Good morning Coinheads, and welcome to Tuesday – a day normally reserved for pancakes, sexy new Aussie dramas at the adults-only time of 9:30 on Channel 7, and for feeling terrible after a huge weekend out partying with the boys from your local professional footy team.
Or so I’m told.
But not this Tuesday, because this one’s shaping up to be a nice one all on its own merits – and because there’s a sense of optimism hanging around the crypto market with things broadly on the rise.
The majors are all playing ball – BTC is up 0.7%, ETH has climbed 2.7% and the war brewing between Doge and Solana is picking up steam as well.
BNB is pretty much the only major not playing ball – so much so that it’s actually in the Top 5 Worst Performers list for the past 24 hours, falling 0.5%.
Mercurial doggy token Doge is up 2.7% for the past 24 hours, and Solana’s rise from the ashes has continued, up a crazy 16.0% overnight to see it up 62.4% this week, and back over the US$6 billion market cap mark.
No wonder there seems to be a few more smiles than usual around the place… so let’s see what I can do about that with some news headlines, shall we?
Mark Cuban predicts the next ‘crypto implosion’
Massively rich person Mark Cuban has issued a dire prediction, claiming that the Next Big Crypto Catastrophe is shaping up to be… *checks notes*… wash trading.
For those unfamiliar with the term, it basically translates to “big players moving vast quantities of stuff around on public exchanges in order to give the illusion of demand, in order to justify the perceived value of the aforementioned stuff”.
According to Cuban, the already super-shaky crypto market is perilously close to having its dirty laundry exposed, and that it’s only a matter of time until “the truth” about quite a large number of tokens and coins and such is exposed.
“I think the next possible implosion is the discovery and removal of wash trades on central exchanges,” Cuban recently said in an interview with The Street.
“There are supposedly tens of millions of dollars in trades and liquidity for tokens that have very little utilisation. I don’t see how they can be that liquid.”
SBF not merry at all after DOJ seizes all of his Robinhood shares
The most hated ambulatory mop in crypto has lost his bid to hang onto half a billion dollars worth of shares, after the US Department of Justice was successful in its bid to seize Sam Bankman-Fried’s Robinhood shares.
SBF reportedly held around $660 million worth of shares in the not-at-all-dodgy trading platform Robinhood – you know, the one that got really famous among the meme-trading set a couple of years ago and subsequently got into huge amounts of trouble.
Remember? It’s the platform that the SEC said made all sorts of misleading statements about the allegedly shady way that it made its money. The one that Bloomberg reported in 2018 that more than 40% of its revenue came from selling its customers’ orders to high frequency trading firms.
You know… the one that famously suspended trading in Gamestop stock for its customers in the middle of a short squeeze? The one that sold off customers’ assets without their consent.
The one that raised a preposterous amount of money prior to its IPO and promptly sh-t the bed from the moment it went live on the NYSE, entering the history books as the worst public share issue ever for a company its size.
Yeah… that Robinhood. Anyway – SBF or FTX or a combo of the two apparently owned more than half a billion dollars worth of shares in that Robinhood (because of course he did) – and had been fighting to keep it, so he could pay his lawyers and continue to feast on the tears of his FTX customers.
But the Feds have seized it out from under him… I just thought you might want to know that.
And lastly, proof that you don’t need to be smart to be a Crypto-HAxx0r
And lastly, an idiot from Ohio is staring down the barrel of a 40-year stretch in “Bubba reckons your mouth is real purty” prison, after pleading guilty to stealing US$12 million worth of Bitcoin.
Yeah, I know… “another crypto hack story? Yaaaaaawn” – but this one’s pretty crazy, considering that the fella in question pinched the coins directly from the IRS, which had seized the Bitcoin after it was seized from his brother by the Feds.
We’ve touched on this story before, because it’s amazingly weird… but as this is likely to be pretty much the final chapter of it, it’s worth tying it all up in a neat little bow.
In February 2020, a guy called Larry Harmon was arrested for laundering millions of dollars through darknet money washing business Helix – and when Larry was pinched, one of the items seized by the IRS was a hard wallet with a bunch of funds on it, which Larry refused to hand over the keys to.
So the IRS put the device in an evidence bag, sealed it up, and put it in storage somewhere, where it sat collecting dust – until someone noticed that, in a Criss Angel Mind Freaky move, someone started draining the wallet, while Larry Harmon was in prison! Spoooooky.
Anyhow – it turns out that Larry’s brother Gary was the one quietly draining the seized wallet (which obviously implies that he had access to the seed phrases) and stole the money right out from under the Feds’ noses.
Gary Harmon has pleaded guilty to the theft of the funds, and is now going to spend at least the next few decades of his life in jail. #CriminalGenius.
Top 10 overview
With the overall crypto market cap at US$884 Billion, up 1.6% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.
DAILY PUMPERS
- Aptos (APT), (mc: US$675 million) +32.3%
- GALA (GALA), (mc: US$308 million) +26.5%
- Curve DAO (CRV), (mc: US$418 million) +12.8%
- Zilliqa (ZIL), (mc: US$408 million) +12.4%
- Solana (SOL), (mc: US$6.03 billion) +10.8%
DAILY SLUMPERS
- Frax Share (FXS), (market cap: US$400 million) -3.7%
- OKB (OKB), (mc: US$6.58 billion) -1.8%
- Lido DAO (LDO), (market cap: US$1.61 billion) -0.7%
- BNB (BNB), (mc: US$44.5 billion) -0.5%
- PancakeSwap (CAKE), (mc: US$550 million) -0.3%
(Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)
