DexCheck AI integrates AI and ML for comprehensive analytics to aid decision-making by providing insights into market trends, token performance and risk assessments.
Over one million new tokens have been created since April 2024, making it difficult for traders to sift through the noise and make informed investment decisions. This choice overload leads to missed opportunities and poorly informed trades.
Because of the crypto market’s dynamic nature, ensuring data accuracy and reliability is also a significant challenge. Despite a reported drop in the value received by illicit addresses, the prevalence of scams and fraudulent activities continues to complicate market navigation for traders, making it difficult to avoid pitfalls and ensure safe transactions.
While numerous tools are available for tracking and analyzing specific aspects of the crypto market, there is a scarcity of platforms that provide comprehensive and integrated analytics.
Additionally, the steep learning curve associated with understanding and using these tools can effectively deter potential investors and limit the market’s growth as users struggle to master complex interfaces and interpret fragmented data.
AI-driven analytics for crypto traders
To address this insufficiency, DexCheck AI — a crypto analytics platform — provides insights to help traders and investors make more informed decisions. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the platform analyzes onchain data from decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and non-fungible token (NFT) markets, aiming to streamline the trading process.
DexCheck AI offers a suite of key features designed to enhance the trading experience. The platform’s comprehensive token analytics deliver up-to-date information on market trends and token performance across major blockchains. Leveraging AI-powered insights, the framework enables users to stay ahead of market movements and make data-driven decisions.
The Dump Risk Radar helps users monitor potential risks and predict possible price drops, allowing DexCheck AI users to identify tokens with high unrealized profits. The tool provides comprehensive risk assessments, enabling users to manage their investments more effectively. By leveraging detailed analytics, users can make informed decisions, thereby minimizing potential losses and maximizing the potential of their investment strategies.
Decrypting market movements
DexCheck AI’s Wallet Analyzer provides detailed insights into specific crypto wallets, including trading history, profit and loss records, holdings and entry and exit prices. The feature allows traders to thoroughly analyze the performance and strategies of individual wallets.
Users can also monitor influential market players to gain valuable insights and potentially anticipate significant market movements using DexCheck AI’s Crypto Whale Tracker. The tool offers visibility into the trading activities of large-scale traders known as whales.
Intending to connect users to crypto projects supported by prominent venture capitalists, the initiative’s launchpad platform, DexCheck Pad, has facilitated nearly $5 million in funding for various initiatives. The launchpad offers traders opportunities to invest in upcoming crypto ventures that are backed by industry experts.
Taking the popular approach with Web3 launchpad platforms, DexCheck Pad requires varying amounts of staked DCK tokens — the native token of DexCheck AI — to get access to public IDOs, private sales and other premium tools on the platform.
Early access to crypto projects with native token
The DCK token is central to the DexCheck AI ecosystem, offering users access to advanced features and benefits through staking:
Premium features: Holding DCK tokens allows users to access premium features on the DexCheck AI platform, including advanced analytics and predictive models.
Participation in DexCheck Pad: DCK tokenholders can participate in private and public sales of upcoming crypto projects through DexCheck Pad, gaining early access to high-potential investments.
Staking rewards: By staking DCK tokens, users can earn rewards, providing additional returns on their investment.
Governance participation: Tokenholders can take part in the governance of the DexCheck AI platform, influencing decisions on feature development and platform improvements.
Leveraging data analysis and ML, DexCheck AI seeks to drive the next wave of innovation in the digital economy. By providing comprehensive, integrated insights and reducing the complexities of data interpretation, platforms like DexCheck empower traders with the tools needed to navigate the increasingly crowded and volatile crypto market.
It’s only recently that Donald Trump has paid any attention to crypto. But now he wants to be the “crypto president,” and he’s raising digital assets as a geopolitical issue.
Asked on July 16 why he’s suddenly embracing the crypto community, he told Bloomberg:
“If we don’t do it, China is going to pick it up and China’s going to have it—or somebody else, but most likely China.”
In the interview, Trump explained how the recent experience with his “Mugshot” NFT Collection “opened my eyes” to cryptocurrencies, saying, “80% of the money [from the NFT sale] was paid in crypto. It was incredible.”
“So we have a good foundation [i.e., crypto]. It’s a baby. It’s an infant right now. But I don’t want to be responsible for allowing another country to take over this sphere,” he added.
His remarks raised several interesting questions — and not just whether China, which banned crypto trading and Bitcoin mining in 2021, is even interested in reentering the crypto trading and mining markets.
It touches on the relationship between governments and the crypto/blockchain sector generally.
To what extent can any single sovereign nation control decentralized and diversified digital assets like Bitcoin
Is it even possible?
Why China?
China was once a major crypto player. The largest crypto exchanges, such as Binance, were located in China, and as much as 75% of Bitcoin mining took place on the Chinese mainland, according to estimates.
But in 2021, China cracked down on crypto trading and mining, and by July of that year, Bitcoin mining had essentially vanished on the mainland.
Recent developments, however, have raised speculation “that the Chinese government may be warming to cryptocurrency and that Hong Kong may be a testing ground for these efforts,” noted Chainalysis in October.
Indeed, in April 2024, the central government approved the launch of several Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Hong Kong. Some observers think China wants to make Hong Kong a crypto hub — despite a continued trading ban on the mainland.
China’s Bitcoin ban a “strategic blunder”
Does China regret vacating the crypto playing field in 2021?
“Absolutely,” Daniel Lacalle, chief economist of Tressis, told Cointelegraph. “China made an enormous mistake banning crypto trading and mining, particularly when they want to de-dollarize at some point. The decision did not help the yuan and eliminated an important disruptive technology development.”
“Beijing’s 2021 mining crackdown was a strategic blunder,” Emiliano Pagnotta, associate professor of finance at Singapore Management University, told Cointelegraph. “They accounted for 75% of the mining industry and, in a short period, lost a considerable percentage to the US, chiefly.”
Why a strategic error? “An adversary to Bitcoin has much more leverage against the security properties of the network by controlling the majority of the hashrate. That latent threat is much more powerful than the ban itself, which only caused a temporary fall in the hashrate,” said Pagnotta.
Still, he couldn’t say for sure whether China lamented its decision.
Yikai Wang, assistant professor in the economics department at the University of Essex, said, “I don’t think that China regrets banning crypto trading and mining in 2021 because the capital markets in China and Hong Kong are different.”
China wants to maintain tight control of capital outflows on the mainland, Wang told Cointelegraph, which is why it banned crypto trading.
But Hong Kong, while controlled by China, has a different economy. It has always had open market policies and free capital flow, and crypto might find a natural home in the former British colony. Wang added:
“Hong Kong serves as the hub to allow some capital flow in and out of mainland China, which is important for Hong Kong and also for mainland China.”
“The digital asset ETF market in Hong Kong has indeed seen substantial growth since its launch in April 2024,” Patrick Pan, chairman and CEO of OSL — a crypto-exchange now operating in Hong Kong — told Cointelegraph.
Pan added that mainland China “has maintained a stringent stance against cryptocurrency trading and speculations.”
Pan points out, however, that China has largely accepted the importance of cryptocurrencies’ underlying blockchain technology.
“China’s development and gradual rollout of the digital yuan showcase an interest and capacity to embrace blockchain technologies, which bring long-term benefits to the country’s financial infrastructure through enhanced efficiency and security of its financial systems,” said Pan.
China may be softening its stance on crypto
Chinese government decision-making is opaque, so one may never know if China truly regrets its 2021 crypto ban. But what is clear is that “the country is reassessing its approach, especially as it sees the strategic value in digital assets,” Zennon Kapron, founder and director of consulting firm Kapronasia, told Cointelegraph, adding:
“The softening stance in Hong Kong could be a strategic move to remain competitive in the fintech and digital finance space without fully reversing its mainland policy.”
But is it too late?
“China still has advantages, such as access to cheap hardware and electricity in certain regions,” Kapron allowed. “If the government were to provide incentives or loosen restrictions, it’s conceivable that some level of dominance could be reestablished.”
It wouldn’t be easy, though. “The global mining landscape has become more diversified, making it harder for any single country to dominate,” observed Kapron.
Wang said that if China allowed Bitcoin mining, it would still “have a high chance of succeeding” because Bitcoin mining is not high-tech but rather “medium-tech and a capital-, energy-, infrastructure-intensive production.” Wang added:
“Bitcoin mining is not like making CPUs, but more similar to producing solar panels, building railways, etc. China has the capacity and even the comparative advantage in this type of mass production.”
Crypto trading may be a different matter, though. China is unlikely to change its trading ban on the mainland unless it first changes its capital markets policy, said Wang.
Economist Lacalle was doubtful. “Once traders and miners see the risk of interventionism and legal or investor insecurity, it is hard for many to regain confidence.”
Pagnotta, by comparison, said China could still be a force within the crypto sector, particularly if it demonstrates more pragmatism and regulatory clarity, adding:
“Bitcoin mining is still important in China despite the ban. Most of the ASIC [application-specific integrated circuit] equipment is developed and manufactured there, and there is a lot of know-how.”
Many local governments within China have benefited from mining tax revenues, smooth energy demand and job creation in past years. Presumably, they would also support a return to legalized BTC mining.
“I am more skeptical about China embracing self-custody for its citizens, in contrast to Trump’s recent rhetoric,” continued Pagnotta. “China could ease investors’ exposure to Bitcoin-related products through ETFs,” as the Biden administration has done, but “the domestic custodial firms would always be under Beijing’s control.”
“They certainly made some mistakes in the past by banning crypto investments and Bitcoin mining,” CryptoQuant’s head of research, Julio Moreno, told Cointelegraph. “Other countries, like the US in the case of Bitcoin mining, took advantage of this ban to grow their crypto industry.”
“But China now seems more open to the crypto industry and has allowed the launch of Bitcoin and ETH ETFs in Hong Kong,” said Moreno.
Also, it’s not as if Chinese influence on Bitcoin mining reverted to zero even when mining was banned on the mainland. “All that equipment operating in China simply found a home in other places,” Moreno added.
“Despite China’s ban on Bitcoin mining, Chinese mining pools still hold nearly 54% market share,” CryptoQuant founder Ki Young Ju posted on July 1. “While not all participants in these pools are Chinese, some mining farms might still be operating covertly in China, with authorities possibly concealing data.”
To be clear: The mining pools Ju referenced were operating beyond the Chinese mainland.
China’s central government also remains a Bitcoin “whale” as a result of its past activities — holding 190,000 BTC, or about 1% of the Bitcoin currently in existence. This is not a trivial amount.
Could China dominate crypto again?
Wang, for his part, believes that if China really sets its mind to it, it could still “play a super important, if not dominating, role” in the global crypto sector.
Not only does it have natural advantages in Bitcoin mining cited above, but there is a huge demand for using cryptocurrencies to send Chinese assets abroad, Wang added, especially given China’s tight capital market controls.
The biggest cryptocurrency exchange platform in the world in terms of trade volume is still Binance, “which is a company started in China by a Chinese but later moved abroad, and still 20% of Binance’s trade comes from China,” noted Wang.
Before China banned crypto trading, “there were even more Chinese cryptocurrency exchange platforms in a similar size to Binance,” added Wang.
As per Trump’s remarks, is crypto really emerging as a new theater of competition between the great powers? According to Pagnotta:
“Trump wants votes, and he understands that tens of millions of Americans hold digital assets and see it as an important electoral issue. Drawing a contrast to Biden or China in this regard is politically astute.”
He may be applying some game theory, too.
“At a more profound level, Trump does not want a Chinese/BRICS [i.e, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa]-led central bank digital currency [CBDC] to become dominant. Even if he did not suddenly become a genuine Bitcoiner, he surely comprehends enough game theory to realize that Bitcoin is the politically neutral global property rights system in the 21st century,” added Pagnotta
In doing so, the former US president could simply be applying the ancient wisdom that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Still, others believe the suggestion that China may once again try to gain dominance in the global crypto market is just plain wrong. Leading cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether are too diversified and decentralized now to allow control by any one sovereign state.
“China’s influence in the crypto market may grow, particularly through initiatives like the digital yuan,” said Kapron, “but achieving dominance over decentralized cryptocurrencies is a different challenge altogether.”
Trump’s recent utterances may reflect a strategic concern, continued Kapron, “but the reality is that the decentralized and diversified nature of these digital assets acts as a significant barrier to dominance by any single nation.”
Added economist Lacalle:
“There is no such thing as nationalist crypto. The beauty of the crypto market is that it is completely diversified and decentralized. The concept of government control of crypto makes no sense to anyone that understands independent currencies.”
Donald Trump is the runaway favorite to win the U.S. elections in November after he survived an assassination attempt on July 13, according to Ethereum-based pollster Polymarket. This is a big deal for the millions of people in the United States who own Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies.
Polymarket raised Trump’s chances of victory to 60%, against current president Joe Biden’s 7% and vice president Kamala Harris’ 22% at the time of writing. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has branded himself as a cryptocurrency candidate.
Two days after the attempt on Trump’s life, Bitcoin recovered 6.2% from a recent two-week slump. Variables behind the rally could include the end of Germany’s $3 billion BTC sell-off. But Trump’s predicted victory might also play a significant role, as Bitcoin holders anticipate the asset reaching $100,000 under a pro-crypto administration.
Crypto Lobby Comes Into Play
Trump has officially tailored his campaign to court the 52 million people in the U.S. who hold crypto. The former president has shifted from his well-known dismissiveness to make Bitcoin a focus of his “America-first” innovation campaign.
The crypto-owning demographic, which accounts for 20% of the population, could prove decisive in the November elections. This is because the demographic is distributed across the country, with the potential to spur its preferred candidate in individual states, including high-stakes battlegrounds.
During the 2024 election cycle, a cryptocurrency lobby has become a major factor for the first time in American politics. Crypto businesses are throwing fundraisers to influence policy changes and key appointments at regulatory bodies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should Trump win a second term.
According to a Public Citizen report, crypto-backed political action committees (PACs) have raised more than $102 million in the current election cycle, and rank third of all super PACs. Of this amount, $54 million comes from corporate expenditures, primarily by Coinbase and Ripple Labs, according to the report.
“Four of the eight corporate crypto super PAC donors have settled or are facing charges by the SEC for alleged violations of securities laws,” the report added.
Trump, who is scheduled to speak at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 27, appears to be fulfilling expectations. On July 16, the Republican presidential candidate announced venture capitalist J.D. Vance as his running mate.
The crypto lobby, along with tech moguls like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, had backed the 39-year-old Ohio senator for the job. Crucially, Vance wants to safeguard cryptocurrency constitutionally and limit the power of regulatory agencies over the sector.
What is the Trump Trade?
Put simply, the Trump Trade describes how financial markets are reacting to the likelihood of Donald Trump winning the election in November. When Trump was first elected in 2016, he quickly reversed many policies from the Barack Obama era.
Experts believe that if Trump wins again, it could hurt the labor market, clean energy, and other sectors, but it would likely benefit Bitcoin. Quasar Elizundia, a research strategist at Pepperstone, notes in comments shared with Cryptonews that the Trump Trade involves Trump’s unique economic policies and positions, which profoundly affect financial markets. These policies include:
Reduced immigration and higher labor costs
Fiscal policy with deficits and higher costs of money
Tariffs and higher import costs
Strength of the U.S. dollar (others posit a weak dollar instead)
Weakness of the Mexican peso
Bitcoin boom
According to Elizundia, Trump’s tough stance on immigration may decrease the supply of cheap labor, resulting in increased labor costs. “This, in turn, could create inflationary pressure as companies try to pass these additional costs on to consumers,” the expert said.
Protectionist tariffs are expected to raise the costs of imported goods for American consumers and potentially provoke trade retaliations from other countries. Elizundia explained that the attendant trade uncertainty could affect “global supply chains and increase market volatility” in a bad way.
The researcher noted that Trump’s populism and disruptive attitude can be interpreted as relatively favorable for the cryptocurrency sector. Put together, different aspects of the Trump Trade create a focus for Bitcoin as a sanctuary from indeterminacy.
“Economic and political uncertainty tends to increase the attractiveness of alternative assets like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are perceived as a hedge against the instability of the traditional financial system,” Elizundia said.
How Does Donald Trump Affect Markets?
Bitcoin went mainstream during Trump’s first term. The price of BTC soared by more than 3,900% from just under $1,000 in January 2017 when Trump assumed office to over $40,000 by the time he left four years later.
U.S. stock markets hit record highs, partly spurred by stimulus spending following the Covid pandemic. The value of the S&P 500 climbed 20% in the days after Trump’s unexpected win in November 2016.
It’s not easy to rationalize the positive impact of Donald Trump’s first term on cryptocurrency, especially given his documented disdain for the sector. Although cryptocurrencies often thrive during times of instability and seem to have a counterintuitive relationship with the establishment, Trump’s presidency was not bad for business. His controversial social policies sent people into the streets, yet they did little to discourage the stock markets, which continued to soar.
It is possible that Trump’s tax cuts, which appeared to favor the rich, and his protectionist measures resonated with the markets while coming across as politically incorrect. According to Bryan Lim, an associate professor of finance at the University of Melbourne, the market’s reaction was an outcome of the second reading of market efficiency being applied by capital.
“The first interpretation says that if markets are efficient, prices in markets accurately reflect all available information. The second says that if markets are efficient, investors cannot make abnormal profits by trading on available information,” he argued in a past blog post, now archived.
Recently, Trump outperformed incumbent Joe Biden in a presidential debate. Despite the former president’s penchant for exaggeration and criticizing the left, he didn’t need to stretch the truth far, as Biden has had his fair share of problems with the economy. A 2022 Reuters poll found that around 55% of Americans disapproved of Biden’s handling of the economy as inflation reached 9.1% in June of that year, the highest in 40 years.
Meanwhile, Trump has doubled down on his separatist rhetoric. The social climate is as charged as it was during his first term, with the far right positioning themselves as crusaders for free speech and financial innovation. As things look up for Trump, the markets may not be far behind.
For example, following the attempt on Trump’s life, Bitcoin ended a two-week decline, rising 6.2% to more than $63,000. Trump-themed meme coins also reacted positively to the former president’s surge in ratings. The price of the MAGA token soared nearly 65% in less than 45 minutes after the shooting incident. During the same period, its market capitalization increased from $293 million to $469 million. FightETH, a meme coin inspired by Trump’s defiant ‘fight’ statement as security agents moved him from the podium, surged 120% within minutes of its creation.
An Unlikely Crypto Ally
Trump, who is not well-known for his commitment to green energy, has promised to support Bitcoin miners in the U.S. He has also promised to relax regulations and appoint favorable officials to key regulatory agencies. This is a far cry from his documented dismissiveness of cryptocurrency over the years.
As president in 2019, he tweeted, “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” In 2021, the former president likened crypto to a scam designed to work against the U.S. dollar.
However, in May this year, Trump rebranded into an unequivocal champion of Bitcoin and vowed to support American dominance in the sector. “Crooked Joe Biden, on the other hand, the worst president in the history of our country, wants it to die a slow and painful death,” he wrote on his social network Truth Social.
The Trump campaign is making every effort to appeal to crypto enthusiasts. The Republican party has begun accepting crypto donations. Additionally, its manifesto prioritizes digital currencies over artificial intelligence as a focus for driving innovation.
Not everyone is convinced. Crypto pundit and former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes believes that Trump has not genuinely embraced crypto but is instead grandstanding for political gain. He urges the crypto community to pressure politicians into passing legislation that would protect the ownership of cryptocurrencies under “free speech.”
The Supreme Court has previously upheld giving money to election campaigns as a form of free speech. Given Trump’s flip-flopping on various policy issues in his first term, constitutional safeguards may be a more certain bet.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban thinks the likelihood of tax cuts under Donald Trump will have an inflationary effect on the dollar and drive up the value of Bitcoin. “What will drive the price of BTC is lower tax rates and tariffs, which if history is any guide (and it’s not always ), will be inflationary,” he posted on X.
According to Cuban, Trump’s reputation as a geopolitical wildcard could negatively impact the dollar, favoring BTC. “Combine that (tax cuts) with global uncertainty as to the geopolitical role of the USA, and the impact on the US Dollar as a reserve currency, and you can’t align the stars any better for a BTC price acceleration.”
Banking on Vance
Trump’s newly named vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, sits on the U.S. Senate’s banking committee and has shown initiative in the legislative process. The 39-year-old advocates for clear laws over regulatory control in sectors including technology and cryptocurrencies.
The “Hillbilly Elegy” author, who holds Bitcoin, has previously co-sponsored legislation granting banks unregulated access to crypto markets. He has actively promoted crypto within the Trump campaign, earning him an endorsement from fundraisers for the vice presidency.
The Ohio Senator could be problematic for the tech sector, having proposed the breakup of giants like Google and Meta, which he views as too “progressive.” Meanwhile, participants at the Tennessee Bitcoin Conference, organized by Vance, will need to pay a steep $800,000 per seat. A previous event organized by Vance charged $300,000 per seat.
Democrats Still in Play
Trump’s pro-crypto branding does not guarantee him all the votes from the sector. A survey of 1,000 registered voters by crypto venture capital firm Paradigm found that 48% of participants plan to vote for Trump, while 39% favor Biden. It’s important to note that crypto holders aren’t single-issue voters; they might support Trump’s crypto policies but disagree with him on other important issues.
Biden’s administration has not been altogether hostile to cryptocurrencies either. This year, the SEC approved rule changes to allow the listing of spot Bitcoin and spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in a first for the sector.
However, these concessions were hard-won after a series of expensive court battles. As far as crypto lobbyists are concerned, a friendly policy environment will serve them better than litigation. This includes companies like Coinbase and Ripple, which have reported losing millions in legal battles with the SEC.
In terms of legislation, the Financial Innovation and Technology bill has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress. Democrats have also started accepting donations in cryptocurrency.
Blockchain venture funding in Africa decreased by 74% in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.
On July 16, Swiss blockchain venture capital firm CV VC released its latest report on African venture funding. Within the report, CV VC highlighted that Africa secured $34.7 million in H1 2024. Compared to 2023, when funding reached $135.4 million, the number marks a 74% year-on-year decline in the amount raised.
While Africa experienced a downturn in funding, CV VC reported a 9% increase in the number of deals made in the region.
Part of a broader funding decline
Overall, blockchain funding worldwide also experienced a significant drop. CV VC reported that the space saw $10.66 billion in funding in the first half of 2023. However, it raised only $5.74 billion in the same period in 2024, representing a 64% drop year-on-year.
In terms of deals, 2024 also recorded only 678 deals. Compared to the same period in 2023, which had 1,306 deals, this shows a 49% decrease in blockchain venture capital deals made worldwide.
According to the report, African blockchain venture funding also accounted for 6.4% of all venture funding and 12.5% of regional deals. According to CV VC, the data shows an all-time high in deal share. This shows promise, as the data shows that Africa performed better than its global blockchain VC counterpart.
Globally, blockchain funding only represented 3.5% of all venture funding and 5.9% of total deals. CV VC noted that the higher percentage of blockchain venture activity in Africa “suggests a greater regional focus on blockchain solutions, driven by unique challenges that this technology can address.”
Africa sees a rise in crypto startups
Despite the decline in venture funding, the region still saw an increase in its share of crypto startups. On July 10, blockchain startup accelerator and founder community Alliance highlighted that Africa saw a 5.2% increase in its share of crypto startups.
Apart from Africa, Europe was the leading place for new crypto startups, overtaking the United States and Canada. Meanwhile, Asia came in third place with a 26.8% share.
On July 15, Constellation Network opened its Hypergraph blockchain, created in partnership with the United States military, to application developers at a global hackathon event hosted alongside technology giants IBM and Panasonic.
The hackathon marks the debut of Constellation’s “meta graph” application layer, which enables third-party developers to build Web3 applications—or even new layer-1 blockchains—on top of Hypergraph’s existing network.
Hypergraph is a so-called “Layer 0” protocol designed to validate and store data from interoperable applications and networks — known as “meta graphs” — on its ledger. According to the announcement, its meta graphs can work with any data type, interface directly with external data sources, and accept mainstream programming languages like Java.
“Constellation’s Hypergraph is the blockchain of blockchains,” Ben Jorgensen, CEO of Constellation Network, said in a statement. “The best way forward with Web3 and blockchain technology for all of us is interoperability and collaboration across chains and communities.”
In 2019, Constellation became among the first Web3 developers to clinch a contract with the US Department of Defense (DoD) to explore applications of blockchain technology for national security. Constellation is also partnered with the US Space Force and Treasury Department, according to the statement.
According to its website, as part of its DoD contract, Constellation is investigating use cases such as facilitating secure encrypted communications and aggregating data from disparate legacy systems. It is also working with the US Air Force to prototype technology designed to secure military data streams from hostile cyberattacks.
Constellation’s blockchain technology “would successfully thwart spoofing attacks from intercepting and replacing an existing data stream with a data stream from a hostile agent,” according to an Airforce memorandum cited on Constellation’s website.
Constellation distributed its native token, DAG, in 2018. The DAG token secures the Hypergraph network through a staking mechanism and is designed to benefit from the proliferation of new metagraph applications, according to the website.
Tokenized United States Treasurys could reach $3 billion by the end of 2024, showcasing the benefits of financial asset tokenization and its widespread adoption.
Tokenized Treasurys would need to grow nearly twofold to reach the $3 billion mark by the end of this year.
Reaching the $3 billion mark is possible due to the growing trend of decentralized autonomous organizations increasingly diversifying their holding into tokenized US Treasurys, according to Tom Wan, a research strategist at 21.co.
Tokenized US Treasurys will grow to $3 billion thanks to the product offerings of global giants like Securitize and BlackRock. The strategist wrote in a July 15 X post:
“With the two projects allocating to tokenized US treasury, we could be seeing the total market cap of tokenized US treasury increasing to $3B+ by the end of 2024.”
Tokenized US government securities have amassed over $1.6 billion in total assets under management, according to Dune data.
BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) became the largest tokenized Treasury fund after it surpassed Franklin Templeton’s fund.
BUIDL became the largest tokenized fund in just six weeks, amassing over $375 million in market capitalization during that time. The fund is currently worth over $528 million and holds an over 28.8% market share.
BlackRock’s fund will add significant momentum for the inflows into tokenized Treasurys, according to Wan. He said:
“As the strategy laid out by Securitize and Blackrock, they intend to provide diversification for the crypto ecosystem to access risk-free US treasury yield without needing to leave the blockchain ecosystem.
Tokenization could be the next multitrillion-dollar market opportunity, according to the world’s largest management consulting firm.
The global value of tokenized illiquid assets will grow to an estimated $16 trillion by 2030, according to a report released by the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA) and Boston Consulting Group.
In more conservative estimates, analysts at Citigroup predicted that another $4 trillion to $5 trillion worth of tokenized digital securities will be minted by the year 2030, according to a 2023 report.
Large companies worldwide are recognizing the potential of tokenization. For example, Goldman Sachs is preparing to launch three new tokenization products later his year, citing an uptick in client interest.
Binance-founded layer-1 blockchain BNB Chain has introduced a new layer-2 chain that it hopes will address its “scalability challenge.”
On June 19, BNB Chain unveiled opBNB, which has launched as a testnet. The new layer-2 scaling solution is based on the Optimism OP Stack, which it says will add additional security and scalability to the Binance blockchain network.
The system is an Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible layer-2 chain, which means it works with Ethereum-based smart contracts, networks and ERC-20 token standards.
Blockchains are often plagued by network congestion and high fees during times of increased network demand. BNB Chain currently claims around 2,000 transactions per second with transaction costs of around $0.10.
According to the announcement, opBNB can support over 4,000 transfer transactions per second at an average transaction cost lower than $0.005.
Furthermore, opBNB also allows for the optimization of data accessibility, the caching layer, and adjusting the submission process algorithm to allow simultaneous operations, it noted. This allows it to increase the gas limit to 100 million per block from the 30 million that Optimism allows.
In a statement, Binance called opBNB its “answer to the scalability challenge that has limited the mass adoption of blockchain technology.”
Optimism uses Optimistic Rollups to scale transactions by automatically assuming the transaction data, which is processed off the root chain, is valid until proven otherwise.
Additionally, the RPC (remote procedure call) service layer simplifies the integration process by offering a user-friendly interface, it noted.
This allows developers to “focus on building applications without worrying about the complexities of Layer 2 scaling,” it added.
Cinneamhain Ventures partner Adam Cochran was among some of those skeptical of the development, commenting that BNB Chain had scaling issues “because they centralized an Ethereum fork and turned up the gas limit to an unsafe level.”
He added that launching an Optimism fork “made no sense” since there were other options, such as joining Optimism as a “superchain,” or becoming a layer-2 directly on Ethereum, or even a layer-3 on Optimism or Arbitrum.
According to DefiLlama, BNB Chain is the third largest blockchain, behind Ethereum and Tron, in terms of DeFi total value locked. It has a TVL of $3.38 billion, a 24-hour volume of $264 million, and around a million active daily users.
The financial services provider Stripe has expanded its cryptocurrency integration into the European market, allowing local customers to buy crypto via credit or debit cards.
According to a July 16, report from the Irish Independent, shoppers located within the EU can now buy Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies with their credit cards.
EU crypto purchases
Stripe said online vendors are able to add a “widget” for crypto-purchasing on their websites, which will handle matters that deal with charges, disputes and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulatory requirements related to online crypto transactions.
John Egan, the head of crypto at Stripe, said the expansion allows crypto companies to help European consumers “buy cryptocurrencies quickly and easily.”
“Now, merchants who rely on Stripe’s onramp for things like conversion optimization, identity verification, and fraud prevention can reach a more global audience. This lets them focus on growing their business and helping their customers.”
The report said the move is initially aimed at crypto marketplaces and vendors and follows Stripe’s recent announcement that it would start supporting stablecoin payments, in which transaction settlements are instantly converted to fiat currencies like dollars or euros.
On July 15, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, agreed to scoop up $861 million in private shares from investors of Stripe, which subsequently boosted the company’s valuation to $70 billion.
Cointelegraph reached out to Stripe for additional information on the EU expansion.
EU regulations at play
Stripe is headquartered in both San Francisco and Dublin, Ireland. Dublin, a member of the EU, has a high per-capita rate of cryptocurrency ownership in Europe.
Europe leads the market in global cryptocurrency transaction value, accounting for 37.32%. It has also proven to be one of the more proactive regions when it comes to creating and enforcing regulation on the crypto industry.
These regulations are designed to help lawmakers understand financial technology and provide traders and exchanges with clear guidelines for navigating the market.
The first set of regulations which were aimed at stablecoins, began to take effect starting from June 30, with the next set anticipated for December 2024.
Industry experts have predicted a learning curve for companies in the industry but overall view the regulations as much needed clarity for better operations for users, businesses and the law combined.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Tuesday central bank independence is a proven and politically popular way to achieve the best possible outcomes for the U.S. economy.
“The record is pretty clear” that a central bank that operates outside of political factors and direction is “a good institutional arrangement that serves the public well,” Powell said, adding “as long as it’s seen to serve the public well, it’s a good choice.”
Powell’s comments came during testimony on monetary policy and the economy given before the Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.
Powell flagged the ubiquity of independence at central banks among major economies, where the institutions are afforded latitude to achieve their respective mandates without being directed to do so by political authorities. A key aspect of independence is that it gives central banks space to make difficult choices when it comes to managing inflation.
That bears on the near-term choices that now lie ahead for the Fed. With its short-term interest rate target at the highest level in decades, officials are searching for evidence that will allow them to cut rates as price pressures ease. That decision puts them potentially on track to ease just ahead of the presidential election in November, which would be highly contentious in political terms.
Fed independence issues have loomed back into focus amid a presidential election season that could return Donald Trump to the White House. When Trump was president he repeatedly attacked the Fed for its monetary policy choices, breaking from decades of presidents steering clear from actively lobbying the Fed over how to set interest rate policy.
Economists and other experts generally agree that political pressure on central banks leads to worse outcomes for the economy, especially on the inflation front.
Powell told senators “the results are clear” that when a central bank can tackle its goals free of political direction “you have better-anchored inflation expectations and you have better performance on inflation and better performance in the economy generally.” In his formal remarks Powell also noted that independence grants the Fed space to take a “longer-term perspective” on policy choices.
POLITICAL PRESSURES
Powell said that among elected officials, the benefit of Fed independence “is pretty broadly understood and particularly on Capital Hill.”
Senator Kevin Cramer, a Republican, told Powell he agreed. “At least on Capitol Hill, we’re all pretty much united” on the importance of Fed independence, while acknowledging some moves within his own party to rein in Fed powers, something he said he had worked to counter.
But he warned Powell on a pre-election rate cut, saying “perception matters, and so I would just submit to you …any move to lower interest rates or move interest rates either direction before November 5th could certainly be a bad perception.”
The rising threat to Fed independence has driven the central bank to increasingly defend the value of the status in both public comments and in official communications. The central bank’s Monetary Policy Report released last Friday included a section on the value of independence, for example.
“In an era of economic populism, and the possible advent of a second Trump administration, the idea of central bank independence is far more important than is commonly understood or appreciated among elected actors and the public,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist of consulting firm RSM US LLP.
The issue of how Trump would approach Fed independence if returned to the presidency has been given additional urgency in the wake of what’s called Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation organized effort created and overseen by a number of former Trump administration staffers.
One of the views it espouses is that “public opinion expressed through the lawmaking process in the Constitution should ultimately determine the monetary-institutional order in a free society.”
The project calls for the Fed moving to an inflation-only legal mandate, dropping its directive to also promote strong job growth. It also supports curtailing the Fed’s emergency lending powers and shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet to levels seen in 2008 when the global financial crisis struck.
Project 2025 even nods toward more radical changes including a possible shift to commodity-based money like gold or silver, and the possible abolition of the Fed itself. The report said at a “minimum” there should be a commission “to explore the mission of the Federal Reserve, alternatives to the Federal Reserve system, and the nation’s financial regulatory apparatus.”
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Rent and housing costs are keeping U.S. inflation higher than preferred but consumer price pressures will continue to come down over time, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Tuesday, as a top White House adviser cited what she called “tremendous progress” in bringing down inflation.
Yellen told the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee that inflationary factors including supply issues and labor market tightness have eased, which would help continue to drive down consumer price pressures.
“I believe that it (inflation) will continue to come down over time. Rents and housing costs continue to leave it higher than we would ideally like,” Yellen told the U.S. House panel on financial services.
“Although the labor market was initially very tight, now we have a strong labor market, but one with fewer pressures that would create inflationary concern, so inflation is coming down,” she said.
Lael Brainard, chair of the White House National Economic Council and a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve, said the Biden administration is encouraged by continued progress on lowering inflation, but President Joe Biden would keep fighting to lower the cost of living for working families.
Brainard said several months of data had confirmed that inflation was returning to the Fed’s 2% target, noting that the most recent data showed an inflation level of 2.6%, which she said marked “tremendous progress.”
The inflation target is set in reference to the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, which as of May was increasing at a 2.6% year-over-year rate.
Looking more closely at the underlying categories of inflation showed an actual reduction in food prices, and gasoline prices holding steady at around $3.50 a gallon over the July 4 “driving holiday,” Brainard added.
“But we also know that Americans are still squeezed by the cost of living,” Brainard said. She said Biden would continue to push for more affordable housing, slower increases in rents and the introduction of tax credits to help first-time homeowners.
The Fed receives consumer price information for the month of June on Thursday. The consumer price index did not rise at all in May, and analysts anticipate another weak reading later this week.
Switzerland’s consumer pricing watchdog has put UBS (UBSG.S), opens new tab under observation following its takeover of Credit Suisse, the regulator said on Thursday, amid concerns that the market power of the enlarged lender could lead to higher loan charges.
The supervisor had met with financial market regulator FINMA, competition authority ComCo and the Swiss National Bank to discuss consequences of the takeover, it said in a statement.
The meeting laid down the groundwork for necessary cooperation between the different authorities in future, they said.
UBS on Monday said it had completed the merger of its domestic unit with Credit Suisse’s operations in its home market.
UBS had no immediate comment on the decision but a spokesperson pointed to previous statements the bank had made noting that there was plenty of competition within the Swiss banking sector.
FINMA last month ruled that the takeover did not create any competition concerns, despite recommendations from ComCo that it merited further scrutiny.
“ComCo’s analysis has shown that the merged UBS now has market power or dominance in some markets,” the pricing supervisor’s office said.
“This means that the price supervisor is directly responsible for monitoring price abuse in these markets,” it added.
The supervisor said it was looking in particular at loan interest rates. Swiss businesses have raised concerns that the market power of the enlarged UBS could lead to higher loan costs in future.
“The price supervisor assumes that the merged major bank is aware of its social responsibility and will behave accordingly,” the office said.
The office said it hoped that regulatory interventions will not be needed but would not hesitate to act if necessary.
On its website the Swiss price regulator says it is generally responsible for assessing prices where prices have not been formed through free competition, but have been set by a dominant company, a cartel or the state.
The financial sector has been rapidly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly generative AI and large language models (LLMs), to enhance various aspects of operations and customer interactions.
For instance, banks are leveraging AI to automate manual processes, enhance data analysis, and personalize customer interactions, improving operational efficiency and customer experience.
Moreover, AI is increasingly used to analyze vast amounts of data for detecting suspicious activities and transaction patterns.
AI technologies are also deployed to improve customer engagement through chatbots, virtual assistants, and recommendation systems.
Top AI Use Cases Among Financial Institutions
According to NVIDIA’s fourth annual State of AI in Financial Services Report, an overwhelming 91% of financial services companies are either assessing AI or already using it in production.
The report revealed that 37% of respondents showed interest in using AI in report generation, synthesis, and investment research to cut down on repetitive manual work.
Customer experience and engagement was another sought-out use case, with a 34% response rate.
The most popular uses for AI were in operations, risk and compliance, and marketing.
Furthermore, financial institutions are using AI to automate manual processes, enhance data analysis, and inform investment decisions, improving operational efficiency.
Overall, the survey found that 97% of companies plan to invest more in AI technologies in the near future.
The Limitations of AI in Trading
Some traders have recently turned to AI for price analysis and prediction.
Finbold, a financial news and analysis platform, has been actively utilizing AI to provide price predictions across various assets, including cryptocurrencies.
The media outlet provides daily and weekly price analysis of top cryptocurrencies using popular AI models like ChatGPT.
While AI tools offer certain advantages, traders must be cautious of their limitations as well, including potential issues like overfitting, lack of adaptability to new market conditions, and the inherent unpredictability of financial markets.
These tools should be viewed as complementary to human decision-making rather than replacements.
Here are five reasons why completely relying on AI for trading might not be a good decision.
Lack of Emotional Intelligence
AI excels in processing vast quantities of data and executing high-volume trades.
However, it lacks the emotional intelligence that human traders bring to the table, which includes an understanding of market sentiments and ethical considerations that machines cannot replicate.
Recent researches have revealed that AI often struggles with understanding the context and subtleties of emotional expressions.
In fact, for this reason, in fields like therapy or healthcare where emotional understanding is crucial, AI’s limitations can be stark.
While AI offers substantial benefits in processing speed and handling large datasets, its lack of emotional intelligence presents significant challenges, particularly in fields requiring interpersonal connections and emotional interactions.
Over-Reliance on Historical Data
AI systems primarily depend on historical data to make predictions and decisions.
This can be problematic during unprecedented market events, such as those influenced by the lack of regulations seen in cases like FTX or Binance.
Moreover, historical data may not always be representative of current or future conditions.
Changes in trends, consumer behavior, market dynamics, or regulatory environments might not be captured if the data is outdated, leading AI systems to make predictions based on scenarios that no longer exist.
Limited Flexibility and Adaptability
Unlike humans, AI algorithms have a rigid nature and may not quickly adapt to sudden market changes.
These systems operate within the confines of their predefined algorithms and parameters.
They excel in environments similar to those they were trained on but struggle when conditions change unexpectedly.
The pace of technological and economic change often outstrips the adaptability of AI systems, highlighting a crucial area where human oversight remains superior.
Ethical and Bias Concerns
AI systems can also manifest biases based on the data they are trained on, leading to ethical concerns in decision-making processes.
If the data they are trained on contains biases, the AI’s outputs will likely reflect these biases, which can lead to unfair or prejudiced decisions.
These biases can affect everything from trading strategies to client interactions, necessitating a vigilant approach to AI management and a robust human oversight framework.
Dependence on Technology
Heavy reliance on AI technologies introduces risks, including system failures or cyberattacks that can disrupt trading activities.
There are several notable instances illustrate how technology failures have significantly impacted trading.
In 2012, a software glitch due to the faulty deployment of trading algorithms led to $440 million in losses for Knight Capital. The problem caused a massive number of unintended orders to be sent to the market within minutes.
Likewise, in 2013, NASDAQ experienced a significant disruption due to a software malfunction that froze trading for three hours.
These incidents demonstrate the critical importance of robust and reliable technology in trading environments, as well as risks of overdependence on technology.
The Bottom Line
AI technologies, particularly generative AI and LLMs, are extensively used in the financial sector to automate manual processes, enhance data analysis, and personalize customer interactions.
More recently, some traders have recently turned to AI for price analysis and prediction.
While AI offers numerous benefits in trading, such as enhanced data processing capabilities and the ability to execute high-volume trades, it also comes with certain risks such as over-reliance on historical data, lack of emotional intelligence, and potential ethical issues.
The financial sector’s dependence on technology also brings risks of system failures and cyberattacks, which can have severe impacts on trading and market stability.
According to cybersecurity firm Cyvers’ mid-year Web3 security report, the total volume of stolen crypto funds in 2024 is approaching $1.4 billion as centralized exchanges emerge as the new ground zero for exploits.
In the second quarter of 2024, total crypto losses exceeded $600 million, marking a 100% increase over the same period in 2023. The surge in stolen funds was driven primarily by a 900% increase in losses on centralized exchanges, according to the report.
“This quarter has witnessed a significant shift in attack vectors, with centralized exchanges (CEX) bearing the brunt of major incidents, while decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols show improved resilience,” the report stated, adding, “This trend may be attributed to the concentration of assets in centralized platforms and potentially lax security measures in some exchanges.”
Access control breaches — often in the form of phishing attacks — accounted for the overwhelming majority of stolen funds, around $490 million in Q2 alone, according to Cyvers. That figure dwarfs losses from smart contract exploits, which saw less than $70 million drained during the same period.
Quick action by decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to freeze compromised smart contracts has protected users, but Cyvers cautioned that exploit risk remains prevalent as hackers unearth new vulnerabilities in complex contracts. Cross-chain bridges are also becoming a significant attack vector, the report noted, citing the $1.44 million exploit of XBridge in April.
The high-profile breach of Japanese cryptocurrency exchange DMM in May heavily impacted Cyvers’ Q2 data. The hack — reportedly caused by a compromised private key — drained over $300 million. Another significant outlier was the Turkish cryptocurrency exchange BtcTurk, which lost around $50 million to hackers in June.
The report noted that explicit victims are having greater success than before in recovering lost funds, with total funds recovered increasing by 42% in Q2 over the same period in 2023. Still, the vast majority of lost funds (some 76%) have not been retrieved.
Web3 users should remain on the lookout for emergent threats posed by artificial intelligence and quantum computing, which could provide hackers with sophisticated new tools for bypassing onchain security measures, Cyvers said.
Bitcoin has three months to go until the bull market resumes — but it can still see 300% gains by 2026.
Those are some of the conclusions of fresh BTC price analysis from the pseudonymous engineer known as Apsk32.
BTC price “acceleration” not due for at least three months
In a post on X on July 9, Apsk32 returned to his power law metric to chart the likely future performance of the Bitcoin market.
The power law essentially provides a lower BTC price support band, which has held since BTC/USD traded at just $1. Several other bands, or “time contours,” provide additional price information, ultimately giving a $1 million price target for 2036.
“Time contours tell us how long it will be before the support forces current prices upward. For 12 years, every bear market has returned to this support line,” part of a previous X post from June explains.
“The support passes one million dollars in 2036 and bitcoin isn’t stopping there.”
Relaying past price action onto the current four-year cycle, as defined by Apsk32, is helping to explain current market behavior, including the ongoing 25% drop from March’s $73,800 all-time highs.
“If bitcoin’s cycle pattern continues, price should remain inside or near this blue cloud,” the latest post summarized.
“The ETFs pushed us out of the cloud and now we’re reverting back. We’re 3+ months away from upwards acceleration and we could see prices go up 4x by the end of 2025.”
An accompanying chart shows the so-called “Power Law Fractal Cloud” — a guideline range for BTC/USD going forward.
“Does the price have to stay within the cloud? Absolutely not,” Apsk32 acknowledged.
“This time could be different, in fact it already is.”
Bitcoin “moving from weak to strong hands”
As Cointelegraph continues to report, Bitcoin traders are poised for further BTC price downside as a feeling of fear takes over across crypto.
Sub-$50,000 levels have returned to the radar, again bringing the current drawdown in line with those past.
Sources of optimism meanwhile include reduced selling by Bitcoin miners over the past month, along with a return to net inflows for the United States-based spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
The latter saw inflows of nearly $300 million on July 8, marking their best single-day tally in over a month, per data from sources including United Kingdom-based investment firm Farside Investors.
“Looks like the boomers & institutions are buying the dip here, while Germany offloads a bunch of coins,” popular trader Jelle wrote in part of a response, contrasting ETF buying with BTC sales by the German government.
Dubai Customs has announced the launch of a new blockchain platform aimed at smoothing out supply chain friction within Dubai and across its borders.
The blockchain solution was launched as part of a broader strategy to cement Dubai’s position as a leading “smart” city, Dubai Media Office said in a July 8 statement.
“This innovation reflects our vision to make Dubai a global hub for trade and logistics,” said Ahmed bin Sulayem, Chairman of the Ports, Customs, and Free Zone Corporation.
“We believe that adopting modern technologies like blockchain will significantly contribute to improving the business environment and enhancing Dubai’s position as a major center for global trade.”
Bin Sulayem noted that the blockchain solution aims to cut time and effort by simplifying many procedures to expedite customs clearance and commercial transactions.
It will also improve supply chain transparency by facilitating tamper-proof data sharing and reducing the voluminous paperwork typically involved in these processes.
“The goal is to make the business environment in Dubai smoother, more streamlined, and transparent,” said Dr. Abdullah Busnad, Director General of Dubai Customs.
Blockchains have long been touted as a solution for tracking the real-time movement of items in supply chains and combating fraud and counterfeiting.
However, academics in 2022 argued there are still hurdles to mass adoption. One promising blockchain supply chain platform from computer manufacturer IBM was axed in November 2022.
IBM and its partner, Danish logistics firm Maersk, cited a lack of “global industry collaboration” as a key reason behind its decision to discontinue TradesLens.
However, many more platforms and blockchains exist today.
VeChain, a smart contract-compatible blockchain used for supply-chain tracking, has been a player in the space since its launch in 2016. Chainlink has been used for supply-chain automation since its launch in 2019. Hong Kong-based Global Shipping Business Network (GSBN) has also become a notable player in the blockchain supply chain space.
VeChain, a smart contract-compatible blockchain used for supply-chain tracking, has been a player in the space since its launch in 2016. Chainlink has been used for supply-chain automation since its launch in 2019. Hong Kong-based Global Shipping Business Network (GSBN) has also become a notable player in the blockchain supply chain space.
Dubai Customers also launched a blockchain-based platform to facilitate cross-border e-commerce in January 2020.
Swiss bank UBS (UBSG.S), opens new tab has completed the merger of its domestic unit with Credit Suisse’s operations in its home market, the bank said on Monday, adding that the head of the Credit Suisse business was leaving the bank.
Andre Helfenstein, CEO of Credit Suisse Switzerland, has decided to leave the bank following the merger of UBS Switzerland AG and Credit Suisse (Schweiz) AG, the bank said.
Following the merger, UBS Switzerland has taken on all the rights and obligations of Credit Suisse, with the process expected to ease the migration of clients and operations to the UBS platform.
Sabine Keller-Busse, president of UBS Switzerland, said the step was an important milestone in the integration of Credit Suisse UBS following last year’s takeover.
“The migration of the majority of client transactions in Switzerland to the UBS platform will take place in 2025 and will be gradual, with tailored updates to our clients,” she said in a statement.
UBS has already begun to move over clients from Credit Suisse in Hong Kong and Singapore.
The merging of the entities also paves the way for UBS to speed up progress on its plan to axe 3,000 jobs in Switzerland. Globally analysts have estimated more than 30,000 staff could be cut.
Debate has been vigorous in Switzerland about the size and power of the enlarged UBS, which analysts say has a dominant position in areas such as the Swiss loan and debt markets since it took over Credit Suisse in a state-engineered rescue.
However, Switzerland’s financial regulator last month ruled that the takeover did not create any competition concerns, despite recommendations from the country’s antitrust watchdog that it merited further scrutiny.
Banks in Germany, France and elsewhere in the EU have lent more than 1.4 trillion euros ($1.5 trillion) to the commercial real estate sector, leaving some lenders vulnerable to “cracks” in the market, the bloc’s banking watchdog said on Tuesday.
In its latest risks report, the European Banking Authority (EBA) said banks faced “elevated uncertainty” from geopolitical factors, with analysts seeing the French parliamentary election as a potential risk.
Capital levels are “comfortable”, but caution is needed as payouts rise on the back of higher profits, the EBA said.
“Planned payouts in 2024 reach nearly 100 billion euros for the covered sample of banks, which is the highest volume for years,” the EBA said in the report, which surveyed about 80% of the banking sector.
It also scrutinised banks’ exposure to property, private credit and non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFI) such as investment funds.
“Structural and cyclical factors have caused cracks in commercial real estate markets,” EBA said.
Total EU bank exposures to real estate have risen 40% to 1.4 trillion euros over the past decade, with several, mainly smaller banks, having exposures that are now multiples of their equity, making them vulnerable to downturns, the watchdog said.
“Although banks domiciled in France and Germany reported the largest exposure, exceeding 280 billion euros, followed by banks in the Netherlands that reported 175 billion euros, only German banks reported an elevated share of their total client lending towards CREs,” it said, referring to commerical real estate borrowers.
EU banks have already set aside 31 billion euros against loans to real estate going sour, and the risks should be “manageable”, EBA said, adding that Denmark’s capital buffer for property risk is one way of mitigating such risks.
As of December 2023, the NBFI sector accounted for more than a quarter of bank-issued debt, and growth in private credit or lending by NBFI directly to households and business, has been “rapidly accelerating” in several EU states, EBA said.
“The downturn of the real estate market might also have stronger repercussions on market stability, negatively affecting NBFIs significantly exposed to the segment,” the report said.
EU banks’ exposures to NBFI reached 9.2% of total assets in 2023, bringing welcome competition for borrowers, but also risks such as potentially lower lending standards, EBA said.
“To detect potential contagion channels early on, supervisors and macroprudential authorities also need to have a particular focus on the direct and indirect linkages between banks and NBFIs,” it added.
The bloc’s executive European Commission has begun scoping out a macroprudential framework for NBFI. EBA said transparency should be improved, with better data on linkages between banks and non-banks also needed.
A “German Government (BKA)” labeled cryptocurrency wallet has sold another $52 million worth of Bitcoin, sparking suspicions that the government is selling its vast BTC holdings.
The wallet associated with the German government transferred 832.7 Bitcoin in four individual transactions on July 2.
The wallet sent 100 BTC to Coinbase, 150 BTC to Bitstamp and 32.74 BTC to Kraken, according to Arkham Intelligence data.
The lion’s share, or 550 BTC worth over $32 million, was sent to the wallet “139Po,” which remains unknown but has previously received funds from the German government, including 500 BTC on June 25 and 800 BTC on June 20.
Tracking the selling patterns of large Bitcoin holding entities can give investors valuable cues about the Bitcoin price since large sell orders can create more downward price pressure.
German government could introduce more Bitcoin selling pressure
The BKA-labelled wallet, which holds over 43,850 BTC worth over $2.75 billion, could threaten Bitcoin’s price due to more potential selling pressure.
The Bitcoin price has been in a downtrend since the beginning of June, falling over 7.3% during the past month. BTC found a local bottom above the $58,450 mark on June 24 before bouncing back above the current $62,000 mark, according to Bitstamp data.
Bitcoin has amassed significant support at the $61,500 mark. However, a move below it would liquidate over $1 billion worth of cumulative leveraged long positions across all exchanges, according to Coinglass data.
Is the German government actively selling BTC?
Besides the largest transfer worth $32 million, the rest of the Bitcoin was transferred to centralized exchanges, which signals that Germany’s government is potentially looking to sell its Bitcoin.
Cointelegraph has approached Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) for comment.
The German government-labeled wallet first sparked suspicions of potential Bitcoin selling on June 19, when it executed a 6,500 BTC transfer worth over $425 million.
Before the transfer, the wallet held nearly 50,000 BTC since February 2024. The funds are believed to have been seized from the pirate movie website operator Movie2k.
The intersection of artificial intelligence and blockchain seems to be a growing focus for venture capitalists and innovators worldwide. Companies developing solutions based on these technologies disclosed substantial capital raises in June, many of them seed rounds.
One of these protocols is Sentient, which raised $85 million in funding to develop an open-source artificial intelligence platform. The round was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures.
The startup is an AI research organization that wants to enable developers to monetize their open-source models and data, similar to other ecosystems such as the Super Intelligence Alliance.
Another startup, ORA, also uses AI models and blockchain to generate revenue for developers. In early June, the protocol raised $20 million from Polychain, HF0 and Hashkey Capital. It is working on a mechanism that will entitle anyone who buys a token to own and share revenue generated by an AI model.
“I am particularly excited about opportunities at the convergence of AI and Crypto, although even that distinction will sound dated in a few years,” Pantera Capital’s portfolio manager Cosmo Jiang told Cointelegraph.
Jiang said that, in the future, every business will use AI as a tool, just as every business has adopted the internet in the past 20 years:
“There won’t be a distinction between “AI businesses” and “Non-AI businesses” […] As such, we expect many blockchain-enabled businesses will explicitly solve problems with or related to AI.”
Pantera is also an investor in Bittensor, a decentralized platform for building and using AI models. It functions like a marketplace where users can create, train and share AI models, earning rewards for contributing to the network.
The funding was made in early 2024, and the amount invested has not been disclosed. “It is a meaningful position in our portfolio,” said Jiang about the token deal. The venture firm, traditional in the blockchain space, has allocated $200 million to AI projects.
This edition of Cointelegraph’s VC Roundup features another batch of startups that raised capital in June.
Lombard raises $16M seed round for Bitcoin restaking
Lombard has closed a $16 million seed funding round to develop a Bitcoin restaking ecosystem in collaboration with Babylon. Polychain Capital led the round, along with participation from dao5, Nomad, Foresight Ventures, and ABCDE.
Major exchanges, including OKX and Bitget, also contributed. The startup’s flagship product is LBTC — a liquid and yield-bearing representation of BTC that can move across decentralized finance protocols as collateral, according to Lombard.
The product is expected to unlock liquidity from BTC staked on Babylon’s protocol. Former executives from Argent, Coinbase and Maple Finance are behind the startup.
Redacted secures $10 million funding co-led by Spartan Group for “entertainment datasphere”
Redacted has raised $10 million in a funding round co-led by Spartan Group, with participation from Saison Capital, Animoca Brands, and Polygon Ventures.
The startup promotes a Web3 entertainment ecosystem that integrates blockchain and artificial intelligence to create an “entertainment datasphere,” which will allow users to play, trade, and watch content while earning rewards — a process known as farming.
The Redacted leadership team is said to include backgrounds from companies such as Tesla, Bank of America, Kraken, and LEGO. The team has allocated more than 50% of the tokens to its community and ecosystem.
A group of advisers and consultants from companies such as Saison Capital, Confiction Labs, King/Candy Crush, Amazon, and Microsoft is assisting in the design and building of the ecosystem.
RedStone closes $15 million Series A round led by Arrington Capital
Modular oracle developer RedStone has closed a $15 million Series A round led by Arrington Capital, with participation from SevenX, IOSG Ventures, Spartan Capital, White Star Capital, Kraken Ventures, Amber Group, Protagonist, gumi Cryptos, Apeiron (Samara Group), among others.
RedStone’s total value secured (TVS) has reached over $4 billion, according to the protocol. The startup claims to have more than 110 clients across 60 chains, including Pendle, Morpho and Venus. In January, RedStone became the only oracle to integrate with TON (The Open Network) and secured a $500 million staking commitment from EtherFi in April.
It provides data feeds to Ethereum, zkSync Era, Avalanche, Base, Polygon, Linea, Celo, Optimism, Arbitrum, Fantom, BNB Chain, Blast, and Bitcoin layer 2s such as Merlin Chain and BOB.
Covalent closes $5M round to offer long-term data availability across Asia
Blockchain infrastructure firm Covalent has announced the closing of a $5 million strategic funding round led by RockTree Capital, with participation from CMCC Global, Moonrock Capital, and Double Peak Group.
The funds will be used to expand Covalent’s operations in Asia and support long-term data availability in China, Korea, Singapore, and other regions. The startup has been working on its modular data infrastructure layer with Ethereum Wayback Machine (EWM) since 2019 and claims to have integrated with over 225 blockchains and 240 million wallets.
Covalent’s structured data pool is used for decentralized artificial intelligence training. Former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes serves as Covalent’s strategic adviser.
DePIN Base Camp announces six startups for Web3 accelerator program
Outlier Ventures has announced the six startups selected for the DePIN Base Camp accelerator program. The remote 12-week is a collaboration between Outlier, Peaq and Borderless Capital. The selected startups are Aydo (United Arab Emirates), Kaisar Network (Vietnam), Roam Network (Finland), ROVR (Hong Kong), TouchBrick (USA), and YOM (U.K.).
These startups are building products in Internet of Things hardware networks, decentralized computing and AI, wireless network optimization, digital twin technology, cybersecurity, and cloud gaming and metaverse.
Throughout the program, the teams will receive support from Outlier on product roadmap, community building, entity structuring, and fundraising. Meanwhile, peaq will share its expertise in building and running a DePIN. In addition, each team will receive investment from Borderless Capital.
Every once in a while, headlines about $100 million or larger Bitcoin and crypto futures contracts liquidations appear, causing novice investors and non-expert analysts to point to excessive leverage by retail traders as the culprit.
Gamblers are undoubtedly responsible for a large portion of these risky bets, especially when the liquidation is concentrated on retail-oriented exchanges such as Bybit and Binance, but not every futures liquidation is the result of reckless leverage use.
Not all futures liquidations are caused by leverage
Some trading strategies used by professionals also end up being liquidated during sudden sharp price moves, but they do not necessarily represent a loss or a sign of excessive leverage. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), OKX and Deribit typically exhibit a much lower liquidation ratio when compared to retail-driven exchanges, indicating that those traders are usually deploying more advanced strategies.
Using futures markets, especially perpetual contracts (inverse swaps), is fairly easy. Almost every crypto exchange offers 20x or higher leverage, requiring just an initial deposit, known as margin.
However, unlike regular spot trading, a futures contract cannot be withdrawn from the exchange. These leveraged futures contracts are synthetic, but they also offer the possibility to short, meaning one can bet on the price downside.
These derivatives instruments have unique benefits and can improve a trader’s outcomes, but traders who become overly confident seldom end up being profitable in the mid- to long term. To avoid falling into this mental trap, pro traders usually deploy three different strategies aiming to maximize profits without relying solely on directional trades.
Forced liquidations on low-liquidity pairs
Whales use futures contracts to exploit volatile markets by targeting low-liquidity pairs. They open highly leveraged positions, anticipating forced liquidations due to insufficient margins. This triggers a chain reaction, pushing the market in a preferred direction.
For instance, if a price drop is desired, large amounts are sold, causing other traders to be liquidated and sell as well, further driving down the price. Though it seems money is being lost initially, the cascading effect benefits the strategy.
Executing this tactic requires substantial capital and multiple accounts. It effectively leverages market mechanics to create a significant impact, and understanding market behavior is crucial for this approach.
Cash and carry trading
The cash and carry trade involves purchasing an asset in the spot market and simultaneously selling a futures contract on that same asset. This strategy locks in the price difference between the spot and futures prices. Traders hold the asset until the futures contract expires, profiting from the convergence of these prices at maturity.
This arbitrage approach is low-risk and capitalizes on pricing inefficiencies between the markets. It is particularly effective in stable markets, providing consistent returns irrespective of overall market volatility, making it a favored strategy among risk-averse investors.
Funding rate arbitrage
Perpetual contracts (inverse swaps) charge a funding rate typically every eight hours to balance buyers and sellers. This rate varies with market leverage demand. When buyers (longs) demand more leverage, the funding rate becomes positive, making buyers pay fees.
Market makers and arbitrage desks exploit these differences by opening leveraged positions and hedging them by buying or selling in the spot market. They also explore differences between exchanges or between perpetual and monthly contracts.
This strategy, called funding rate arbitrage, involves capitalizing on varying rates across markets, requiring constant monitoring and precise execution to maximize profits while managing risk effectively.
In essence, using derivatives requires knowledge, experience and a substantial capital reserve to withstand market volatility. However, strategies like funding rate arbitrage can be effective even in less volatile markets, where there is minimal price action. These approaches prove that it is possible to use leverage prudently, maximizing profits even in calmer market conditions.
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC price action attempting to cement gains, which accompanied the monthly close.
Despite an overall failure to tackle key resistance levels above $64,000, Bitcoin traders had renewed cause for optimism as July got underway.
“Bitcoin has resumed its uptrend,” popular trader and analyst Rekt Capital summarized in one of several news posts on X (formerly Twitter).
Rekt Capital highlighted the monthly close as a key sign of strength, with a chart showing a breakout from the downtrend that characterized June.
“The goal? To build a foundation from which it will be able to springboard to the Range High area at ~$71500 over time,” he explained.
Fellow trader Daan Crypto Trades, meanwhile, placed emphasis on United States dollar liquidity trends. As Cointelegraph reported, these are crucial for crypto market performance, with expectations of positive repercussions increasing last month.
“During this range, the BTC price has moved mostly in line with USD Liquidity,” he asserted on the day alongside a comparative chart.
“We just saw a big decrease into a nice move up during this end of the quarter into the new quarter. Liquidity has moved little this year but both BTC & Stocks have been front running a future expansion of USD liquidity.”
Market analyst Cole Garner went further, suggesting that recent Federal Reserve liquidity changes could have a tangible short-term impact on BTC price strength.
“Biggest Fed Net Liquidity rate-of-change spike in 15 months,” he observed.
“Last time that happened, bitcoin rose ~40% in one week. Not assuming a repeat, but you love to see it.”
Bollinger Bands demand BTC price breakout
Technical indicator data likewise teased signs of increased volatility hitting Bitcoin next.
On weekly timeframes, Bollinger Bands were constricting to levels only seen a handful of times in Bitcoin’s history — a classic precursor to major breakouts.
The phenomenon was observed on X by popular analyst Matthew Hyland.
Tether is increasing its presence in Turkey by partnering with a local cryptocurrency firm to promote industry knowledge.
The firm, issuer of the Tether stablecoin, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with local crypto platform BTguru to evaluate digital asset-related educational initiatives in Turkey, it announced on July 2.
BTguru positions itself as a technology and strategy partner, specializing in virtual crypto assets “for primarily banks.”
As part of the agreement, Tether will assess the development of programs to introduce private and public stakeholders in Turkey to the benefits of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
The MoU also aims to promote peer-to-peer (P2P) technology using BTguru’s connections to facilitate discussions with financial institutions in the country.
Additionally, Tether and BTguru will explore real-world asset tokenization use cases for banks and evaluate regional payment network scenarios.
Tether to evaluate what business lines can be introduced into Turkey’s banking verticals
According to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, Tether and BTguru are committed to promoting the transformative potential of digital assets and P2P technologies.
“This MOU has the potential to provide a solid foundation for the responsible and informed use of digital assets. We are excited to be part of a movement that could promote freedom and educate people across Türkiye,” Ardoino said.
BTguru partner Can Bukulmez said that the new collaboration with Tether aims to introduce new business lines with the stablecoin firm. The partnership will also evaluate what business lines can be introduced into Turkey’s banking verticals and emerging digital assets businesses.
Turkey emerges as a global cryptocurrency hub
Tether’s expansion in Turkey comes amid cryptocurrency adoption, which has been gaining traction in the country at a significant pace. According to data from Binance, Turkey ranks fourth in transaction volume and 12th in adoption, with a rate of 40%, making it a significant player in the global crypto ecosystem.
Turkey’s stablecoin purchases also make up a significant share of the country’s gross domestic product, accounting for 4.3% of its GDP, which is the highest among global economies, according to Chainalysis.
“With the interest of the Turkish community in digital assets and blockchain technology, Turkey emerges as one of the leading global hubs for crypto with a dynamic ecosystem, active participants, and significant transaction volumes,” Binance TR general manager Mücahit Dönmez said in a statement on July 2.
Tether and Binance’s growing efforts to participate in the Turkish crypto ecosystem follow a massive hack of the local crypto exchange BtcTurk. According to Peckshield, hackers stole more than $100 million in crypto from BtcTurk on June 22.
The events also follow a local regulatory milestone. In late June, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) removed Turkey from its gray list, citing “significant progress” in improving its regime for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and countering terrorist financing.
As Cointelegraph previously reported, the FATF’s AML requirements, including those related to cryptocurrency, have accelerated the urgency for Turkey to introduce crypto regulations in 2024.
“Because it’s France” was how Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president at the time, explained Brussels’ decision in 2016 to give leeway to the large, founder member of the European Union on the bloc’s budget rules.
That patience continued even as the EU endured a sovereign debt crisis that almost sunk the euro and forced smaller, more indebted nations such as Greece and Portugal to adopt swingeing austerity measures.
But any indulgence for French exceptionalism may come to an end if France’s snap election produces a eurosceptic, far-right government in Paris that could strain ties with other European capitals and test the very foundations of the euro project.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) insists it would not blow up the French budget. But questions persist about how it would fund costly spending plans within the eurozone’s newly minted budget rules and whether the European Central Bank could step in to help if financial markets turn on France.
“If a country can just ignore the rules and be helped by the central bank, you’ll get a lot of doubts about the future value of the euro and the future cohesion of the euro,” said Holger Schmieding, an economist at Berenberg.
Such concerns are not on the official agenda of Thursday’s EU summit. But with the RN leading polls in the two-round vote starting June 30, they are bound to occupy the minds of President Emmanuel Macron’s fellow leaders.
Senior German government sources said they were dismayed by Macron’s surprise decision to call elections that could usher in an RN-led government. One compared it to former UK premier David Cameron’s ill-fated gamble on an “in-out” Brexit referendum.
In Italy, with an even bigger debt pile than France, a tinge of Schadenfreude over France’s misfortunes is offset by fears that a French crisis could extend across the Alps, said Francesco Galietti of Rome-based political risk consultant Policy Sonar.
Otmar Issing, the ECB’s first chief economist and one of the euro’s architects, compared the debt of Italy and France to “a sword of Damocles hanging over the monetary union”, bound to fall unless the problem is tackled.
“You can pull the hair by which it is attached but it cannot hold for ever,” he said in an interview.
Even Greece is not cutting France any slack, with central bank governor Yannis Stournaras stressing that all member states needed to respect EU rules.
NO MORE INDULGENCE
Polling points to the RN emerging as the largest party, with or without a clear majority to pursue an awkward “cohabitation” with Macron until the 2027 presidential election.
France’s fiscal credibility is already at stake with the International Monetary Fund questioning how it will reduce a budget deficit running at around 5.1% this year and its credit rating downgraded by two agencies.
In truth, France’s fiscal sins far pre-date Macron. It has run budget deficits greater than the EU-mandated 3% for most of the 25 years since those rules came into force.
Brigitte Granville, economist at London’s Queen Mary University and author of “What ails France?”, said its rejection in the 1990s of German proposals for more complete political union reflected a desire to retain sovereignty over its finances.
She expected the RN, which long ago dropped calls to leave a single currency broadly accepted by French voters, to moderate its plans just enough to please Brussels if it came to power.
“They don’t have a choice unless they want to leave the euro,” Granville said in an interview.
RN statements to that effect have reassured investors, who were demanding a premium of just 70 basis points to own 10-year French bonds rather than their safer German counterparts – a far cry from peaks of 190 points for France and nearly 560 points for Italy during the 2011 debt crisis.
ECB chief economist Philip Lane told Reuters the moves in the French bond market did not appear “disorderly”, meaning they don’t meet one of the conditions for the central bank’s intervention.
CAUTIONARY TALES
Observers point to cautionary tales ranging from Greece, where a leftwing government was brought to its knees by financial and political pressure, to Britain, where Prime Minister Liz Truss was forced to resign after unveiling a budget that unnerved investors.
Most analysts emphasise the ECB has the tools to stem contagion from a French crisis by buying bonds of other countries that do respect the EU’s fiscal framework, meaning Paris might find itself isolated at times of need.
“There is, of course, a possibility that Frankfurt would intervene if the problems with France were to have some kind of external negative effects on other countries, like Italy,” former ECB policymaker Ewald Nowotny said.
An EU official cited Rome as a model for Paris after Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni toned down her anti-EU rhetoric once elected in 2022.
This, along with her support for the EU’s stance on conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, has helped Italy keep the Commission and financial markets on-side despite repeatedly raising its deficit forecasts.
Jeromin Zettelmeyer, director of the Bruegel economics think tank in Brussels, said RN’s rhetoric thus far did not suggest it was seeking a major confrontation with the Commission that could trigger a financial crisis.
However he said that if its officials ended up running key ministries, they could hamper EU moves to reform energy markets, advance the green transition and boost the bloc’s competitiveness by reforming its capital markets.
“If the far-right gets elected that is bad news for EU integration because they would control the government positions involved in most dimensions of EU policy-making,’ he said.
“The question is whether that is reversible or existential.”
Big U.S. lenders are expected to show they have ample capital to weather any renewed turmoil during this week’s Federal Reserve health checks, but will be conservative on investor payouts amid economic and regulatory uncertainties, analysts said.
The central bank on Wednesday will release the results of its annual bank “stress tests” which assess how much cash lenders would need to withstand a severe economic downturn and how much they can return to investors via dividends and share buybacks.
The results come a year after three large banks failed and as higher Fed interest rates continue to squeeze regional lenders’ margins and their commercial real estate (CRE) portfolios. Weakening consumer demand has also dampened sentiment on the trajectory of the economy.
With more mid-sized banks in the mix this year, the tests should provide fresh insight into the health of those lenders.
Introduced following the 2007-2009 financial crisis, the annual exercise is integral to banks’ capital planning.
The results will also likely fuel Wall Street banks’ campaign to ease draft capital hikes proposed by the Fed, which they say are unnecessary because big banks are already flush with cash.
Bank groups will be scouring Wednesday’s results for evidence that boosts their case, while being cautious on payouts since big dividends and buybacks could hurt banks’ argument that extra capital demands would impede their capacity to lend.
“The stress test could be used as a proxy battle in the overall capital regulatory reform war,” said Ed Mills, an analyst at Raymond James. “There could be some increase in returning capital to shareholders but it is expected to be modest as capital norms are yet to be finalized.”
This year 32 lenders will be tested. Wall Street giants JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N), opens new tab, Citigroup (C.N), opens new tab, Bank of America (BAC.N), opens new tab, Goldman Sachs (GS.N), opens new tab, Wells Fargo (WFC.N), opens new tab and Morgan Stanley (MS.N), opens new tab usually attract the most scrutiny.
Citi and Goldman, as well as smaller lender M&T Bank (MTB.N), opens new tab, are expected to perform well due to changes in their balance sheet mixes, said analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW).
With some lingering investor jitters about regional banks, mid-sized lenders including Citizens, KeyCorp (KEY.N), opens new tab and Truist (TFC.N), opens new tab are likely to be in the spotlight too, as will Discover Financial Services (DFS.N), opens new tab, whose compliance problems helped make it a takeover target.
“KeyBank is well capitalized with strong credit quality and deposit profiles,” a bank spokesperson said, adding Key also has a moderate risk profile with a wide range of funding sources.
Spokespeople for Wells Fargo, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Truist and M&T Bank declined to comment while Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citizens and Discover did not respond to requests for comment.
CRE EXPOSURE
The industry has performed well in recent years, although some critics say the tests are too easy. The Fed faced criticism after the 2023 bank failures for not having probed lenders’ ability to withstand higher rates, for example.
Analysts expect all 32 banks will show capital in excess of regulatory minimums. Last year, the central bank found the 23 banks tested would suffer a combined $541 billion in losses in a severe economic downturn, but that would still leave them over twice the capital required under Fed rules.
This year’s test is similar in its severity, but includes around 10 banks that are tested less frequently.
The Fed’s 2024 “severely adverse” scenario envisages the unemployment rate jumping 6.3 percentage points, compared with 6.4 points in 2023, to a peak of 10%. It includes sharper declines in the stock and bond markets this year, but slightly less severe dips in home prices and the overall economy.
As with 2023, the test also envisages a 40% slump in CRE prices, an area of concern as lingering pandemic-era office vacancies and high rates continue to stress landlords.
How well a bank performs dictates the size of its stress capital buffer (SCB) – an extra cushion of capital the Fed requires banks to hold to weather the hypothetical economic downturn, on top of regulatory minimums needed to support daily business. The larger the losses under the test, the larger the buffer.
Piper Sandler and KBW analysts predict that SCBs will mostly be flat across the group, although KBW expects Citi’s will fall after the bank sold most of its international consumer loans and that Goldman’s will likewise decline thanks to lower exposure to equity and real estate investments. M&T Bank’s efforts to reduce its CRE exposure should also result in a smaller SCB, said KBW.
KeyCorp and Truist, meanwhile, could experience an increase in their SCBs from a hypothetical hit to their income, KBW said.
Christopher Wolfe, head of North American banks ratings at Fitch, said investors will be watching how banks’ CRE loans perform.
“The banks have been keeping aside reserves of up to 10% for the office loan portfolio and CRE will be a focus but mainly for regional banks compared to large lenders,” he said.
Canadian crypto and Web3 startups could benefit from “lower taxes” and regulations that cater to “pre-commercial specialist technology companies,” said a Toronto ETO official.
Hong Kong government entities dedicated to attracting foreign investments visited a tech conference in Toronto, Canada, to advertise its offshore ready-to-move technology hub for Canadian crypto and Web3 startups.
The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Toronto (Toronto ETO), Invest Hong Kong (InvestHK) and StartmeupHK (SMUHK) co-hosted an event at Collision 2024 in Toronto, highlighting Hong Kong’s crypto-centric landscape.
Speaking at the event, Toronto ETO director Emily Mo underscored existing startup-friendly regulations, such as lower taxes than in Canada and Hong Kong’s willingness to work with “pre-commercial specialist technology companies.” She added:
“There is a creative mindset on Web3/virtual assets developments. Fintech, health technology, green technology and property technology, etc, are trending in Hong Kong and Asia these days.”
Tax treaty between Canada and Hong Kong
Mo said that Canadian businesses in Hong Kong are allowed to receive public and private funding.
The governments of Canada and Hong Kong have had a double tax agreement in place for more than a decade. It was designed to avoid double taxation and prevent fiscal evasion regarding taxes on personal and corporate income.
On June 22, Hong Kong Legislative Council member Johnny Ng Kit-Chong announced the formation of the Subcommittee on Web3 and Virtual Asset Development to promote the development of Web3 and digital assets in Hong Kong.
The council seeks feedback on several critical aspects of Web3 policy development, including balancing technical, legal and regulatory frameworks to create a cohesive environment for Web3 development with robust and clear regulations.
Crypto exchange exodus in Hong Kong
In May, all crypto exchanges operating without a license in Hong Kong were forced to shut down. While more than 20 exchanges had initially applied for a crypto license, most withdrew it after failing to meet the set requirements.
One Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange, Gate.HK, said it would relaunch its services after reconstructing its platform to comply with Hong Kong’s regulatory requirements. These requirements include establishing Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing measures. The company stated:
“Gate.HK is actively working on the aforementioned overhaul. We plan to resume our business in Hong Kong in the future and contribute to the virtual asset ecosystem after obtaining the relevant licenses.”
Crypto exchanges that retracted their license applications include prominent global players such as OKX, Huobi HK and Bybit, among others.
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC price strength staging a tentative recovery after the Wall Street open.
Bulls had suffered the day prior, as a trip to seven-week lows of $58,500 sparked a cascade of capitulations.
Bitcoin’s relative strength index (RSI) reading on four-hour timeframes hit its lowest levels since August 2023 — the last time BTC/USD gave up bull market support lines such as the short-term holder aggregate cost basis.
“Range held where it needed to,” popular trader Daan Crypto Trades confirmed in one of his latest updates on X.
“Yesterday was the largest net selling day in Bitcoin in over a year. RSI levels also hit levels not seen in a year.”
Data from monitoring resource CoinGlass put total BTC long liquidations for June 24 at just under $150 million.
“Massive liquidity zone at $65K and all the way up to that point,” Daan Crypto Trades continued.
“I think that would be a good level in the short term to target and see how the market looks by then. Invalidation is losing the range low at ~59K.”
Talk of the psychological — if not physical — impact of the Mt. Gox bankruptcy proceedings continued to circulate.
“We think there will continue to be selling pressure in the market as markets try to digest what 140,000 BTC means for markets and prices that in,” trading firm QCP Capital wrote on the topic in part of its latest update to Telegram channel subscribers.
“Existing Mt Gox creditors are probably unhedged given how expensive it is to hold perp positions and option positions for long periods of time.”
QCP noted that BTC’s price had bounced near its 200-day exponential moving average (EMA), currently at almost exactly $58,000. The last time BTC/USD traded below that trendline was in October.
Bitcoin squares off with U.S. dollar
Fellow trader Skew nonetheless warned of ongoing strength for the United States dollar — traditionally a headwind for risk assets and crypto — and suggested that this would continue in the short term.
Applying Elliott Wave theory to the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY), however, Matthew Dixon, CEO of crypto rating platform Evai, argued that the picture was conversely bearish for dollar bulls.
“A valid 5 waves down for DXY is a very promising sign for BTC & Crypto,” he commented on the 15-minute chart.
“If we now get a three wave retracement, ideally to around the 0.618 Fib then we would expect a further 5 waves down as a minimum, which would give risk assets a further boost.”
Recently, a new Bitcoin-based protocol called MetaID has been released, with the ambitious goal of building Web3 entirely on Bitcoin. The devs behind MetaID believe that Bitcoin is the most suitable carrier for Web3. While this may seem like an ambitious plan, judging from the protocol’s history and the release of related infrastructure, it appears that they have been preparing for this protocol for a long time. In fact, few Web3 applications based on the MetaID protocol are already running on Bitcoin.
The following is an interview with Sunny Fung, one of the initiators of the MetaID protocol, conducted by Bitcoin columnist Clarissa Yorke.
Clarissa: Can you please explain what MetaID is?
Sunny: MetaID is the first designed specifically for building Web3 apps on Bitcoin. Here’s a simple example: Imagine a decentralized version of X.com and Telegram built on Bitcoin using MetaID. With MetaID, these apps could interact seamlessly, allowing you to send a DM from your X account directly to a Telegram user. The best part? Your data is secured by Bitcoin’s network, meaning no central authority can ban your account or delete your info. While many people see Bitcoin primarily as digital gold, we believe its potential goes way beyond that. Bitcoin’s UTXO architecture and ability to store data on-chain make it the perfect foundation for Web3 apps.
So MetaID is a protocol about enabling web3 on Bitcoin.
Clarissa: Could you tell me other aspects that make MetaID stand out compared to the others?
Sunny: The biggest difference between MetaID and other protocols is that MetaID organizes scattered on-chain data into tree-like structures, using ‘people’ as the classification method. Data from other protocols is like scattered stones and bricks, while MetaID data is like piles of structured building materials classified by ‘people’, making it easy for us to build skyscrapers.
Plus, MetaID introduces models for declarative modification, deletion, hiding, and privacy handling of data. These data processing capabilities are precisely what other protocols are missing, and they’re a must for building large-scale Web3 apps.
Clarissa: Please explain history of MetaID.
Sunny: MetaID isn’t a new protocol created in 2024. The idea came in 2020. The first version of MetaID was released in April 2020, based on the MetaNet protocol, and has undergone nearly 4 years of development. Before the release of v2, MetaID had already accumulated over 170,000 users and more than 21 million transactions with more than 10 MetaID apps running at its peak.
Clarissa: Which parts of the ecosystem are already complete and which are being worked on to be launched in the near future?
Sunny: Yes. over the past year, we have done a lot of work for MetaID v2. It has truly been an arduous process.
Luckily, The main protocol is now complete, and theoretically, we can start building Web3 apps on Bitcoin from today. But having just the protocol isn’t enough. That’s why we’ve also built a lot of infrastructure, including the open-source MetaID indexer (https://github.com/metaid-developers/man-indexer) and MetaID dev SDKs (https://github.com/metaid-developers/metaid).
Currently, our ongoing work mainly focuses on launching MRC20, a MetaID asset issuance protocol, and enabling cross-chain functionality.
Clarissa: Could you give me some more detail on how the PIN data works?
Sunny: Sure, PIN is the core concept of MetaID.
PIN is the smallest data unit and the most core concept in MetaID. Each PIN is like a brick of Lego, different PINs can be combined to create various Web3 applications. Eeach PIN inscribed is an NFT and introduced capabilities such as creator, holder, modification, deletion, hiding, encryption, and a POP value for value assessment. As a result, various complex Web3 applications and DataFi applications can be built using PINs.
I hope this fig can roughly explain how PIN organizes data:
Clarissa: Could you explain me a little more about data being inscribed as an NFT? It seems to me something amazing.
Sunny: Yes, making data into NFT is interesting. We’ve drawn inspiration from Ordinal theory and the colored coins principle, where we color and label each satoshi on the Bitcoin network as a piece of on-chain data. Since a satoshi is the smallest unit in the Bitcoin network, it is atomic, indivisible, and can be freely circulated. Therefore, in MetaID, all data is a satoshi and also an NFT.
Therefore, PIN=Sats, it also gains security properties from Bitcoin.
Afterword
In the context of the thriving Bitcoin ecosystem, MetaID bringing more possibilities to Bitcoin is a very good thing for the industry. It remains to be seen whether Bitcoin has the natural advantages in the future Web3 competition as Sunny Fung suggests. Additionally, whether the protocol can be adopted by a wider range of developers also seems to be a major challenge that MetaID must address.
A “German Government (BKA)” labeled cryptocurrency wallet has sold over $54 million worth of Bitcoin.
The German government’s wallet sold 900 Bitcoin in three individual transactions on June 25.
The first 200 BTC transaction was sent to the Coinbase exchange, while the second 200 BTC transfer was sent to the Kraken exchange.
However, a third transaction, worth 500 BTC, or over $30 million, was sent to wallet “139Po,” which remains unknown, according to onchain intelligence provider Arkham Intelligence.
While wallet “139Po” remains unknown, it is not the first time the German government has interacted with it. The German government previously sent 800 BTC to the address on June 20 and another 500 BTC on June 19, just six days ago.
Following today’s transfers, the wallet still holds 46,359 Bitcoin, according to Arkham Intelligence.
Will the German government tank Bitcoin below $60,000?
The government-labeled wallet holds over $2.8 billion worth of BTC and could introduce significant selling pressure that could tank Bitcoin’s price below the key $60,000 psychological mark.
Bitcoin price has been in a downtrend, falling 11% on the monthly chart and over 7% on the weekly, trading just above $61,000 as of 9:40 am UTC, according to Bitstamp data.
According to popular analyst Willy Woo, technical chart patterns suggest that Bitcoin might experience a correction lasting up to four weeks before its price rally resumes.
The analyst wrote in a June 22 X post to his over 1.1 million followers:
“Eyeballing this model… probably 1-4 weeks more of cooling down before #Bitcoin price action is sufficiently boring. Chart: Intensity of speculators playing casino games.”
More Bitcoin selling pressure from Germany and Mt. Gox?
The German government-labeled wallet first sparked suspicions of potential Bitcoin selling on June 19, when it executed a 6,500 BTC transfer worth over $425 million.
Besides the transfer to the untagged wallets, the majority of the Bitcoin is transferred to centralized exchanges, which signals that the government is potentially looking to sell Bitcoin.
Prior to the transfer, the wallet held nearly 50,000 BTC since February 2024. The funds are believed to have been seized from the pirated movie website operator Movie2k.
However, July could introduce more Bitcoin selling pressure since collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox announced that would start repaying its defunct users.
More than $9.4 billion worth of Bitcoin is owed to approximately 127,000 Mt. Gox creditors, who have been waiting for over 10 years to recover their funds. This could introduce significant selling pressure for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin (BTC) failed to reclaim $65,000 after the June 18 Wall Street open as analysts predicted further BTC price downside.
Moving averages topple as BTC price goes under $65,000
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD struggling to maintain support near key trendlines.
Bitcoin shed another 3% on the day, continuing a downtrend now responsible for up to $7,900 of losses since it began on June 9.
With various support levels now on the radar, market participants began to warn that many of these lacked conviction under current conditions.
For Keith Alan, co-founder of trading resource Material Indicators, multiple moving averages (MAs) were now a problem after spot price slipped through them.
“I set a trailing stop loss before leaving town to protect some profits in case Bitcoin dumped. That wick to $64k last night scaled me out of a position,” he revealed to followers on X.
“Hopefully I’ll be able to buy back cheaper and won’t regret that move. I’m optimistic. Losing the 21, 50 and 100-Day moving averages are not exactly shining beacons of strength.”
Next up for a retest, as Cointelegraph reported, was the short-term holder cost basis at just under $64,000 as of June 18.
“BTC approaching short-term holders’ cost basis around $63.8k, don’t want to see consecutive days closed below. Typically serves as a good line in the sand for trends,” William Clemente, co-founder of crypto research firm Reflexivity, wrote in part of a commentary on the topic.
Analyzing order book activity, popular trader Daan Crypto Trades warned that “spoofing” was rife, with large blocks of liquidity being posted and removed in a possible attempt to drive BTC price in a certain direction.
“A good bunch of those orders got filled,” he acknowledged as BTC/USD headed lower after the Wall Street open.
Altcoins lose big as Bitcoin “sneezes”
Updating Telegram channel subscribers, trading firm QCP Capital offered an alternative perspective on crypto market forces.
Far from bad news, it suggested, Bitcoin and altcoins were suffering from a lack of news altogether.
“While BTC seems to have sneezed, alts seemed to have caught a cold as they drop 20-30% over the weekend,” it wrote.
“We attribute this weakness in majors to a lack of news flow. Boring markets usually shakes out weak hands, and nobody likes to pay 11% ann. to hold a long position in perps.”
QCP thus suggested a wait-and-see approach to “boring” markets.
The total altcoin market cap traded down 7.5% on the day at $219.06 billion.
Ether’s price reaching the $10,000 mark could be the most “asymmetric bet” in the current cryptocurrency market conditions, according to one popular analyst. Can Ether reach the $10,000 mark during the current bull cycle?
Ether to $10,000 could be the best bet in crypto
Ether’s price reaching $10,000 could be the best bet in the current market, according to popular crypto analyst Tyler, who wrote in a June 16 X post:
“The most asymmetric bet in crypto today is Ethereum to $10,000. As annoying as that is, just the way the chips have fallen. We trade the market, not our emotions.”
Ether’s price is down over 4% on the weekly chart, trading just below the $3,400 mark as of 1:10 pm in UTC, according to TradingView data.
Ether’s price has been in a downtrend for over two weeks since May 27, when it rose to a range high of $3,939 before being rejected from the $4,000 psychological mark.
Can Ether ETFs boost ETH’s price to $10,000?
Despite the bullish prediction, Ether is still struggling to rise above the $4,000 psychological mark.
Moreover, Ether is currently down over 30% from its all-time high of $4,891 in November 2021. A hypothetical move to the $10,000 mark would imply an Ether price increase of over 194% from the current levels.
ETH’s price faces significant resistance at the $3,500 mark. A potential move above would liquidate over $534 million of cumulative leveraged short positions across all exchanges.
Short liquidations would surpass $1 billion if Ether were to rise above the $3,586 mark, according to CoinGlass data.
Ether’s price action could be boosted by institutional inflows from the first spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which are expected to start trading by July 2, according to Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas.
However, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler provided a broader timeframe for when spot Ether ETFs might begin trading, indicating that it could happen within the next three months by the end of September.
In Bitcoin’s case, ETF inflows were a significant part of its price rally. By Feb. 15, Bitcoin ETFs had accounted for about 75% of new investment in the world’s largest cryptocurrency as it surpassed the $50,000 mark.
Ether supply on exchanges hits eight-year low
Ether could also see a price breakout due to a potential supply squeeze, as Ether’s supply on cryptocurrency exchanges sunk to an eight-year low.
This could translate into more upward momentum, according to popular crypto analyst Quinten. Quinten François wrote in a June 18 X post to his 112,000 followers:
“Ethereum supply on exchanges is at an 8-YEAR LOW. Meanwhile, institutional demand will be unlocked through the ETH ETF in July. You don’t need to have a degree to understand what is about to happen.”
Brazil’s tax authority is reportedly planning to seek information from foreign cryptocurrency exchanges to find out how they operate in the country and whether its citizens are complying with the country’s new tax laws or not.
The Receita Federal do Brasil (Federal Revenue of Brazil) is expected to publish an ordinance summoning these firms for further information later this week, according to a June 18 report from Reuters citing comments from Brazilian officials.
“It’s an area of concern for us to understand first how they operate here, whether there’s any illegality or not,” Andrea Chaves, DFR’s Deputy Secretary of Inspection told Reuters.
“We are also concerned about having information on Brazilian wealth subject to taxation.”
Up until now, only local cryptocurrency exchanges have been obligated to report transactions conducted on their trading platforms.
Last December, Brazil passed a law mandating Brazilians to pay a 15% income tax on cryptocurrency profits and dividends earned on foreign exchanges.
The Brazilian tax authority intends to collect around $4 billion (20 billion Brazilian reals) in the 2024 financial year.
Binance, Coinbase, OKX and KuCoin are among the notable trading platforms operating in the country. Binance currently holds the largest market share in Brazil, accounting for 79% of all transactions — though it has lost some of its dominance to Brazil’s Mercado Bitcoin and Mexico-based Bitso in recent months.
Meanwhile, Brazil saw a spike in cryptocurrency trading activity in the first few months of 2024, increasing 30% year-on-year to $6 billion between January and May.
A recent Kaiko report revealed that it is the largest market player in Latin America and the seventh-largest worldwide in terms of fiat currency trade.
Stablecoin transfers remain the main source of cryptocurrency activity in Brazil.
Prospects for retail crypto trading in Canada are looking good, and a convergence of factors, including the local regulatory environment, is likely to continue driving market growth.
“We have certainly seen retail come back,” Dean Skurka, CEO of Canadian crypto asset platform WonderFi, told Cointelegraph’s Sam Bourgi at the Collision event in Toronto.
Canada experiences lucky convergence for crypto
Skurka said the convergence of the interest rate cut by the Bank of Canada, leading to greater discretionary spending by the public, along with strong interest in Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds that put crypto “in favorable standing [with] a broader audience” and the expected impact of the BTC halving promise a strong retail market.
“It’s not going to happen overnight,” Skurka said, but indicators of public receptiveness to crypto are there. New signups spiked at WonderFi along with the all-time high price for BTC, he noted. He expected to see it in the next six to 12 months.
WonderFi, which had early backing from billionaire celebrity Kevin O’Leary, has acquired an impressive stable of crypto firms that it plans to combine into a single entity, thanks to its merger with Coinsquare in July 2023. That firm is regulated by the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization.
WonderFi has also acquired Bitbuy and Coinberry. It reached $1 billion in assets under management at the end of 2023.
WonderFi looks abroad and appreciates home
Canadian regulators have addressed staking and the crypto spot market, and Skurka predicted crypto derivatives — such as futures — to be the next to be regulated. As WonderFi begins implementing plans to expand into the Asia-Pacific region, it has gained new perspective on the Canadian regulatory environment.
Canadian regulators “further ahead” compared with their Asia Pacific colleagues, Skurka said. The firm’s experience with Canadian regulators will inform its actions in APAC markets. WonderFi will make public its activities in APAC within months.
Other industry figures have shown less enthusiasm for Canadian regulation. Rules introduced by the Canadian Securities Administrators in February 2023 led to the withdrawal of several crypto firms from the country.
A large memecoin holder, or whale, has made a $3.7 million profit after selling their MAGA (TRUMP) tokens amid the current market sell-off.
Whale wallet “0x52C0” has sold over 171,000 TRUMP tokens for 414 Ether worth $1.44 million in the past 24 hours, for a total profit on their investment of over $3.7 million.
The whale has been selling their TRUMP tokens at the $8.38 mark, according to a June 18 X post by Lookonchain.
Looking at the savvy whale, 28% of their wallet still consists of TRUMP tokens worth $372,000. Their largest holding is the BasedAI (BASEDAI) token, worth $921,000 at the time of writing and accounting for over 71% of the wallet.
At its peak valuation on June 2, the whale wallet was worth $7.53 million, according to CoinStats.
Why is the TRUMP token down?
The whale started locking in their profits just as the TRUMP token started its price decline.
The token fell over 30% in the 24 hours leading up to 9:00 am UTC to trade at $7.88. The memecoin is down over 37% on the weekly chart, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Trump-related cryptocurrencies started falling amid rumors that Donald Trump’s team launched an “official” token on Solana.
Pirate Wires claimed in a June 17 X post that Trump’s 18-year-old son, Barron, was “spearheading” the token under the name TrumpCoin (DJT).
However, Trump’s team hasn’t confirmed the token launch, and blockchain data firms such as Bubblemaps seem confident that DJT isn’t linked to the presidential candidate.
Large holders are taking note of the marketwide memecoin sale, which saw some of the most popular meme tokens log double-digit gains.
Leading memecoins Dogecoin and Shiba Inu fell 13% and 18% on the daily chart, while Pepe tanked 13%, and Solana-based Dogwifhat (WIF) fell over 20%, according to CoinMarketCap data.
The total market capitalization of memecoins fell 9.4% to $46.6 billion in the past 24 hours, while trading volume rose 79% to $6.25 billion.
Other TRUMP token whales have also taken note of the decline and started locking in profits. Wallet “0x35D1” sold their tokens for a $648,000 profit, while trader sighduck.eth sold their tokens for an over 1,500% gain of $1.88 million.
The Central Bank of Ireland has approved 15 different VASPs from June 7, 2024, including Crypto.com, Coinbase, Gemini, Ripple and others.
The Central Bank of Ireland (CBI) has given a nod to another major cryptocurrency company, Crypto.com, as a virtual asset service provider (VASP).
Crypto.com, one of the world’s largest crypto trading platforms, announced on June 11 that it had received VASP approval in Ireland. The approval allows Crypto.com to expand its offering in the country, including crypto-to-fiat exchanges and fiat wallets.
Crypto.com’s president and chief operating officer, Eric Anziani, said the approval shows the company’s commitment to compliance and responsible innovation.
“We are excited to broaden our offering in Ireland, enabling consumers to engage with the most comprehensive crypto product offering,” the exec added.
Crypto.com declined to comment to Cointelegraph on the specifics of new crypto services enabled in Ireland with the latest VASP approval.
Ireland has approved 15 entities as VASPs
In obtaining the approval, Crypto.com joins several crypto firms regulated by the country’s central bank, including the United States-based crypto exchange Coinbase.
The full list of registered VASPs in Ireland features 14 entities as of June 7, including major industry firms like Ripple, the Winklevoss brothers’ Gemini exchange, MoonPay, Standard Chartered’s Zodia custody platform, Paysafe and others.
Seven companies on the list received approvals in Ireland in 2023. In 2024, the CBI approved four others, including Foris DAX Global, Fortuna Digital Custody, Ramp Swaps and Crypto.com.
Some crypto firms opted to leave Ireland
The Central Bank of Ireland’s approval of Crypto.com marks another milestone in the country’s growing interest in the crypto industry.
Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S. by trading volumes, selected Ireland as its European crypto hub in late 2023.
Coinbase chose Ireland to help it comply with Europe’s major cryptocurrency regulatory framework, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation.
Other major companies, including Ripple and Gemini, have also been cementing their presence in Ireland while facing issues from U.S. regulators.
On the other hand, Circle Internet Financial — the company behind the world’s second-largest stablecoin, USD Coin — announced plans to return to the U.S. and move away from Ireland in May 2024.
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed a 3% dip taking Bitcoin to lows of $67,320 on Bitstamp after the daily close.
Lacking support at the key $69,000 level, Bitcoin bulls failed to stave off a downward move through thin exchange order book liquidity.
The day prior, Keith Alan, co-founder of trading resource Material Indicators, had warned that insufficient bids could be a warning sign for BTC price strength.
“Sure we have some laddered bid support in here, but not a heavy, heavy concentration of it — and really, it’s not even heavy down to $60,000 if I can be completely honest,” he said during his latest YouTube update.
An accompanying chart covered order book liquidity for the BTC/USDT pair on the largest global crypto exchange, Binance.
In a subsequent post on X, Material Indicators noted that with the latest move down, Bitcoin had formally rejected $69,000 as support and had also given up the 21-day moving average — a key short-term trendline.
“Support at the 21-Day Moving Average and the R/S Flip at $69k have both been invalidated,” it read.
“This move isn’t over. In fact I expect these killer whale games to continue up to and through JPow’s comments on Wednesday and economic reports on Thursday.”
As Cointelegraph reported, the week’s main potential volatility catalyst for Bitcoin and crypto price action is United States macroeconomic data — the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Producer Price Index (PPI) — along with the Federal Reserve’s latest interest rate decision and accompanying press conference by Chair Jerome Powell.
“So far CPI/PPI has been around the highs of this range & FOMC resulting in local lows,” popular trader Skew continued on the topic.
Mixed opinions on Bitcoin support
In his own market analysis, meanwhile, fellow trader and commentator Credible Crypto suggested that the outcome of the down move may not be as radical as a trip to $60,000.
With liquidity being added and pulled from the market at will by large-volume traders, appetite for BTC could spare bulls any lower than even $65,000.
“We continue to see spot absorption on each and every move down, even on lower timeframes,” he summarized to X subscribers.
Credible Crypto noted that overhead resistance at $72,000 had been “pulled immediately” once Bitcoin began reversing.
“What are the odds we front run range lows and 62-65k and just reverse from here? I think they are decent,” he concluded.
“No guarantees of course, but we will know soon enough with developing PA over the next 24 or so hours.”
As BTC continues to trade sideways at high levels, the bull market momentum is unstoppable, and platform tokens are once again drawing attention.
This article analyzes and compares the platform tokens of several leading platforms, focusing on three dimensions: platform token earnings, buyback and burn, and fee discounts for investors’ reference.
The earnings from platform tokens consist of two major parts: active earnings, which refer to the token’s own price increase, and passive earnings, which include dividends, new token offerings, airdrops, and other benefits. According to CoinMarketCap data, the performance of the top ten platform tokens by market capitalization over the past year is as follows:
Data shows that MEXC’s platform token MX has increased by 101% over the past year, surpassing even BNB, while OKX’s platform token OKB has seen an annual increase of less than 5%.
Additionally, comparing other second-tier exchanges, Bitget’s passive earnings (from new token offerings and airdrops) fall far short of MEXC’s. MX’s passive earnings are significantly higher. According to statistics, since last July, MEXC has been airdropping tokens to MX holders every month, with an average of over 150 token airdrops each month. Over six months, a total of 927 project tokens were airdropped, resulting in an APY of up to 76%. As shown below:
In 2024, MEXC further increased its airdrop intensity, with an average of nearly 250 tokens airdropped per month from January to April. The APY reached 107%, far surpassing BGB holders.
According to the MEXC official website, airdrop participation is a simple process. Users need only hold MX to receive all new token airdrops for free. Compared to other platform tokens, MEXC’s airdrops have a significantly lower entry barrier, allowing more MX holders to enjoy higher returns.
In fact, MX’s token price is severely underestimated during the bull market. After users receive token airdrops by holding MX, if they convert these earnings into MX tokens, they can easily achieve a compounding effect, thus achieving tremendous profit potential.
Trading fee discounts: MX offers the biggest savings
Using platform tokens to offset trading fees is a common promotional strategy on cryptocurrency trading platforms. Each platform has its own discounts, as summarized below:
Conclusion
In the bull market’s complex investment landscape, cryptocurrency users may consider positioning themselves in platform tokens that have stable value support, excellent performance, and from up-and-coming platforms that can generate various expected returns. MX is an important alternative in this regard, as it can effectively mitigate investment risks and achieve better investment returns.
Former United States President Donald Trump is ramping up his advocacy for cryptocurrency, now setting his sights on becoming the “crypto president.”
He made the comment during a fundraising event in San Francisco, co-hosted by Craft Ventures’ general partner, David Sacks, and tech billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya, according to a recent Reuters report.
At this gathering, Trump purportedly affirmed his commitment to cryptocurrency, asserting his readiness to champion the industry’s advancement, while cautioning against the Democratic Party’s purported inclination towards stringent regulations.
The fundraising event proved to be a significant boon for Donald Trump’s promotional efforts, reportedly netting a substantial $12 million in support ahead of the November 5 U.S. presidential election.
Trump’s Crypto Support Comes in Contrast to Biden
Donald Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency aligns with his broader strategy to distinguish himself from the policies espoused by the current administration, particularly in light of President Joe Biden’s recent decision that drew ire from the crypto community.
Just a week prior, Biden faced criticism after vetoing a resolution aimed at overturning the controversial U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Staff Accounting Bulletin (SAB) No. 121.
This bulletin, which mandates institutions holding cryptocurrency assets to record them as liabilities on their balance sheets, has been a point of contention within the industry.
Trump’s vocal support for cryptocurrency is not new, as evidenced by several recent public statements.
On May 26, he reiterated his stance that the United States must assert its dominance in the crypto sector.
“Our country must be the leader in the field, there is no second place,” he said at the time in a post on Truth Social, a social media platform owned by Trump Media and Technology Group.
Furthermore, he has recently announced that his presidential campaign would accept cryptocurrency donations.
The fundraising page, which allows eligible individuals to donate in crypto using Coinbase Commerce, displays logos for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Shiba, XRP, USD Coin, SOL, and 0x (ZRX).
Earlier this month, Trump also made a promise to grant a presidential pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, if he is re-elected in November’s election.
Voters Consider Candidates’ Stance on Crypto
As reported, a survey conducted by the Harris Poll has revealed that one in three voters in the US consider a candidate’s position on cryptocurrencies before making their voting decision.
Another survey conducted by leading crypto venture capital firm Paradigm reveals that Trump’s poll numbers for the 2024 US Presidential Election enjoy significant support from the crypto community.
The survey, which included 1,000 registered voters, found that 48% of crypto owners plan to vote for the former president, while 39% intend to vote for current U.S. President Joe Biden.
Likewise, a recent report from Coinbase claimed that California voters who own cryptocurrencies are expected to have a significant impact on the 2024 elections.
From June 6 to 9, more than 185 million people from the European Union’s 27 member states voted for candidates to serve a five-year term in a new European Parliament, the legislative branch of the political bloc.
This pivotal event will shape the political direction of the EU for five years, and crypto and blockchain are no exception.
The election results are mixed: The Christian Democrats won 10 seats, while the Social Democrats hung on, losing only four seats, and the pro-business (and pro-crypto) Renew Europe Group lost 23 seats.
The Greens also took a beating, losing 18 seats, while far-right parties made notable gains.
So, what plans do these parties have for the crypto and blockchain industries?
Cointelegraph reviewed the election manifestos of various parties and interviewed a number of members of the European Parliament about their plans for the future.
European People’s Party (EPP), or Christian Democrats — 186 seats (gained 10)
The EPP Group, the largest and one of the most influential political groups in the European Parliament, generally holds a cautious yet forward-looking stance on cryptocurrencies, the digital euro and blockchain technology.
The group recognizes the transformative potential of blockchain and digital currencies in enhancing financial services and economic efficiency. However, it emphasizes the need for robust regulatory frameworks to prevent misuse, ensure consumer protection and maintain financial stability.
MEP Stefan Berger, a member of the EPP Group who helped negotiate the EU’s major crypto regulation — Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) — told Cointelegraph:
“Crypto assets are gaining importance and have their place as a complement to the traditional financial system. We see crypto assets as forward-looking technologies with diverse possibilities for consumers and businesses and support balanced regulation that allows room for further development and innovation.”
The EPP supports the current MiCA law but also sees the potential for future adjustments. Berger said, “MiCA creates trust in the industry, provides security for founders and offers the European Economic Area a significant competitive advantage. It is clear that in the future, we will also need a legal framework for NFTs that benefits consumers and the entire industry.”
The EPP supports a more relaxed tax policy for crypto. Berger said the party wants to “strengthen Europe as an innovation location and reject restricting the adoption of crypto assets through restrictive tax policies.”
The party is also keen to explore the potential of blockchain technology outside of crypto.
“Blockchain can bring efficiency gains in public administration processes and enable new applications. This strengthens citizens’ trust in the state and administration,” said Berger.
Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) — 135 seats (lost 4)
The S&D Group is cautiously optimistic about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The group recognizes the potential benefits of these technologies in promoting financial inclusion and improving public services. However, its primary concern is the regulatory and social implications.
S&D calls for strict rules to prevent fraud, money laundering and tax evasion. It supports the idea of a digital euro, seeing it as a tool to increase the effectiveness of monetary policy and protect consumers.
Renew Europe — 79 seats won (lost 23)
Renew Europe, a centrist and liberal political group, has been a prominent voice in the European debate on crypto. The group held the rapporteurship for the report on digital finance, which the European Parliament approved in 2020.
Since then, Renew Europe has consistently called for a robust regulatory framework for crypto assets to ensure the EU is ready for structural digital transformations.
Renew Europe also champions a proactive, innovation-friendly approach to blockchain and digital assets. The party views blockchain technology as a key driver of transparency, efficiency and growth across various sectors.
The group supports developing and establishing a digital euro, which it sees as essential for maintaining the European Union’s competitiveness in the digital age. Renew Europe describes the digital euro as “an ambitious project that should preserve public money as a monetary anchor, strengthen Europe’s strategic autonomy in the payments sector and promote financial inclusion.”
Additionally, Renew Europe strongly advocates for a European digital identity. The party believes that a secure and universally recognized digital ID system will enhance trust in digital transactions, streamline administrative processes and improve access to public and private services.
European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) — 73 seats (gained 4)
The ECR Group holds a pragmatic and cautious view on cryptocurrency, reflecting its broader conservative and reformist principles.
The group sees blockchain and cryptocurrencies as promising tools for economic growth and modernization. According to the ECR, these technologies could make Europe’s financial sector more competitive and efficient, benefiting businesses and consumers alike. It believes cryptocurrencies should be integrated into a diverse financial ecosystem and support the MiCA regulation
However, the ECR supports stringent Anti-Money Laundering measures to combat the misuse of cryptocurrencies. It also calls for robust cybersecurity measures to defend against hacking and other threats.
The ECR is skeptical about a digital euro, calling it “a solution looking for a problem” and attributing the popularity and rise of cryptocurrencies to what it describes as irresponsible monetary policy.
The group argues that existing solutions, such as instant payments, already offer the benefits touted by proponents of a digital euro without the associated risks or complications.
Identity and Democracy (ID) — 58 seats (gained 9)
While the ID Group, known for its populist and nationalist tendencies, does not have an official stance on digital currencies and blockchain, member parties such as Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) have some thoughts, at least on a digital euro.
The AfD sees the euro as fundamentally flawed and unable to sustain a union of 20 diverse economies. The party thinks that euro bailouts, often at Germany’s expense, are further evidence of its structural inadequacy.
The AfD opposes the introduction of a digital euro by the European Central Bank. The party sees it as a threat to cash, which is essential to protecting individual freedom and privacy from government overreach and surveillance. The party advocates for the preservation of cash as a constitutional right, fearing that a digital euro could undermine this fundamental liberty.
In contrast, Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally (also a member party of the ID Group) has softened her stance despite a history of skepticism toward cryptocurrencies.
After initially calling for a ban on Bitcoin in 2016, Le Pen now supports strict regulation rather than an outright endorsement of crypto or blockchain technology.
The Greens/EFA Group has no overarching policy on cryptocurrencies or blockchain.
Paul Butcher, an EFA policy adviser, explained to Cointelegraph: “As a European political party, we are an alliance of our member parties, which have different views on the subject or have not developed policies on the sector. As a result, we have not yet discussed this issue at our General Assemblies or at the EFA Congress, where our 2024 manifesto was developed.”
However, the EFA supports the principle of subsidiarity and the MiCA regulation. Butcher said the party welcomes MiCA “as a starting point for a European-wide regulatory framework on crypto assets, which by their nature cross borders and cannot be adequately regulated at the national or regional level alone.”
“However, when it comes to taxation and specific measures to promote the sector, we seek to safeguard the right of the member states and regions to legislate in these areas.”
The EFA also recognizes the potential of crypto assets to give individuals greater freedom and ownership over their financial affairs. Butcher added: “We support this competition in the traditional banking sector and would like to see it develop in line with appropriate regulations to ensure that investors are protected while still being able to choose self-custody if they so wish.”
The Greens/EFA Group takes a cautious and socially conscious stance on blockchain. It acknowledges its potential for enhancing transparency and sustainability in various sectors, such as supply chain management and energy.
However, it is wary of the environmental impact of certain cryptocurrencies, particularly those relying on energy-intensive consensus mechanisms, such as proof-of-work.
The Greens/EFA Group supports exploring a digital euro, provided it aligns with sustainability goals and contributes to social welfare.
The Left in the European Parliament (GUE/NGL) — 36 seats (lost 1)
The Left is critical of cryptocurrencies, expressing concerns over their potential to facilitate illicit activities and exacerbate economic inequality. It is wary of the speculative nature of cryptocurrencies and the risks they pose to financial stability.
According to the Left, “crypto assets are an ecological disaster.” The German Left party’s election manifesto calls for banning Bitcoin and crypto mining to save energy.
MEP Chris MacManus (Ireland) said he had “no interest in creating a market for or in fostering the use of crypto assets,” adding that “at their worst, they are pyramid schemes, or used by criminal gangs for money laundering, or defrauding working people, and they can waste huge amounts of energy for no purpose.”
“I see little or no social or economic benefit to these tools of speculation. I accept the reality that crypto assets exist, and short of banning them, they must be regulated.”
The Left supports a digital euro designed to enhance public control over the monetary system and promote economic justice. It advocates for strict regulatory measures to curb speculation, protect consumers and ensure digital financial innovations serve the broader public interest.
Non-Inscrits
Non-Inscrits are MEPs who do not belong to one of the recognized political groups listed above.
Volt Europa — 5 seats won (plans to join Renew in EU Parliament)
Volt Europe, a pro-European federalist party focused on innovation and digital rights, holds a progressive stance on cryptocurrencies.
It believes cryptocurrencies are significant within the traditional financial system and advocates for protecting users’ digital rights while ensuring compliance with financial regulations. Pauline Raabe, who handles public relations for Volt Europe, told Cointelegraph:
“Cryptocurrencies are already intertwined with the traditional financial system, as evidenced by the recent emergence of Bitcoin [exchange-traded funds]. As such, it is an asset class that is here to stay, and therefore, our main concern is its impact on society and the economy.”
Volt supports the introduction of a digital euro without limits and with remuneration to foster competition in the market for deposits and payment services. Its approach to regulation, including MiCA, emphasizes the need for clarity and consistency across the EU to avoid unnecessary red tape for investors and companies.
Regarding taxation, Volt proposes treating crypto investments like any other investments. It aims to harmonize European investment regulation to create an integrated market for financial investments. As part of this harmonization effort, the party supports the creation of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with crypto assets.
Regarding blockchain technology, Volt sees its potential applications in digital identities, e-health and certificate diffusion. It advocates for further research and development to advance the cryptographic foundations of blockchains and support innovative firms exploring their real-world applications.
“Volt wants to triple the budget of the Horizon Europe program. To facilitate innovative startups, Volt strives to establish a full-scale European venture program and to support entrepreneurs in fitting into the regulatory framework of the EU by, for example, creating regulatory sandboxes.”
European Christian Political Movement (ECPM) — 4 seats won
According to Adriana Rus, the ECPM’s communications manager, the party generally supports technological progress as long as it “does not threaten human dignity and fundamental rights, such as the right to privacy and freedom of speech, and the environment is not harmed.”
Some ECPM members are particularly critical of initiatives like the European digital wallet and eID, believing they compromise privacy and anonymity. However, beyond these concerns, the ECPM has not established a detailed policy on cryptocurrencies.
Balancing innovation with regulatory oversight
The newly elected European Parliament will significantly influence the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in the EU. Each political group has a different perspective: The EPP Group favors balanced regulation to support growth and innovation, while the S&D Group prioritizes strict rules to prevent misuse and supports the development of a digital euro. Renew Europe advocates for a proactive stance on digital assets, pushing for a digital euro and a European digital identity.
Given the Parliament’s diverse composition, debates and potential adjustments to frameworks like MiCA are expected. The presence of far-right and conservative parties adds complexity, with some skeptical of the digital euro and prioritizing stringent Anti-Money Laundering measures. Meanwhile, smaller groups like the Greens and the Left emphasize environmental concerns and social justice in digital finance.
Some euro zone banks have fallen short of the European Central Bank’s climate-related goals and may face fines, a senior ECB supervisor said in an interview published on Wednesday.
The ECB has handed banks a list of deadlines for factoring in risks relating to climate change, from floods and droughts to a transition to new energy sources, into the way they do business.
But some banks have fallen behind schedule, Kerstin af Jochnick, a member of the ECB’s Supervisory Board, told Spanish newspaper Cinco Dias.
“We have notified a few banks that, based on our current assessment, they have not met the interim milestones, which means they face the prospect of having to pay a so-called pecuniary penalty,” af Jochnick said.
International financial authorities must give consideration to legal risks surrounding the potential winding up of global banks, Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter was quoted as saying on Wednesday.
In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, Keller-Sutter was asked whether rules to deal with banks deemed “too big to fail” need to be standardised internationally so that such lenders can be wound up.
Keller-Sutter said she was in contact about that with the Financial Stability Board, a body that monitors the global financial system, and other finance ministers, including Germany’s Christian Lindner, who she is meeting in Berlin.
“I’d like to raise awareness that winding up (a bank) may sometimes not be possible due to international legal risks. In the case of Credit Suisse, that was clearly a risk,” she said, referring to the Swiss bank that collapsed last year.
“There are considerable doubts that recapitalisation via compulsory participation of creditors, that is, a “bail-in”, would work,” Keller-Sutter said.
“I’m looking primarily at the United States. The big banks are heavily invested there. That’s why American supervisory authorities would have to agree to a winding up.”
Managing this risk is why the Swiss government wanted systemically relevant banks to back their foreign subsidiaries with up to 100% equity, she said.
“The equity backing of the foreign subsidiary must be so large that it can be sold or liquidated in a crisis without damaging the Swiss parent company. That was exactly the problem with Credit Suisse,” she said.
The demise of Credit Suisse roiled financial markets and led to its takeover by long-term rival UBS, prompting the Swiss government to set out its own measures for too big to fail entities in April.
UBS formally absorbed the parent company of Credit Suisse last week. Ratings agency S&P on Tuesday revised up UBS Group AG’s outlook to stable from negative, saying that “tail risks from the group’s integration and restructuring have eased”.
Bitcoin gained 2.5% on June 3 to $69,400, sparking hopes that it might reclaim the $69,000 support level for the first time in 11 days. This positive price movement coincided with a surge in the Bitcoin futures premium to its highest level in seven weeks. But what does this mean for the sustainability of Bitcoin’s rally toward $70,000?
GameStop mania and weaker odds of Fed’s interest rate cuts
Some analysts believe that Bitcoin’s recent price jump was partly influenced by GameStop’s (GME) impressive 36% rally. This surge in GameStop stock rekindled memories of the 2021 anti-traditional finance sentiment when retail investors banded together to challenge the status quo. This sentiment appears to have spilled over into the memecoin sector as Floki gained 16.5%, Dogwifhat (WIF) 9%, and Bonk rallied 7.5%.
Additionally, comments from the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) of Minneapolis’s Neel Kashkari have added to the uncertainty. The Fed official stated that he doesn’t foresee a rate cut anytime soon, citing Americans’ strong aversion to inflation. This stance, although not universally shared among Fed officials, is seen as negative for the housing and stock markets. As a result, some investors are turning to alternative investments like Bitcoin.
Global geopolitical tensions have also played a role in Bitcoin’s recent price action. Australia’s decision to order Chinese investors to reduce their stakes in a rare earths miner has heightened uncertainty in global markets. This move coincided with a 1% gain in gold and a sell-off in U.S. Treasuries, with the 5-year yield dropping to 4.42% from 4.59% on May 31.
Bitcoin derivatives support further price gains
The Bitcoin futures premium reflects the difference between the monthly contracts derivatives markets and the spot level on regular exchanges. Usually, a 5% to 10% annualized premium (basis) occurs to compensate for the extended settlement. In essence, a higher premium suggests that traders are willing to pay more for future contracts, indicating bullish sentiment.
While the overall nonfungible token (NFT) space saw a 54% drop in sales in May, digital collectibles on Bitcoin reached a new milestone.
On June 4, NFT data tracker CryptoSlam showed that NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain reached a total all-time sales volume of over $4 billion. The data combined the NFT sales, which were $3.97 billion, and the wash sales, which were $82 million.
In the last 30 days, Bitcoin-based NFTs recorded a sales volume of $171 million, taking the top spot in terms of sales volume by blockchain. The network was followed by Ethereum, which had $159 million and Solana, which recorded $90 million in the past month.
Bitcoin NFTs are still far from Ethereum
Even though Bitcoin-based NFTs are leading the charts in 30-day volumes, the network is only the fourth-largest blockchain in sales. It follows the Ronin blockchain, which holds the top three spot with $4.2 billion in all-time sales.
Solana-based NFTs hold the second place, with a $5.5 billion record for all-time sales. Meanwhile, the Ethereum network retains the top spot for NFT sales, with a whopping $43.8 billion in recorded sales.
Bitcoin NFTs also hit by market slump
The broader NFT market also saw lower sales volumes in May. On May 31, CryptoSlam showed a 54% decline in monthly NFT sales volume compared to April. In April, NFTs saw over $1 billion in sales, while May recorded a volume of $624 million.
The decline in sales volume also affected Bitcoin-based collectibles. The data showed that NFTs based on Bitcoin experienced a 68% decline in sales in May.
Bitcoin transaction value hits yearly high
Apart from Bitcoin NFTs recording a new all-time milestone for sales, the network also saw a new record in transaction value. On May 28, Bitcoin transactions reached an estimated value of over $25 billion, its highest in the last year.
Bitcoin explorer Blockchain.com showed that Bitcoin holders moved about 367,000 BTC on the blockchain on May 28. At the time, Bitcoin’s price hovered around $69,000, making the transactions worth $25.5 billion.
United States President Joe Biden has vetoed a resolution that would have overruled the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Staff Accounting Bulletin (SAB) No. 121.
“This reversal of the considered judgment of SEC staff in this way risks undercutting the SEC’s broader authorities regarding accounting practices,” Biden wrote in an official response to Congress voting to repeal the cryptocurrency accounting guidelines, which requires institutions that custody crypto assets to record crypto holdings as liabilities on their balance sheets.
The guidelines were set to take effect on April 11 but were met with considerable backlash from the crypto community and lawmakers alike.
Lawmakers in the House of Representatives voted to repeal the SEC’s guidance by a margin of 228 to 182 and passed the bill to the Senate. Once there, senators voted to repeal SAB-121 by a significant margin of 60 to 38 in favor.
“We’re disappointed that the admin chose to overrule bipartisan majorities in both Houses of Congress who recognized the harm created by SAB 121,” crypto advocacy group the Blockchain Association declared in its X post.
U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis argued that Biden went against the “will of the American people” by intervening and preventing the guidelines from being revoked.
Israel launches digital shekel experiment
Israel intends to expedite the development of its in-house central bank digital currency (CBDC), the digital shekel. The Bank of Israel (BoI) plans to involve various service providers in co-developing an advanced digital payments ecosystem centered on the digital shekel.
Project Rosalind is a joint experiment between the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Bank of England. It aims to develop prototypes for an application programming interface (API).
As part of the challenge, the BoI will provide a sandbox environment attached to a layer of API. Participants will compete to build real-time CBDC payment systems for the general public.
Paraguay proceeds with crackdown on crypto mining
Property containing 2,738 crypto mining units was seized in Salto del Guairá, Paraguay after the National Electricity Administration (ANDE) detected an unmetered power connection in the area.
A bill to ban crypto mining and other crypto-related activities is before the country’s senate, pending comprehensive legislation and assurances from the national power supplier.
ANDE used artificial intelligence and power distribution analysis to zero in on the electricity theft, which it estimated was worth 1.1 billion guarani ($146,000) per month.
Five transformers were also seized on the property. The operators of the illegal operation may face criminal charges.
At least two other actions against illegal crypto farms — one in Salta del Guairá — were carried out in Paraguay in May, although those raids had much more modest results. All the government actions involved multiple agencies, including the National Police of Paraguay.
Hong Kong kicks out all unlicensed crypto exchanges
All cryptocurrency exchanges that have not applied for an operational license with the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) of Hong Kong are legally required to cease operations in the region immediately.
In an effort to minimize risks for investors, Hong Kong regulators issued a clear ultimatum to cryptocurrency exchanges: either apply for a license by Feb. 29 or shut down their operations within three months.
During this period, more than 22 cryptocurrency exchanges applied for licenses to maintain their presence in the region. However, many of these exchanges ultimately decided to withdraw their applications just before the deadline.
While most exchanges did not provide any reasons for the surprise turn of events, Hong Hong-based Gate.HK cited the need for a “major overhaul” of its trading platform before it could comply with Hong Kong’s regulatory requirements.
The Qatar Central Bank (QCB) has completed the infrastructure for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) project and launched the first phase of an experimental project. The QCB will look at settlements of large payments among large local and international banks.
Few details of the project were released. The state news agency said it would focus on distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence, enhancing liquidity and transactions with securities. The project will run through October.
The QCB began studying CBDC technology in March 2022 and confirmed that it was launching a project in June of that year. According to a press report, QCB governor Sheikh Bandar bin Mohamed bin Saoud al-Thani said at the Qatar Economic Forum in May, “We are in the foundation stage and evaluating the pros and cons of issuing the CBDC.”
Keeping up with the neighbors
The neighboring United Arab Emirates (UAE) was a founding member of the mBridge project, along with China, Hong Kong and Thailand. It has already used mBridge to transfer remittance payments to India and for wholesale transfers among the mBridge project members. The UAE also participated in a CBDC proof-of-concept, called Project Aber, with Saudi Arabia that ended in 2020.
A day before the announcement of the CBDC project, the QCB launched a new fintech sandbox. The Express Sandbox offers a “reduced testing period, rapid testing cycles, and a streamlined overall evaluation process” for eligible participants. Like the new sandbox, the CBDC project was described as part of official national development strategies, although none of the strategies mention CBDC explicitly.
Cryptocurrency frowned on
The Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority — a business development jurisdiction in the country — banned virtual asset services from operating there in 2020. The Financial Action Task Force criticized Qatar in 2023 for not enforcing that ban and lacking an understanding of “more complex forms of money laundering and terrorist financing.”
Rumors circulated in the crypto community in March that the Qatar Investment Authority would invest heavily in Bitcoin, but there is doubt about the likelihood of that.
The International Monetary Fund now expects China’s economy to grow 5% this year, raising its forecast from 4.6% a few weeks ago to reflect a strong expansion at the start of 2024 and additional support from the government.
The Fund expects the momentum to continue, raising its gross domestic product forecast for next year to 4.5% from 4.1%, according to a press release published Wednesday. China is targeting growth of around 5% this year. In the first quarter it reported a better-than-expected expansion of 5.3%, although a drawn-out slump in housing continues to weigh on domestic demand.
The Fund expects the momentum to continue, raising its gross domestic product forecast for next year to 4.5% from 4.1%, according to a press release published Wednesday. China is targeting growth of around 5% this year. In the first quarter it reported a better-than-expected expansion of 5.3%, although a drawn-out slump in housing continues to weigh on domestic demand.
“We certainly are seeing that consumption is recovering but it has some ways to go,” the Fund’s First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath said in an interview with Bloomberg News earlier this week. “The strength we’re seeing in public investment remains. Private investment is still weak, mainly because of the weakness in the property sector.”
The IMF has called on Beijing to provide more monetary and fiscal support for the economy, including further steps to resolve the housing crisis, which has persisted despite repeated efforts by authorities to put a floor under prices and boost demand.
In the IMF’s Wednesday statement, Gopinath said the priority should be to “mobilize central government resources to protect buyers of pre-sold unfinished homes and accelerate the completion of unfinished pre-sold housing, paving the way for resolving insolvent developers.”
Earlier this month Chinese officials announced a new effort to shore up real estate markets, easing down-payment requirements for buyers and providiing 300 billion ($42 billion) of central bank funding to help local governments purchase excess inventory from developers.
Gopinath said more is needed. “Fiscal policy should prioritize providing one-off central government financial support for the real estate sector,” she said in the statement, while low inflation means there’s also room for further monetary easing.
BTC price action shows sensitivity to Mt. Gox events, leaving $69,000 unclaimed as new support — to the frustration of Bitcoin bulls.
saw four-day lows into the May 28 Wall Street open after holiday BTC price action deceived bulls.
Bitcoin wobbles on Mt. Gox fund movements
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD hovering below $68,000 after spiking to weekly highs.
The trip to $70,600 during the Memorial Day holiday in the United States came without institutional involvement, for example in the form of demand for the spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Despite rapidly gaining momentum, Bitcoin’s latest rally failed to endure for long before the market retraced all of its progress.
The volatility came amid new movement of BTC worth $7 billion from wallets linked to defunct exchange Mt. Gox.
“And there is a full retrace of that recent pump as expected,” popular trader Credible Crypto wrote in part of his ongoing commentary on X (formerly Twitter).
“Let’s see what kind of reaction we get here at the lows.”
The latest data from monitoring resource CoinGlass highlighted liquidity concentrations around spot price, with the area around $67,000 now the nearest point of interest below.
Responding to the past 24 hours’ moves, fellow trader Daan Crypto Trades revealed a positive impact on market structure — a removal of leverage.
“All positions entered during yesterday’s move were flushed out and the funding rate is back to neutral,” he wrote on X alongside a chart of open interest data.
“ETH is a bit stronger still but as long as BTC is within its bigger range we’ll keep seeing more of this low timeframe chop.”
BTC price performance thus continued to hinge on overcoming key resistance and flipping it to support.
Bullish BTC price visions unfazed
As Cointelegraph reported, the greatest challenge remains the 2021 all-time highs of $69,000 and the subsequent trip to $73,800 this year.
Zooming out, popular trader Jelle revealed a mere consolidatory structure on monthly timeframes despite the lack of upward momentum since March.
In a further post, he considered a broader BTC price range in place all the way since mid-2017 — when BTC/USD hit historical all-time highs of $20,000 two cycles ago.
“Bitcoin has spent the past 6.5 years inside this rising channel, and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon,” he confirmed.
“If history is any indication, it’s time for another trip towards the highs of the channel. 6-figure Bitcoin is coming.”
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack attempts to take down a website, computer or online service by flooding it with requests, depleting its capacity and affecting its ability to respond to valid requests.
A DDoS attack involves hackers inserting malware into possibly thousands of internet-enabled devices, collectively referred to as a botnet, and prompting them to deliver a deluge of requests to the target system simultaneously. These compromised machines, individually termed bots or zombies, could be cellphones, desktops, servers or even Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Attackers usually establish direct control over bots by infecting them with malware without the knowledge of the victims.
The influx of incoming traffic overwhelms the target system’s ability to respond to valid requests because the attack consumes too much bandwidth, processing power or memory. In its Q1 2024 DDoS threat report, Cloudflare noted an alarming 50% rise in DDoS attacks in general.
Is a DDoS attack possible on a blockchain network?
Attacking a blockchain network with a DDoS attack is theoretically feasible, though it is more difficult than targeting centralized systems like websites or servers. Blockchain networks are inherently resistant to such attacks thanks to their decentralization.
A blockchain operates as a decentralized distributed ledger, functioning across an array of nodes, which are responsible for validating and processing transactions and creating blocks. Unlike traditional systems, there is no central point of control within a blockchain network. Decentralization makes a blockchain network harder to attack as attackers need to deal with a multitude of nodes.
One way to disrupt the network is by flooding the blockchain with spam transactions, which overwhelms the network and slows down transaction throughput, hindering the timely validation of legitimate transactions. This queues up transactions from genuine users in the mempool, a mechanism in blockchain nodes that stores unconfirmed transactions.
A well-known instance of a DDoS attack was one on the Solana blockchain network, which lead to a 17-hour downtime in September 2021. During Grape Protocol’s initial decentralized exchange offering (IDO) on the Solana-based DEX Raydium, bots bombarded the network with 400,000 transaction loads per second, causing network congestion.
Moreover, DDoS attacks may target decentralized applications (DApps), which are applications built on top of the blockchain, rather than the blockchain network itself. Cryptocurrency exchanges, which play a key role in ensuring liquidity in a blockchain-based ecosystem, frequently fall victim to DDoS attacks, resulting in temporary service outages.
How can DDoS attacks affect blockchain networks?
DDoS attacks can affect blockchain networks via transaction flooding and compromising smart contracts. The objective is to clog the network with fraudulent transactions, slowing it down and, in worse cases, bringing it to a halt.
Transaction flooding
Malicious actors can intentionally overload a blockchain network with a voluminous number of transactions, disrupting its normal operations. The attackers would stir up a volley of transaction requests, usually using automated scripts or specialized software. These transactions resemble legitimate transactions but are designed to squeeze the network.
The attackers broadcast these transactions to the nodes. To achieve consensus, the network propagates the transactions across multiple nodes, which work to process these transactions. However, the sheer volume of incoming transactions overwhelms their processing capacity. The network becomes congested and even genuine transactions get stuck in the backlog. The disruption could affect businesses, exchanges and other services reliant on the blockchain network.
Smart contracts
Hackers can identify vulnerable smart contracts in a blockchain network and flood them with transaction requests. These transactions contain fraudulent instructions or excessive computations to exhaust the functionality of the contract and the underlying network. The execution of code in the smart contract becomes increasingly burdensome, leading to inordinate delays in transaction validation.
As smart contracts are a key part of blockchains, the impact of such an attack may propagate across the network, affecting other smart contracts and transactions, disrupting critical operations and rendering services inaccessible to legitimate users.
Software crashes
Core application software in blockchains has built-in limits regarding the memory allocated and the number of transactions it can process in a block and store in the mempool. When there is a surge in transactions, the software might behave unexpectedly or simply crash.
Moreover, immutability is an inherent characteristic of blockchain transactions, which means they simply cannot be altered once they are recorded in blocks. This mechanism creates a problem when transactions flood the network during an attack. The network gets overloaded with useless transactions, which might be much beyond the software’s ability to handle.
Node failure
Nodes, acting as validators or miners, run the core blockchain software on equipment robust enough to handle the rigorous demand. When malicious actors stream in loads of junk data in a DDoS attack, a node might run out of memory or processing power and crash. A node’s failure due to an attack will increase pressure on the other nodes in the network.
Blockchain networks are essentially an amalgamation of nodes where each receiving node keeps track of the state of the blockchain and broadcasts information regarding transactions to other nodes. Flooding of fraudulent transactions affects the node architecture deleteriously, slowing down the whole network or even pulling it down.
How DDoS attacks affect crypto exchanges
Crypto exchanges are an indispensable part of the blockchain ecosystem, as they make digital assets liquid. They are often the target of the attackers.
When attacking exchanges, the modus operandi of attackers is to exploit vulnerabilities, such as outdated security patches in exchange infrastructure, disrupt operations, extort ransom, or manipulate markets. According to Cloudflare, a major chunk of DDoS attacks on crypto exchanges stemmed from simple service discovery protocol (SSDP) amplification attacks, network time protocol (NTP) amplification attacks and application layer attacks.
An SSDP attack is a reflection-based DDoS attack that exploits universal plug-and-play (UPnP) networking protocols to dispatch a huge amount of traffic to the target system. An NTP attack refers to a technique where the attacker sends a series of small queries that trigger large responses from different bots, multiplying the traffic. An application layer attack refers to an attacker methodology that targets the top layer in the open systems interconnection (OSI) model.
How to prevent DDoS attacks on blockchain networks
To protect blockchain networks from DDoS attacks, security measures are required at the node and network levels. Regular audits take care of vulnerabilities, while redundant infrastructure and stress testing keep the network functioning even during an attack.
Node-level security measures
Nodes should have adequate storage, processing power and network bandwidth to be resilient against DDoS attacks. Strong authentication methods and access controls help to protect network nodes. A completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart (CAPTCHA) is quite useful in ensuring only legitimate users are able to send transaction requests and prevents bots from infiltrating the network. Load balancing helps in dividing traffic and lessening the effect of node-level attacks.
Network level protection
Putting in place adequate defense mechanisms at the network level is important to safeguard a blockchain network. To identify and reduce the impact of DDoS attacks, firewalls and intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS) serve well. Content delivery networks (CDNs) are also helpful in dispersing and absorbing attack traffic.
Audits
To find and fix any vulnerabilities, a thorough audit of various aspects of the blockchain is important. This should include analyzing smart contracts, auditing the integrity of the blockchain’s data structure and validating consensus algorithms. Fault tolerance in consensus mechanisms should be strong enough to resist attacks. Updating the code regularly is important to keep attackers at bay and improve security.
Stress testing
Networks and systems should perform stress tests on blockchain protocols at regular intervals to evaluate their ability to withstand DDoS attacks. This will facilitate the detection of potential vulnerabilities in time, enabling patching of the network infrastructure and upgrading of defense mechanisms.
Redundancy and backup
Blockchain protocols and DApps need to have redundant network infrastructure and backup servers to ensure that the system keeps functioning even when under attack. Nodes located across multiple geographical locations can hold out against a DDoS attack that is limited to a specific region.
Central banks are increasingly adopting generative AI for cybersecurity, with a BIS report indicating that 71% are already using it and more planning to follow.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) believes in the potential for widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI), an area in which many central banks have developed a strong interest.
The BIS, an international financial institution comprising 63 central banks and monetary authorities, surveyed 32 of its central bank members to assess their interest in adopting generative AI tools for cybersecurity. The report found:
“Over two-thirds (71%) of respondents are already using gen AI, and 26% have plans to incorporate such tools into their operations within the next one to two years.”
The BIS predicts all of its members will adopt generative AI to enhance their internal cybersecurity measures. Central banks that have already implemented generative AI have praised its effectiveness in detecting cyber threats compared to traditional tools.
Moreover, generative AI tools have accelerated banks’ response times to cyberattacks and aided in the detection of suspicious trends and anomalies. However, the most common concern for central banks remains the costs associated with implementing generative AI tools.
Additionally, the BIS report highlighted:
“Risks related to social engineering and zero-day attacks as well as unauthorized data disclosure are of highest concern.”
Central banks unanimously believe that generative AI tools can eventually replace cybersecurity staff for conducting routine tasks. BIS anticipates this move to “free up resources” that could be reallocated for other initiatives.
BIS members include the central banks of prominent economies such as Australia, China, France, Belgium, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and India, among others.
The BIS recently teamed up with seven central banks to explore asset tokenization within the monetary system alongside private financial institutions.
France, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States Federal Reserve Banks are among the participating countries.
Dubbed “Project Agora,” the initiative will build on a unified ledger concept proposed by BIS that bridges tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized wholesale central bank money.
Former United States President Donald Trump’s on-chain crypto asset holdings briefly surpassed $10 million on Monday, primarily driven by his largest tokenholding, TRUMP.
On May 27, blockchain intelligence firm Arkham reported that presidential candidate Donald Trump’s crypto asset portfolio topped $10 million.
The surge to a seven-figure portfolio was catalyzed by the MAGA memecoin, TRUMP, which surged to an all-time high of $13.24 on May 27.
According to Arkham, Donald Trump holds 579,290 TRUMP tokens, currency worth around $6.79 million.
The memecoin has surged 53% over the past week following Donald Trump’s crypto endorsements.
“I am very positive and open-minded to cryptocurrency companies, and all things related to this new and burgeoning industry,” he said on May 25.
On May 21, the Trump 2024 campaign launched a fundraising page for people to donate in crypto.
However, TRUMP prices have declined 8.8% since that peak in a fall to $12.04 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko.
This has caused the entire portfolio to retreat to $9.5 million as crypto markets declined during early trading on May 28.
MAGA was launched in August to donate to U.S. veterans and protect children. While it bears the former president’s name, it is not officially affiliated with or endorsed by Donald Trump.
According to the official website 234.75 ETH has been donated to United States veterans and 204.5 ETH to child trafficking prevention since MAGA launched.
Donald Trump also has a big Ether bag with 464.2 ETH worth around $1.79 million at the time of writing.
He also holds a million MVP tokens worth around $473,000. MVP is another memecoin offering rewards and supporting donations to the Trump election campaign. It hit an all-time high of $0.709 on May 17 but has fallen back 33% since then to trade at $0.477 at the time of writing.
One in three voters in the United States considers a candidate’s position on cryptocurrencies before making their voting decision.
According to a recent online survey conducted by the Harris Poll, 77% of respondents believe that a U.S. presidential candidate should possess at least an “informed perspective” on cryptocurrencies.
The poll, which surveyed likely U.S. voters, was funded by Grayscale, a Bitcoin ETF issuer, and involved over 1,700 participants.
Interestingly, the survey highlighted that voters are equally divided on which political party takes the lead on digital asset issues.
Crypto Finds Increased Political Attention
This recent poll builds upon a previous round of questioning conducted late last year, which indicated that an increasing number of people anticipate cryptocurrency becoming a part of their investment portfolios (47%).
The growing interest in cryptocurrencies could explain the heightened political attention the topic is receiving.
Zach Pandl, Head of Research at Grayscale, said that likely American voters, regardless of their political affiliation, demonstrate a heightened interest in investing in crypto assets and supporting candidates who are well-versed in emerging technologies.
The survey revealed that the majority of respondents (98%) had heard of Bitcoin, indicating its widespread recognition.
Additionally, a significant segment of voters claimed to be familiar with Ethereum’s ether (ETH), with only 46% stating that they had never heard of it.
Moreover, around 17% of voters reported having invested in Bitcoin, placing it on par with bonds as an investment option and surpassing investments in exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Furthermore, 44% of voters expressed their belief, to varying degrees, that “crypto and blockchain technology are the future of finance,” marking a four-percentage-point increase from responses to the same question asked the previous year.
However, respondents also indicated a desire for government oversight, with 52% stating that they would be more likely to invest in digital assets if the field were subject to more regulations.
Fed Survey Finds 7% of US Adults Using Crypto
The number of United States adults reporting crypto ownership or usage has seen a significant decline, according to the latest annual household survey conducted by the Fed.
The survey, known as the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), indicates that approximately 18 million US adults reported using cryptocurrencies in 2023, representing a drop from previous years.
In the 12-month period leading up to October 2023, the survey found that 7% of the surveyed US adults reported using cryptocurrencies, down from 10% in 2022 and 12% in 2021.
These findings from the Federal Reserve survey significantly differ from Coinbase’s claim that 52 million Americans own cryptocurrencies.
Furthermore, another survey conducted by The Harris Poll in December last year revealed that approximately 73% of US voters believe that US presidential candidates should have an informed perspective on innovative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency.
Likewise, a recent report from Coinbase claimed that California voters who own cryptocurrencies are expected to have a significant impact on the 2024 elections.
