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The Swiss-licensed firm has launched a tokenization service and a trading platform, offering, it says, real-time settlement.

About 2,822 bitcoins were moved from OKEx within 15 minutes of withdrawals restarting.

The price of bitcoin has fallen suddenly in the last 24 hours.

From about $19,500 yesterday, bitcoin crashed to $16,350 earlier today, a slide of about 15%. The world’s first and largest cryptocurrency is currently trading at about $16,700 on Coinbase, according to tracker TradingView. 

Bitcoin price crashes are generally a result of liquidations at crypto derivatives exchanges. Indeed, nearly $1.9 billion worth of open interest was liquidated from exchanges in the last 24 hours, according to The Block Research. Binance experienced the highest liquidations, worth about $840 million, followed by Huobi and OKEx.

© 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.

Coinbase has front-run an upcoming investigative story by the New York Times that is said to allege the crypto exchange operator mistreated Black employees.

In a blog post published late Wednesday, Coinbase said the NYT is going to publish the story in print on Sunday and online sometime before that and thus wanted to give everyone a “heads-up” and provide some “important context.”

The NYT’s story, by reporter Nathaniel Popper, is said to allege that several Black employees of Coinbase have had negative experiences at the company over the last few years.

The story will likely quote three former Coinbase employees and one former contractor by name, and include photos of some of them, said the exchange. Other sources of information for the story include Coinbase’s current and former employees, leaked Slack chats, and internal documents.

“The story covers our efforts related to Belonging, Inclusion and Diversity; our positioning as a mission-focused company; and the discussions we had within the company this year about Black Lives Matter,” said Coinbase. “However, a significant portion of the story also focuses on major changes to our Compliance and CX orgs [c-level restructuring] that took place in 2018. The story will likely imply that Black employees were discriminated against during this process; this is false.”

Coinbase went on to say that the story will also likely allege that several Black employees referenced in the report filed complaints with the company, but, “in reality, only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.”

The exchange further said that those complaints were “thoroughly investigated” via internal and third-party examiners and found “no evidence of wrongdoing.”

Overall, Coinbase warned that the story will recount episodes that will be “difficult for employees to read.”

Recent issues 

Coinbase has been in the limelight for its inclusion and diversity efforts since September of this year when the exchange’s CEO Brian Armstrong put out an apolitical blog post. He said at the time that Coinbase is “laser focused” on its mission to build an open financial system while focusing “minimally” on “broader societal issues” and political causes.

Soon after the controversial blog post, Coinbase offered an exit package to employees that were uncomfortable with its stated mission. Nearly 5% of the exchange’s 1,200 employees accepted a severance package at the time. 

These developments at the time also revealed that Coinbase experienced an employee walk-out over a meeting in which a question about Black Lives Matter was raised. Armstrong was said to have asked what he thought about Black Lives Matter and responded that he didn’t have an answer in that moment. 

Amid these events, Coinbase was recently looking to hire someone to lead its internal diversity efforts. That position is still open at the time of writing. 

© 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.

The cryptocurrency exchangeis now reopening withdrawals five weeks after services were suspended due to a missing key holder.

OKEx has announced the time to resume crypto withdrawals more than a month after it suspended the services due to Chinese police investigation.

The crypto exchange said in a post on Thursday that it is expected to reopen withdrawals at 8:00 UTC on November 26. The post follows a long-waited update last week where the exchange told users that it would resume asset withdrawals by November 27.

The exchange also rolled out a series of incentive programs that will begin starting from Friday this week in an attempt to retain users and avoid large amounts of crypto asset outflows. 

OKEx abruptly suspended asset withdrawals on October 16 because one of its private key holders – later identified as OKEx’s founder Star Mingxing Xu – was taken into Chinese police custody to assist an investigation.

OKGroup, a Hong Kong-listed shell company that was acquired by Xu in 2018 where he serves as a non-executive director, said in an announcement over the weekend that “the relevant investigation by public security authority in the PRC has temporarily come to an end and Mr. Xu has now returned to his normal business functions.”

© 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.

Bitcoin fell more than $1000 dollars, it’s sharpest decline in almost three weeks, as panic gripped the markets.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong publicly voiced concern that the outgoing Trump Administration may ram through onerous new data-collection requirements for crypto exchanges.

Quick Take

• Record flows everywhere you look.
• But be careful about your priors.

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Former CFTC Chair Gary Gensler, who’s leading Joe Biden’s financial oversight team, may be tapped as Deputy Treasury Secretary.