Etiket arşivi: U.s.

Crypto.com Overtakes Coinbase to Dominate North American Crypto Trading, Data Shows

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Digital asset trading on Crypto.com has exploded this year, pushing the crypto exchange’s volumes in North America well ahead of Coinbase (COIN).

Crypto.com’s monthly spot trading volume soared to $134 billion in September from $34 billion in July, according to data from The Block. Overall trading volumes on North American crypto exchanges was $183 billion in September, in which Coinbase handled $46 billion.

Crypto.com first overtook Coinbase in July and continues to lead so far in October. So far this month, the exchange saw $112 billion trading volume out of the overall $173 billion traded on exchanges in the region, The Block data shows. Kraken, the third-largest exchange, way behind in October with just under $10 billion in trading activity.

A key reason for Crypto.com’s popularity could be the wide range of tokens on offer. It lists over 378, ranging from mainstays bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) to memecoins, such as book of meme (BOME), to ecosystem tokens such as Jupiter’s JUP and deBridge. Coinbase and Kraken, in contrast, are more selective, offering fewer than 290 tokens each.

BTC and ETH trading dominate Crypto.com, accounting for more than 85% of all trading activity across Tether’s USDT stablecoin and U.S. dollar pairs, CoinGecko data shows.

Some 26% of the exchange’s web traffic comes from the U.S., Kaiko Research said earlier this month, with most users active during U.S. trading hours.

A Citigroup report earlier this month partly attributed this dominance to the crypto ETFs that have been extremely successful in 2024.

Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck, said in an X post in September that Crypto.com’s “average BTC trade size on Crypto dot com has 3x YTD” coinciding with Cboe Global Markets, a U.S.-based exchange, closing its spot crypto division.

“Liquidity has kept pace with trade volumes, suggesting market makers are also more active on the platform,” Sigel said at the time.

Meanwhile, the bump in volumes comes amid ongoing legal drama for Crypto.com. Earlier this month, the exchange filed suit against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to “protect the future of the crypto industry in the U.S.,” shortly after it received a Wells notice from SEC staff.

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the firm brought the case to limit the SEC’s “unauthorized overreach and unlawful rulemaking,” as CoinDesk reported.

As BIS Mulls Shutting Down mBridge, Its Innovation Hub Calls The Project a ‘Public Good’

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The future of the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) involvement in mBridge was cast into doubt on Oct 28. following a report from Bloomberg that top bank officials and financial executives discussed the possibility of shutting mBridge down during a meeting in Washington.

The discussions, which took place last week, stemmed from concerns about comments made by Russian president Vladimir Putin during the opening of the BRICS Summit in Kazan, where he floated the idea of an alternative BRICS-led international payments system. Though Putin’s comments garnered a lukewarm response from fellow BRICS members, it has focused attention on projects like mBridge which are seeking to build alternatives to SWIFT.

Run by the central banks of China, Thailand, the UAE and Hong Kong — with Saudi Arabia joining this year as a new member — and backed by the BIS Innovation Hub, mBridge is a cross-border payments system that aims to make transferring money internationally quicker and cheaper.

It removes the need for correspondent banks, which act as intermediaries for payments between banks in different countries that don’t have formal relationships.

In June this year, it reached its minimum viable product (MVP) stage, with participating banks deploying consensus nodes and commercial banks conducting transactions. The platform currently supports key functions for participants including CBDC issuance and redemption, FX payment versus payment (PVP), CBDC transfers, queue management and balance alerts, and information management systems.

As of October 2024, the project had 32 observing members, including the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Bank of Korea FATF and the Banque Central du Luxembourg, according to the BIS Innovation Hub.

A total of 39 commercial banks from China, Thailand, the UAE, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia are also participating in its MVP stage. Between April and September 2024, the platform facilitated payments and transactions in four CBDCs (e-CNY, e-THB, e-AED and e-HKD), with transactions conducted by 35 commercial banks.

To its proponents, mBridge is a potential solution for the major pain points that have long plagued traditional banking, particularly for underserved regions. It can allow countries to settle payments in their own currency instead of the more commonly used U.S. dollar and make transactions much quicker using distributed ledger technology.

Speaking at Hong Kong Fintech Week, Li Shu-Pui, Advisor to H.E. The Governor at the Central Bank of the U.A.E., said that in a test in February they sent money from a bank in Abu Dhabi to one in Beijing in just ten seconds.

“Middle Eastern, Central Asian, African countries and even South American countries are underserved [by traditional banking] because the correspondent banking network does not cover so many of these countries. Many of these countries are not served adequately so they’re very excited about how they [can] make use of mBridge” he said.

BIS’s own literature available through its BIS Innovation Hub stand at Hong Kong Fintech Week calls mBridge “a public good” and claims it can “help foster financial inclusion”.

Countries like China have been taking steps to push for greater dedollarization of the global economy and the settlement of international payments in different currencies. During the BRICS summit, Putin claimed that nearly 95% of Russia-China trade is done in local currency.

But mBridge’s detractors are worried about the geopolitical risk the project poses. Policymakers in the U.S. and Europe have warned against having an international financial system underpinned by China-developed technology, as well as the risk of reduced ability to enforce U.S. and European economic sanctions.

In 2022, Yaya J. Fanusie, currently the Director of Policy for AML & Cyber Risk at the Crypto Council for Innovation, said that the announcement of the mBridge project should serve as a wakeup call to U.S. policymakers who wanted to maintain U.S. influence on the financial system. “[mBridge] likely will be built upon not only by nations seeking more efficient payment infrastructure, as all central banks should, but also by U.S. adversaries strategizing for ways around U.S. geopolitical influence, like China,” he wrote.

The BIS did not respond to a request for comment and staff on the ground at Hong Kong Fintech Week said they could not discuss the matter.

President Biden Thanks Nigerian President for Binance Exec’s Release: White House

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U.S. President Joe Biden called Bola Tinubu, the President of Nigeria, on Tuesday to personally thank him for the recent release of detained American Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan.

According to a Tuesday statement from the White House, Biden “underscored his appreciation for President Tinubu’s leadership” in securing Gambaryan’s release in the phone call.

Gambaryan, head of financial crime compliance at Binance, was released on humanitarian grounds last week, eight months after he was first taken into Nigerian custody and subsequently charged with money laundering and tax evasion as a proxy for his employer, which the Nigerian government accused of tanking the value of the naira. The Nigerian government has since dropped both charges against Gambaryan, though Binance still faces tax-evasion charges in the country.

While imprisoned in Nigeria’s notoriously dangerous Kuje Prison, Gambaryan’s health deteriorated. According to his family, he suffered malaria, pneumonia, tonsillitis and complications from a herniated disc in his back that left him struggling to walk.

Gambaryan’s plight attracted the attention of several members of Congress as well as a large swath of former government officials who urged the U.S. government to intervene on his behalf before his health deteriorated further.

The day Gambaryan was released from custody, the U.S. Department of State announced the formation of a new bilateral liaison group between the U.S. and Nigeria focused on cryptocurrency and illicit finance.

According to the White House’s statement, Biden and Tinubu discussed the “value of the U.S.-Nigeria partnership in addressing global challenges and advancing security and prosperity across multiple sectors,” and Biden “expressed appreciation for cooperation on law enforcement, including through the recently announced Bilateral Liaison Group on Illicit Finance and Cryptocurrencies.”

Former U.S. Soldier Is Sentenced to 14 Years for Planning to Help ISIS

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A former soldier in the U.S. Army was sentenced on Friday to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to provide ISIS with information to help plan an ambush he thought would result in the deaths of U.S. soldiers in the Middle East, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

The soldier, Pvt. Cole Bridges, 24, of Stow, Ohio, also discussed potential locations for terrorist attacks in New York City with an undercover F.B.I. agent whom he believed to be a supporter of the Islamic State.

Private Bridges enlisted in the military in 2019 and joined an infantry division in Fort Stewart, Ga. Before enlisting, he had already been persuaded by radical ideologies, according to the Justice Department.

“Cole Bridges used his U.S. Army training to pursue a horrifying goal: the brutal murder of his fellow service members in a carefully plotted ambush,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

Beginning in at least 2019, Private Bridges began researching jihadist propaganda and posted his support for ISIS on social media. About a year after joining the Army, he began a correspondence with an F.B.I. agent who was posing as an ISIS supporter in contact with the group in the Middle East.

A criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York detailed the soldier’s fervent intent on aiding the Islamic State, describing Private Bridges as “a supporter of ISIS and its mission to establish a global caliphate.”

Bitcoin Bounces 7% Above $63K as Crypto Traders Eye China Stimulus Statement

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Cryptocurrencies sharply rebounded on Friday from the previous day’s lows with bitcoin (BTC) retaking $63,000 as investors quickly shrugged off worries over slightly hotter inflation readings, turning their attention to a fiscal policy update from China on Saturday.

Bitcoin, the leading crypto asset by market capitalization, shot up 7% from Thursday’s trough below $59,000 after the hotter U.S. CPI inflation report, bucking this week’s trend of giving up gains during the U.S. trading hours. Recently, BTC was up 5.5% over the past 24 hours, outperforming the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index’s (CD20) 4.7% advance.

Tokens from Solana (SOL), Avalanche (AVAX) and Render (RNDR) were the leaders among altcoin majors with 6%-8% gains. The only token of the CD20 index with a negative daily return was Uniswap (UNI), which slightly shed some of its Thursday gains that were spurred by the decentralized exchange’s plan to launch its own layer-2 network.

The crypto rally happened as equities also gained, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 closing the week at record highs. The U.S. dollar index paused below 103 after steeply strengthening over the past week as traders repriced expectations of further Federal Reserve interest rate cuts following solid U.S. jobs reports and hotter inflation readings.

Crypto-related stocks also reflected the positive sentiment. Bitcoin miners including MARA Holdings (MARA), Riot Platforms (RIOT) and Bitdeer (BTDR) soared 5%-10%, while U.S. crypto exchange giant Coinbase (COIN) ended the day up 7%.

MicroStrategy (MSTR), the largest corporate holder of BTC with nearly $16 billion of the asset, surged 16% to its highest price since March 2000. The company’s share price premium versus its bitcoin holdings also broadened to the widest since 2021.

China fiscal policy update may move crypto

Macroeconomic factors influencing crypto prices have shifted away from monetary policy to the U.S. election outcome, Coinbase analysts David Duong and David Han said in a Friday report.

The key catalyst for crypto volatility might be the upcoming China fiscal policy update by the finance minister slated for early Saturday UTC. Investors anticipate more financial stimulus for the ailing Chinese economy and financial markets, which could reverberate in the digital asset market, the Coinbase report noted.

“As most markets will be closed during this next briefing, we expect traders could turn to crypto markets as a way to express their (proxy) views on the size and strength of China’s fiscal announcements,” the authors said.

Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research, noted that recent U.S. economic data shows a resilient economy and jobs market, allaying past concerns over an imminent recession.

“This sets the stage for risk assets to perform well into year-end, and it may take little to drive crypto prices higher,” Thielen said. “A significant move is likely on the horizon, and diligent traders will be well-positioned to capture it.”