Bitcoin Pops Above USD 24K, Coinbase On Its Exposure to Celsius

3AC, Voyager & Terra, ZIPMEX Zips Withdrawals

Market and Exchange News Updates

At 15:18 UTC, BTC traded near USD 24,150 and was up 6% in a day and 25% in a week. The price is still down 22% in a year. While this “rally is strong” and BTC crossed above its 50-day moving average this week for the first time since April, Katie Stockton, co-founder of Fairlead Strategies, was quoted as saying by Bloomberg that it might be premature to call this latest leg higher the start of a meaningful reversal. Stockton said she’s watching for a break above USD 25,000 for signs it’s sustainable, as well as a weekly “buy” signal from an indicator called MACD, a momentum gauge.

• Coinbase said it had no financing exposure to troubled crypto companies Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, Voyager. However, Coinbase’s venture program “did make non-material investments in Terraform Labs,” the firm behind the failed Terra project, they added.
• Trading platform ZIPMEX announced that it is pausing withdrawals until further notice due to “a combination of circumstances beyond [its] control including volatile market conditions, and the resulting financial difficulties of [its] key business partners”.
• ByBit announced that it integrated with blockchain oracle project Chainlink (LINK) to add more than 35 of the latter’s price feeds to the spot trading platform on the Polygon (MATIC) mainnet. The volume-weighted, aggregated price data helps “improve [ByBit’s] backend pricing mechanism, spot price outliers, and protect users in the case of extreme market volatility,” they added.

Adoption news

• IBEX Mercado, the company behind El Salvador’s BTC rollout, announced that it has partnered with crypto wallet provider OSMO Wallet to roll out BTC payments in Guatemala to enable its citizens to buy, sell, and pay with BTC at a network of retail locations. OSMO aims to push bitcoin adoption to more than a million retail points across Latin America within the next five years, they added.

Legal news

• The US Department of Justice announced a complaint filed in the District of Kansas to forfeit crypto paid as ransom to North Korean hackers or otherwise used to launder such ransom payments. In May 2022, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation filed a sealed seizure warrant for the funds worth around half a million dollars, which include ransoms paid by health care providers in Kansas and Colorado and which will be returned to the victims.

Regulation news

• A crypto bill that would overhaul how the industry is regulated within the United States is unlikely to be voted on this year by the US Senate, Bloomberg reported, citing Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, one of the lawmakers driving the effort. “It’s a big topic, it’s comprehensive, and it’s still new to many US senators,” she explained.

Metaverse news

• Meta, the owner of social networks Instagram and Facebook, has partnered with digital fashion provider DressX to provide outfits for its new avatar fashion marketplace, per Vogue Business. Pieces from DressX’s digital-only inventory will be sold alongside luxury players Balenciaga, Prada, and Thom Browne, which partnered with the marketplace at launch last month, they added.

Investments news

• Blockchain security firm Halborn raised USD 90m in a growth equity financing round led by Summit Partners. The company aims to provide a suite of products and services designed to identify and close vulnerabilities in Web3 applications, they said.
• Digital assets custody provider BitGo registered to operate in Italy through the country’s regulator, the Organismo Agenti e Mediatori. The company joins the likes of crypto exchanges Coinbase and Crypto.com, which have both recently obtained regulatory approval from the same watchdog.

Economics news

• The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) in the UK rose by 9.4% in the 12 months to June 2022, up from 9.1% in May, according to data from the country’s Office for National Statistics. On a monthly basis, CPI rose by 0.8% in June 2022, compared with a rise of 0.5% in June 2021, they said.