The late spring and summer months of 2022 would be remembered not only for their extreme temperatures across the globe but also for a crushing streak of large crypto companies falling apart. Terra Lab in May, Celsius in June and now, the lasting agony of a Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC). Technically,…
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Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC), a chief financial regulator, issued a note to the banking industry, indicating that they should not grant the virtual assets providers (VASPs) the status of merchant in operations with credit card holders. That means a de-facto ban on buying crypto with a credit card on the island. As the local…
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It’s not every week that regulators from both sides of the Atlantic ocean come together to discuss cryptocurrencies. But that’s what happened last week, with the European Union and United States counterparts sharing their thoughts on stablecoins, central bank digital currencies (CBDC) and the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) proposal. The representatives of the European Commission,…
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New York-based crypto trading platform Gemini claims to be the first one to get registered as a virtual asset service provider (VASP) by the Central Bank of Ireland (CBI). Earlier in February 2022, a company received an electronic money institution (EMI) authorization from the CBI. The news was reported on Gemini’s official blog on Tuesday. As…
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Reducing your initial debt of $820 million to just $0.013 over a month can’t be easy. And, it’s hardly surprising that such a heroic dash has led Celsius to bankruptcy. Last week, the crypto lending platform voluntarily filed petitions for Chapter 11 reorganization after closing off the last of its decentralized finance (DeFi) debts owed…
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The year 2022 saw not only drastic dips in leading cryptocurrencies and financial markets in general but also major legislative frameworks for crypto in prominent jurisdictions. And while the “crypto bill,” co-sponsored by United States senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand, still has a long way to go, its European counterpart, the Markets in Crypto-Assets…
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Amid the soaring inflation, the European Central Bank (ECB) has found time to sum up its concerns about the “significant carbon footprint” of Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies, which require vast amounts of computational power. ECB published the report titled “Mining the environment – is climate risk priced into crypto-assets?” on July 12. In the report, the…
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It’s been a century or so since the property qualification came out of vogue, but it doesn’t seem a problem if you want to apply it to crypto and policymaking. An advisory notice released by the United States Office of Government Ethics last week states that the de minimis exemption — which allows for the…
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Crypto and Know Your Customer (KYC) guidelines seem to be an unhappy marriage — pseudonymity in the digital currencies’ DNA doesn’t match the old-school centralized protocols of traditional finance, but cohabitation is inevitable for the maturing industry. The tension never really goes away, but even before recent months’ market failures for crypto, the regulators have…
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A United States-based lobbying group has raised a voice against developing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the United States. The National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions (NAFCU) believes the project’s cost outweighs the “hypothesized benefits.” In a public letter to the U.S. Commerce Department, dated Tuesday, Andrew Morris, the senior counsel for research…
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