Elon Musk’s X acquires a crypto license, Robinhood buys back its shares from Sam Bankman-Fried and a crypto streamer exposes his private key during a livestream. You can guess what happened next. These stories and more, this week in crypto.
Gains Erased on Regulatory Decisions
Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies experienced a rollercoaster of high volatility this week. An encouraging court decision launched the market on Tuesday, but on Thursday, the SEC released news that brought it back to earth, erasing the gains from earlier in the week. The market as a whole recorded a red candle for August, with Bitcoin down nearly 11% at month’s end.
Grayscale Decision Sends Bitcoin Rallying
The rollercoaster ride began on Tuesday, when Bitcoin’s price jumped on the news of a court ruling in favor of Grayscale Investments’s Bitcoin trust. A federal Court of Appeals overturned the SEC’s decision to reject Grayscale’s proposal to convert the trust to a spot Bitcoin ETF, unanimously repudiating the agency’s arguments for the denial. GBTC’s share price saw a 21% rally on the news, outpacing even Bitcoin’s gain of nearly 7%.
SEC Delays Bitcoin ETF Decisions
Following Tuesday’s ruling though, The SEC chose to delay its decision on all of its pending spot Bitcoin ETF applications, causing a rapid downturn in the crypto market. The SEC said it needs a “longer period” to evaluate the applications by BlackRock, Wisdom Tree Funds, Invesco, Galaxy Digital, and Valkyrie Funds and now has until the 17th of October to approve or reject those applications.
X Obtains Crypto Licenses
X’s payment branch, Twitter Payments has obtained US licenses to store, transfer, and exchange crypto on behalf of its users. Elon Musk has previously stated that he wants to turn X into the “everything app,” promising that the platform will add comprehensive communications features and will be able to conduct your entire financial world.
Robinhood Buys Back SBF’s Shares
Robinhood has agreed to buy back Sam Bankman-Fried’s stake in the company for $600 million. The 55 million Robinhood shares were owned by Bankman-Fried and FTX co-founder Gary Wang. The repurchase agreement was approved by a US court this week. Robinhood shares climbed around 3% on the news.
Binance Launches Remittance Service in LatAm
Binance has launched its new ‘Send Cash’ remittance service in Latin America that aims to ease the burden for people who wish to send funds to friends and family in the region. Users in 9 countries including Colombia, Argentina, Paraguay and Mexico – will be able to send funds directly to bank accounts without the cost of having to employ third party intermediaries.
US Judge: ETH is a Commodity
A US District judge has called Ether a commodity while throwing out a lawsuit against decentralized exchange, Uniswap. Judge Katherine Polk Failla made the distinction between securities and commodities part of her reasoning for dismissing the case, negating the argument that Uniswap’s token sales were subject to the Exchange Act.
Crypto Streamer Exposes Private Key
Ivan Bianco, better known as Brazilian crypto streamer Fraternidade Crypto exposed his private key during a live stream while attempting to access his game passwords, which were unfortunately stored in the same file as his MetaMask wallet’s seed phrase. Bianco quickly closed the livestream and tried to move the funds to a different wallet, but it was too late: a viewer had already gained access and stole 86,000 MATIC tokens, worth nearly $50,000 at the time.
That’s what’s happened this week in crypto, see you next week.