FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Buying eggs with bitcoin just got a whole lot cheaper.

Egg prices measured in bitcoins fell for the third month in March. The St. Louis Fed has been tracking the price of a dozen eggs using bitcoin as a unit of measure since last summer. Since bitcoin is worth considerably more than a dozen eggs, the reserve bank multiplied the price by 100 million to express it in satoshis.

A satoshi is the smallest unit of bitcoin, worth 0.00000001 BTC. As such, the average price charged for 12 eggs fell to about 0.00013714 BTC, or about $3.88, based on the average price on March 31, according to the St. Louis Fed’s data.

The cost of eggs in the U.S. hit all-time highs (in dollar terms) in 2022 as inflation soared and the food product drew media attention. March marked the biggest one-month fall in price in 36 years.

The U.S. Federal Reserve has been scrambling to combat inflation for the past year. This week’s data shows signs that interest rate hikes and quantitative tightening might finally be working. Goldman Sachs analysts no longer expect the central bank to hike rates in June.

An end to rate hikes would be an encouraging sign for risk assets like bitcoin. When rates are rising, investors typically flock to safe-haven assets. Risk could be back on, though, at least, that’s what Paradigm co-founder Anand Gomes told The Block recently.

© 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.

U.S. crypto exchange Kraken has initiated withdrawal requests for their stakes following the Shapella upgrade that introduced ether (ETH) withdrawals.

The upgrade has resulted in a massive influx of withdrawal requests, surpassing $1.5 billion, including both partial and full exits. Kraken provides a staking service that streamlined the Ethereum staking process, allowing users to deposit into the platform and create validators on their behalf.

This development follows Kraken’s settlement of charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly failing to register the offer and sale of its staking program in the U.S. Kraken agreed to pay a $30 million fine.

In response, Kraken has requested to withdraw over 551,000 ETH (valued at $1 billion), accounting for more than 65% of the 820,000 ETH (approximately $1.5 billion) currently in the queue for withdrawal from the network, according to data from Nansen. 

The amount of ETH waiting to be withdrawn by Kraken does not represent its entire stake, but rather a portion of its 1.25 million ETH ($2.5 billion) staked on Ethereum.

ETH waiting for withdrawal | Source: Nansen

Kraken previously announced that it would automatically begin unstaking all ether for its U.S. clients due to regulatory measures. Despite Kraken’s request to exit validator stakes, it is still subject to the validator exit queue wait time on Ethereum.

Kraken, the third-largest stakeholder on Ethereum behind Lido Finance and Coinbase according to the Dune Analytics dashboard, is expected to slide into that position once the withdrawal queue is processed in a few days.

Currently, 17.4 million ether is staked (excluding rewards) on the Ethereum network, accounting for 15% of the total ether supply. Since the Shapella upgrade went live, the net staking balance has decreased by 94,581 ether (valued at $189 million), based on Nansen data.

Kraken did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

© 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 Securities and Exchange Commission issued a summons for Tron Foundation Ltd. founder Justin Sun, as well as rapper Soulja Boy and YouTube music star Austin Mahone, following a civil complaint from the agency last month over tokens issued by Tron and the filesharing company BitTorrent. 

The trio were named by the SEC as the only holdouts in a celebrity-filled complaint declaring Tronix and BTT, the BitTorrent token, as unregistered securities offerings. Actress Lindsay Lohan, YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul, porn star Kendra Lust, rapper Lil Yachty, and singers Akon and Ne-Yo all settled with the SEC over similar civil charges, per an agency release announcing the case last month. The celebrities who settled agreed to disgorge their earnings and settle charges without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings. 

If Sun, Mahone, and Soulja Boy, whose given name is Deandre Cortez Way, do not respond within 21 days then a judgement by default will be entered against them “for the relief demanded in the complaint.” 

The SEC asked a court to bar Sun and his companies from ever offering securities, including digital assets, again, forfeit their proceeds plus interest and pay civil penalties. The complain also sought to permanently bar Sun from serving as the officer or director of any company that issues securities, a standard punishment sought in similar complaints.

The markets regulator also wants Way and Mahone to be banned from receiving money for future endorsements of digital assets and to pay their own penalties.

Inflating Tronix’s volume

Sun, who no longer claims a diplomatic post with Grenada despite continuing to use the acronym for ‘His Excellency,’ a diplomatic honorific, in his Twitter handle, has been accused of the most serious charges. Those include Sun allegedly orchestrating a scheme to artificially inflate Tronix’s trading volume, in addition to selling unregistered securities and paying for celebrity endorsements without disclosing that those were paid spokespeople. 

According to the SEC, Sun directed employees to engage in more than 600,000 wash trades of Tronix between multiple crypto exchanges in order to create the appearance of high demand for the token, and boost its price. The SEC found that between 4.5 million and 7.4 million tokens were wash traded daily, a major violation of antifraud provisions. 

Sun, who also owns BitTorrent Foundation, which the SEC says is a for-profit organization despite its nonprofit title, allegedly made $31 million from illegal sales of the token in the secondary market. 

Though he has yet to respond in court, the Tron Foundation founder answered the SEC’s charges on Twitter last month, saying that “we believe the complaint lacks merit, and in the meantime will continue building the most decentralized financial system.”

© 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.