Category: cryptocurrency

PARIS – A co-founder of French crypto company Ledger was released on Wednesday after being kidnapped from his home in France, the prosecutor’s office in Paris said. David Balland was kidnapped early on Tuesday morning at his home in central France and taken by car to another address where he was held captive, the prosecutors said in a statement on Thursday. The kidnappers demanded a “large ransom in cryptocurrency”, they said, without giving its size or saying whether it had…

MicroStrategy. “FORM 8-K MICROSTRATEGY INCORPORATED.” MicroStrategy, a business intelligence firm led by Michael Saylor, purchased an additional $1 billion worth of Bitcoin last week. This acquisition brings their total Bitcoin holdings to approximately 140,000 BTC, acquired at an average price of around $29,000 per coin. The company continues to view Bitcoin as a critical store of value and a hedge against inflation, strengthening its position as one of the largest corporate holders of the cryptocurrency. Selling Shares To Add To…

One bitcoin will now set you back six figures. The cryptocurrency’s break above the $100,000 milestone has felt inevitable since Donald Trump’s election as the next U.S. president on a crypto-friendly platform. While it is just a number, it highlights how cryptos have carved out a place in modern financial markets. Some commentators joked that perhaps a sales pitch from children and grandchildren around the Thanksgiving table was enough to get it past $100,000 – after investors in recent weeks…

According to a report from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) on Oct. 10th, TD Bank’s U.S. wing agreed to pay over $3 billion in penalties. The fine was for failing to properly monitor money laundering activities. The bank has also accepted limits on its future growth in the U.S. FinCEN found that TD Bank facilitated over $1 billion in transfers linked to two crypto exchanges — one based in the United Kingdom and the other in Colombia. TD Bank…

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former cryptocurrency executive Caroline Ellison is set to be sentenced on Tuesday for her role in her imprisoned former boyfriend Sam Bankman-Fried’s theft of about $8 billion in customer funds from the now-bankrupt FTX exchange he founded. Ellison has pleaded guilty to seven felony counts of fraud and conspiracy, and testified as a prosecution witness in the trial of Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud and other charges last year and is serving a 25-year prison…

NEW YORK – Terraform Labs and its co-founder Do Kwon will pay US$4.47 billion (S$6 billion) to resolve a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit over the company’s 2022 collapse, which wiped out US$40 billion in investor assets and shook the cryptocurrency world. The SEC on June 12 asked a federal judge in New York to approve the settlement. The deal was reached after a jury in April found Terraform and Kwon liable for fraud following a two-week civil…

  Bitcoin topped US$71,000 for the first time, advancing for a sixth straight day and taking this year’s rally to almost 70 per cent on the back of massive inflows into US exchange-traded funds.  The original cryptocurrency jumped as much as 3.2 per cent to US$71,631.45 on March 11.  “This rally comes following a weak Asian trading session in which shorts tested the conviction of longs – it appears the longs have given a rather convincing positive answer,” said Mr…

Attorneys for the Securities and Exchange Commission apologized to a judge on Thursday for misrepresenting facts used to secure a restraining order and asset freeze against a crypto firm. In a filing submitted to the U.S. District Court of Utah, in response to the judge’s order to show cause for its misstep, the SEC attorneys wrote that the commission “deeply regrets these orders” and promised to conduct mandatory training for staff members involved in the investigation. “I fully appreciate the…

NEW YORK – Terraform Labs and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will head to trial in January, with Jump Trading swept up in the mix, after a judge ruled that the SEC’s fraud case against Terraform must be tried by a jury. US District Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled in favour of the regulator on Dec 28, agreeing that Terraform is liable for selling unregistered securities, though he threw out allegations that it had made transactions in unregistered…

SINGAPORE – A co-founder of Cake DeFi, which operates a Singapore-based online platform that offers access to decentralised finance services and products, has filed for the company to be wound up. A winding up notice in The Straits Times on Dec 7 showed that the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer Chua U-Zyn, represented by law firm Rajah & Tann Singapore, had filed an application with the High Court on Dec 1. ST has contacted the group for comments. This development…

Malicious actors have been abusing Ethereum’s ‘Create2’ function to bypass wallet security alerts and poison cryptocurrency addresses, which led to stealing $60,000,000 worth of cryptocurrency from 99,000 people in six months. This is reported by Web3 anti-scam specialists at ‘Scam Sniffer,’ who observed several cases of in-the-wild exploitation of the function, in some cases losses incurred by one individual reaching up to $1.6 million. Legitimate function Create2 is an opcode in Ethereum, introduced in the ‘Constantinople’ upgrade, that allows creating smart…

Business intelligence firm MicroStrategy has notched a paper gain of $900 million on its stack of 158,400 Bitcoin, spurred by optimism over the potential approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds.

The Michael Saylor-founded firm added 6,067 Bitcoin (BTC) since the third quarter, including another 155 in October, according to MicroStrategy’s Nov. 1 results filing.

In a recent development, PayPal has been registered by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to offer crypto asset activities in Britain. This move comes as PayPal establishes a post-Brexit base in the UK, reflecting its commitment to serving the British market. According to a Reuters report, the crypto market in the UK awaits its first set of regulations; companies seeking to offer crypto assets must demonstrate to the FCA that they have robust safeguards to prevent money laundering and financing…

Kraken announced plans to suspend transactions involving USDT, DAI, WBTC, WETH, and WAXL within Canada in the next two months. Several other cryptocurrency exchanges have taken similar actions in 2023, discontinuing support for specific assets due to regulatory challenges. The write-off of the world’s largest and most liquid stablecoin came as the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) has banned crypto exchanges operating in the region from touching Tether (USDT). The decision dates back to 2021 when the stablecoin was deeply linked…

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried began testifying at his fraud trial on Friday, saying the innovative business he hoped would move the cryptocurrency ecosystem forward ended up doing the opposite and hurting customers. The onetime cryptocurrency golden boy lost his businesses and his reputation as a pioneering entrepreneur in an emerging facet of finance when a rush of customers withdrew their money last year, exposing that billions of dollars were missing. Bankman-Fried, 31, acknowledged some of his failures early in his…

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried plans to testify at his fraud trial, his lawyer told a federal judge Wednesday, ending speculation over whether a man who embraced the spotlight during his years atop the cryptocurrency world could remain silent after prosecutors portrayed him as a greedy entrepreneur who stole billions of dollars from customers. Attorney Mark Cohen told Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that he planned to call three witnesses “and then our client is also going to be testifying” after prosecutors…