“reHash” — Your Weekly Summary of Everything Important in the Crypto World — issue no. 26

Published in

Wanchain

7 min readMar 17, 2021

reHash issued for March 11th to March 17th

Elon Musk would prefer Dogecoin to be listed on Coinbase. Cats find their way back to blockchain with abandoned MoonCats project and NFTs. Binance gets probed by the CFTC, South Korea gets mentioned twice. Some projects get exploited. It would be hard to catch all the important news if reHash was not there. Hope you enjoy!

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

Digital Currency Group aims to buy up to $250 million in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust; Trust is run by Grayscale Investments which is owned by the Digital Currency Group; “The share purchase authorization does not obligate DCG to acquire any specific number of shares in any period, and may be expanded, extended, modified, or discontinued at any time. The actual timing, amount, and value of share purchases will depend entirely upon a number of factors, including the levels of cash available, price, and prevailing market conditions.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Valkyrie Digital Assets has filed for a new ETF that would invest in companies that hold Bitcoin in ther portfolio; which companies that would be is not yet known;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3
BlockFi, a Bitcoin lending firm, has raised $350 million in a Series D funding round; it is their biggest funding round so far and puts their valuation at $3 billion up from $435 million just six months ago; size of this funding round shows “our growth, the size of the industry, and as a result, the size of businesses that can be built in this industry,” commented Zac Prince, CEO of BlockFi “If you look at some of the constituents in the round, it’s a testament to increasing institutional adoption, and participation in the crypto ecosystem or crypto as an asset class by very high-quality and sophisticated institutional investors.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
JP Morgan plans to offer Cryptocurrency Exposure Basket; it will involve stock of (amongst others) MicroStrategy (20%) Square (18%), Riot Blockchain (15%), NVIDIA (15%) and PayPal (10%) with a total of 11 companies in total; it will not include Tesla because JP Morgan assumes Tesla’s stock is too high
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Bitpanda has raised $170 million in Series B funding round; it means a $1.2 billion valuation for Austrian cryptocurrency broker; funding round was led by Valar Ventures;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3

REGULATION

Bakkt has received a BitLicense in New York; they received virtual currency license as well as a money transmitter license; that means they will be able to provide the Bitcoin custody solutions to companies based in New York; Depertment of Financial Services Superintendent Linda Lacewell commented “This approval provides additional virtual currency options to New Yorkers as the state continues to rebuild and recover,”; “This represents a major milestone to achieving our vision of making digital assets accessible to all, and we’re thrilled to continue driving innovation in this rapidly evolving industry, highlighted by the upcoming launch of the Bakkt App,” said CEO of Bakkt Gavin Michael;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
French Government will auction 611 Bitcoin seized during the 2019 GateHub hack; currently it is worth approximately $35 million; auction is set for the 17th of March in Paris-based auction house Kapandji Morhange in 478 lots each of which will consist of between 0.11 and 20 BTC;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Binance probed by the CFTC over whether the US Residents traded on the exchange; CFTC is trying to determine whether Binance allowed residents of the US to trade derivatives or their exchange; CZ commented “We’ll continue to improve our compliance,” he said. “We’ll also work very actively with regulators around the world to improve the compliance standards of the industry.”, he also commented that “It’s not a bull market without some FUD. Ignore FUD, keep BUIDLing.”;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
South Korea tightens rules for AML procedures; Korea’s Financial Services Comission (FSC) has announced that cryptocurrency exchanges that don’t adhere to stringent AML laws will face fines; “The company will continue improving its system to protect investors, and enhancing transparency in the crypto market,” commented Bithumb
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Bitmain has been accused of illegally poaching engineers from Taiwan; prosecutors in Taiwan have accused Bitmain Technologies of poaching over 100 Taiwanese engineers; a probe has been launched in New Taiper and Hsinchu; the New Taiper Prosecutors Offices has commented that they “discovered that Bitmain has been poaching Taiwanese research and development talent to speed up its efforts on artificial intelligence chip capability by illegally setting up companies in Taiwan. The newly established companies served a headhunting purpose and the timespan of what Bitmain did dates back to 2018.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
BitMEX co-founder, Ben Delo has surrendered to the authorities in New York City; Delo was arraigned on March 16th after he flew from the UK to USA and consequently posted $20 million in bond; the indictment alleges that Delo and his co-defendants has failed to implement sufficient AML and KYC procedures on BitMEX which made it a “vehicle for money laundering and sanctions violations”; Arthur Hayes and Greg Dwyer remain abroad;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4

GENERAL UPDATES

Pancake Swap and Cream Finance have been attacked by hackers; their DNS (domain name service) has been “compromised by a third party”; DNS hijacking leads to attackers redirecting users to a malicious servers, if users enter their credentials (seed phrases, private keys) they get stolen; Cream Finance has commented on Twitter: “Our DNS has been compromised by a third party; some users are seeing requests for seed phrase on http://app.cream.finance. DO NOT enter your seed phrase. We will never ask you to submit any private key or seed phrases.”; Pancake Swap has tweeted “This is now confirmed. DO NOT go to the Pancakeswap site until we confirm it is all clear. NEVER EVER input your seed phrase or private keys on a website. We are working on recovery now. Sorry for the trouble.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Roll, a social token platform, suffered an exploit for $5.7 million (3000 ETH approximately); nearly two thirds were already transferred to Tornado.Cash (a proxy in which the link between the two addresses is broken); “there was a security incident with Roll’s hot wallet. As a result, the attacker was able to steal all the tokens from this wallet and sell on Uniswap for ETH. As of this writing, it seems like a compromise of the private keys of our hot wallet and not a bug in the Roll smart contracts or any token contracts.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
A Beeple NFT has sold for $69.3 million; the work depicts a collage of art pieces made over 5,000 days; “On March 11, 2021, Christie’s sold Beeple’s First 5000 Days, the first purely digital NFT-based artwork ever offered by a major auction house. The monumental work achieved $69.3 million, becoming the most expensive NFT ever sold and positioning Beeple among the top three most valuable living artists.”; reportedly DC Comics is looking into NFTs as well; some users also found an abandoned NFT dapp MoonCats (supposedly second oldest NFT dapp on Ethereum) and started mining/adopting cats paying collectively $600 thousand to adopt all the cats (and then resell for profit); other users have found Etheria.world which is the oldest NFT dapp on Ethereum and someone bid $130,781 for 1 tile of game land
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
South Korean digital currency market volume has briefly overtaken the country’s stock market volume; according to data from CoinMarketCap combined the UPBit, Bithumb, Coinone and Korbit had a 24-hour volume of $14.6 billion compared to $14.5 billion on Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) and $10 billion on Korean Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (KOSDAQ);
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
River Financial, a startup touted as “Bitcoin for Boomers” has secured $12 million funding in Series A round; Alex Leishman the CEO of the company targets people over the age of 50, so far the company has a customer base of under 100,000; River Financial claims a $1 billion of AUM; “Unlike exchanges that onboard new customers and try to and cross-sell them other coins, we just offer bitcoin, and then cross-sell other financial services,” said Alex Leishman;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4

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

About Wanchain

Wanchain is the infrastructure connecting the decentralized financial world. Wanchain’s live cross-blockchain solution is EVM-based, includes optional private transactions, and provides a decentralized, permissionless, and secure approach for interoperability. Wanchain has employees globally with teams in China, the USA, and other team members around the world in Asia, Africa, and Europe.