The order against Binance Nigeria Limited follows U.S. SEC allegations that the exchange had violated federal securities laws.
Crypto exchange Binance’s Nigerian unit was ordered to immediately halt operations in the country by the local Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a Friday circular.
“Binance Nigeria Limited is neither registered nor regulated by the Commission and its operations in Nigeria are therefore illegal,” the notice said.
Nigeria’s order follows a lawsuit by the U.S. securities watchdog last Monday against the largest global crypto exchange by market capitalization, alleging it failed to register as a broker or exchange, and that it sold offered unregistered securities the general public.
Although Nigeria’s SEC had previously said it viewed all crypto assets to be securities by default, this appears to be the first action taken by the regulator against a major exchange platform. In May, Bloomberg reported the country’s SEC was processing crypto firms’ applications for registration on a trial basis but would not officially start registering them until it has reached an agreement with the country’s central bank.
Banks in the country are prohibited from offering services to crypto platforms.
“The Commission shall provide updates on further regulatory actions with respect to the activities of Binance Nigeria Limited, and other similar platforms and shall work with other regulators in Nigeria to provide further guidance on this matter,” Friday’s order said.
Landmark new crypto laws under MiCA may have few short-term benefits without further steps, the report commissioned by EU lawmakers says.
Crypto assets should be treated as securities by default, and the autonomous organizations that govern decentralized finance (DeFi) should be granted legal status, according to a study commissioned by lawmakers at the European Parliament that was published Tuesday.
The report comes as the European Union finalizes its Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation, and considers whether a sequel will be needed to cover extra areas like DeFi, staking and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
All crypto assets should be deemed a transferable security – implying they would fall under the EU’s tough governance and authorization rules that apply to traditional stocks and bonds – unless and until a national regulator says otherwise, the report says.
That default rule “shifts the onus of gathering the technical facts and arguing the scope of regulation” from regulators to industry, said the report, drafted by a panel of academics from universities in Luxembourg, Sydney and Hong Kong, on request from the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee.
Without changes, “we are skeptical that MiCA will have positive short-term effects given the difficulties of enforcing its rules in an opaque cross-border context,” in which 10,000 crypto protocols vie for the lightest possible regulation, added the document, though its findings aren’t a formal position of the European Parliament.
The crypto industry has been plagued by a lack of clarity on whether rules designed for traditional financial securities apply to digital assets. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Chief Gary Gensler has declined to say whether major cryptocurrencies such as ether (ETH) constitute securities under his jurisdiction, but a series of legal actions against companies such as Ripple have led to accusations of regulation by enforcement.
With MiCA signed into law on Wednesday, EU agencies responsible for banking and securities markets must now set out the detailed rulemaking to put it into effect. Even before then, the European Systemic Risk Board, an EU panel responsible for monitoring financial stability risks, has called for further laws to fill in what MiCA leaves out.
U.K. experts have also been studying the legal status of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), a potential precursor to regulation of a sector which the report says is a “Wild West” of “fraudsters and thieves.”
The latest price moves in crypto markets in context for June 1, 2023.
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Bitcoin and the broad cryptocurrency market sold off for the second consecutive day on Thursday with fears over inflation and continued rate hikes resurfacing. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the debt ceiling deal Wednesday night and the bill now moves to the Senate for its approval. Bitcoin was down 1% on the day to $26,800 and has lost more than 6% over the past month. While new eurozone data showed that inflation fell more than expected to 6.1% in May from 7% in April, European Central Bank President, Christine Lagarde signaled that additional interest rate rises are needed. “We need to continue our hiking cycle until we are sufficiently confident that inflation is on track to return to our target in a timely manner,” she said in a speech on Thursday.
Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken is reaping the benefits of staying in Canada after rivals such as Binance and OKX set withdrawal plans. Kraken told CoinDesk its customer deposits in the country grew by 25% in the weeks following Binance’s announced departure in early May, and the exchange saw a fivefold increase in downloads of its two mobile apps for Canadian clients within a week of OKX saying in March it planned to leave. Canada tightened its regulatory framework for digital asset trading earlier this year, resulting in an exodus of some of the largest crypto exchanges. Alongside Binance – the globe’s largest exchange by volume traded – and OKX, Paxos, Blockchain.com and Deribit also all announced their departures. The most recent exit announcement was from Bybit earlier this week.
Kısmen başarısız kripto hedge fonu Three Arrows Capital’in (3AC) müdürleri tarafından kurulan iflas talep borsası OPNX, platformdaki işlem ücretlerini azaltmak için tasarlanmış “Open Exchange token” (OX) adlı yeni bir yönetişim parası çıkardı . Borsanın mevcut token’ı FLEX, teknik incelemede FLEX’in OX için 1:100 oranında dönüştürülebileceğinin ortaya çıkmasının ardından %16 arttı. OX, maksimum 9,86 milyar arza sahip bir ERC-20 tokenidir. Etherscan’e göre, basın zamanında yaklaşık 100 kişi varlığı ya bastı ya da satın aldı. OPNX değişimi, 3AC’den Kyle Davies ve Su Zhu ile başarısız kripto kredi kuruluşu CoinFLEX’in yöneticileri tarafından ortaklaşa kuruldu.
Floki prices rallied on Sunday amid a bitcoin-led market push and bets on the token’s “China narrative.”
Floki (FLOKI) spiked over 10% on Sunday and saw its highest trading volumes in over three weeks as traders bet on the tokens amid a China-focused push for its Valhalla metaverse game.
Trading volumes for the tokens, which are fashioned after the Shiba Inu dog breed, jumped to over $60 million, up from last week’s $25 million average. The spike comes as ads for its Floki game featured in some Chinese sporting tournaments. This could have attracted some speculators who hypothesized that the move might attract new traders from China.
In a tweet, Floki developers said they saw an influx of Chinese-based community members on their social media groups.
Floki previously said it was targeting China in its latest push toward attracting more users for its Valhalla game, as previously reported. The game’s content and technical documents will be available in both traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese and are specifically targeted toward the Chinese gaming market, developers added at the time.
The “China narrative” has caught on among some on Crypto Twitter ahead of lax laws for retail trading in Hong Kong, driving up prices of some Asia-focused tokens, such as conflux (CFX) in the past few weeks.
Starting June 1, Hong Kong will allow traders to invest in some tokens, such as bitcoin, ether and solana, on regulated exchanges in the country. Traders are not allowed to hold any stablecoins, but the move has fuelled sentiment that wealthy Chinese speculators could soon plough money into the crypto markets.
“While most major economies are expected to slow down this year, the Chinese economy is projected to grow strongly,” said Floki core developer @100bviking in a Twitter message to CoinDesk. “J.P. Morgan projects a 4% GDP growth for China in 2023; that’s 2.5 times more than what is projected for the global economy and 4 times more than projected US economic growth.”
“This strong growth will spill over into crypto, especially with Hong Kong legalizing crypto in a few days’ time which is a sign of China warming up to crypto. There is a very high probability that China will drive the next crypto bull run,” @100bviking added.
The joint venture between Gulf Innova and Binance aims to begin offering crypto services in the country later this year.
Gulf Binance, a joint venture between crypto exchange Binance and Gulf Energy’s innovation arm Gulf Innova, has received a digital asset operator license in Thailand, according to a Friday press release.
The rubber-stamp from Thailand’s Ministry of Finance will allow the firm to advance plans to open a regulated crypto exchange and broker in the southeast Asian country. The platform will likely launch by year’s end, according to a press statement.
“By harnessing Binance’s expertise together with Gulf’s established local presence and network, Gulf Binance aims to showcase the full potential of blockchain technology to meet the needs of Thai users, Binance Head of Asia, Europe, and MENA Richard Teng said in a statement. Gulf Energy is one of Thailand’s largest private power producers.
Thailand has signaled it is warming up to positioning itself as an emerging Asian crypto hub. In January, the country’s regulators introduced a set of rules for crypto custody services, and later announced a $1 billion tax break for firms issuing digital tokens for investment. A 2022 ban on crypto lending and staking services and restrictions on digital asset-related advertising, however, indicates the nation is taking a careful approach to supervising the emerging market.
The latest price moves in crypto markets in context for May 17, 2023.
This article originally appeared in First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.
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Blockchain-based play-to-earn project Axie Infinity’s native cryptocurrency AXS ralliedafter the company’s card-based strategy game debuted on the Apple app store. AXS surged over 12% from $7.16 to $8.04 on the news, becoming the top gainer on CoinDesk Indices’ leaderboard. The game will initially launch in the Apple store across Latin America and Asia. Bitcoin traded down on Wednesday, struggling to hold the $27,000 mark as investors keep a close eye on developments around raising of the debt ceiling in the U.S. The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value has lost 9% over the past month.
Crypto companies fleeing U.S. regulatory uncertainty have been offered a welcome in France, by officials boasting a regulatory framework that offers relative predictability. The European Union member already boasts around 74 registered crypto companies. “In France, we are proud to be pioneers,” said Benoît de Juvigny, Secretary General of the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), noting his country’s crypto service asset provider regime – known as PSAN – was passed in 2019, “If American players want to benefit, in the very short term, from the French regime, and from the start of 2025 from European arrangements, clearly they are welcome,” he added. “We have good relations and discussions with our U.S. counterparts.”
Using distributed ledger technology (DLT) in securities markets could create savings north of $100 billion per year, a report produced by a major traditional-finance lobby group has said. In a paper published Tuesday evening, the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA) called for regulators to allow the technology that underpins crypto to aid collateral management, asset tokenization and sovereign bond markets.“ Distributed ledger technology holds promise for driving growth and innovation,” said Adam Farkas, Chief Executive of GFMA, whose affiliates in the U.S., Europe and Asia count major players such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and Nomura among their members.
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The agreement offers Talos clients connectivity to Coinbase Prime for spot liquidity and custody services.
Talos, a crypto trading platform for institutional investors, is working with Coinbase Prime to expand access to digital assets for customers of both firms.
With rising demand from institutional investors for more secure and efficient trading platforms, the agreement offers Talos clients access to Coinbase Prime for spot liquidity and custody services, according to a press release. Coinbase Prime, which is typically used by institutional investors, is an integrated system that offers users offline storage and advanced trading.
The pact will also give Coinbase Prime clients access to Talos’s trading and connectivity products, according to the press release.
With institutional investors pushing further into crypto, demand for more sophisticated means of trading, investing and managing the digital asset has ramped up. Last week financial institutions T. Rowe Price, WisdomTree and Wellington Management joined layer 1 blockchain Avalanche’s Evergreen subnet to make execution and settlements more efficient. Last month, Nasdaq said it is aiming to debut its crypto custody services by the end of the second quarter.
“We’ve seen consistently growing demand, despite recent market conditions, for high-performance digital asset trading platforms as institutional investors continue to build for long-term participation in this emerging asset class,” Anton Katz, co-founder of Talos, told CoinDesk in an interview.
Katz added that unlike retail investors, institutional firms entering the space require trading platforms with a much higher standard for safety and reliability along with more efficient means of trading that matches what they’re accustomed to in the traditional financial (TradFi) world.
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Talos raised $105 million in a Series B funding round last May that included investments from U.S. financial services giants Citigroup (C), Wells Fargo (WFC) and BNY Mellon (BK). The crypto trading platform offers institutional investors a “full trade lifecycle” which includes liquidity aggregation, trading, analytics and settlement through a single point of access, according to the statement.
Creditors can expect to receive between 40% and 65% recoveries, ideally in crypto, attorneys for the bankrupt crypto lender said in court Wednesday.
Voyager Digital was taken by surprise when Binance.US canceled a $1 billion deal to buy its assets on Tuesday. The exchange was still showing interest as recently as last week, Voyager’s attorneys said in a New York courtroom on Wednesday.
Binance.US had made an offer for the bankrupt crypto lender in December but pulled out on Tuesday, citing an “uncertain regulatory climate” in the U.S.
“The debtors have been in constant contact and communication with Binance.US and as lately as this past Friday, Binance.US had expressed the desire to close the transaction as soon as possible,” Christine Okike of law firm Kirkland & Ellis, representing Voyager, told a bankruptcy court in the Southern District Court of New York, adding that “the debtors reserve all rights against Binance.US for breach” of the deal.
Given the collapse of the Binance.US deal, likely recoveries for Voyager creditors are in the range of 40% to 65%, Okike said, depending on whether Voyager wins a parallel lawsuit involving bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, and how much recovery FTX offers its creditors.
Okike also said Voyager would attempt to give creditors back their holdings in original cryptocurrency, dismissing speculation it would instead seek to pay the cash equivalent.
“The debtors have every intention of making ‘in kind’ distributions subject to regulatory restrictions and our platform functionality,” Okike said, but warned that a shifting legal position from U.S. regulators could complicate Voyager’s ability to do so.
“We’re faced with a situation where the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] may not have taken a position or issued a formal order with respect to [Voyager’s token] VGX,” Okike said, “But they’ve made certain allegations that could make it untenable in certain situations for the debtors, for instance, to sell VGX into the market.”
The regulatory uncertainty that would require payments to be made in cash applied to tokens with a likely total value of $1.6 million within an overall estate of around $1 billion, Okike said.
Voyager filed for bankruptcy in July, and a deal by FTX to buy its assets fell through after FTX also collapsed in November. The Binance.US deal was held up in part by protestations from the SEC that the fine print of the deal offered exoneration for breaches of tax or securities law.
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Todd Groth of CoinDesk Indices shares some thoughts on how macro analysis works in crypto.
One thing I like about macro investing is the scope.
While financial analysts and their respective crypto degens counterparts are looking at balance sheets, earnings statements, Solidity code and social media sentiment, macro strategists get to think about the consequences of exogenous things.
Put another way, while the analysts examine the forest tree by tree, macro investors sit on a hill, surveying the whole valley and considering which parts of the forest will be nourished or threatened by rainfall, forest fires, changes in land use and other factors outside of the idiosyncrasies of the micro analysis.
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Being macro in digital assets means considering historical environments in which cryptocurrencies have thrived as well as more challenging environments, such as 2022.
Last year, digital assets were clearly sensitive to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tighten financial conditions. There are many ways to measure financial conditions, but to keep it simple we can simply use trends in nominal and real yields, U.S. dollar exchange rate baskets and corporate credit spreads. From these measures we can create a financial conditions indicator and see how it relates to the historical risk-adjusted performance of digital assets, as proxied by bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH).
To estimate trends in these financial-condition proxies we utilize a trend signal similar to the one used in the Bitcoin Trend indicator (BTI) released recently by CoinDesk Indices.
To represent nominal yields (“NomRates”), we use two-, five- and 30-year U.S. Treasury yields; we subtract the five-year breakeven inflation rate derived from TIPS to create a proxy for two-, five- and 30-year real yields (“RealRates”). U.S. dollar denominated baskets of advanced and emerging economy currencies are used alongside a broader basket as three proxies for the dollar (“FX_USD”). And option adjusted spreads (OAS) for high-yield corporate bonds rated BB and CCC are used alongside an investment-grade index to represent U.S. credit conditions (“Credit_OAS”).
Trend signals are generated from the data within these four macro indicator buckets, then averaged to result in a positive, neutral and negative score for the financial condition regime. Risk-adjusted return ratios (annualized return per unit of volatility) are calculated on BTC and ETH within each regime and compared to an unconditional buy-and-hold strategy (“BuyHold”) shown in the figure below.
From this preliminary macro regime analysis it’s clear that financial conditions matter when investing in digital assets. Keeping a pulse on market conditions, particularly real and nominal interest rates and credit conditions, can help to navigate the crypto cycle better by offering a better risk-adjusted return than a simple buy-and-HODL approach.
In summary, as investors in cryptocurrencies we’d all benefit from taking a broader macroeconomic and market perspective to not miss the forest for the trees.
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P.S.: See you in Austin this week at Consensus 2023. Come meet the CoinDesk Indices team at booth #1306!
The U.S. Department of Justice last year charged three members of a Miami crew in a crypto-related scheme from 2020.
The leader of a Miami crew charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with defrauding banks in a 2020 cryptocurrency-related scheme has pleaded guilty, an official notice from Wednesday said.
Esteban Cabrera Da Corte was one of three individuals arrested in relation to the crime, and was accused of “participating in a scheme to steal millions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency and trick U.S. banks into refunding the millions used to purchase that cryptocurrency, in part by using personal identifying information stolen from other people.”
The scheme saw U.S. banks processing more than $4 million in false reversals, while a cryptocurrency exchange lost around $3.5 million worth of digital assets, the DOJ’s notice said.
Cabrera, a 26-year-old from Miami Florida, pled guilty to “one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud,” which comes with a 20-year prison sentence, and has agreed to pay restitution of $3.6 million – with an additional forfeiture of $1.2 million.
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