“reHash” — Your Weekly Summary of Everything Important in the Crypto World — issue no. 23

Published in

Wanchain

7 min readFeb 24, 2021

reHash issued for February 18th to February 24th

New all time high, new highest drop. Elon Musk (and others) with laser eyes until Bitcoin breaches the hundred thousand dollars mark. Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy drops another $1 billion into BTC. Relatively busy week, and if you are busy — it’s best to catch up on the news in shortest form factor available (probably) — hope you enjoy reHash no. 23!

NOTE:
reHash is not intended to be original journalism. It is intended to be a brief summary of significant articles and events from the past week with links to the original sources. Sources will always be linked and credited. If you know any good newsletters or Twitter accounts which provide news we have been missing, please mention them in the comments!

ADOPTION

MicroStrategy buys Bitcoin for $1 billion, again; they have completed their additional offering of convertible senior notes for $1.05 billion; they can be bought back by MicroStrategy in 2024, they will mature in 2027; “The conversion rate for the notes is 0.6981 shares of MicroStrategy’s class A common stock per $1,000 principal amount of notes”; “This represents a premium of approximately 50% over the last reported sale price of $955.00 per share of MicroStrategy’s class A common stock on The Nasdaq Global Select Market on February 16, 2021.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Purpose Bitcoin ETF (the first one in North America/Canada) has raked over $80 million in its first hour; it has raised a total of $421 million within two days (the figure is up to $470 as of writing); “The Canada Bitcoin ETF $BTCC already has collected $421 million in assets on the first two days (crushing our estimate). Proportionally speaking it is the equiv of a US ETF taking $8b in first two days. If it were to keep up this pace it will be the biggest ETF in Canada in 20 days.”; second Canadian Bitcoin ETF also launched last week on Friday; CI Financial has applied for the third Bitcoin ETF in Canada and more companies are reportedly planning to apply
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
CoinShares has launched a new physically-backed Ethereum ETP; CoinShares is a digital asset manager and it already had a Bitcoin ETP listed on SIX Swiss exchange; the new Ethereum product has $75 million in AUM; each unit of Physical Ethereum (ETHE) is backed with 0.03 ETH at launch; “Bringing innovative products like ETHE allows us to continue setting the industry standard for trust and transparency and provide institutions with easy access to industry-leading crypto investment vehicles,” commented head of product at CoinShares Townsend Lansing;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4
Square has bought another $170 million in Bitcoin; it amounts to a 3,318 BTC purchased as a reserve asset; Bitcoin holdings of $220 million for Square are equal to about 5% of their total liquid assets of $4.4 billion in total cash and securities; per the CEO — Jack Dorsey “We believe the internet is a native currency. We believe that has the highest probability of empowering more people in the economy in a fair way. We’re doing a lot to ensure this from a product standpoint, open-source development and open patent perspective. And by us owning bitcoin, our incentives are aligned with skin in the game.”;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

REGULATION

Tether and Bitfinex have settled with NY AG’s for $18.5 million; Bitfinex and Tether will not admit any wrongdoing, will pay the settlement and provide quarterly reports to NYAG and also will “end all trading activity with New Yorkers”; NYAG will bring no charges; “Bitfinex and Tether recklessly and unlawfully covered-up massive financial losses to keep their scheme going and protect their bottom lines. Tether’s claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times was a lie.” as per AG Letitia James; Tether responded that “The Attorney General’s Office concluded, in essence, that we could have done better in publicly disclosing these events. Contrary to online speculation, after two and half years there was no finding that Tether ever issued tethers without backing, or to manipulate crypto prices,”;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Department of Justice in USA has charged three North Korean hackers; according to the DoJ — Jon Chang Hyok, Kim Il and Park Jin Hyok — the three hackers have attempted to steal $1.3 billion from businesses and banks in a number of complex schemes; amongst other charges they are accused of stealing tens of millions of cryptocurrency; “As laid out in today’s indictment, North Korea’s operatives, using keyboards rather than guns, stealing digital wallets of cryptocurrency instead of sacks of cash, are the world’s leading bank robbers,”; “The department will continue to confront malicious nation state cyber activity with our unique tools and work with our fellow agencies and the family of norms abiding nations to do the same.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
BitPay was fined over $500 thousand for breaching OFAC sanctions; BitPay is accused of facilitating over 2,100 transactions amounting to approximately $129,000 with individuals in sanctioned nations (Ukraine, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria); “The Apparent Violations related to BitPay’s payment processing service, which enables merchants to accept digital currency as payment for goods and services. Specifically, BitPay received digital currency payments on behalf of its merchant customers from those merchants’ buyers who were located in sanctioned jurisdictions, converted the digital currency to fiat currency, and then relayed that currency to its merchants,”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Coinseed, an automated cryptocurrency investing application, is facing fraud allegations and breaking of the U.S. regaistration laws; they are being sued by SEC and the State of New York; allegedly the application based service has defrauded investors of more than $1 million through hidden fees, false claims and a ‘worthless’ token; Coinseed has raised over $100,000 and sold 200,000 of CSD tokens which had “no functionality” and were “not required to use the trading platform, or not manage one’s account.”; “Attorney General James seeks to stop Coinseed and the two individual defendants from further operating as unregistered commodities broker-dealers through their mobile application, as well as return investments of Coinseed’s worthless cryptocurrency, the CSD token,”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
SEC has halted trading of the Long Blockchain company; Long Island Iced Tea Company rebranded to Long Blockchain Corp back in 2017; it was officially delisted by the SEC citing that the shift from making soft drinks to blockchain technology never happened; the shares were delisted because the company failed to file financial reports since Q3 2018;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
As the battle between the Ripple and SEC progresses with new statements in the litigation, Ripple has registered a new entity LLC in Wyoming; MoneyGram has dropped Ripple as the partner temporarily “due to the uncertainty concerning their ongoing litigation with the SEC.”; Wyoming positions itself as a crypto safe haven in the USA with “”More crypto companies are realizing Wyoming is a better domicile than Delaware due to our crypto-friendly laws,”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

GENERAL UPDATES

Northern Data AG is looking to raise as much as $500 million in their plan on U.S. IPO; Northern Data AG claims to be the biggest Bitcoin miner in the world; the listing could happen before EOY 2021; the sale would boost Norther Data’s shareholder base and its global profile; “Since 2015, Northern Data has been listed on Germany’s over-the-counter market, where it’s more than tripled in value over the past year.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3
OKCoin has delisted BSV and BCH; they cite the reasons as Craig Wright’s crusade to prove he is the real Satoshi; “On the one hand we feel very strongly about protecting the open-source ethos, but on the other, if we do something about it, that would conflict with our principle of being a neutral platform. We wouldn’t have changed that if it weren’t for Craig Wright posting these threats to the open-source dev community. We think these threats are very destructive to development and Bitcoin as a whole,”; and also because BSV and BCH are misleading customers: “most are coming [to buy] bitcoin as a store of value. But when they see BSV and BCH they get confused.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4
Blockchain.com crypto wallet and exchange has raised $120 million to boost their institutional business; they have already raised a total of $70 million earlier; several notable funds have joined “including Moore Strategic Ventures, Access Ventures, Rovida Advisors, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Google investment spin-off GV, Lakestar, Eldridge, Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass”; “The fact that the best macro investors in the world participated in our latest fundraise is further proof that institutions are taking a serious look at their crypto strategy,”commented Blockchain.com CEO Peter Smith
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Thank you, as always, for reading and hope to see you next week! We will have news next week too!

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