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Celsius Network is opening the door to be able to swap altcoins into bitcoin and ether.

The debtors intend to, pending court approval, have the ability to swap all coins that aren’t bitcoin and ether into those two cryptocurrencies, according to a filing on June 14. This would not affect tokens held in Withhold or Custody accounts, and the sales would start from July 1.

This conversion would not affect any creditor claims, the filing noted. The debtors would also try to maximize the currency conversion where possible.

The debtors noted that the overall plan will include paying out cryptocurrency to creditors in the form of bitcoin and ether, except for limited circumstances.

Updates on the token conversions will be included in the monthly Budget and Coin reports.

© 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.

Investment management firm BlackRock is close to filing an application for a bitcoin ETF, CoinDesk reported, citing a source.

The company plans to use Coinbase Custody and the exchange’s spot market data for pricing, CoinDesk said, adding that BlackRock began working with Coinbase halfway through last year.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has so far rejected every bitcoin ETF application it’s received, and it’s not yet clear how the request will be received.

© 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.

Ransomware criminals are increasingly using mining pools to launder illicit funds, Chainalysis said in a report released Thursday. 

“Since the start of 2018, we’ve seen a large, steady increase in value sent from ransomware wallets to mining pools,” Chainalysis said in the report, explaining what it said were sophisticated attempts to funnel funds through mining pools to avoid triggering compliance alarms at exchanges.

The use of mining pools to launder ransomware funds surpassed that of peer-to-peer exchanges.

Ransomware actors have been abusing mining pools since 2018, according to the blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis.

Though more ransomware scammers look to mining pools to launder funds, crypto funds stolen during in ransomware attacks largely decreased. Cryptocurrency revenue derived from such extortions decreased 40.3% in 2022, primarily because victims are increasingly refusing to pay.

“Cryptocurrency mining is a crucial part of our industry, but it also holds special appeal to bad actors, as it provides a means to acquire money with a totally clean on-chain original source,” Chainalysis wrote in the report.

“The first and most important fix would be for mining pools and hashing services to enact more strenuous wallet screening measures in addition to KYC, using blockchain analysis to check users’ origins of funds and reject crypto coming from illicit addresses,” it added.

© 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.

Bitcoin dominance has reached a level that has not been seen in almost two years, suggesting that traders and investors are flocking to the relative safety of the world’s first and largest cryptocurrency over other smaller tokens.

Bitcoin dominance, or a percentage of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization that Bitcoin represents, has reached 45.84%, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard. The last time such a level was seen was in July 2021, when it peaked at 46.77%.

In April of this year, Bitcoin dominance touched 45.65% but had been swinging in a range. Since last week, however, its dominance has been on the rise. It comes at a time when the United States Securities and Exchange Commission has declared several tokens as unregistered securities in its lawsuits against crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase — claiming that most tokens are securities. Since then, the prices of many mentioned tokens have declined. Meanwhile, bitcoin’s price has been relatively stable.

The upcoming Bitcoin halving in April or May 2024 could also be a factor. The Bitcoin halving is an event that occurs approximately every four years, reducing the reward for mining new Bitcoin blocks by half, effectively decreasing the rate at which new bitcoins are created, in order to control inflation and maintain the scarcity of bitcoin over time. The upcoming Bitcoin halving will see the block reward halve from 6.25 bitcoin to 3.125 bitcoin.

The upcoming halving could help bitcoin reach a price of $45,000, JPMorgan analysts predicted late last month. Michael Saylor, founder and chairman of bitcoin holder MicroStrategy — a permanent bitcoin bull — expects the price to increase tenfold and then again tenfold from the current level of around $25,000.

“The entire industry is kind of destined to be rationalized down to Bitcoin and a half a dozen to a dozen other proof-of-work tokens,” Saylor told Bloomberg earlier this week. MicroStrategy holds over 140,000 Bitcoin (nearly worth $3.5 billion at current prices) on its balance sheet.

Bitcoin’s network activity has also been heavily boosted by the rise of tokens and NFTs through the Ordinals platform.

© 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.