Leadership of the Senate Agriculture and Banking Committees are setting the stage for greater enforcement authority for the CFTC.
The post Nominee for CFTC chair asks Congress to make agency the ‘primary cop on the beat’ for crypto appeared first on The Block.
The Block’s Frank Chaparro chats with Robinhood Crypto COO Christine Brown.
The post Robinhood’s crypto COO on retail ‘ebbs and flows,’ NFTs, and new coin listings appeared first on The Block.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is ready to be the main federal regulator for crypto, its acting head said Wednesday.
Rostin Behnam, the acting chair of the CFTC, told the Senate Agriculture Committee that the commodities regulator is ready to become the primary federal regulator for digital assets, should Congress expand the agency’s remit.
Behnam was testifying as part of his confirmation hearing to serve a full term as chair of the agency.
“The CFTC has responsibly and aggressively been pursuing enforcement cases in the digital asset marketplace for a number of years now,” Behnam said, pointing to the agency’s recent settlements with Kraken and Tether.
The regulator pointed to the size of the crypto market, noting the overall market capitalization hovers around $2.7 trillion right now, and “nearly 60% were commodities.”
“I think it’s important for this committee to reconsider and consider expanding authority for the CFTC,” Behnam said.
He acknowledged that regulating crypto would be “a departure” from the agency’s historic role as a commodities regulator, but said the sector is important enough that the shift would be warranted.
“Given the size, the scope and the scale of this emerging market, how its interfacing and affecting customers, retail customers, and then with the scale of the growth being so rapid, potential financial stability risks in the future, I think it’s critically important to have a primary cop on the beat and certainly the CFTC is prepared to do that if this committee so wishes,” Behnam said.
Behnam later pointed to digital asset market transactions as posing a risk, including banking and prudential finance risks and clearing and settlement risks.
“We really also need to have a conversation about market regulation and sort of the exchange, the purchase and sale of these coins in a regulatory structure for both securities and commodities,” he said.
Shiba inu, the self-proclaimed dogecoin killer, briefly surpassed DOGE in market value on Wednesday, according to data from CoinGecko.
Both coins now have a market cap of over $31 billion and are toggling between 10th and 11th on CoinGecko’s rankings page.
Blockchain data shows that while SHIB continues to attract retail investors around the globe, more-sophisticated crypto traders are fueling the latest rally.
Since the beginning of this week, addresses labeled as “smart money” by blockchain data firm Nansen, started buying up SHIB, according to Daniel Khoo, a research analyst at Nansen. The buying was mostly concentrated in the past seven days, worth about $160 million.
Addresses labeled as “smart money” include traders who made more than $100,000 in profit by providing liquidity and mining liquidity in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and public entities that invest in crypto.
“It was shocking to me,” Khoo said, adding that he didn’t expect SHIB to become accumulated by “smart money.”
Read more: Shiba Inu Coin (SHIB): A Beginner’s Guide 2021
Data from another blockchain data firm Santiment also supports the perspective.
SHIB transactions worth at least $1 million started increasing since the beginning of October, Santiment data shows. The whale activities spiked on multiple days in the past weeks, as SHIB’s price rallied.
Notably, while there have been a lot of SHIB spot activities on centralized exchanges, at press time, roughly 66% of SHIB are on DeFi versus 13% on centralized exchanges, according to Nansen.
Over on centralized exchanges, SHIB’s trading volumes mostly come from Binance, Coinbase and BKEX, according to CoinGecko. Compared with Binance and Coinbase, BKEX is a little-known exchange started in China.
Google trends also revealed another interesting fact about shiba inu: Despite China doubling down on its crypto trading ban, traders in the East Asian country have shown an unquenchable appetite for SHIB that’s nearly as high as their counterparts in the United States.
At press time, Google Trends, a widely used tool to gauge retail interest in trending topics, shows a value of 98 for the search query “SHIB” in China versus 100 in the U.S. over the past week.
A score of 100 represents peak popularity – the maximum number of searches observed for a term during a given time frame. It means more and more people are scanning the web for information on SHIB.
The finding is extraordinary considering the fact that the market has been talking down China’s influence on crypto for weeks. Chinese crypto traders may be lying low, but they have not quit crypto, as suggested by SHIB’s latest rally.
Read more: Why Shiba Inu Has Been More Resilient Than Some SHIB Haters Would Like to Admit
DeFi lending protocol Cream Finance has suffered another flash loan-based attack, this time losing $115 million to an exploit.
The post Ethereum DeFi protocol Cream Finance hacked for $115 million appeared first on The Block.
Tulip Protocol (formerly SolFarm), a crypto yield aggregation platform built on Solana, has raised $5 million in strategic funding.
The post Solana-based yield aggregator Tulip Protocol raises $5 million in token sale appeared first on The Block.
If there is a new acronym or concept that you’ve picked up in the last year, it is most likely ‘NFTs’, short for Non-fungible tokens.
The post NFT Markets Pain Point: Lack of Utility and How We Should Change This? appeared first on The Block.
The European Central Bank (ECB) has appointed 30 members to its new “Digital Euro Market Advisory Group.”
The post European Central Bank appoints 30 members to digital euro advisory group appeared first on The Block.
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