It is difficult to pinpoint any specific reason for the sell-off, but analysts believe that the confusion arising from the alleged write-down of SpaceX’s $373 million i Bitcoin holdings may have been one of the potential triggers. Continue Reading on Coin Telegraph More
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The potential legal dispute arises from letters sent by Checkout.com to Binance on Aug. 9 and Aug. 11. According to a Forbes report, Guillaume Pousaz, CEO of Checkout.com, ended the relationship with Binance, citing “reports of regulators actions and orders in relevant jurisdictions,” along with concerns about Anti-Money Laundering, sanctions and compliance controls.Continue Reading on Coin Telegraph More
BTC was hovering around $27,677 on Aug. 17 at 9:30 pm UTC time before tumbling just over 8% to $25,409, according to Coinmarketcap.Continue Reading on Coin Telegraph More
By 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT), the price of the digital token had fallen by 7.60% to $26,331. Despite the decline, Bitcoin’s price represents a slight recovery after it dipped below $26,000 on Thursday.Among a number of factors cited by analysts, soaring bond yields and subsequent investor nervousness around riskier assets have taken their toll on Bitcoin. It is now trading hands well below its annual high of $31,818 recorded in July.Sentiment was also dented by a report in the Wall Street Journal that said that SpaceX, billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket company, had written down the value of Bitcoin it owns by $373 million last year and in 2021 and had sold the cryptocurrency. Musk has become something of a fixture in the crypto community, often posting on social media about the market for digital assets over recent years.Analysts have told media outlets that fears over a sputtering post-pandemic recovery in China and thin trading volumes may be factoring into the moves in Bitcoin as well. More
In a lengthy Twitter thread, Samourai claims the educational project is designed to make users forget the recent announcement with chain surveillance firms to create “compliant coinjoin.”Samourai has not answered the request for sources about Wasabi developing a compliant coinjoin by press time.Samourai also pointed to the PlusToken ponzi scheme as bad actors, having purportedly seen their mixing deanonymized “due to broken Wasabi mixing protocol.”In its analysis of the PlustToken scam, OXT Research detected an “abnormally high address reuse among Wasabi mixer outputs” which “led to the discovery of an active Sybil attack on the Wasabi mixer.” Furthermore, “the source of the Sybil attack traced back to addresses reportedly controlled by PlusToken.”A Sybil attack uses a node to operate many fake identities — called Sybil identities — simultaneously in a peer-to-peer network such as a blockchain. The aim is usually to influence the network or gain intelligence on its participants.Similarly, OXT Research’s analysis of the North Korean Lazarus Group and deanonymization of laundered funds also cited the poor quality of Wasabi’s CoinJoin implementation, as did the research analyzing the KuCoin hack and the Hydra deep web black market. The last two cases cited were about Blender, a centralized frontend to Wasabi.While the findings are interesting, one cannot help but notice that they all come from one source, making collusion more likely. Moreover, OXT Research pointed out back in 2021 that it works with Samourai “developers to test and create techniques that mitigate the privacy shortcomings,” so the two parties have close ties.Samourai further claims that it had discovered that Wasabi’s coin selection algorithm for Conjoin was deterministic and predictable in 2020 — a flaw nullifying all anonymity gained. Wasabi reportedly refuted the claim and silently patched later.The conflict between Samourai Wallet and Wasabi Wallet is not a new one. Samourai has been raising concerns over alleged privacy shortcomings in Wasabi Wallet’s Coinjoin implementation as far as 2019 — and possibly much earlier.In a 2020 comment on the conflict between the two companies, Mário Havel, co-founder of crypto-and-privacy non-profit Paralelni Polis, said that “there were many clashes in the past, more or less reasonable, but generally, Samourai research does a good and interesting job for the privacy ecosystem of Bitcoin.”Unfortunately, the accusations moved by Samourai against Wasabi usually require a significant amount of precise technical knowledge and research to be understood and even more to be proven or disproven. For this reason, waiting for expert analysis and commentary is the best way to shed light on the controversy.This article was originally published on Crypto.news More
The amount of Bitcoin liquidation was the highest for a single day since the June 2022 market upheaval.The Wall Street Journal reported, citing documents, that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has sold off its Bitcoin assets after writing down $373 million. The journal report does not specify when SpaceX sold its Bitcoin, so this remains speculation.This implies that whales were very active in this drop, as Santiment noted in a tweet.Santiment wrote in a graphic attached to its tweet that “Bitcoin whale transactions soared to a month high today, and they started before the big drop. The amount of BTC $1 million transactions began surging before and during the dump down below $26,600.”The on-chain data platform stated this in a tweet: “The dust has far from settled after crypto markets had one of its sharpest price drops of 2023. We are seeing a large amount of $1 million+ BTC transactions, indicating whales are very active on this dump. But the number of large wallets is not falling.”Santiment noted that the number of addresses holding over 10 remained high despite the dump.At the time of writing, Bitcoin remains down 7.27% in the last 24 hours to $26,431. Currently, Bitcoin traders are concentrating on the $25,000 mark, below which options positioning signals another wave of liquidations may occur.This article was originally published on U.Today More
Kazakhstan Regulatory ChangesTo ensure legal compliance, the Company decided to temporarily shut down approximately 2.0 Exahash/s of its mining computing power in Kazakhstan since July 2023, subsequently to the Rules for Licensing of Digital Mining Activities (the “Rules”) became effective in Kazakhstan.The Rules were released by The Ministry of Digital Development, Innovations and Aerospace Industry of the Republic of Kazakhstan to implement Law No. 193-VII on Digital Assets in the Republic of Kazakhstan (the “Law”), which came into effect in April and set a legal framework for governing the mining of cryptocurrency within the country. Under the Law and Rules, persons engaged in the mining of cryptocurrencies must first obtain a specialized license.With a hope to resume mining operations upon receipt of approval, the Company has been working actively to obtain a Type II license for mining hardware owners since early July. However, it must wait for one of its local partners to obtain its Type I license for mining infrastructure possessors before the Company can complete its license application. This local partner has applied for a license but its application remains pending. The Company now anticipates a continued suspension of its mining operations in Kazakhstan into the third quarter of 2023, resulting in an expected reduction in bitcoin generation. The computing power shutdown consists of approximately 50% of the Company’s total installed computing power in Central Asia and North America, which totaled 4.0 Exahash/s at the end of the first quarter of 2023. The Company has been monitoring potential policy changes and their impact in Kazakhstan as early as 2021. As mentioned in the Company’s third quarter of 2021 earnings call, the Company was hopeful that Kazakhstan’s then-forthcoming regulations on cryptocurrency mining would bring about a period of sustainable cryptocurrency development in the country. At the same time, to better manage its geographic exposure, the Company has been building out its global mining operations outside Kazakhstan.The Company and its local mining partners are actively pursuing the necessary licenses. While the Company remains optimistic about being able to obtain such licenses and continue its Kazakhstan mining operations in the future, as of now, it has yet to receive said license. We are also exploring avenues to sustain our collaboration with local miners by adjusting our present cooperation arrangements to align with both the Law and the Rules.Dispute Relating to Joint Mining Activities in the U.S.On August 3, 2023, Canaan U.S. Inc., an operating subsidiary of the Company (“Canaan US”), participated in a mediation with a partner that provides hosting and management services for cryptocurrency mining machines, after the partner breached the parties’ Joint Mining Agreement (the “Agreement”) at a U.S.-based mining farm. Per the Agreement, mediation was mandatory before the parties can proceed to arbitration. Canaan US seeks to recover for, among other things: (i) the partner’s failure to install 13,000 of Canaan US’s cryptocurrency mining machines, of which we have also discovered that a small number were returned damaged; (ii) the partner’s failure to refund Canaan US’s $1.25 million deposit; (iii) the partner’s failure to cause the continued operation of another 13,000 cryptocurrency mining machines that were installed, which have yet to be returned; (iv) the partner’s failure to pay Canaan US a substantial amount of the Bitcoin profits; (v) the partner, in violation of the agreement, attempted to impose substantial off-contractual operating fees on Canaan US; and (vi) the partner’s failure to cause the selection of a mining pool provider satisfactory to Canaan US and to seek Canaan US’s consent as to the selection of the mining pool provider. Because no settlement was reached at the mediation, Canaan US intends to file an arbitration demand and proceed to arbitrate the parties’ dispute.The challenges outlined above are anticipated to substantially affect the Company’s operational mining computing power starting in the third quarter of 2023. We recognize that operating in a dynamic market environment comes with its share of uncertainties. Navigating the complex landscape of varied legal frameworks across countries, coupled with unpredictability stemming from collaborating with partners in an evolving market, underscores the inherent operational challenges we aim to address. Such risks are indeed at the forefront of our operational strategy, which we are actively working to improve so that we may proactively solve and manage these challenges. More
