Today's news tips:
1. US regulators have removed the "reputation risk" assessment clause, which will ease the problem of the crypto industry being "disconnected" by banks
2. The U.S. Treasury Department officially lifts sanctions on Tornado Cash
3. Germany's BaFin halts Ethena's stablecoin USDe token issuance business, citing major compliance deficiencies
4. Bloomberg: The U.S. House Financial Services Committee is expected to review the draft stablecoin legislation on April 2
5. Zoth lost $8.32 million in theft, the attacker’s funds came from ChangeNOW
6.Tether CEO: Negotiating with one of the Big Four accounting firms on reserve audits
7. AUCTION is suspected to have been pulled to a new high by a certain whale/institution and then fell back. The whale/institution currently holds 20% of the total tokens.
8. Crypto VC Haun Ventures plans to raise $1 billion for two new funds
Regulatory/Macro
According to reporter Eleanor Terrett, one of the key factors that led to "debanking" in the past was that regulators required banks to consider so-called "reputational risk" when assessing whether customers can obtain financial services. The Federal Reserve once instructed employees in an internal manual to pay attention to whether bank executives made "controversial remarks", but Federal Reserve Chairman Powell promised to delete the clause last month.
The latest developments show that the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has officially removed "reputation risk" from its bank inspection standards, emphasizing that it will focus on more transparent risk areas in the future.
According to the announcement of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), its Crypto Task Force held the first roundtable meeting of the "Spring Crypto Regulatory Sprint" series at its Washington headquarters at 13:00 Eastern Time on March 21, with the theme of "How did we get to this point and how will we get out of the predicament - defining securities attributes". The meeting will be broadcast live to the public through the SEC official website.
The meeting focused on whether crypto assets constitute securities and on clarifying the regulatory path. Guests included general counsel from major law firms and institutions such as a16z, Delphi Ventures, Cooley, and BakerHostetler, as well as academics, regulators, venture capital, and policy advocates. Former SEC Commissioner Troy Paredes served as moderator.
The U.S. Treasury Department officially lifts sanctions on Tornado Cash
According to an announcement by the U.S. Treasury Department, OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) has removed Tornado Cash and its related Ethereum addresses from the sanctions list (SDN List), ending the economic sanctions on the privacy mixing protocol since August 2022. This decision is based on the government's review of the applicability of financial sanctions in the evolving technological and legal environment.
However, the Treasury Department still emphasized that it will continue to crack down on North Korean government-sponsored hacker groups and their illegal activities using crypto assets, and remain highly vigilant about all crypto transactions that may be involved in malicious behavior.
According to an announcement on BaFin's official website, the German Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin has stopped Ethena GmbH's new business of issuing USDe stablecoins in Germany on the grounds that it had major organizational deficiencies and compliance violations in the MiCAR licensing process, including improper asset reserve management and failure to meet capital requirements.
BaFin has taken the following measures: freezing Ethena GmbH’s asset reserves, restricting management’s disposal rights over assets, shutting down relevant functions on its official website, and appointing specialists to supervise the implementation. In addition, BaFin also suspects that Ethena GmbH illegally publicly sold sUSDe security tokens without providing the necessary prospectus.
Currently, Ethena GmbH customers are temporarily unable to redeem USDe tokens, but secondary market trading is not restricted. As of now, there are about 5.4 billion USDe tokens in circulation. BaFin will continue to evaluate whether to completely reject its compliance license application under MiCAR.
According to Ethena’s official statement, Germany’s BaFin has notified its Frankfurt-based entity Ethena GmbH that its MiCAR compliance application will not be approved, but the decision does not affect USDe’s current exchange listing and minting and redemption services through the British Virgin Islands entity Ethena (BVI) Limited.
Ethena emphasized that USDe is still fully asset-backed and has not been "frozen". Other regulatory paths will be evaluated in the future, and the relevant terms of service will be revised within the next week to reflect the current changes. This incident does not affect the normal use process of most users.
Market News: Fidelity Solana Fund has been registered in Delaware, USA
According to market news, Fidelity Solana Fund (FIDELITY SOLANA FUND) has been registered in Delaware, USA.
According to Bloomberg, the U.S. House Financial Services Committee is expected to review the draft stablecoin legislation on April 2. Arkansas Chairman French Hill said last week that a well-regulated stablecoin market would "strengthen the dominance of the dollar, modernize our payment infrastructure, and promote the popularization of financial services without excessive government intervention." But critics such as Maxine Waters, the Democratic leader of the House committee, and Elizabeth Warren of the Senate Banking Committee believe that the bill does not go far enough to protect consumers and advocate a ban on technology companies from issuing stablecoins and other reforms. Critics also worry that if stablecoins fail, there will be a lack of insurance backing like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC); while bankers warn that stablecoins could siphon off deposits and reduce credit channels.
Market News: Fidelity to launch tokenized fund investing in U.S. Treasury bonds
According to Aggr News, Fidelity will launch a tokenized fund that invests in U.S. Treasuries to compete with BlackRock’s BUIDL.
Earlier news revealed that BlackRock’s BUIDL became the first on-chain fund with a management scale of over US$1 billion.
Viewpoint
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce: Crypto startups should be allowed to raise funds using NFTs
Hester Peirce, head of the U.S. SEC’s cryptocurrency task force, said that cryptocurrency projects like Stoner Cats (which use NFTs as a fundraising mechanism to fund their work) should be exempt from securities regulation and may soon get this clarity from regulators.
At the SEC's first cryptocurrency roundtable, Peirce (who led the SEC's work with acting SEC Chairman Mark Uyeda after Gary Gensler resigned) said that NFTs could be the next asset class the agency addresses through similar exemption statements. She noted that it would be "very helpful" for the industry if the SEC could provide a reference framework for NFT issuers. However, not all projects containing NFTs are automatically exempt from regulation, and NFTs that are structurally securities are still subject to regulatory constraints.
Earlier news said that the U.S. SEC is about to hold a roundtable meeting on crypto asset regulation, focusing on the definition of "securities attributes".
Project News
GoPlus completes KYB verification, GPS buyback program to start soon
According to the announcement of GoPlus Security, the repurchase of GPS tokens was delayed due to the need to open a Binance corporate account. At present, its parent company has completed the corporate identity verification (KYB) and the repurchase procedure is about to start. Previously, the community questioned the progress of the process due to the failure to communicate in time. GoPlus promised to strengthen information transparency in the future and simultaneously promote the development of cross-chain assets and product functions. The relevant results will be announced in one week.
According to Zoth's official announcement, its system has recently suffered a security attack. The team has launched an emergency investigation and is coordinating with partners to deal with it. Preliminary analysis points to permission leakage, which led to malicious replacement of the contract. Zoth promises to publish a detailed report as soon as possible and take remedial measures. Users should avoid interacting with the contract and pay close attention to subsequent updates.
Zoth theft loss reached $8.32 million, the attacker's funds came from ChangeNOW
Yu Xian, the founder of SlowMist, tweeted that the Zoth platform suffered a loss of approximately $8.5 million due to the leakage of the administrator's private key and the replacement of the core logic contract with a malicious contract .
According to MistTrack, Zoth suffered a total loss of about $8.32 million from the attack, and the stolen funds are now located at the address 0x7b0c…60cf. Tracking shows that the attacker's initial funding source was the ChangeNOW platform address 0x3b33…01e5.
Binance Alpha now supports AFT, BNB Card, Mubarakah, and Plume
The Binance Alpha page shows that Binance Alpha has newly launched AIFlow Token (AFT), BNB Card, Mubarakah and Plume (PLUME).
Binance Alpha adds Tell A Tale (TAT) and quq (quq)
The Binance Alpha page shows that Binance Alpha has newly launched Tell A Tale (TAT) and quq (quq).
Binance will launch BRUSDT and PLUMEUSDT perpetual contracts
According to the Binance announcement, the platform will launch the BRUSDT perpetual contract at 20:45 Beijing time on March 21, and the PLUMEUSDT perpetual contract at 20:50, both supporting a maximum leverage of 25 times.
Strategy increases STRF preferred stock offering to $722.5 million to purchase Bitcoin
According to the official announcement, Strategy increased the issuance scale of STRF Series A perpetual preferred shares from US$500 million to US$722.5 million, with an issue price of US$85 per share and an annual interest rate of 10%. It is expected to be settled on March 25, with a net fundraising of approximately US$711 million, which will be used to purchase Bitcoin and general operations. STRF has a quarterly cash dividend mechanism, and overdue interest will be compounded, with the highest annualized interest rate reaching 18%. This underwriting by Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, etc. marks that Strategy continues to promote the "Bitcoin Vault" strategy.
Kaito AI founder Yu Hu purchased 1 million KAITO and pledged all of them
Yu Hu, founder of Kaito AI, said that he has purchased 1 million KAITO (about 1.4 million US dollars) with personal funds TWAP and pledged all of them, becoming the second largest KAITO pledger on the chain. He also set up an unlocking mechanism: 50% will be unlocked when the protocol revenue reaches 50 million US dollars, and the full amount will be unlocked when it reaches 100 million US dollars. Yu Hu emphasized that he is optimistic about KAITO in the long term and will share his strategy and vision tomorrow.
MegaETH announces the opening of public testnet
MegaETH announced the opening of a public testnet, supporting 20,000 TPS, 1.7Gigas/s computing power, and 10ms block time. Yesterday at 14:06 EST, MegaETH airdropped testnet ETH to over 190,000 wallets in just 15 seconds. Officials said that the network is based on the Ethereum Rollup architecture, and will introduce parallelization, JIT compilation, and optimized storage backends in the future to provide a truly real-time on-chain experience. Users can visit testnet.megaeth.com to experience the testnet application, receive test ETH, and explore native integration with MetaMask.
Farcaster launches data layer Snapchain mainnet
Farcaster, a decentralized social media protocol, has launched the mainnet of its “blockchain-like” data layer Snapchain, and has also launched an “Airdrop Offers” incentive program to reward users who actively use the decentralized social media platform. According to co-founder Varun Srinivasan, who announced the launch of the Snapchain testnet in December, the new system can handle more than 10,000 transactions per second. The system reportedly took only six months from conception to official launch.
According to previous news , Farcaster plans to launch a new data layer Snapchain in Q1 next year.
Bloomberg: Coinbase is in advanced talks to acquire derivatives exchange Deribit
According to Bloomberg, people familiar with the matter revealed that Coinbase Global Inc. is in advanced negotiations to acquire crypto derivatives exchange Deribit, the world's largest Bitcoin and Ethereum options trading platform. It is not clear whether Coinbase has reached a final agreement with Deribit.
Some of the people said the two companies have informed Dubai regulators of the talks because Deribit holds a Dubai license that any acquirer could take over. Bloomberg reported in January that Deribit could be valued at around $4 billion to $5 billion. Deribit was founded in the Netherlands in 2016 by John Jansen and Marius Jansen. Early backers of the company included crypto investment firm XBTO and growth equity investor 10T Holdings. Total trading volume at Deribit, which offers options, futures and spot trading, nearly doubled last year to nearly $1.2 trillion.
Tether CEO: In talks with one of the Big Four accounting firms on reserve audits
According to Reuters, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said that he is "working with one of the Big Four accounting firms" to push for an audit of its reserves. Tether has issued more than $140 billion worth of U.S. dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies, and currently only publishes quarterly reports on its reserves and has not yet completed a full audit. Ardoino did not disclose which of the Big Four accounting firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, Deloitte and KPMG, Tether is in talks with, and declined to say when the audit will be conducted.
According to OKX market data, AUCTION broke through $68 this morning and approached its all-time high ($73), then fell by more than 35% and is now trading at $47.7. Coinglass data shows that in the past 12 hours, AUCTION's liquidation was $14.3335 million, second only to BTC's liquidation of $11.3797 million.
According to previous news , AUCTION was suspected to have been pulled to a new high by a certain whale/institution and then fell back. The whale/institution currently holds 20% of the total tokens.
Bithumb will list Across Protocol (ACX) Korean Won trading pairs
According to the official announcement, South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb will launch the Across Protocol (ACX) Korean won trading pair, which is expected to open for trading at 5 pm (UTC+8) on March 22.
Important data
According to the monitoring of on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa, the smart money (TOP6 whales) who built a position of 6 million LAYER at an average price of $0.9559 three weeks ago was suspected to have liquidated their positions and taken profits 5 hours ago. If they sold, they would make a profit of $1.704 million.
ENA market maker Amber Group topped up $10.35 million of ENA to Binance in the past 12 hours
According to on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa, Amber Group, one of the ENA market makers, has deposited $10.35 million worth of ENA to Binance in the past 12 hours. Among them, 6.96 million tokens (US$2.5 million) were withdrawn from Binance at an average price of $0.3979 two weeks ago, and another 21.87 million tokens (US$7.85 million) were received from the Ethena Claim address between April and July 2024.
According to on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa, address 0x80F...8b932 withdrew 30 million BMT (about 5.23 million US dollars) from Binance 2 hours ago, with a position price of 0.1743 US dollars, becoming the top 1 address on the chain.
Financing
Crypto VC Haun Ventures plans to raise $1 billion for two new funds
According to people familiar with the matter, former federal prosecutor Katie Haun is preparing two new crypto funds with a total size of $1 billion, which are expected to be completed in June. $500 million will be used for the early stage and $500 million for the late stage.
Previously, Paradigm announced that it would establish a third fund of $850 million in 2024, and Haun's new fund is expected to become one of the largest funds in the crypto venture capital field in the past two years. According to sources close to Haun Ventures, based on market trends, the company's overall financing target is lower than the previous financing target, but the two new funds may be oversubscribed.
