The United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, has filed a complaint related to a 2017 initial coin offering from a blockchain project originally developed by the Walt Disney Company. In a Tuesday notice, the SEC said it had charged Dragonchain, the Dragonchain Foundation, the Dragon Company, and their founder John Joseph Roets for
Regulation
The market capitalization of Tether (USDT) tokens has increased by nearly $2 billion since the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash. The Office of Foreign Asset Control essentially barred Americans from using Tornado Cash on Aug. 8, blacklisting 44 USD Coin (USDC) and Ether (ETH) addresses connected to the service to
Crypto exchange Huobi Global announced the suspension of derivatives trading in New Zealand. The statement from Huobi said the new restrictions against derivative offers are in light of compliance with local regulations. Users in New Zealand will no longer have access to derivative trading services, which include coin-margined futures and swaps, USDT-margined contracts, options and
The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued sanctions against Tornado Cash this month, marking its first action against a decentralized finance (mixer in what may prove to be a watershed moment for DeFi regulation. A lack of response and regulatory preparation from the industry is perhaps unsurprising of a mindset honed outside
Among a rich range of anxieties both for the crypto industry and the global economy at large, the summer of 2022 will be remembered as the time when stablecoins proved themselves to be not so stable and thus came into the focus of regulators’ attention. The shock of the TerraUSD (UST) depegging in May opened
Singapore-based crypto lending platform Hodlnaut is seeking judicial management to manage its ongoing liquidity crisis and avoid the forced liquidation of assets in the current bear market. The crypto lender informed its users in a Tuesday announcement that they have applied to the Singapore High Court to be placed under judicial management. The firm said: “We are aiming
South Korean banks are being investigated for their role in facilitating $6.5 billion in suspicious overseas remittances which have been tied to companies arbitraging cryptocurrency. According to an Aug. 15 report from Asia Times, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) ordered an investigation into South Korean banks last month after identifying a significant amount of overseas
United States-based crypto policy advocacy group Coin Center said it intended to “pursue administrative relief” for individuals affected by Tornado Cash sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, or OFAC. In a Monday blog post, Coin Center executive director Jerry Brito and director of research Peter Van Valkenburgh alleged OFAC “overstepped
The United States Federal Reserve Board announced Monday that it had finalized its guidelines for the factors reserve banks are to consider when reviewing requests for Federal Reserve accounts and payment services. The guidelines create a three-tiered review framework with the level of due diligence to be provided, depending on the applicant’s risk level. Guidelines
Summer is still on, harvesting the fresh names for its list of the crypto companies in deep trouble. This time, the trouble came not from the market or management but from the United States Treasury Department. The regulator has added more than 40 cryptocurrency addresses allegedly connected to crypto mixer Tornado Cash to the Specially
The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), the council of provincial and territorial securities regulators, announced Monday that crypto trading platforms will be expected to provide a preregistration undertaking to their principal regulators as they take steps to comply fully with securities regulation. Two platforms, Crypto.com and the Canadian platform Coinsquare Capital Markets, have already filed those undertakings.
The Astana Financial Services Authority, or AFSA, an independent financial regulator in Kazakhstan, has taken a step towards licensing major cryptocurrency exchange Binance to operate in the country. In a Monday announcement, AFSA said it had granted in-principle approval toward Binance operating as a digital asset trading facility and providing custody services in the Astana
The Twitter exchange between WazirX co-founder Nischal Shetty and Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao over the ownership of the Indian crypto exchange grabbed a lot of headlines in the first week of August. WazirX was reportedly acquired by Binance in 2019, and ever since then, the Indian crypto exchange has been referred to as “Binance-owned”;
Cryptocurrency exchange Zipmex has gotten a chance to sort out liquidity issues as a court in Singapore has granted the firm with more than three months of creditor protection. Singapore’s High Court has ruled to give each of the five Zipmex entities a moratorium until Dec. 2, 2022 to come up with a restructuring plan,
Clamping down on crypto applications that “mess with the primal forces of regulation” is necessary, says Shark Tank host and millionaire venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, who argued that Tornado Cash and similar services are preventing real institutional capital from coming into the space. In a discussion on Crypto Banter on Saturday, O’Leary, also known as
For Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin (BTC), the motivation to create a new payment ecosystem from scratch in 2009 stemmed from the economic chaos caused by the banking sector’s over-exuberant and risky lending practices mixed accompanied by the bursting of the housing bubbles in many countries at the time. “And who do you think
Typically there are macroeconomic factors that a country is looking to manage through the adoption of a currency as legal tender. In order to make Bitcoin legal tender, these factors should coincide with visionary leadership. Despite that, central banks are getting into digital currencies. There are countries with more fundamental problems that just a digital
As the global Web3 ecosystem continued to evolve at a staggering pace, so have the various use cases associated with this niche. In a striking new development, a high-ranking Singaporean government minister recently noted that legal marriage proceedings, court case disputes, and government services could one day be conducted using Metaverse platforms. While delivering a
In an article I wrote for Cointelegraph, I commented on how the European Union has moved forward to regulate the crypto-asset market through Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) and Transfer of Funds Regulation (ToFR). With this subject as a background, I had the privilege of interviewing one of the people who knows the most about regulating
India’s Directorate of Enforcement (ED) announced Friday that it has frozen the financial accounts of Bengaluru-based financial services company Yellow Tune Technologies, some of which were held by Flipvolt crypto exchange, the Indian branch of Singaporean Vauld. The move is linked to an ongoing investigation into money laundering by China-linked instant loan companies. This is