The bitcoin price has plunged to lows not seen for more than two years, with the $2 trillion crypto crash triggering a stark global financial crisis warning and fears swirling around FTX rival Binance....
iBitHub is a Blockchain Technology, cloned from Litecoin. iBH is a Pure-Passion-Project technology that has been running since 2018. Most projects have raised Millions or even Billions from investors, but iBH is like Bitcoin, where Satoshi Nakamoto did not have an ICO. This puts iBH in a different category than many cryptocurrency projects. Technology is all about Passion. The passion for research and to find solutions that are different, yet efficient, simple to use, and cheap. Cost and necessities can be one of the main drives for Innovation. This is when existing solutions are improved to slash costs or make the user experience better. When Satoshi was Forced to create Bitcoin, he did it out of Passion. His aim was to solve a problem: To cut out banks and to empower people to be their own bank as the world’s banking system caved in at the height of the Great Financial Crisis. The same passion is behind iBitHub. The iBitHub project is formed by a dedicated team based in the US. Formed by blockchain enthusiasts, the project complies with relevant laws and didn’t carry out an ICO for funding. Their aim is to drive adoption in the United States and help people understand the benefits of distributed ledger technology. Specifically, iBitHub is registered, complying with the rules and regulations set out by the state of Wyoming. This makes iBH, the native currency of the iBitHub blockchain, a true United States Digital Currency.
The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc. If Bitcoin catches on in a big way, these are things we’ll want to explore in the future, but they all had to be designed at the beginning to make sure they would be possible later.
by PRASHANT JHA - COINTELEGRAPHThe recent movement of funds from Alameda wallets just days after Sam Bankman Fried was released on bail raised many eyebrows about the timing. The crypto wallets associated with now-bankrupt trading firm Alameda Research, the sister company of FTX, were seen transferring out funds just days after the former CEO Sam Bankman Fried was released on a $250 million bond. The transfer of funds from Alameda wallets raised community curiosity, but more than that, the way in which these funds were transferred grabbed the community’s attention. The Alameda wallet was found to be swapping bits of ERC-20s for Ether, and then the ETH and USDT were funneled through instant exchangers and mixers...
By Cheyenne Ligon - Coindesk.comExperts have suggested the digital fingerprints left by the alleged hacker points to an inside job The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has reportedly launched a criminal probe into the alleged hack that drained nearly $400 million out of FTX-controlled wallets the night the Bahamas-based exchange filed for bankruptcy. Bloomberg first reported the news on Tuesday, citing persons familiar with the case. Between Nov. 11 and the early hours of Nov. 12, massive outflows of cryptocurrency began moving out of FTX and FTX US’s wallets. Multiple FTX employees told Twitter sleuth ZachXBT that they did not recognize the transfers. Over an hour after the suspected hack began, FTX General Counsel Ryne Miller tweeted that his company was “investigating abnormalities with wallet movements” and later pinned a message in FTX’s official Telegram support channel: “FTX has been hacked. FTX apps are malware. Delete them. Chat is open. Don’t go on FTX site as it might download Trojans.” The official FTX Twitter account remained silent throughout the pandemonium. In the afternoon of Nov. 12, FTX CEO John Jay Ray III confirmed the hack through a statement posted via Miller’s Twitter account, and said they were in contact with law enforcement. The criminal investigation is separate from the fraud case against disgraced former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, according to the Bloomberg report, which also said authorities have been able to freeze a portion of the stolen funds. Blockchain experts have pointed to several clues that the hacker was an FTX insider, including the simultaneous hacks of the FTX and FTX US websites, the suspect’s access to multiple cold wallets, and the use of a personal Kraken account to withdraw gas fees for at least one transaction.
by John Hyatt - Forbes Staff
by LUC OLINGA - TheStreet.comThis year was a dark streak for the crypto industry, which has certainly been shaken up but should use this as an opportunity to mature. When the subject is cryptocurrencies, bitcoin usually dominates. The most popular of the digital currencies has often been confused by the general public as the one representing the entire cryptocurrency industry. Since its creation by one or more anonymous people in 2009, bitcoin has always been assigned the leading role. Cryptocurrency fans see the most prominent cryptocurrency as a way to financial independence and freedom from the dictates of central banks and politicians. They therefore assume that nothing will stop its rise. No surprise, then, that everything has always revolved around that digital currency, the price of which touched an all-time high of $69,044.77 in November 2021. But this year, bitcoin played a supporting role in the crypto movie. Some experts would even call bitcoin an extra, even as its value lost about three-quarters from its record high. Luna and UST Went Down, Hard That's because the real star of the crypto industry in 2022 was bankruptcy. The fledgling financial-services industry powered by blockchain technology has been rocked by an avalanche of major corporate bankruptcies. These failures have come right alongside the cryptocurrency market's loss of nearly $2.2 trillion from its record $3 trillion reached in November 2021. It all started on May 9, when sister cryptocurrencies Luna and UST, or TerraUSD, collapsed. The two tokens crashed after UST lost its peg to the dollar, the foundation qualifying it as a stablecoin. Such cryptocurrencies are tied to more stable assets, like the U.S. dollar or gold. From May 9 to May 13, at least $55 billion of market cap disappeared, causing many investors to sustain colossal losses. UST was an algorithmic stablecoin, which was backed not by dollar reserves but rather by its sister asset, Luna. Algorithmic stablecoins are different from centralized alternatives like tether or USD coin, which are backed by actual dollars or equivalent assets stored in a bank. This disaster caused a credit crunch that proved catastrophic for many firms, including hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, or 3AC, which found itself unable to honor its payments to crypto lenders Celsius Network and Voyager Digital. 3AC was forced into liquidation. Celsius and Voyager filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. TerraUSD's fall led to investigations in the U.S. and South Korea, and revived calls for stricter regulation of stablecoins. Institutional investors prize these cryptos because they are designed to be less volatile than other coins and to enable funds to move easily within the crypto ecosystem. Investors Lost Massive Amounts in Crypto Crash The depegging of Terra’s UST coin and the collapse of Celsius and 3AC a few weeks later drove massive losses for investors: $20.5 billion in the case of UST and $33 billion in the case of Celsius and 3AC, according to blockchain security firm Chainalysis. This crisis mainly revealed the links and exposure of crypto firms to each other, like the banks during the financial crisis of 2008. The other lesson was the lack of transparency of centralized crypto companies, which are mostly unregulated. This opacity created another situation that would cause the overnight implosion of FTX a few months later. This past summer, the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its sister company, Alameda Research, a hedge fund that also serves as a trading platform, became the companies through which their founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, took advantage of the crisis of confidence in the crypto industry. He consolidated power and became the new strongman of the crypto space. Bankman-Fried used the two companies to save struggling firms, but, as would come clear later, some of these deals were questionable, such as the one with lender BlockFi. The Details of the FTX Debacle Less than three months later, the Bankman-Fried empire went bankrupt. Regulators accused the former trader of defrauding and conspiring to defraud FTX clients and investors. It will take time to determine exactly what happened, but FTX customer funds appear to have been comingled with Alameda's and were illegally used in high-risk transactions. Bankman-Fried has refuted the allegations of fraud and denied having intended to defraud. For many insiders, the crypto exchanges' collapse is due to a lack of transparency and closely held, centralized, reckless power. According to Chainalysis, the downfall has caused $9 billion of losses for FTX clients, but this number doesn't take into account potential losses for people who deposited their funds with the exchange. The likelihood of these investors recovering them is unclear. As 2023 approaches, these bankruptcies have thrown a shadow of suspicion on the entire crypto industry, which must now learn lessons from the failures and mature. Its survival depends on it.
By Ritu Lavania - CoinEdition.com The blockchain risk monitoring firm Solidus Labs released the 2022 Rug Pull report. The report claimed since September 2020, nearly two million investors have been scammed. As of 1 December 2022, 117,629 token scams were carried out in 2022, noted the report. The blockchain risk monitoring firm Solidus Labs has released the 2022 Rug Pull report which reveals that an average of 350 crypto scam tokens were developed per day, to defraud millions of investors. Since September 2020, nearly two million investors have become victims of these scams. However, this figure is relatively smaller than the 1.8 million users who were affected by the bankruptcy of FTX, Celsius, or Voyager Digital. As of 1 December 2022, 117,629 token scams were carried out in 2022, which is 41% more than what was the last year with only 83,400 scam tokens. With 12% of BNB’s native BEP-20 tokens being fraudulent, BNB Chain witnessed the greatest number of scam tokens. The Ethereum network stood second, with 8% of its native ERC-20 tokens being forged. As per the report, the $3.3 million Squid Game [SQUID] token scam was the biggest honeypot scam. A honeypot scam is one that has a smart contract that does not allow buyers to resell. The report further revealed that since September 2020, Ether [ETH] tokens worth $11 billion were stolen from scam tokens through 153 centralized exchanges (CEX). Note that these exchanges are supervised by US regulators. In the analyzed frame of time, nearly $4 billion dollars flowed to the United States’ CEXes. This amount was approximately twice that of the second-most vulnerable CEX jurisdiction, the Bahamas. Recently, US regulators had charged social media influencers of Twitter and Discord in an alleged $100 million “pump and dump” scheme.
by Sindhu Sundar - insider@insider.comCaroline Ellison, Alameda's ex-CEO, is out on a $250,000 bond after pleading guilty in the FTX case. She reportedly expressed contrition in court, saying, "I knew that it was wrong." Cooperators may give up a high level of autonomy in hopes of a lighter sentence, legal experts said. Caroline Ellison's world is about to get a whole lot smaller since the heady days of working and living with a group of colleagues — including her ex-boyfriend, FTX's former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried — in the Bahamas. Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra 128 GB In Phantom Black With Installment Ad Verizon Wireless Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra 128 GB In Phantom Black With Installment The plea deals thatEllison, who was the CEO of Bankman-Fried's trading firm Alameda Research, and FTX cofounder Gary Wang have struck with federal prosecutors in New York free them each on $250,000 bonds. At a hearing on Dec. 19, before those plea deals were made public, Ellison told the New York federal court overseeing the FTX criminal cases that she is "truly sorry" and that she "knew that it was wrong," the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. She also said she knew FTX essentially allowed Alameda to borrow customer funds, according to Bloomberg. "I understood that if Alameda's FTX accounts had significant negative balances in any particular currency, it meant that Alameda was borrowing funds that FTX's customers had deposited on the exchange," according to a transcript of the hearing cited by Bloomberg. Ellison and Wang's plea deals don't involve the same rigid surveillance imposed on Bankman-Fried, who left a New York federal court on Thursday on a $250 million bail and wearing an ankle monitor. But cooperators like Ellison may still be fairly tethered to prosecutors and alienated from former circles while the government builds its case against Bankman-Fried. For instance, Ellison's deal all but forbids her from talking about the events surrounding FTX and Alameda without prosecutors' permission, and limits her travel to within the continental US. Attorneys for Ellison and others in the web of FTX and Alameda have most likely also advised their clients against communicating with one another during the US government's ongoing criminal investigation, white-collar experts told Insider. Related video: Sam Bankman-Fried posts $4 million equity for release on $250 million bond (CNBC) >> HE'S GOT AN ANKLE BRACELET ON WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE TERMS OF Sam Bankman-Fried posts $4 million equity for release on $250 million bond "Her day-to-day has to have dramatically changed based on these charges and her status as a cooperator," said Nancy DePodesta, who co-chairs the white-collar defense practice at Saul Ewing LLP and who was previously a federal prosecutor in Chicago. "Yes, she's still free to go about life, so to speak, with certain restrictions, of course," DePodesta added. "But her former colleagues are going to shy away from her by virtue of the fact that she is cooperating." An attorney for Ellison didn't respond to requests for comment on Thursday. Ellison has pleaded guilty to seven counts against her in a charging document called an information, which prosecutors unveiled this week. The government has portrayed Ellison and Wang as active henchmen in Bankman-Fried's alleged scheme to use FTX customer funds to bring money into his separate firm Alameda, according to a civil complaint filed on Wednesday by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The rise and fall of FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, who became a crypto billionaire in just 4 years — and lost most of his wealth in a single day Full screen 1 of 45 Photos in Gallery©Getty Images The rise and fall of FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, who went from being a crypto billionaire to being arrested and charged with fraud Sam Bankman-Fried catapulted into a crypto billionaire, but it took just one day for most of his fortune to be wiped out. The co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and Alameda Research saw his net worth plummet from nearly $16 billion to $1 billion. Bankman-Fried, also known as SBF, was arrested in the Bahamas, and is now facing several legal proceedings. Just months ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was a 30-year-old with a mop of brown hair and enough clout to go by his initials, SBF. He had a cryptocurrency exchange called FTX, a trading firm called Alameda Research, and $15.6 billion to his name, according to estimates from Bloomberg. He had catapulted into one of the biggest names in crypto in a matter of four years and was setting his sights on mainstream finance. Now, all he has left are his initials, and several legal proceedings ahead of him. Bankman-Fried was arrested Monday by Bahamian authorities at the US government's request, "based on a sealed indictment" that was filed by the US Attorney's Office Southern District of New York, the office tweeted. Shortly after his arrest, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had "authorized separate charges relating to his violations of securities laws." On November 11, FTX announced Bankman-Fried was resigning as CEO and would be replaced by John J. Ray III. In addition, FTX, Alameda Research, and roughly 130 affiliated companies have begun Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. The collapse of Bankman-Fried's fortune has loomed for months. Reports have been circulating this year that FTX was on a "shaky financial foundations" amidst larger instabilities in the global crypto market, according to The New York Times. Bankman-Fried spoke to Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit on November 30, where he said he didn't "personally think that" when Sorkin asked if he was worried about being held criminally liable for the collapse of FTX. He said he was more focused on helping FTX's millions of customers and stakeholders who lost money from the exchange. Here's how SBF went from crypto's poster child to its greatest cautionary tale: See More The criminal counts against Ellison, including for wire fraud and conspiracy, mirror those against Bankman-Fried. But unlike his charges, hers weren't a product of a grand jury indictment, as her cooperation and plea relieved prosecutors of taking that step. The counts against Ellison carry a maximum penalty of 110 years, if the sentences for each were to be stacked up. But her cooperation could secure her a much lighter sentence, perhaps even no jail time at all, depending on how useful prosecutors find her help, and what the judge decides. "It would be nothing close to what they'd be exposed to if they were to go to trial," said Andrey Spektor, a white collar partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP and former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn. Spektor was referring to the kinds of sentences that cooperators can expect. But there's a long road ahead. Bankman-Fried's own proceedings in the US are just beginning, and he is expected to enter his plea on Jan. 3. Cooperators like Ellison and Wang typically remain behind the scenes. They won't be sentenced until after prosecutors unveil much more of their investigation and Bankman-Fried's own fate becomes clearer. In the meantime, Ellison and Wang would be expected to continue working with investigators. "Even though we might not be seeing her in court any time soon, prosecutors are likely to be working with her insofar as they believe she has more information that would help them," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
With what mingled joy and sorrow do I take up the pen to write to my dearest friend! Oh, what a change between to-day and yesterday! Now I am friendless and alone...
The bitcoin price has plunged to lows not seen for more than two years, with the $2 trillion crypto crash triggering a stark global financial crisis warning and fears swirling around FTX rival Binance....
As disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried faces charges he defrauded investors of billions of dollars, his wide-ranging political campaign contributions to politicians...
arlier this week, Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder and CEO of crypto exchange Coinbase, shared his thoughts on crypto regulation in the U.S. In a blog post published on 19 December 2022, Armstrong said that, in the wake of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, the U.S. and other major jurisdictions needed...
A look at some of the biggest disappointments in the crypto space from this year as the industry readies itself for better things to come. 2022 has been a bumpy year for the cryptocurrency market, with one of the worst bear markets on record and the downfall of some major platforms within the space....