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The top two U.S. market regulators — the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — have hit crypto firms and founders with at least $198 million in penalties to date, according to The Block Research.

Specifically, the SEC has charged around $175 million in total to date, while the CFTC has levied about $23 million in fines and other charges. The numbers may not be exhaustive as they are based on press releases from the two agencies. There may be more enforcement action-related material that is not included in our research for this piece.

A majority of the SEC’s crypto enforcement efforts have been related to initial coin offerings or ICOs, and tokens that were deemed securities. This year, the SEC’s actions have slowed, while the CFTC’s have gone up.

Some of the CFTC’s biggest enforcement actions this year include charges against crypto exchange BitMEX and crypto investment app provider Abra. Cryptocurrencies that are not securities fall under the purview of the CFTC.

To read the full report and more such data-driven stories, subscribe to The Block Research.

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

In an otherwise extremely bullish week, famed investor Ray Dalio reiterated his skepticism of bitcoin and digital assets.

Roger Ver, one of the biggest bitcoin cash advocates, is not a fan of the scheduled fork event of the cryptocurrency’s network.

The cryptocurrency merchant bank has acquired a lending firm and a trading company as it seeks to become the “go to” platform for institutional access to digital assets, the firm said Friday.

The cryptocurrency dropped as low as $15,750, having hit highs over $16,300 in the Asian trading hours.

Quick Take

• Former CFTC chair Gary Gensler is no crypto enthusiast, but he takes the underlying payments technology very seriously.
• As an MIT professor, Gensler argued that cryptocurrency has exposed shortcomings in traditional existing payments infrastructure.

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Quick Take

• A consensus bug led to a brief split on the Ethereum network.
• Its impact on frequently used service providers brought centralization concerns back to the fore.

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Bitcoin’s price is climbing for the third straight day as more of the cryptocurrency is locked into the Ethereum network.

The USD value of Ethereum-based mixer Tornado Cash’s privacy pool has logged an all-time high, peaking at over $13 million on November 11, according to data compiled by The Block.

The non-custodial privacy service has experienced a nearly 7,700% growth increase year-to-date, from $174,000 to $13.44 million.

Tornado Cash has been active since August 2019 and has four different types of mixer contracts supporting ETH, DAI, cDAI and USDC. The service is used to protect a user’s identity by shielding the link between their withdrawal address and the one they used to deposit their assets.

Each mixer contract allows Tornado Cash users to choose between one of four fixed amounts. For example, for ETH, users can pick between 0.1 ETH, 1 ETH, 10 ETH or 100 ETH.

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto Twitter reacts to the announcement and answers the question: Just how big a deal is this?