There have been some mixed developments in the crypto world over the past few days, some of which were postive while some negative, including the hacking incident of CoinDCX’s twitter account, over $160 million hack in decentralised finance operations of crypto market maker Wintermute, MicroStrategy, the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin (BTC) holder buying in the dip, and other news.
SEC vs Ian Balina
Sparkster(SPKR) Ltd. and its CEO, Sajjad Daya, have been ordered by the Securities and Exchange Commission to repay around $35 million to injured investors for their unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset securities from April 2018 to July 2018.
They’d raised around $30 million from 4,000 investors in the US. According to the token promoters by purchasing SPRK tokens, investors could gain access to Sparkster's "no-code" software creation platform, which promised to enable users to create applications with little to no technical knowledge of coding.
"ETH contributions were validated by a network of nodes on the Ethereum blockchain, which are clustered more densely in the United States than in any other country," US SEC wrote in the court filing. "As a result, those transactions took place in the United States."
US Treasury Official Believes Sanctioning Crypto Mixers’ Is Highly Effective
According to a Treasury official, sanctioning cryptocurrency mixers would help reinforce the US federal actions in preventing countries from evading sanctions.
“When [sanctions] can serve as a deterrent to any criminal that would seek to use a mixer in order to launder their funds — the funds of the proceeds of corruption, or other criminal activity — that’s an effective avenue we can use in order to signal that we cannot tolerate money laundering. So whether that’s for a Russian criminal actor, an Iranian, a North Korean, or wherever they may come from,” said Elizabeth Rosenberg, assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes in the US Treasury.
On the night of September 20, CoinDCX’s verified Twitter account was hacked, and hackers posted fake Tweets about CoinDCX pumping Ripple (XRP) crypto tokens and that they are also giving away 1,00,00,00,000 XRP tokens as a bonus. CoinDCX is an Indian crypto exchange, and they does not indulge in crypto tips and pumping.
About 13 hours ago, CoinDCX announced on Twitter that they have regained access to their account, and no users’ data or funds have been compromised. They also assured that on an organisational level too, their data is safe and secured.
Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO, Wintermute, announced on Twitter that they have been hacked for about $160 million in their DeFi operations however their CeFi and OTC operations were not affected. He further cautioned users by saying on Twitter, “If you have a MM agreement with Wintermute, your funds are safe. There will be a disruption in our services today and potentially for the next few days and will get back to normal after.”
On September 14, Wintermute was chosen as the market maker for the Tron (TRX) blockchain across various crypto exchanges in order to improve the token’s visibility.
Michael Saylor, executive chairman, MicroStrategy, announced on Twitter that his company has bought 301 Bitcoins for $6 million at an average price of $19,851 per BTC. Saylor also highlighted that his company now has a total of 1,30,000 Bitcoins which they acquired for $3.98 billion with an average cost of $30,639 per BTC.
Bitcoin’s price as of 11 am is down by 2.22 per cent at $18,917.92, according to Coinmarketcap.com data.
Aditya Narain, deputy director and Marina Moretti, assistant director, IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets department, have published a blog post, where they ushered in the need for a global crypto regulation.
It was said that although crypto has been around for more than a decade, the need to regulate them now is because they were a niche product back then and now has a larger mainstream presence as speculative investments, hedges against weak currencies, potential payment instruments, and others.
“A global regulatory framework will bring order to the markets, help instil consumer confidence, lay out the limits of what is permissible, and provide a safe space for useful innovation to continue,” said the IMF.
OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace by volume, has announced on Twitter that today they will integrate Arbitrum’s solution and that it will compliment their existing blockchains like Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), and Klaytn (KLAY). Opensea also mentioned that one of their platform's first NFT projects live on Arbitrum will be from Smolverse, GMX Blueberry Club, and Diamond Pepes.
“We’re excited to share that OpenSea will soon support
@arbitrum! This is a first step in building our goal of a web 3.0 future where people have access to the NFTs they want on the chains they prefer,” Tweeted OpenSea on September 20
