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A Steve Cohen-backed exchange launched to offer 24-hour stock trading is shutting down its spot crypto offering due to a lack of demand, Bloomberg News reported. 

Launched in 2018, 24 Exchange raised $14 million in 2021. New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s Point72 Ventures led the round for the Bermuda-based company, which attempted to secure a license from the US Securities and Exchange Commission to trade equities 24/7.

The firm plans to reapply with the SEC at the end of the summer, according to Bloomberg. 

As for crypto, the firm will continue to offer trading in crypto-tied non-deliverable forwards, but a decline in demand in the wake of the meltdown of crypto exchange FTX has pushed it out of spot.

© 2023 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.

Sam Bankman-Fried promised billions to Michael Kives and Bryan Baum after being awed by their connections to politicians, billionaires and reality TV stars.

The regulator agreed to forego the payment, owed as part of a settlement of charges against BlockFi, to maximize and speed up payments to investors.

Electricity costs played a vital role in the past year’s bear market as miners struggled to survive, the report said.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has filed an enforcement action against a New York city resident, William Koo Ichioka, for fraudulently misappropriating over $21 million from over 100 commodity pool participants’ funds.

Historically, an above-90% reading on the index has coincided with interim market tops.

ALSO: CoinDesk Senior Research Analyst George Kaloudis offers a straightforward explanation of why BlackRock and other financial services giants want to offer a spot bitcoin ETF.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson likened renewed excitement toward artificial intelligence to the cycle he’s seen around cryptocurrency.

“I think these technologies kind of go in these hype cycles,” Wilson said. “We had this huge hype cycle in web3. And now we’re definitely in the trough of disillusionment and we’re in the full hype cycle of AI. And I think there will come a time when we calm down a little bit and realize we’re not gonna be working for robots in a few years.”

Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures, was speaking in a Thursday panel where he discussed AI and crypto.

Crypto and AI

Wilson’s Union Square Ventures has invested in numerous companies like Twitter, Coinbase and Stripe. Also on the roster include web3 powerhouses like Dapper Labs and Dune Analytics, as well as AI-focused startups like Alife. 

Amid regulatory uncertainty in the web3 industry, Wilson has said that USV will “double down” on crypto venture capital investments, The Block previously reported.

© 2023 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.

The Nevada Financial Institutions Division said Thursday that crypto custodian Prime Trust could not meet all customer withdrawals.

The regulator said it had been monitoring the company’s solvency ahead of the planned acquisition by BitGo that was called off on Thursday. 

“Prime failed to safeguard assets under its custody and cannot meet all client withdrawals,” the regulator said in an emailed response to questions. “As such, Prime has breached its fiduciary duties to its clients, in violation of Nevada trust laws.”

“NFID’s primary objective is to preserve any enterprise value remaining in Prime for the benefit of Prime’s clients,” the regulator added. It said it sent a cease-and-desist order to the company on June 21, ordering it to stop accepting fiat and cryptocurrency from existing and new clients for custody purposes. 

BitGo earlier this month had signed a non-binding term sheet to acquire 100% of the equity of Prime Core Technologies, the parent company of Prime Trust. It said Thursday that the decision to end the deal came “after considerable effort and work to find a path forward.”

Prime Trust enforcement action

In the Nevada enforcement action, the regulator said it started a “safety and soundness examination” of the firm on Nov. 7. The firm reported a negative $12.1 million stockholders’ equity position in a March report.

“The overall financial condition of Respondent has considerably deteriorated to a critically deficient level, and Respondent is now in position where it is in an unsafe or unsound condition to transact business and/or if it were to continue to operate it would be in an inviable and/or unsafe manner,” the regulator said.

On around June 21, the firm was not able to honor customer withdrawals due to a shortfall of customer funds, which was caused by a “significant liability” on its balance sheet, the regulator added.

“Additionally, Respondent failed to safeguard assets under its custody and is unable to meet all customer withdrawals,” it added. “As such, Respondent has materially and willfully breached its fiduciary duties to its clients.”

Other companies forced to suspend some services

Fiat onramp service Stably, which relies on Prime Trust as its regulated custodian, said earlier in the day that it was forced to pause some services and operations as a result of Prime Trust freezing withdrawals and deposits. 

Securitize Markets also said it is temporarily pausing its Cash Balance feature and secondary trading on the Securitize Markets ATS.

“In the event that you are unable to withdraw any funds from your Prime Trust account, our parent company, Securitize, Inc., will make you whole,” it wrote in an email sent to customers that was seen by The Block. “Given today’s events, we have expedited our already planned migration away from Prime Trust to a new cash custodian, and we anticipate that migration to be complete in approximately one month.”

Coinmetro said in a post on Twitter that it was currently unable to process new USD transactions as a result. TrueUSD, meanwhile, said the TUSD stablecoin was not affected.

© 2023 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.

The race to launch a spot bitcoin ETF has not just lifted the asset’s price, but also its volatility. 

Bitcoin volatility, which up until recently was stuck in a sleepy regime, has picked up again, hitting its highest level since mid-May, according to data tracked by The Block.

Annualized bitcoin volatility has been on a tear, hitting 51.8% on June 21. That’s up from a recent bottom of about 31% on June 6, according to The Block’s data dashboard.

Bitcoin was mostly flat in trading on Thursday, rising 0.4% to $30,024, according to CoinGecko. 

Bitcoin rally spikes volatility

Bitcoin’s low volatility has been well documented, with the world’s largest crypto seeing more stable prices than shares in tech giants like Amazon and Meta earlier this month.

But the recent rally that’s brought bitcoin above $30,000 for the first time since April has also brought back volatility to a market that’s been under pressure from low liquidity and low volumes. Bitcoin has gained 18% over the last seven days, according to CoinGecko.

That price momentum has been underpinned by a flurry of new bitcoin spot ETF filings kicked off by asset management giant BlackRock and soon followed by firms like WisdomTree and Invesco. 

‘Stark turn around’

The Block Research’s Rebecca Steven’s described the shift as “a stark turn around from the start of the month when a lot of people were talking about how low it was.”

Still, the volatility has not necessarily translated into stronger volumes on spot crypto exchanges. While, the seven day moving average for crypto trading volumes on exchanges has ticked upwards, it is still about one fourth the level it was at three months ago, according to The Block Research. 

That might indicate that most buying is happening off-exchange, according to one industry source who described recent action as “institutions coming in via [over-the-counter]” trading desks. 

© 2023 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.