself and is liquidating. Here’s the liquidation notice. [Doc 1459, PDF]
Celsius is finally converting its altcoins to BTC and ETH as it pursues its plan to relaunch with the auction-winning consortium Fahrenheit. [CoinDesk]
If you have vastly too much time on your hands, here’s the full Celsius Network auction transcript — all 256 pages of it. [Doc 2748, PDF]
Customers of the bankrupt US branch of the Bittrex crypto exchange — which is being sued by the SEC — can withdraw those holdings that are clearly theirs … whatever that means. [CoinDesk]
Three Arrows Capital: What Su and Kyle did next
Crypto was taken out in 2022 by a one-two punch of Terra-Luna collapsing in May and then crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital collapsing in June.
Other crypto firms had invested in Terra-Luna and 3AC because they paid the highest interest rates! Now, you might think that investment firms would know that high interest means high risk.
What did Zhu and Davies do next? They spent the summer traveling around Asia, went surfing, and played video games. Davies is currently in Dubai and Zhu is back living in Singapore. [NYT]
Zhu and Davies insist they must have done nothing wrong because no government has filed charges yet. Uh huh.
3AC’s creditors think Zhu and Davies have done one or two things wrong. Teneo, the liquidator trying to clean up the 3AC mess, wants the pair fined $10,000 a day for contempt, saying that Davies has failed to respond to a subpoena. [CoinDesk]
The pair are suing Mike Dudas, the original founder of crypto media outlet The Block, for defamation. In the US, LOL. They allege Dudas said nasty things about their new crypto venture OPNX, though the suit doesn’t say what allegedly defamatory claims Dudas made. We expect the 3AC boys to have some trouble demonstrating they have a reputation to malign. Stephen Palley is representing Dudas. [CoinDesk]
Regulatory clarity
In the UK, the Financial Services and Markets Bill has passed. One part of this gives the Treasury greater powers to regulate crypto, likely via the Financial Conduct Authority. We should expect more detailed regulations within a year. [CoinDesk]
This comes not before time. UK losses to crypto fraud increased more than 40% to surpass £300 million (USD$373 million), according to Action Fraud, the national reporting center for fraud and cybercrime. [FT]
Europe’s MiCA is now law from the end of June 2023. It goes into application in one year for stablecoins and in 18 months for general crypto assets and virtual asset service providers. [EUR-Lex]
The European Central Bank keeps talking about doing a CBDC. This is good news for crypto! Or maybe it isn’t: [ECB]
Policymakers should be wary of supporting an industry that has so far produced no societal benefits and is increasingly trying to integrate into the traditional financial system, both to acquire legitimacy as part of that system and to piggyback on it.
The CFTC Division of Clearing and Risk sent out a staff advisory to registered derivatives clearing organizations on May 30, reminding them of the risks associated with expanding the scope of their activities. It specifically addressed crypto. [CFTC]
When the CFTC points out that market shenanigans are illegal in crypto just like they are in regular commodities, keep in mind that Avi Eisenberg is finally going to trial for allegedly committing those precise market shenanigans in DeFi. These are real go-to-jail crimes. [Bloomberg; Schedule, PDF; Case docket]
The Thailand SEC has banned crypto lending that pays returns to investors. It now also requires crypto trading firms to post the following warning: “Cryptocurrencies are high risk. Please study and understand the risks of cryptocurrencies thoroughly. because you may lose the entire amount invested.” [SEC Thailand, in Thai]
New York has settled with CoinEx after suing them in February for failing to register as a securities exchange. The company has to stop operating in the US — not just New York — return $1.1 million to investors, and pay $600,000 in penalties. [NYAG; Stipulation and consent, PDF]
The ETF trick will surely work this time
Guys, guys, the Blackrock and Fidelity bitcoin ETFs will change everything! They’re going to get surveillance of trading and market data from somewhere! This will surely answer all of the SEC’s previous objections to bitcoin ETFs! The market will be delighted!
… oh. The SEC has found these applications inadequate. [WSJ]
Blackrock and Fidelity are going to try again with Coinbase as the exchange supplying market surveillance. [CoinDesk]
But the trouble with monitoring at Coinbase is that Coinbase isn’t where the market is — the bitcoin market is at Binance. That’s where price discovery happens.
We expect these ETF applications to go no further than all the previous bitcoin ETF applications.
The good news for bitcoin continues its monotonous patter
Binance senior staff have been jumping ship. General counsel Han Ng, chief strategy officer Patrick Hillmann, and SVP for compliance Steven Christie all resigned this week. They specifically left over CZ’s response to the ongoing Department of Justice investigation. [Fortune]
Binance.US’s market share has dropped to 1%, down from a record 27% in April. Is Binance giving up on its US exchange? The market share nose-dived after the SEC sued Binance in June. [WSJ]
Fortune favors the internal trading desk: Crypto.com has been caught trading directly against its own customers. Dirty Bubble spotted the job ads for a proprietary trading desk at the firm in November 2022, of course. [FT, archive; Twitter, archive]
Russia is giving up on the idea of a unified state-run crypto exchange. Instead, it’s focusing on regulation for multiple exchanges. Russia is continuing to promote crypto as a way to evade sanctions for making international payments. When you’ve devastated your economy by embarking upon a very stupid war, that’s … a strategy? [Izvestia, Russian]
In crypto collapse news from the distant past, something’s happened in Quadriga! The government of British Columbia is seeking forfeiture of $600,000 in cash, gold bars, and Rolex watches that QuadrigaCX cofounder Michael Patryn has in a safe deposit box. The RCMP alleges the items are the proceeds of unlawful activity. [Vancouver Sun]
Amy Castor 
