FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Celsius (CEL) is trading below $0.60 today amid a broader market downturn throughout May.

As of this morning, celsius was trading at $0.58, down from $0.70 just 24 hours before, according to data via Coingecko. Friday’s losses mean that celsius is down just over 30% in the past week from $0.83 on May 20.

This drop leaves celsius at its lowest levels since September 17, 2020, when it last traded below $0.60.

The drop in Celsius’s token price comes after the collapse of the Terra ecosystem. The collapse pushed crypto prices mostly lower through the whole digital asset space. 

Celsius has also been lowering its savings rates throughout the year as bearish sentiment spreads across the crypto and broader financial markets.

© 2022 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.

Two of the largest staking companies will not be supporting the new Terra blockchain, citing concerns over the way the decision-making process was handled.

The two are Figment, which had $6 billion in assets under management in February — likely much lower now — and Chorus One, which currently looks after $1 billion in assets.

Chorus One said it will not be supporting the new Terra blockchain because it did “not follow a legitimate governance process.” The first reason it offered was that staking was frozen on the network at the time of the vote and voting powers had shifted. The second reason was that the main proposal to relaunch the blockchain had been amended during the vote.

As a result, Chorus One abstained from voting, has wound down its existing infrastructure and said that it will not be supporting the new Terra blockchain, according to a post on Twitter.

Similarly, Figment said that it also will not be supporting the new blockchain. “We do not plan to support Terra 2.0 at launch and will make a decision to support Terra 2.0 at a later date, should we evaluate it as a new opportunity,” it said on Twitter.

Figment voted “no with veto” on the main proposal to relaunch the Terra blockchain. In a blog post, it said, “The proposal has been unilaterally modified multiple times while the voting period was active, leading to a lack of confidence in the integrity of the vote itself.”

Figment said it did not see launching a new chain this quickly as a solution. It added that Terraform Labs may still end up having influence over the new blockchain and that the company may face a range of lawsuits in the near future. 

“These lawsuits could also pose unforeseen risk to infrastructure providers (such as Figment) in the future,” it said.

Terra’s new blockchain is being launched as a result of the collapse of the current chain. Its stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) lost its peg to the US dollar, leading to a death spiral for the blockchain’s native token Luna (LUNA).

Following its collapse, Terra’s governance saw a speedy turnaround as Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon proposed a new blockchain and put it to a vote. As The Block reported, the proposal was modified during the course of the vote, leading to the concerns about its integrity.

Despite this — and a variety of community and validator concerns — the proposal passed and the new blockchain is set to go live on May 28, having been pushed back a day. 

© 2022 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.

Latin American crypto exchange Bitso laid off 80 members of staff on Thursday, CoinDesk reported. 

Bitso had more than 700 employees before the layoffs and still lists more than 60 open jobs on its website, according to the report, which cited a statement from Bitso.

The Gibraltar-registered exchange has more than 4 million users in Latin America, across Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. It officially launched its trading app in Colombia just last week. 

The company closed a Series C fundraising round in May 2021 at a valuation of $2.2 billion. Tiger Global and Coatue Management co-led the $250 million round, which finished just a few months after Bitso announced its Series B. 

© 2022 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.

Episode 46 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and StarkWare Co-Founders Uri Kolodny and Eli Ben-Sasson.

Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblockcrypto.com.

Fresh off the heels of a $50M Series C round last November, StarkWare Industries closed a $100M Series D round on Wednesday, giving the Israeli-based startup a valuation of $8 billion. The fundraise was led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue, and included Tiger Global amongst others.

StarkWare aims to bring efficient, affordable blockchain transactions to the masses through its ZK-rollup technology, which addresses blockchain congestion by compressing multiple transactions into ‘STARK proofs’ that are then passed on to the underlying blockchain.

In this episode of The Scoop, StarkWare co-founders Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny sit down with host Frank Chaparro to discuss what their firm has been building, and how their technology will allow blockchains to scale.

According to Kolodny, the trustless computational integrity enabled by StarkWare technology will be very useful to society:

“It delivers something that is dearly missing and dearly needed in modern societies and the way they’re doing their computation. That is something very simple: it is integrity — the ability to know that something was done the right way, even when you weren’t watching.”

Despite bearish sentiment across markets, StarkWare’s recent fundraise shows VCs are excited about the opportunities unlocked through StarkWare’s scaling technology, and are willing to continue providing the developer with capital.

StarkWare’s two products, StarkEx and StarkNet, both serve as Ethereum scaling solutions, with the former being “scaling as a service,” while the latter is permissionless. StarkNet completed its launch earlier this year, allowing any developer to integrate the platform into their application.

StarkWare’s scaling solutions are an important infrastructure improvement for blockchains, as Kolodny highlighted during the interview:

“I often use this metaphor for scaling of Manhattan going from single-story houses circa 17th century to high rises. And that’s the scaling of this limited real estate: Manhattan or the blockchain, we can allow it to scale. What I’m saying is that we don’t know of an upper bound to the height of these skyscrapers at any given moment in time. It may be the metal beams, it may be the glass — fundamentally we don’t know the limit.”

During this episode, Chaparro, Kolodny and Ben-Sasson also discuss:

• The mathematics behind StarkWare technology
• Competition amongst L2 scaling solutions
• The intersection of academia and crypto

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.

About Coinbase Prime
Coinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.

About Cross River
Cross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

© 2022 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.

Huobi Global announced today that it has purchased Latin America-based exchange Bitex in a deal with confidential terms. 

Bitex, founded in 2014, operates in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The company will join Huobi Global’s platform but keep its own branding and management, according to a May 26 press release. 

The Bitex website shows that the exchange supports at least 15 cryptocurrencies, including the stablecoins Tether (USDT), DAI and USD Coin (USDC). It supports on-ramps from several fiat currencies, including dollars; Argentine, Chilean and Uruguayan pesos; the Paraguayan guaraní and Peruvian sol. 

“Bitex was founded to protect the value of our users’ money, in the wake of major financial crises in Latin America,” Bitex CEO Francisco Buero said in a press release. “Having grown rapidly after eight years of successful operations, we believe our partnership with Huobi Global will not only support our expansion, but also help us better serve our customers, enabling them to access a broader range of digital assets on Huobi Global’s platform.”

Huobi first entered the Argentina market under its brand name in 2019, providing a way for locals to exchange Argentine pesos for bitcoin and Tether (USDT).

Last year it added five payment methods to trade crypto from Argentine financial institutions, including major banks Santander Río and Banco Galicia. 

© 2022 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 mining stocks recovered on Thursday, with TeraWulf for instance jumping as much as +12.29%.

Cipher Mining rose by +8.08%, followed by Iris Energy (+7.14%), CleanSpark (+7.02%), and Marathon (+6.26%).

However, some miners still saw their stocks drop on Thursday, including BIT Mining (-4.28%), Northern Data (-2.64%) and Argo Blockchain (-0.17%).

Here’s how crypto mining companies performed on Thursday, May 26:

© 2022 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.

“America can’t be left behind,” said Maxine Waters (D-CA), chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, opening a May 26 hearing on a US central bank digital currency.

The virtual hearing featured testimony from Lael Brainard, a longtime governor at the Federal Reserve who in April was confirmed as vice chair. Central to the hearing was a January Fed discussion paper on the outlook for an American CBDC.

Brainard’s testimony, like the discussion paper itself, was diplomatic, but fundamentally sought to give the Fed more license to explore a CBDC. She said: 

“The rapid ongoing evolution of the digital financial system at the national and international levels should lead us to frame the question not as whether there is a need for a central-bank-issued digital dollar today, but rather whether there may be conditions in the future that may give rise to such a need.”

 It’s a project that has increasingly become the subject of partisanship in Congress. Days ago, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) called a CBDC “a horrific idea.” 

House Financial Services Committee Republicans wrote to Brainard last week, arguing that the Fed does not have the approval to move ahead with a CBDC in the absence of Congress’ go-ahead. 

That topic came up repeatedly, with committee Republicans expressing broad dissatisfaction that Brainard would not fully disavow the Fed’s issuance of a CBDC absent new law.

“It is important for us to have strong support from both the executive branch and congress and ideally that would come in the form of authorizing legislation,” Brainard told the committee’s leading Republican, Patrick McHenry. McHenry identified that as Brainard leaving “wiggle room.”

Many of the earliest proponents of cryptocurrency in Congress have been Republicans. The crypto industry has been working to get Democrats on board over the past year and a half, lending increasing credence to claims from the crypto lobby that it is a nonpartisan policy area. A US CBDC, however, seems to have few defenders on the political right.

Republicans don’t believe the Fed can handle the demands of retail banking and are suspicious of its interest in surveilling or blocking transactions based on changes in the political winds. 

“No one has made a compelling case on why we should expand the Fed’s mandate into retail banking or how a Fed-issued CBDC won’t politicize the Fed,” said McHenry.

Credit allocation is another area in which Republicans sought to defend commercial banks.

“If working people got paid in CBDC, could it threaten the ability of commercial banks using their deposits to fund lending activities?” Bill Posey (R-FL) asked Brainard.

As for the areas of criticism, the idea that Fed expanding its role into allocating credit has drawn fire from Republicans. Democrats are more suspicious of the commercial banking system that sits between citizens and the Fed. Today and elsewhere, they have proved willing to experiment with more direct lines between the Federal Reserve and the general public. 

That specific degree of support includes proposals for FedAccounts that initially appeared in 2020, as well as moves to expand the role of the US Postal Service in payments and accounts, which Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) praised during today’s hearing.

Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) pointed to the potential for a CBDC to cut out the significant fees that credit card companies charge merchants. “I don’t have an estimate right now but I know that transaction fees are very high,” said Brainard.

However, Brainard said that there would still be intermediaries.

“You don’t support direct consumer accounts with the Fed?” asked French Hill (R-AR). Brainard answered, “Yes, I think statute is clear on that.”

© 2022 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 Terra governance system has voted to approve a proposal to burn all TerraUSD (UST) tokens held in the project’s community pool and UST deployed for past liquidity incentives on Ethereum.

This amounts to more than 1.3 billion UST, or roughly 11% of the existing 11.2 billion UST supply, according to CoinGecko. The proposal received 99.3% of the total cast votes in favor of it. Following the vote, Terraform Labs, Terra’s core development firm, will proceed to execute the burn.

This process will take place over two phases. First, it will send about 1 billion UST from Terra’s community pool to a burn module where it will be permanently removed from the supply. Then, the team will manually bridge back 370 million UST to Terra from the Ethereum blockchain and destroy them, as detailed in an explainer post on the Terra governance forum.

Earlier this month, the dollar-pegged algorithmic stablecoin UST plummeted from $1 to $0.04 cents before slightly recovering to $0.07 where it trades now. This represents a 93% drop from its value prior to the fall from dollar parity. 

The approval of the UST burn comes a day after Terra’s governance system also approved Terraform’s revival plan to re-launch the Terra blockchain and create LUNA 2.0 tokens.

The relaunched chain will go live Friday and subsequently airdrop the new LUNA 2.0 tokens to holders of Terra-based assets. However, the new Terra blockchain will exist without the UST tokens, and their use will be restricted to the original blockchain.

© 2022 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.

Twitter agreed to a settlement including a $150 million civil penalty with the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

In a complaint filed Thursday, the US government alleged that the social media giant used private information for targeted ads, according to a statement on Thursday

The settlement is still subject to approval from the federal court. Per the agreement, Twitter would also have to implement “robust compliance measures to protect users’ data privacy.”

“The $150 million penalty reflects the seriousness of the allegations against Twitter, and the substantial new compliance measures to be imposed as a result of today’s proposed settlement will help prevent further misleading tactics that threaten users’ privacy,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta.

The complaint specifically alleges that between May 2013 and September 2019, Twitter deceived users as to what the company did with their private information and how it protected it.

Twitter collected phone numbers and email addresses supposedly for “account-security purposes,” but failed to disclose that it would also use that same information for target ads from other companies, per the document.

According to the complaint, this affected 140 million Twitter users and the company violated the FTC Act and an administrative order issued by the FTC in March 2011.

“Keeping data secure and respecting privacy is something we take extremely seriously, and we have cooperated with the FTC every step of the way,” Twitter said in a statement Wednesday. “In reaching this settlement, we have paid a $150M USD penalty, and we have aligned with the agency on operational updates and program enhancements to ensure that people’s personal data remains secure and their privacy protected.”

© 2022 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.

Thailand’s government issued a royal decree that includes a provision exempting crypto transfers from value added tax (VAT) payments until December 31, 2023, the Bangkok Post reported on Thursday.

Based on the new ruling, crypto and digital asset transfers on regulated exchanges will not require 7% VAT payments until the start of 2024.

This new ruling is in addition to a previous waiver on VAT levied on crypto and digital asset transactions that was enacted in March. This exemption will also expire at the end of 2023.

The Thai government also rolled back plans to institute a 15% capital gains tax, thus enabling traders to offset any annualized losses against unrealized profit earned from crypto investments.

Thailand’s government says these waivers are part of efforts to boost investment in the country’s digital asset space.

Crypto is, however, banned as a means of payment in Thailand, as previously reported by The Block. This ban does not prohibit people in the country from trading and investing in cryptocurrencies and digital assets.

© 2022 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.