Leading cryptocurrencies recaptured lost ground after weeks of general declines, but on the business side of things, Vauld and Voyager became the latest crypto lenders to battle insolvency after Celsius and BlockFi.
The troubled crypto lending firm Celsius reportedly used its customers’ funds worth $534 million to execute "high-risk leveraged crypto trading strategies" through a third-party asset manager, a new report by blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence says.
The report, which uses on-chain analytics, also indicates that these strategies “resulted in apparent losses of $350 million when the asset manager returned capital,” corresponding to $210 million at current prices.
Those crypto assets, as...
Along those lines, former leading crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) recently filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy, and now the company's lawyers, according to that filing, can't locate the founders, Su Zhu and Kyle Davies.
3AC's lawyer and liquidation representatives... don't know where co-founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies are. From the Friday bankruptcy filing: pic.twitter.com/oy8jHMYHFg
So, the crypto bailouts have begun, with billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried leading the vanguard. His exchange, FTX, extended a $250 million line of credit to battered crypto lender BlockFi last month. The following day, Alameda Research, another SBF company, gave Voyager Digital a $500 million line of credit. Two weeks later, FTX reached a deal to acquire BlockFi outright. Now, Alameda already owed Voyager $377 million, so this was a borrower bailing out its lender.
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has rushed to the rescue of ailing crypto firms so quickly amid the current crash that he is being compared to John Pierpont Morgan (the man himself, not the bank) in 1907. Now his rivals are taking note, and they want in on the bailout race.
Last month, FTX extended a $250 million line of credit to battered crypto lender BlockFi. One day later, Alameda Research, another SBF company, gave Voyager Digital a $500 million line of credit. Two weeks later, FTX came to terms...
Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao criticized the deal in an interview for Decrypt's gm podcast. CZ also said he's looking to do a few bailouts of his own: "Some of them are actually good deals. So I think you will see that we will be investing, bailing out, saving multiple projects."
happy to return the Voyager loan and get our collateral back whenever works for voyager
— Alameda Research (@AlamedaResearch) July 8, 2022
TRON's Justin Sun also made clear that he stands at the ready.
— H.E. Justin Sun 🅣🌞🇬🇩 (@justinsuntron) July 8, 2022
Worst. Breach. Ever.
News broke at the beginning of the week that the personal data of more than a billion people had been acquired from a Shanghai police database and offered up for 10 Bitcoin (at the time worth $202,000).
#Shanghai has suffered the largest breach of user privacy yet:
1B+ Chinese national residents. Data includes: ✅ Name ✅ Address ✅ Birthplace ✅ National ID # ✅ Mobile # ✅ All crime/case details 💰 All for 10 BTC
— 🤓Kenny 🦇🔊 (ETHcc Paris | DM me to meet up!) (@superanonymousk) July 3, 2022
According to Bloomberg, the data included everything from names and national ID numbers to mobile phone numbers and food orders. And there were timestamps for when the details were recorded.
CZ offered a technical explanation.
Apparently, this exploit happened because the gov developer wrote a tech blog on CSDN and accidentally included the credentials.
Billionaire CEOs and crypto HODLers Michael Saylor and Elon Musk both shilled their favorite coins this week. Saylor tweeted about how much value Bitcoin has gained since his company, MicroStrategy, first announced its plan to buy and HODL. (He neglected to mention he's still down on his investment.)
On August 11, 2020, @MicroStrategy embarked on its #Bitcoin Strategy, acquiring 21,454 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $250 million.
Performance since that time of BTC is +83%, $MSTR is +79%, S&P is +16%, Nasdaq is +6%, Gold is -14%, Bonds is -16%, and Silver is -33%.
And CNN Business reported that another of Elon Musk's firms, The Boring Company, will accept Dogecoin for rides on a new underground transit system in Las Vegas that allows passengers to zip around town in Teslas at about 35 mph.
A major outage of mobile and internet networks across Canada prompted TrustSwap CEO and Bitcoin advocate Jeff Kirdeikis to reflect on his favorite cryptocurrency.
The banking system, including all debit cards, are currently down in Canada. No one can make payments for anything.
In a year that has pushed crypto to unprecedented heights of cultural and political prominence, this week brought some of the cycle’s most uncanny moments yet—thanks to Donald Trump.
On Monday, just one day after the former president survived an apparent second assassination attempt, he hosted Rug Radio’s Farokh Sarmad, a prominent Crypto Twitter personality, to discuss digital assets policy at his Mar-a-Lago estate. (Disclaimer: Rug Radio is Decrypt’s sister company.)
Due to the wild timing,...
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Degens had plenty to sink their teeth into last week on Crypto Twitter, with surprise developments emerging from numerous high-profile projects in the space.
At the top of the week, Friend.tech, the once-red-hot decentralized social network with financial incentives, announced that development of the project had effectively ceased after months of flagging momentum.
Admin and ownership parameters have been set to 0x000...000 to prevent any changes to...
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
While Crypto Twitter can often be brutally black-and-white when it comes to narrativizing major events, this week saw the industry splinter into shades of gray after Telegram CEO Pavel Durov broke a days-long silence following his release from police custody in France.
In a lengthy letter to the public on this week—posted first to Telegram and then to Twitter—Durov weighed in for the first time on his arrest and indictment last week by French authori...
