Crypto newsletter: BitMEX drags market down

 

This week is significantly negative for the cryptocurrency market. All major cryptocurrencies have come under pressure after the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed criminal charges against one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, BitMEX. Also market sentiment was hit by news of US president Donald Trump's positive Covid-19 test, with just weeks to go before the November presidential election. Bitcoin's market dominance dropped to 58.2%. The capitalization of all digital assets in circulation decreased to 332 billion, while an average daily trading volume is registered at $105 billion.

 

 

Yesterday US authorities accused four founders and executives of BitMEX, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges, of evading rules designed to stop money laundering. DoJ charged Arthur Hayes, Samuel Reed and Benjamin Delo, who together founded BitMEX in 2014, and Gregory Dwyer, its first employee and later head of business development, with violating the federal Bank Secrecy Act and conspiring to violate that law. Meanwhile CFTC filed a separate civil lawsuit, accusing BitMex of offering the US citizens illicit derivative instruments. "We strongly disagree with the U.S. government's heavy-handed decision to bring these charges, and intend to defend the allegations vigorously," a spokesman for BitMEX's parent HDR Global Trading Ltd said. Bitcoin could be the most affected cryptocurrency as BitMEX holds around 193,000 BTC which is a significant portion of all Bitcoins in circulation. The current value of these digital assets is around $ 2 billion. It is still unclear what will happen to these Bitcoins, but it may have a significant impact on the price of the most popular cryptocurrency.

 

The growing Cardano Community has celebrated the third anniversary of the Cardano network, almost three months after the successful launch of Shelley Network as the most decentralized blockchain ecosystem.  Cardano‘s founder Charles Hoskinson highlighted the achievements and underlined the growth that the Cardano network has achieved, during a video-stream. Hoskinson pointed out that the community has quadrupled in size and network has seven times more transactions on a daily basis today, then there were on the second anniversary. Hoskinson said that " There are hundreds of projects that want to be on Cardano. […] 2500 people are currently participating in 500 concepts in 100 distinct ideas […] More than the half of all ADA in the ecosystem is delegated.
He also made some comments regarding his biggest competitor, Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin. Cardano will have hundreds to thousands of decentralized applications, DeFi, hundreds of tokens, a voting system and an identity solution until next year, all of which the Ethereum ecosystem also has, but better, more secure and scalable, said Hoskinson.

Ethereum 2.0: Failed ‘Spadina’ dress rehearsal could mean further delay

The coordinator of the Ethereum 2.0 announced that the test network Spadina, which was designed to be “dress rehearsal” before the launch of phase 0. Testnet was deployed on Tuesday with 2,856 active validators and 91,382 ETH staked, however it showed several problems in its configuration, the client nodes and in calculation errors genesis. The failures were exacerbated by the low participation in Spadina along with “small failures” in the process of launching the clients. Low participation for Ethereum 2.0 has been a constant concern of the Ethereum core developers and the community.