Daily Report | Coinbase lists DRIFT on its coin listing roadmap; BlockTower Capital's main hedge fund suffers a hacking incident; Coinbase's cold wallet transferred 16,000 bitcoins this morning
May 15 News OverviewOrganizer: Fairy, ChainCatcher
Important News:
- Matrixport Co-founder: Bearish if tonight's CPI and core CPI both reach 0.4% or higher
- Kunming Economic Investigation Bureau cracks down on a virtual currency mining pyramid scheme, involving over 280 million yuan
- Data: Coinbase cold wallet transferred 16,000 bitcoins this morning, worth nearly 1 billion dollars
- FTX has extended the deadline for creditors to submit claims until the end of July or early August
- BlockTower Capital's main hedge fund was hacked, with some funds depleted
- Coinbase: Added Drift Protocol (DRIFT) to the listing roadmap
- a16z Partner: Americans have accepted digital assets, but current regulatory approaches limit innovation and privacy
"What important events have occurred in the past 24 hours"
Matrixport Co-founder: Bearish if tonight's CPI and core CPI both reach 0.4% or higher
Matrixport co-founder Daniel Yan stated on platform X: "The risk tonight is to the upside. I will closely monitor three tokens: BTC, NEAR, WIF. If either tonight's CPI or core CPI is 0.3%, then bullish. If both reach 0.4% or higher, then bearish."
Kunming Economic Investigation Bureau cracks down on a virtual currency mining pyramid scheme, involving over 280 million yuan
In November 2023, the Kunming Public Security Bureau's Economic Investigation Team successfully cracked a new type of online pyramid scheme crime using virtual currency and blockchain concepts. Since 2022, Li and others established a community on a public blockchain, luring participants with claims of "static mining profits through staked virtual currencies" and "dynamic referral rewards for developing downlines." By April 2023, their group had developed over 10,000 members, forming a 15-tier criminal organization with over 280 million yuan involved. Currently, 15 suspects have been arrested, 8 have been approved for arrest, and 11 have been transferred for prosecution.
Ethereum options implied volatility may rise before the end of May
According to Wintermute OTC trader Jake Ostrovskis, the market currently believes there is only a 16% chance that these ETFs will be approved by the end of May. He added that Ethereum options implied volatility may rise before the end of the month, especially around the SEC's expected decision on Ethereum spot ETFs.
Oklahoma signs bill protecting cryptocurrency mining and self-custody rights
Oklahoma has signed a bill HB 3594 that protects cryptocurrency-related rights. According to the state legislature's website, Governor Kevin Stitt approved the bill on May 13, which will take effect on November 1. Under the new law, the Oklahoma government cannot prohibit, restrict, or harm the use of cryptocurrency in purchases and self-custody rights.
Interactive Brokers launches cryptocurrency trading for UK clients
Global electronic brokerage Interactive Brokers (NASDAQ: IBKR) announced the launch of cryptocurrency trading in the UK as a new feature on its platform. Individual and institutional investor clients of Interactive Brokers (UK) Limited (IBUK), including financial advisors, can now trade cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash on the trading platform.
Data: Coinbase cold wallet transferred 16,000 bitcoins this morning, worth nearly 1 billion dollars
According to Cryptoslate, Arkham Intelligence data shows that Coinbase's cold wallet transferred 16,000 bitcoins this morning, valued at nearly 1 billion dollars. The balance on Coinbase has been steadily declining throughout 2024. According to CryptoQuant, the balance was approximately 418,000 BTC at the beginning of the year and is currently around 267,000 BTC.
FTX has extended the deadline for creditors to submit claims until the end of July or early August
Cryptocurrency exchange FTX sent an email to its customers stating that it has extended the deadline for submitting claims. Previously, May 15 was the last date for users to submit claims. The email stated that the deadline will be extended to align with the date and time for voting on the approval of the Chapter 11 reorganization plan in the U.S. proceedings.
FTX's liquidators expect this date to arrive at the end of July or early August, giving customers at least 10 to 12 weeks to file claims. The company also noted that customers of the exchange can participate in lawsuits in the Bahamas or the U.S. but can do so simultaneously.
Data: Six Hong Kong virtual asset ETFs had a trading volume of approximately 17.29 million HKD today
The first six Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs launched in Hong Kong had a total trading volume of approximately 17.29 million HKD today. Among them: Huaxia Bitcoin ETF (3042.HK): 11.3 million HKD; Huaxia Ethereum ETF (3046.HK): 2 million HKD; Harvest Bitcoin Spot ETF (3439.HK): 1.89 million HKD; Harvest Ethereum Spot ETF (3179.HK): 598,700 HKD; Bosera HashKey Bitcoin ETF (3008.HK): 795,000 HKD; Bosera HashKey Ethereum ETF (3009.HK): 706,400 HKD.
Data: Over 1 million new tokens have been created across the network since early April
Since early April, over 1 million new tokens have been created, with a total of 372,642 new tokens launched on the Ethereum network, of which 88% (327,553) were launched on Coinbase's Base, while over 640,000 new tokens (mainly memecoins) were launched on Solana.
Google releases new AI model Project Astra, competing with GPT4o
Google held its annual developer conference "I/O 2024" early this morning, unveiling a new AI agent product, Project Astra, which can achieve multi-modal real-time reasoning across text, audio, and video, similar to OpenAI's GPT4o.
It also launched an update for Gemini 1.5 Pro, with its AI model soon able to handle more data, along with a new smaller Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model.
Data: Bitcoin spot ETF had a total net inflow of 100.5 million dollars yesterday, with an ETF net asset ratio of 4.2%
According to SoSoValue data, yesterday (Eastern Time May 14), the total net inflow for Bitcoin spot ETFs was 100.5 million dollars. Yesterday, Grayscale's ETF GBTC had a net outflow of 50.9317 million dollars, with a historical net outflow of 17.684 billion dollars.
BlockTower Capital's main hedge fund was hacked, with some funds depleted
According to Bloomberg, citing informed sources, BlockTower Capital's main hedge fund has been hacked, with some funds depleted. One source indicated that these funds remain unaccounted for, the hacker has not been caught, but BlockTower Capital has hired blockchain forensic analysts to determine the cause of the theft and recently informed its limited partners about the incident. According to data provider PitchBook, the company manages 1.7 billion dollars in assets.
a16z Partner: Americans have accepted digital assets, but current regulatory approaches limit innovation and privacy
a16z partner Chris Dixon posted on social media: "In the next two weeks, the House will vote on the most important cryptocurrency legislation to date, the Financial Innovation and Technology Act of the 21st Century (FIT21). We have long called for clear regulations to protect consumers and innovation, and the FIT21 bill will do just that. Americans have accepted digital assets, but current regulatory approaches often limit innovation and privacy without truly addressing the solutions needed to protect consumers or combat illegal activities."
Insider: Musk's xAI plans to spend nearly 10 billion dollars renting Oracle cloud servers
According to The Information, citing informed sources, Elon Musk's AI startup xAI, which was established just a year ago, has been in talks with Oracle executives, planning to spend 10 billion dollars over several years to rent cloud servers from Oracle, making xAI one of Oracle's largest clients.
Coinbase: Added Drift Protocol (DRIFT) to the listing roadmap
According to official news, Coinbase has added Drift Protocol (DRIFT) to its listing roadmap.
"What are some noteworthy articles to read in the past 24 hours"
Tornado Cash developer sentenced, is "Code is speech" dead?
Yesterday, Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, a 31-year-old Russian citizen, was sentenced to 5 years and 4 months in prison in the Netherlands for laundering 2.2 billion dollars on a cryptocurrency mixer platform. Pertsev had previously been detained for eight months. This time will be deducted from his sentence, leaving a remaining term of four and a half years. Pertsev's lawyer will have 14 days to appeal the judge's decision.
The industry generally believes that this case is not only a watershed moment for DeFi regulation but will also change the course of crypto privacy, creating a "chilling effect" on the global open-source community, where open-source software developers being convicted marks that Web3 smart contract developers will be bound by traditional legal frameworks.
Xiao Za: Is merely buying and selling USDT a crime? Starting from a controversial case…
Recently, the team led by Za has received multiple inquiries related to buying and selling USDT (Tether USD, a stablecoin issued by an overseas private company, pegged to the US dollar, hereinafter referred to as "USDT"). In several cases, individuals have been criminally detained by public security authorities for suspected crimes, while others have had their accounts frozen.
The Za team believes that the increasing number of USDT-related cases is related to the intensified crackdown on telecom fraud by judicial authorities in recent years, as well as the large-scale "money laundering" of various upstream involved funds through cryptocurrency. As a special type of cryptocurrency, USDT not only has advantages such as peer-to-peer transmission, global trading, and anonymous transactions like other cryptocurrencies but has also gradually become a discreet and useful settlement tool due to its 1:1 peg to the US dollar and stable exchange rate.
Today, the Za team will analyze whether buying and selling USDT may involve illegal business operations through publicly available USDT-related cases to help partners avoid pitfalls.
Cumulative financing exceeds 15 million dollars, Web3 social networking pioneer UXLINK and its "social + trading" ambition
Recently, the v2 version of Friend.tech was released along with the airdrop of its native token FRIEND, quickly attracting market attention. The token price surged by 72.6% within 24 hours, pushing Web3 social applications to a new peak and making SocialFi the focus of the market again.
In the SocialFi space, a plethora of Web3 social applications, including Farcaster and Tomo, continue to emerge. The Farcaster ecosystem's L3 chain Degen Chain performed impressively, setting a record for the highest transaction volume (TPS) in the Ethereum ecosystem on April 18; on April 10, Friend.tech's clone Tomo announced the completion of a 3.5 million dollar seed round led by Polychain; additionally, CyberConnect launched a Cyber re-staking feature powered by EigenLayer and liquidity re-staking protocols.
BlockTower's funds stolen, will MakerDAO collapse?
On May 15, Bloomberg reported, citing informed sources, that BlockTower Capital's main hedge fund has been hacked, with some funds depleted, and these funds remain unaccounted for, with the hacker yet to be caught.
It is reported that BlockTower Capital has hired blockchain forensic analysts to determine the cause of the theft and recently informed its limited partners about the incident. However, BlockTower declined to comment on the hacking incident, and its Chief Information Officer and founder Ari Paul has not yet made any statements regarding the matter.
