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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-market-movers-fb3791aa
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BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has filed an application for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund.
There are currently no such products in the U.S. The SEC approved several bitcoin BTCUSD futures-based ETFs in the past, but has yet to greenlight anything that is backed by bitcoin itself.
BlackRock BLK will tap Coinbase Global…
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A spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Friday has confirmed statements on social media that some customers are seeing duplicate transactions and fees on their checking accounts.
“We’re sorry,” the spokesperson said in an email to MarketWatch. “We’re working to resolve the issue and will automatically reverse any duplicates and adjust any related fees.”
JPMorgan Chase
JPM,
customers on Twitter and other social-media outlets said payments made through Zelle were showing up twice.
“PSA!!!,” said Twitter user @haunteraIIA. “Anyone waking up to duplicate zelle charges from chase, my call just went through and was told the duplicate charge should be credited within 24hours. they’re having issues with this today. i was on hold for an hour, so just in case anyone else wakes up freaked out lol.”
Zelle is jointly owned by six banks: JPMorgan, Truist Financial Corp.
TFC,
Capital One
COF,
U.S. Bancorp
USB,
PNC Financial Services Group Inc.
PNC,
and Wells Fargo & Co.
WFC,
A spokesperson from Chase clarified that the problems are confined to its customers.
Also Read: Banks explore reimbursing customers who send money to scam Zelle accounts
Weston Blasi contributed to this report.
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Welcome back to Distributed Ledger. This is Frances Yue, reporter at MarketWatch.
Fears are brewing in financial markets that the U.S. lawmakers won’t be able to reach an agreement to raise the country’s debt limit by X date, or the date that the U.S. government is unable to meet its debt obligations.
Analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co.
JPM,
on Wednesday said they see the odds of debt ceiling negotiators failing to reach a deal by early June at “around 25% and rising.”
Concerns around a technical default of U.S. government debt have contributed to volatility across financial markets, sending Treasury bills maturing in the first eight days of June above 6%. Yields on such bills briefly topped 7% on Thursday.
As investors search for havens from such tumult, gold and bitcoin are often cited as potential refuges.
Still, gold futures have been retreating since the most-active contract reached its second-highest settlement on record on May 4.
Bitcoin, which rallied almost 60% so far this year, have also posted lackluster performance for the past few weeks, down 5.8% over the past month.
Are gold and bitcoin effective hedges against a technical default of U.S. government debt? Why are we not seeing a rally as the X date approaches? I caught up with several analysts to ask their views.
Find me on Twitter at @FrancesYue_ to share any thoughts on crypto, gold, or this newsletter.
“Generally speaking, gold thrives when there are periods of uncertainty,” said Rhona O’Connell, analyst at StoneX Group. “But if you take that uncertainty too far, then we get to stages where people are sitting on their hands and not really doing very much and that’s what’s happened here.”
Gold futures for June delivery
GC00,
GCM23,
on Thursday declined by $20.90, or 1.1%, to $1,943.70 per ounce on Comex, with prices for the most-active contract posting their lowest finish since March 21, according to FactSet data.
As gold futures price retreat to below $2,000, “I suppose it’s arguable that the bulls might be a bit disappointed,” said O’Connell. But there’s “bound to be a retreat” with gold’s price premium building over the past few weeks, according to O’Connell.
“The fact that gold hasn’t managed to climb any higher given the potential seriousness of the economic consequences should no agreement be reached before the June deadline reflects a prevailing view that ultimately the markets believe some middle ground can be found in time,” Rupert Rowling, analyst at Kinesis Money, wrote in a recent note.
Still, gold’s price stays elevated at levels that were not seen many times in history.
Considering the rally bitcoin had so far this year, it’s “not crazy to see a little bit of pullback, according to Steven Lubka, a managing director at Swan Bitcoin.
Bitcoin gained almost 60% so far this year while still down over 60% from its all-time high in 2021.
Still, if the U.S. ends up defaulting on its debt, and “everyone freaks out, bitcoin could do very well in that scenario,” Lubka said, citing bitcoin’s limited supply, decentralized and non-sovereign properties.
However, not everyone agrees. There is not enough evidence to support the claim that bitcoin could serve as a hedge against the debt ceiling tumult, according to Lapo Guadagnuolo, director at S&P Global Ratings.
“We can’t make that argument because we don’t see that in the data,” Guadagnuolo said.
The recent strength of the U.S. dollar have also weighed on bitcoin and gold.
On Thursday, the ICE U.S. Dollar Index
DXY,
which measures the currency’s strength against a basket of six major rivals, climbed above 104 to its highest level since March 17, according to Dow Jones market data.
Although a technical default of U.S. government debt could hurt the dollar’s reputation in the long term, it might have little bearing on the immediate reaction, which would resemble a knee-jerk move higher, as my colleague Joseph Adinolfi elaborated here.
As gold is mostly denominated in U.S. dollar and bitcoin’s main trading pairs are dollar-denominated stablecoins, a strong dollar could weigh on both assets.
Still, the debt ceiling debacle in the long term could strengthen the narrative around bitcoin and gold, as “the governance of the worlds fiat system comes into question,” according to Greg Magadini, director of derivatives at Amberdata.
Bitcoin lost 2.8% in the past week and was trading at around $26,360 on Thursday, according to CoinDesk data. Ether declined 0.9% in the same period to around $1,805
| Biggest Gainers | Price | %7-day return |
| marumaruNFT | $0.26 | 201% |
| Render | $2.70 | 19.5% |
| Kava | $1.10 | 14.3% |
| TRON | $0.08 | 10.6% |
| Huobi | $3.12 | 8.4% |
| Source: CoinGecko |
| Biggest Decliners | Price | %7-day return |
| GMX | $52.68 | -14.6% |
| Sui | $0.99 | -13.3% |
| Fantom | $0.33 | -10.1% |
| Stacks | $0.59 | -9.7% |
| Optimism | $1.62 | -9.7% |
| Source: CoinGecko |
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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres backed the reform of the U.N. Security Council and the international financial system to align them with the “realities of today’s world.”
Both the U.N. body and the financial architecture reflect the power relations of 1945 and need to be updated, Guterres told a press conference Sunday on the margins of the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, according to Reuters.
“The global financial architecture is outdated, dysfunctional and unfair,” Guterres said. “In the face of the economic shocks from the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it has failed to fulfill its core function as a global safety net.”
Guterres made the same point on Saturday, writing in a tweet that it was “time to think seriously about the reform” of the international financial architecture.
The U.N. Security Council came under fire in April when Russia assumed the rotating presidency of the 15-member body despite the fact that 141 countries condemned its aggression on Ukraine. Experts have claimed that Russia’s veto in the Security Council undermines the U.N.’s effectiveness on the international stage.
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Gregorio Sorgi
Source link
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Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. made a change in banking targets for investment, sending two banks’ shares in opposite directions Monday afternoon.
Capital One Financial
COF,
shares rallied more than 5% in after-hours trading while Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
BK,
sold off in the extended session Monday after filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed Berkshire
BRK.B,
BRK.A,
switched its position. The quarterly filing showed a new stake of 9.9 million shares in Capital One as Berkshire sold off its 25.1 million-share stake in Bank of New York Mellon.
At Berkshire’s annual meeting, Buffett weighed in on recent scares for regional banks.
“In terms of owning banks, events will determine their future and you’ve got politicians involved, you’ve got a whole lot of people who don’t really understand how the system works,” he said.
Other changes included an increased stake in HP Inc.
HPQ,
which grew by 16% to about 121 million shares. That growth was part of a combination of the holdings of General Re Corp., which Berkshire has owned since 1998 but had previously reported its holdings separately as part of New England Asset Management Inc.
“Beginning with the Form 13F to be filed later today, the holdings of Gen Re will be included in Berkshire’s 13F filing,” Berkshire said in a news release earlier Monday. “The NEAM Form 13F filings will no longer include Gen Re’s holdings but they will continue to include NEAM client holdings where NEAM is acting as an investment manager.”
Other holdings affected by that change included Apple Inc.
AAPL,
Bank of America Inc.
BAC,
and Chevron Corp.
CVX,
Berkshire said in its news release.
Other stocks that Berkshire made moves with during the first three months of the year included the former Restoration Hardware — RH
RH,
shares fell 3% after Berkshire disclosed selling off its 2.4 million stake. Berkshire also officially reported selling of its 8.3 million stake in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
TSM,
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Popular crypto exchange Coinbase
COIN,
late Monday asked a federal court to force the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to respond yes or no to its petition from July 2022 to make formal rules around digital-asset regulation.
Coinbase’s petition requested that the “Commission propose and adopt rules to govern the regulation of securities that are offered and traded via digitally native methods, including potential rules to identify which digital assets are securities.”
In March, Coinbase was hit with a Wells notice from the SEC, identifying potential violations of securities laws that might spur it to take legal action. The notice came after nine months of back-and-forth between the SEC and Coinbase, CEO Brian Armstrong said in March.
Coinbase was expected to respond to the notice by the end of April, but Monday’s filing reveals that Coinbase believes the SEC’s approach doesn’t provide enough regulatory guidance for crypto companies in the U.S. to operate.
“The SEC at a minimum must set forth how those inapt and inapposite requirements are to be adapted to digital assets. But the SEC has refused to do even that,” the filing says. “It has not conducted any rulemaking to provide the regulatory clarity and process that companies need to determine which digital asset products and services to register and how to make the registration that the SEC now demands.”
Coinbase shares slid more than 7% on Monday but are up 55% year to date. Still, the stock is down nearly 60% over the past 12 months. In comparison, the S&P 500
SPX,
is up nearly 8% in 2023 and has declined almost 4% over the past year.
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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-market-movers-8b6c2e7b
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Bitcoin rallied Monday to its highest level in 10 months, as some industry proponents touted the asset as a potential “safe haven,” like gold, as recession fears return to the forefront, and after fears rose last month about potential instability in the banking system.
The world’s largest cryptocurrency topped $30,000 Monday night for the first since June 10, 2022, according to Dow Jones Market Data, peaking at $30,321 before pulling back. Bitcoin
BTCUSD,
has surged 81% year to date, though is still down over 57% from an all-time high in November 2021. Ethereum
ETHUSD,
also rallied Monday, and was closing in on the $2,000 level for the first time since last August.
“With the bank crisis, I think that the leading feature of bitcoin has changed from speculative tech to safety. A lot more like gold,” said David Tawil, president and co-founder at ProChain Capital. Some investors may have started to view the asset as a haven from the banking turmoil and a recession, instead of a speculative asset, Tawil said.
Still, bitcoin has been often trading in tandem with other risky assets, such as stocks, for the past few years.
“I also believe there will be an influx of liquidity from Asia, especially Asian tech companies who had accounts with Silicon Valley Bank who are now looking for places to put their money,” according to Stefan Rust, founder of Truflation.
The rally on Monday may be partially driven by “the growing influence on the crypto market led by Hong Kong,” while U.S. regulators increase their oversight over the industry, according to Rachel Lin, co-founder and chief-executive at Synfutures.
Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan said Sunday in a blog post that while crypto markets have been highly volatile, it’s the “right time” to push the adoption of Web3, or the so-called third generation of the internet, in the region.
Bitcoin had been attempting to break the $30,000 level, a psychological level, for three weeks, Rust noted.
Stocks were mixed Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
up 0.3% and the S&P 500
SPX,
up 0.1%, while the Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
dipped 0.1%.
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Watch Alex Marquardt’s report on the sting operation on Erin Burnett OutFront on Monday, April 10, at 7 p.m. ET.
CNN
—
A team of South Korean spies and American private investigators quietly gathered at the South Korean intelligence service in January, just days after North Korea fired three ballistic missiles into the sea.
For months, they’d been tracking $100 million stolen from a California cryptocurrency firm named Harmony, waiting for North Korean hackers to move the stolen crypto into accounts that could eventually be converted to dollars or Chinese yuan, hard currency that could fund the country’s illegal missile program.
When the moment came, the spies and sleuths — working out of a government office in a city, Pangyo, known as South Korea’s Silicon Valley — would have only a few minutes to help seize the money before it could be laundered to safety through a series of accounts and rendered untouchable.
Finally, in late January, the hackers moved a fraction of their loot to a cryptocurrency account pegged to the dollar, temporarily relinquishing control of it. The spies and investigators pounced, flagging the transaction to US law enforcement officials standing by to freeze the money.
The team in Pangyo helped seize a little more than $1 million that day. Though analysts tell CNN that most of the stolen $100 million remains out of reach in cryptocurrency and other assets controlled by North Korea, it was the type of seizure that the US and its allies will need to prevent big paydays for Pyongyang.
The sting operation, described to CNN by private investigators at Chainalysis, a New York-based blockchain-tracking firm, and confirmed by the South Korean National Intelligence Service, offers a rare window into the murky world of cryptocurrency espionage — and the burgeoning effort to shut down what has become a multibillion-dollar business for North Korea’s authoritarian regime.
Over the last several years, North Korean hackers have stolen billions of dollars from banks and cryptocurrency firms, according to reports from the United Nations and private firms. As investigators and regulators have wised up, the North Korean regime has been trying increasingly elaborate ways to launder that stolen digital money into hard currency, US officials and private experts tell CNN.
Cutting off North Korea’s cryptocurrency pipeline has quickly become a national security imperative for the US and South Korea. The regime’s ability to use the stolen digital money — or remittances from North Korean IT workers abroad — to fund its weapons programs is part of the regular set of intelligence products presented to senior US officials, including, sometimes, President Joe Biden, a senior US official said.
The North Koreans “need money, so they’re going to keep being creative,” the official told CNN. “I don’t think [they] are ever going to stop looking for illicit ways to glean funds because it’s an authoritarian regime under heavy sanctions.”
North Korea’s cryptocurrency hacking was top of mind at an April 7 meeting in Seoul, where US, Japanese and South Korean diplomats released a joint statement lamenting that Kim Jong Un’s regime continues to “pour its scarce resources into its WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and ballistic missile programs.”
Here’s how to keep your passwords safe, according to a hacker
“We are also deeply concerned about how the DPRK supports these programs by stealing and laundering funds as well as gathering information through malicious cyber activities,” the trilateral statement said, using an acronym for the North Korean government.
North Korea has previously denied similar allegations. CNN has emailed and called the North Korean Embassy in London seeking comment.
Starting in the late 2000s, US officials and their allies scoured international waters for signs that North Korea was evading sanctions by trafficking in weapons, coal or other precious cargo, a practice that continues. Now, a very modern twist on that contest is unfolding between hackers and money launderers in Pyongyang, and intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials from Washington to Seoul.
The FBI and Secret Service have spearheaded that work in the US (both agencies declined to comment when CNN asked how they track North Korean money-laundering.) The FBI announced in January that it had frozen an unspecified portion of the $100 million stolen from Harmony.
The succession of Kim family members who have ruled North Korea for the last 70 years have all used state-owned companies to enrich the family and ensure the regime’s survival, according to experts.
It’s a family business that scholar John Park calls “North Korea Incorporated.”
Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s current dictator, has “doubled down on cyber capabilities and crypto theft as a revenue generator for his family regime,” said Park, who directs the Korea Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. “North Korea Incorporated has gone virtual.”
Compared to the coal trade North Korea has relied on for revenue in the past, stealing cryptocurrency is much less labor and capital-intensive, Park said. And the profits are astronomical.
Last year, a record $3.8 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen from around the world, according to Chainalysis. Nearly half of that, or $1.7 billion, was the work of North Korean-linked hackers, the firm said.
It’s unclear how much of its billions in stolen cryptocurrency North Korea has been able to convert to hard cash. In an interview, a US Treasury official focused on North Korea declined to give an estimate. The public record of blockchain transactions helps US officials track suspected North Korean operatives’ efforts to move cryptocurrency, the Treasury official said.
But when North Korea gets help from other countries in laundering that money it is “incredibly concerning,” the official said. (They declined to name a particular country, but the US in 2020 indicted two Chinese men for allegedly laundering over $100 million for North Korea.)
Pyongyang’s hackers have also combed the networks of various foreign governments and companies for key technical information that might be useful for its nuclear program, according to a private United Nations report in February reviewed by CNN.
A spokesperson for South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told CNN it has developed a “rapid intelligence sharing” scheme with allies and private companies to respond to the threat and is looking for new ways to stop stolen cryptocurrency from being smuggled into North Korea.
Recent efforts have focused on North Korea’s use of what are known as mixing services, publicly available tools used to obscure the source of cryptocurrency.
On March 15, the Justice Department and European law enforcement agencies announced the shutdown of a mixing service known as ChipMixer, which the North Koreans allegedly used to launder an unspecified amount of the roughly $700 million stolen by hackers in three different crypto heists — including the $100 million robbery of Harmony, the California cryptocurrency firm.
Private investigators use blockchain-tracking software — and their own eyes when the software alerts them — to pinpoint the moment when stolen funds leave the hands of the North Koreans and can be seized. But those investigators need trusted relationships with law enforcement and crypto firms to move quickly enough to snatch back the funds.
One of the biggest US counter moves to date came in August when the Treasury Department sanctioned a cryptocurrency “mixing” service known as Tornado Cash that allegedly laundered $455 million for North Korean hackers.
Tornado Cash was particularly valuable because it had more liquidity than other services, allowing North Korean money to hide more easily among other sources of funds. Tornado Cash is now processing fewer transactions after the Treasury sanctions forced the North Koreans to look to other mixing services.
Suspected North Korean operatives sent $24 million in December and January through a new mixing service, Sinbad, according to Chainalysis, but there are no signs yet that Sinbad will be as effective at moving money as Tornado Cash.
The people behind mixing services, like Tornado Cash developer Roman Semenov, often describe themselves as privacy advocates who argue that their cryptocurrency tools can be used for good or ill like any technology. But that hasn’t stopped law enforcement agencies from cracking down. Dutch police in August arrested another suspected developer of Tornado Cash, whom they did not name, for alleged money laundering.
Private crypto-tracking firms like Chainalysis are increasingly staffed with former US and European law enforcement agents who are applying what they learned in the classified world to track Pyongyang’s money laundering.
Elliptic, a London-based firm with ex-law enforcement agents on staff, claims it helped seize $1.4 million in North Korean money stolen in the Harmony hack. Elliptic analysts tell CNN they were able to follow the money in real-time in February as it briefly moved to two popular cryptocurrency exchanges, Huobi and Binance. The analysts say they quickly notified the exchanges, which froze the money.
“It’s a bit like large-scale drug importations,” Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s co-founder, told CNN. “[The North Koreans] are prepared to lose some of it, but a majority of it probably goes through just by virtue of volume and the speed at which they do it and they’re quite sophisticated at it.”
The North Koreans are not just trying to steal from cryptocurrency firms, but also directly from other crypto thieves.
Should you invest in crypto? One expert weighs in after FTX’s collapse
After an unknown hacker stole $200 million from British firm Euler Finance in March, suspected North Korean operatives tried to set a trap: They sent the hacker a message on the blockchain laced with a vulnerability that may have been an attempt to gain access to the funds, according to Elliptic. (The ruse didn’t work.)
Nick Carlsen, who was an FBI intelligence analyst focused on North Korea until 2021, estimates that North Korea may only have a couple hundred people focused on the task of exploiting cryptocurrency to evade sanctions.
With an international effort to sanction rogue cryptocurrency exchanges and seize stolen money, Carlsen worries that North Korea could turn to less conspicuous forms of fraud. Rather than steal half a billion dollars from a cryptocurrency exchange, he suggested, Pyongyang’s operatives could set up a Ponzi scheme that attracts much less attention.
Yet even at reduced profit margins, cryptocurrency theft is still “wildly profitable,” said Carlsen, who now works at fraud-investigating firm TRM Labs. “So, they have no reason to stop.”
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Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former chief executive of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, is facing new charges for bribery, according to an indictment on March 28.
It claims Bankman-Fried in 2021 transferred over $40 million worth of cryptocurrency to Chinese government officials. The founder allegedly made the transfer to “influence and induce them to unfreeze the accounts” of Alameda Research, which contained over $1 billion in cryptocurrency that Beijing had frozen, according to the document.
The indictment contains 12 charges that Bankman-Fried previously was facing, plus the additional one for conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, bringing the new tally to a 13-count indictment.
Bankman-Fried’s lawyer didn’t immediately respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.
Bankman-Fried has been restricted from using messaging apps, but prosecutors and Bankman-Fried’s attorneys have asked U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to approve a new set of proposed restrictions that would limit his access to electronic devices and the internet.
He has pleaded not guilty to eight counts over the collapse of FTX and is currently under house arrest with his parents in Palo Alto, Calif.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan set a new hearing for Thursday.
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Shares of Coinbase Global Inc. dropped 15.8% in the extended session Wednesday after the crypto exchange disclosed a warning from regulators that it may have broken securities laws.
Coinbase
COIN,
said it received a Wells notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which could lead to formal charges.
“We asked the SEC for reasonable crypto rules for Americans. We got legal threats instead,” Coinbase said in a blog post detailing the action. “Rest assured, Coinbase products and services continue to operate as usual — today’s news does not require any changes to our current products or services.”
Based on discussions with the SEC, Coinbase said that the potential charges relate to the company’s spot market, its staking service Coinbase Earn, Coinbase Prime and Coinbase Wallet.
The crypto exchange said it asked the regulators to detail which assets in its platforms the SEC believes may be securities, but the SEC declined to do so. Coinbase called it a “cursory investigation.”
SEC representatives declined to comment Wednesday.
The company said that the investigation is “still at a very early stage,” and that it has turned in documents and provided two witnesses for testimony, “one on the basic aspects of our staking services and one on the basic operation of our trading platform.”
Coinbase has said that its staking services are not securities.
Regulators have doubled down on efforts to increase oversight of the crypto industry, shutting down crypto exchange Kraken’s staking program in February and issuing a Wells notice to warn stablecoin issuer Paxos.
Staking allows users to earn rewards by using their existing holdings of tokens to verify transactions.
Shares of Coinbase ended the regular trading day down 8.2%.
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As U.S. banking regulators begin their post-mortem of Silicon Valley Bank, some pundits are pointing the finger at crypto markets, whose own collapse over the past year left the tech-focused lender hopelessly exposed.
The conventional wisdom about crypto is that it’s “self-referential” — a separate universe to conventional finance — and that its inherent volatility can be contained. The emerging “contagion” theory is that there are enough linkages for extreme turmoil to spill over, much as a virus can sometimes jump from one species to another.
That’s what happened here, according to Barney Frank, the former U.S. congressman who wrote sweeping new banking rules after the banking crisis in 2008, and joined the crypto-friendly Signature Bank as a board member in 2015.
“I think, if it hadn’t been for FTX and the extreme nervousness about crypto, that this wouldn’t have happened,” Frank told POLITICO this week. “That wasn’t something that could have been anticipated by regulators.”
FTX, the crypto exchange that collapsed in November amid allegations of massive fraud, capped a year of turmoil in crypto markets, as investors began withdrawing funds from riskier ventures in response to rising interest rates, which in turn exposed the shaky foundations underpinning the industry. The ensuing “crypto winter” saw the value of the industry plummet by two-thirds, from a peak of $3 trillion in 2021.
Policymakers sought to reassure the public that volatility in the crypto market, blighted by scams and charlatans who sought to profit from investors’ fear of missing out, would naturally be contained. With the collapse of SVB, that claim is facing its biggest test yet.
Under the contagion theory, “patient zero” could be traced back to the implosion of TerraUSD, an “algorithmic stablecoin” that relied on financial engineering to keep its value on par with the U.S. dollar. That promise fell short in May last year following a mass sell-off, creating panic among investors who had used the virtual asset as a safe haven to park cash between taking punts on the crypto market. The origin of the crash is still subject to debate but rising interest rates are often cited as one of the main culprits.
TerraUSD’s demise was catastrophic for a major crypto hedge fund called Three Arrows Capital, dubbed 3AC. The money managers had invested $200 million into Luna, a crypto token whose value was used to prop up TerraUSD, which had become the third largest stablecoin on the market. A British Virgin Islands court ordered 3AC to liquidate its assets at the end of June.
The fund’s end created even more problems for the industry. Major crypto lending businesses, such as BlockFi, Celsius Network and Voyager, had lent hundreds of millions of dollars to 3AC to finance its market bets and were now facing massive losses.
Customers who had deposited their digital assets with the industry lender were suddenly locked out of their accounts, prompting FTX — then the third largest crypto exchange — to step in and bail out BlockFi and Voyager. Meanwhile, central banks continued to raise rates.
The contagion seemed under control for a few months until revelations emerged in November that FTX had been using client cash to finance risky bets elsewhere. The exchange folded soon after, as its customers rushed to get their money out of the platform. BlockFi and Voyager, meanwhile, were left stranded.
This is the point where the outbreak of risk in the crypto industry might have jumped species into the banking sector.
Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank, two smaller banks that also failed last week, had extensive business with crypto exchanges, including FTX. Silvergate tried to downplay its exposure to FTX but ended up reporting a $1 billion loss over the last three months of 2022 after investors withdrew more than $8 billion in deposits. Signature also did its best to distance itself from FTX, which made up some 0.1 percent of its deposits.
SVB had no direct link to FTX, but was not immune to the broader contagion. Its depositors, including tech startups, crypto firms and VCs, started burning their cash reserves to run their businesses after venture capital funding dried up.
“SVB and Silvergate had the same balance sheet structure and risks — massive duration mismatch, lots of uninsured runnable deposits backed by securities not marked to market, and inadequate regulatory capital because unrealized fair value losses excluded,” former Natwest banker and industry expert Frances Coppola told POLITICO.
Eventually, the deposit drain forced SVB to liquidate underwater assets to accommodate its clients, while trying to handle losses on bond portfolios and an outsized bet on interest rates. As word got out, the withdrawals turned into a bank run as frictionless and hype-driven as a crypto bubble.
Zachary Warmbrodt and Izabella Kaminska contributed reporting from Washington and London, respectively.
This article has been updated to correct the value of the crypto industry.
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Bjarke Smith-Meyer
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State authorities closed New York-based Signature Bank
SBNY,
on Sunday, after Silicon Valley Bank was shut down by regulators on Friday in the biggest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis.
All depositors of Signature Bank will be made whole, according to a joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve and FDIC.
Also see: Silicon Valley Bank depositors will get ‘all of their money,’ regulators say
Signature Bank has been popular among crypto companies, especially after crypto-friendly Silvergate Bank
SI,
said last Wednesday it would close its operations.
Signature Bank provides deposit services for its clients’ digital assets, but does not invest in, does not trade, does not hold on its own balance sheet nor provide custody of digital assets, and does not lend against or make loans collateralized by such assets, the company said.
The Federal Reserve on Sunday also announced a new emergency loan program to bolster the capacity of the banking system.
U.S. equity markets traded higher Sunday afternoon, with the Dow futures
YM00,
up 0.5%, and the S&P 500
ES00,
futures up 0.8%. Futures for the Nasdaq 100
NQ00,
rose 0.9%, according to FactSet data.
Major cryptocurrencies rallied Sunday. Bitcoin
BTCUSD,
surged 6.4% in the past 24 hours to around $21,842 and ether
ETHUSD,
gained 7% to $1,576, according to CoinDesk data.
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U.S. stocks extended losses in the final hour of trade on Thursday, while awaiting Friday’s February employment data that could help decide how large an interest rate hike the Federal Reserve will impose at its next meeting in two weeks.
Financial sector stocks were particularly hard hit along with cryptocurrencies after Silvergate Capital Corp., collapsed overnight amid growing scrutiny in Washington. Other financial stocks fell, dragged down by SVB Financial Group, which fell by a record amount.
Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq finished higher on Wednesday, with only the Dow finishing in the red, while all three indexes remained on track for weekly losses. A weekly drop for the S&P 500 would mark its fourth such pullback in five weeks.
U.S. stocks trimmed earlier gains and extended losses on Thursday afternoon after trading modestly higher after the open when the latest weekly jobless claims data showed an unexpectedly large uptick in the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits.
The number of Americans who applied for unemployment benefits in early March jumped to a 10-week high of 211,000, the highest level since Christmas. That’s higher than the 195,000 new applicants that economists polled by the Wall Street Journal had anticipated.
Economists said the data suggest that the labor market might be starting to slow, which is seen as a necessary prerequisite for driving inflation back to the Fed’s 2% target.
“The labor market might just be on the cusp of an inflection point,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer of Bleakley Financial Group, in emailed commentary.
Investors are now looking ahead to Friday’s closely watched February jobs report from the Department of Labor. Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal expect 225,000 jobs were created last month after 517,000 new jobs were created in January, a number that was much higher than economists had anticipated.
“If we do get the expected 200,000, or really anything between say 180,000 and 240,000, this would be a return to the prior trend and would signal that last month was indeed a one-off,” said Brad McMillan, chief investment officer of Commonwealth Financial Network, in emailed comments.
“That would be perceived as a positive by the Fed and markets, suggesting that inflation may start moderating again but is still high enough to allow for continued economic growth.”
The Russell 2000
RUT,
the small-cap index, is on pace to close below its 50-day moving average for the first time since January 9, 2023, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Regional bank stocks underperformed on Thursday. Shares of Silicon Valley Bank parent company SVB Financial Group
SIVB,
plummeted more than 61% after the company disclosed large losses from securities sales and a stock offering meant to provide a boost to its balance sheet. SVB is on pace to book the biggest one-day selloff since the dotcom boom, while its trading was halted for volatility multiple times, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Signature Bank
SBNY,
shares dropped 11.2%undefined
The KBW Bank Index
BKX,
of 24 leading banks slumped 7.1%, on pace for its worst day since June 26, 2020, according to Dow Jones Market Data. SPDR S&P Bank ETF
KBE,
was down 6.5%.
Treasury yields fell with the yield on the 2-year note BX:TMUBMUSD02Yslipped to 4.885% from 5.064% on Wednesday.
Stocks suffered earlier in the week after Powell said during testimony on Capitol Hill that rates would likely need to rise even further than market participants had expected. However, the main indexes saw some relief after the Fed chief clarified that policymakers hadn’t yet decided on the size of the next rate hike.
Investors have already digested several reports on the labor market this week, including a report on the number of job openings, which showed that the number of Americans quitting their jobs had fallen below 4 million in January for the first time in 19 months.
“The big picture is that the labor market is easing, but it’s still tighter than it was before the pandemic,” said Sonu Varghese, a global macro strategist at Carson Group.
— Jamie Chisholm contributed to this article
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LONDON — The U.K. government was scrambling on Sunday to limit the fallout for the British tech sector from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, a big U.S. lender to many startups and technology companies.
The government is treating the potential reverberations as “a high priority” after a run on deposits drove California-based SVB into insolvency, marking the largest bank failure since the global financial crisis, U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said in a statement Sunday morning. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other policymakers were on alert that problems at SVB could spread.
Hunt said the British government is working on a plan to backstop the cashflow needs of companies affected by SVB’s implosion and the halt in trading of its British unit, Silicon Valley Bank UK. The Bank of England announced on Friday that the U.K. unit is set to enter insolvency.
Silicon Valley Bank’s “failure could have a significant impact on the liquidity of the tech ecosystem,” Hunt said.
The government is working “to avoid or minimize damage to some of our most promising companies in the U.K.,” the chancellor said. “We will bring forward immediate plans to ensure the short-term operational and cashflow needs of Silicon Valley Bank UK customers are able to be met.”
Hunt told the BBC Sunday morning that the government would have a plan that deals with the operational cashflow needs of companies “in the next few days.”
Discussions between the governor of the Bank of England, the prime minister and the chancellor were taking place over the weekend, according to the statement.
Speaking on Sky News Sunday morning, Hunt said that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey had made it clear that there was “no systemic risk to our financial system.” But Hunt warned that there was a “serious risk” to the technology and life-sciences sectors in the U.K.
Ministers held talks with the tech industry on Saturday after tech executives in an open letter warned Hunt that the SVB collapse posed an “existential threat” to the U.K. tech sector. They called for government intervention.
Britain’s science and technology minister on Saturday pledged to do “everything we can” to limit the repercussions on U.K. tech companies.
Michelle Donelan, who heads the newly created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said in a tweet: “We recognize that the tech sector is often not cashflow positive as they grow and I am determined to stand with them as we do everything we can to minimize impact on the sector.”
A bank insolvency procedure for Silicon Valley Bank UK would mean eligible depositors would be paid the protected limit of £85,000, or up to £170,000 for joint accounts.
The Bank of England said in its Friday statement that SVB UK “has a limited presence in the U.K. and no critical functions supporting the financial system.”
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Silvergate Capital Corp.
SI,
shares plunged more than 30% in after-hours trading Wednesday after the company said it intended to wind down operations and voluntarily liquidate its subsidiary Silvergate Bank, a crypto-friendly lender.
The stock’s plunge would take it to a record low if losses hold through regular trading Thursday.
The La Jolla, Calif.-based lender made the announcement after it said last week in a regulatory filing that it was at risk of “being less than well-capitalized,” and discontinued its crypto-payments network.
As one of the few crypto-friendly banks, the liquidation of Silvergate Bank points to uncertainty in the future relationships between crypto companies and banks, who play an essential role in the conversion of fiat currencies into crypto.
Read: Crypto traders may lean toward stablecoins after Silvergate ceases crypto payments network
Silvergate Bank’s liquidation plan includes full repayment of all deposits, according to a statement Wednesday.
The company is considering the best way to resolve claims and preserve the residual value of its assets, Silvergate Capital said. All of the company’s other deposit-related services remain operational, it said.
Silvergate also said it hired Centerview Partners as financial adviser and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP as legal adviser.
Several crypto companies, such as Coinbase Global Inc.
COIN,
Galaxy Digital, Paxos and Circle, said last week that they would cease some or all payment transactions with Silvergate Bank.
Representatives at Silvergate didn’t immediately respond to a request seeking comment.
Signature Bank
SBNY,
another crypto-friendly lender, saw its shares slide 3.7% in after-hours trading Wednesday.
Major cryptocurrencies were steady Wednesday. Bitcoin
BTCUSD,
lost 0.3% to around $21,981, while ether
ETHUSD,
gained 0.2% to about $1,550, according to CoindDesk data.
Read: Here’s the real challenge facing Silvergate and other ‘crypto banks,’ says this short seller
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CNN
—
Sitting across from Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show,” Paris Hilton, wearing a sparkling neon green turtleneck dress and a high ponytail, looked at a picture of a glum cartoon ape and said it “reminds me of me.” The audience laughed. It did not look like her at all.
Hilton and Fallon were chatting about their NFTs – non-fungible tokens, typically digital art bought with cryptocurrency – from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The camera zoomed in on framed printouts of the ape cartoons. “We’re both apes,” Fallon said. Hilton, with her signature vocal fry, replied, “Love it.”
“The Tonight Show” episode from January 2022 is a YouTube time capsule showing the temporary alliance between celebrity marketing and the crypto industry. Bored Ape Yacht Club was not the biggest crypto phenomenon, but it was one of the top beneficiaries of celebrity hype. That celebrity hype, in turn, helped draw new consumers to crypto — an industry rife with manipulation and fraud, and one that US regulators are now giving more scrutiny in the wake of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. But for a time, when crypto’s prices seemed to have no limit, the money appeared too good for some to ask questions — questions like: Why are some of those apes wearing prison clothes?
“That was a very significant moment, because the audience for that show is very different from the typical crypto person,” explained Molly White, a software engineer and a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. The Bored Apes — a computer-generated collection of 10,000 cartoons — were being presented as a status symbol, membership in an exclusive club. Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities had joined — and viewers could join, too, if they bought an NFT.
A class action lawsuit, filed in December, alleges Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities conspired in a “vast scheme” to artificially inflate the price of Bored Ape NFTs and enrich themselves, the crypto payments company they used to get the apes, MoonPay, and the company that made the Bored Apes, Yuga Labs.
Hilton and Fallon did not respond to requests for comment.
In April 2021, Yuga Labs released the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of cartoon apes with a computer-generated combination of features and accessories, such as gold fur, a sailor hat, laser eyes, 3-D glasses, a cigarette, as well as “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison jumpsuit, a pith helmet, and a “sushi chef” headband. The founders were anonymous, known only by their online screen names.
That fall, Hollywood agent Guy Oseary reached out to Yuga Labs, eventually investing in the company and joining its board. Soon celebrities started posting their Bored Apes on social media — including Oseary’s client Madonna, along with Steph Curry, Lil Baby, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and more. Bored Apes started selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Justin Bieber bought an ape for $1.3 million. By March 2022, Yuga got a $450 million venture capital investment, and was valued at $4 billion.
The class action lawsuit claims, “this purported interest in” Bored Apes “by high-profile taste makers was entirely manufactured by Oseary at the behest of” Yuga Labs. “In order to make the promotion of, and subsequent interest in, the BAYC NFTs appear to be organic (as opposed to being solely the result of a paid promotion), the Company needed a way to discreetly pay their celebrity cohorts.” The suit alleges they did this through MoonPay.
When Jimmy Fallon introduced his audience to crypto, he also presented a frictionless way to buy in: MoonPay, a payments company that allows customers to buy crypto through most major payment systems like with a credit card. In November 2021, Fallon said on “The Tonight Show” that he’d bought his first NFT through MoonPay. “MoonPay? MoonPay! I did my homework — Moonpay, which is like PayPal but for crypto,” Fallon said. The following January, when Hilton showed her ape on the show, she said, “You said you got it on MoonPay, so I went and I copied you.”
A few months later, in April 2022, MoonPay announced more than 60 celebrities and influencers had invested in the firm. MoonPay spokesman Justin Hamilton told CNN that Hilton became an investor, but not until after she spoke with Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” The FTC generally requires an endorser to disclose when they have a financial interest in promoting a company.
The celebrity hype and unbelievable prices generated enormous media interest. “Rolling Stone” minted NFTs of the magazine with Bored Apes on the cover. Guy Oseary was on the cover of “Variety” under the headline “NFT King.”
Independent journalists, under the names of Coffeezilla and Dirty Bubble Media, noticed blockchain ledger records suggesting not everything was as it appeared. Cryptocurrency is traded on the blockchain, a permanent and public ledger of every transaction. That means it can reveal financial relationships, if you figure out the right questions to ask.
Hours before Justin Bieber bought an ape for the equivalent of $1.3 million on January 29, 2022, Bieber received Ethereum worth about $2.5 million in his crypto wallet, the blockchain shows. A couple weeks before Post Malone released a music video in November 2021 in which he bought a Bored Ape through MoonPay, MoonPay transferred cryptocurrency then worth about $760,000 into the artist’s wallet, and sent two more payments, worth about $640,000, a couple weeks after. MoonPay admits it paid for the placement in Post Malone’s video but says other celebrities paid full price for their service in US dollars.
Many celebrities who got apes thanked MoonPay on social media. Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted, “Joined @BoredApeYC ready for the reveal? Thanks @moonpay concierge.” The rapper Gunna posted on Instagram, “I Bought A @boredapeyachtclub NFT worth 300K No Cap ! His Name is BUTTA Thanks @moonpay !” Lil Baby mentioned MoonPay in his song “Top Priority.”
The blockchain shows MoonPay paying high prices for the apes, and then transferring them to purported celebrity wallets for free. MoonPay explains this as a service that helps wealthy people buy NFTs without setting up their own crypto wallet.
The company says the “white-glove” service was created because MoonPay’s CEO, Ivan Soto-Wright, had a lot of celebrity friends, and many of them asked how they could get an NFT. Jimmy Fallon, Lil Baby — they were Soto-Wright’s friends, Hamilton said.
CNN spoke to several former MoonPay employees who said they were skeptical the celebrities paid for their NFTs, because there was no evidence on the blockchain.
The company’s ape purchases have been significant. Since 2021, one of its wallets, “MoonPayHQ,” has spent at least $25 million on NFTs — 60% or about $15 million of that was spent on Bored Apes. The company told CNN they had 14 apes in a cold storage wallet, which offers more safety. It said that five of those NFTs were “purchased by concierge clients that are in the process of being transferred.” The last ape was purchased in April 2022, 10 months ago, according to blockchain records.
One influencer has said he was approached about an ape. In a Twitter Spaces audio chat last year, celebrity jeweler Ben Baller said, “Real talk: not once, not twice, three times, I’ve been offered a Bored Ape through MoonPay. … The fact that some of these super top-tier all-star NBA players have them? And I was like, ‘Yo this is all cap [lies.]’ They didn’t buy this sh*t.” Baller did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. MoonPay’s spokesman said this didn’t happen.
Oseary, the Hollywood agent and MoonPay/Yuga investor, texted CNN in response to a question: “NO ONE is paid to join the club and Yuga do NOT and have NOT given away any apes.” He said he paid full price for his Bored Ape, and so did Madonna.
Yuga Labs declined an on-the-record interview with CNN. In a statement, the company said, “In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic. We strongly believe that they are without merit, and look forward to proving as much.” Hamilton, MoonPay’s spokesman, said of the lawsuit, “We look forward to it being dismissed.”
“The fine art market is a scam – that’s OK, at least there’s art going on,” said Max Gail, who’s been a blockchain developer since 2010, and founded Omakasea and Eth Gobblers.com. (Gail hosted the Twitter Space in which Baller discussed Bored Apes.) The NFT market, he said, “is like a parody of the fine art market. They took the same strategies that had been employed in the fine art market, but then distorted it with some strange crypto economics.”
Anonymous buyers and sellers dealing in items whose values are difficult to calculate has made the fine art market susceptible to money laundering, a Senate investigation found in 2020. In 2022, an average of more than half of NFT trading volume on the Ethereum blockchain was “wash” trading, according to an analysis at Dune Analytics. (Most NFTs are on Ethereum.) Essentially, wash trades are a transaction in which the buyer and seller are the same person, or they’re working together. Wash trading has been illegal in traditional finance since the Great Depression, because it can distort the market by making people believe there is a high volume of interest in the investment. The ability to open many anonymous cryptocurrency wallets makes wash trading NFTs easier. A Chainalysis report found one “prolific NFT wash trader” made 830 sales to self-financed wallets in 2021.
Though NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art, and a way for artists to earn royalties, many NFT collections operate more like securities — a financial instrument, like stocks or bonds, that hold some monetary value. “People will say that the technology itself has provided this whole new way of creating digital art,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “It’s not that unique. The unique part of it is the speculative bubble.”
The NFT marketplace does not always make sense even to those who benefit from it. “Bored Apes have gone from $100 to $100,000 in a year. Nothing appreciates that fast,” a successful NFT artist said. The artist’s own works had gone from a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands. One of the artist’s major collectors “treats me as a commodity and my art is a commodity and he’s always pumping and dumping it. … It’s being treated as a financial vehicle.”
But there is pressure not to raise questions about the system. The NFT artist did not want to go on the record, saying it would be career suicide. “The big collectors watch for artists that FUD. And as soon as an artist FUDs, they get cancelled,” the artist said. FUD is “fear, uncertainty, and doubt,” or criticism of crypto.
Beyond how the Bored Ape NFTs are traded, what they depict is at issue in yet another Yuga Labs legal battle.
In the fall of 2021, accusations began swirling on social media that the Bored Ape Yacht Club contained visual references to racist memes from the troll site, 4chan. The artist Ryder Ripps — who’s worked with stars like Kanye West and Tame Impala — started tweeting about the claims of racist imagery. Ripps claims Guy Oseary, the Hollywood agent on Yuga’s board, called to pressure him to stop talking about the claims. (Oseary told CNN, “I can’t speak on active litigation.”)
Ripps doubled down and made a website cataloging the claims. Then, in an act he says was meant to protest the alleged racism and comment on the idea you can’t copy an NFT, Ripps made copycat NFTs he sold as RR/BAYC. Yuga sued Ripps for trademark infringement, and argues that his maligning of the Yuga apes is nothing more than a profiteering tactic. Ripps says Yuga is trying to silence its critics, and has doubled down on his claims as part of his defense in the trademark suit.
Yuga Labs called the accusations “the incoherent ramblings of a small group of for-profit conspiracy theorists.” However, the Yuga lawsuit against Ripps could affect the class action lawsuit against Yuga. Ripps’s lawyers have issued subpoenas to Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon.
To assert its trademark rights, Yuga must show that consumers associate its logos with its products, and it did so in a legal filing, in part, by pointing to celebrity owners “including TV host Jimmy Fallon…”
Ripps’s lawyer, Louis Tompros, asserts Yuga compensated celebrities for promoting its NFTs, and they did not disclose it. “And by doing that, in our view, they have gotten this public notoriety for their brand improperly,” Tompros told CNN. “And so having gotten it improperly, they now can’t go and assert that they have these rights.”
This week Yuga co-founder Wylie Aronow published a 24-page letter explaining that he was stepping back from the company and addressing widespread rumors that the company and its products were connected to the alt-right.
“I will soon call out this utter bullsh*t under oath,” he wrote.
So what are the racist references alleged by Ripps and others? To start, there’s what’s right on the surface: some of the NFTs are pictures of apes in “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison uniform, a bone necklace, gold and diamond grills. Record executive Dame Dash, a crypto enthusiast, pointed out on a podcast last year that monkeys and apes are old racist tropes.
“Think if you were a racist, like ‘Guess what I’m gonna do? I’mma get Black people to love monkeys so much that they gonna buy them, wear them on their neck… go to something called ApeFest and they’re gonna like it!’ Wouldn’t that sound funny?” Dash said on the podcast. “That’s what’s happening.”
Dash told CNN he hadn’t intended to target Yuga directly. But he’d started to wonder if he was being trolled, given the ubiquity of apes in crypto. “Racism is different these days — you can’t be so overt about it. You have to kind of troll,” Dash said.
This week Yuga agreed to settle a lawsuit with a developer who worked with Ripps, with the developer agreeing to pay them $25,000 and saying he would reject all disparaging statements against Yuga Labs.
Ryan Hickman, a software engineer who also worked with Ripps on RR/BAYC, is also being sued separately by Yuga. Hickman, who is Black, thought the Bored Apes looked like stereotypical portrayals of Black people as stupid or lazy. He said he thought this would be obvious to most people the second they saw an image of a Bored Ape. But, he said, “then somebody says, ‘Well, it’s worth $100,000.’ They say, ‘Okay well, tell me more.’”
In a statement, Yuga said, “Our company and founders strongly condemn the spread of hate, in any form, against any group.” Hollywood agent Oseary said he’d never been on the troll site 4chan.
The crypto community has adopted a lot of terms — rekt, frens, wagmi — that were popularized on 4chan, and it’s not always clear if the person using them understands where they came from. “I doubt that they were a massive alt-right troll campaign,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “I do think it’s likely that the creators of the project basically included some nods to 4chan.”
“It’s not one thing that makes it racist. It’s everything together as a package,” programmer and 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan said, looking at comparisons between Pepe the Frog memes and Bored Apes. Brennan took an interest in the claims that Yuga referenced 4chan memes, because he’d seen them so often when he was running 8chan, a similar troll site. He quit 8chan in 2016, and in 2019 pushed for it to be taken down because it had become a hub for extremist violence. He began to suspect the Yuga founders were like the people he used to know.
Take one of the apes’ characteristics, which Yuga calls a “sushi chef headband.” Brennan reads and speaks Japanese, and saw the headband actually said “kamikaze,” which has been used as a slur against Japanese people. A similar headband appeared on a Pepe meme. “That one was the most shocking,” he told CNN.
In a legal filing connected to the Ripps case, Yuga said the apes reflected a combination of many traits, “not any person’s purported racism.”
“I was hoping, in my eternal optimism,” Brennan said, “that people would become a lot more skeptical of tech bros. … And that liberal — so-called — celebrities in Hollywood would view these people with suspicion. Apparently not.”
– CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify when Paris Hilton invested in MoonPay. Jimmy Fallon is not an investor, a company spokesman said.
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New York
CNN
—
A record $3.8 billion worth of cryptocurrency was stolen from various services last year, with much of those thefts driven by North Korean-linked hackers, according to a report Wednesday from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.
The increase in crypto heists, from $3.3 billion in 2021, came as the overall market for cryptocurrencies suffered significant declines. The value of Bitcoin, for example, fell by more than 60% last year.
North Korea was a key driver for the surge in thefts, according to the report. Hackers linked to the country stole an estimated $1.7 billion worth of crytopcurrency through various hacks in 2022, up from $429 million in the prior year, Chainalysis said.
Some of the biggest crypto hacks of the year have since been attributed to North Korea. The FBI has blamed hackers linked to the North Korean government for more than $600 million hack of video game Axie Infinity’s Ronin network in March and a $100 million Harmony, a cryptocurrency firm, in June.
“North Korea’s total exports in 2020 totalled $142 million worth of goods, so it isn’t a stretch to say that cryptocurrency hacking is a sizable chunk of the nation’s economy,” Chainalysis noted in the report.
US officials worry Pyongyang will use money stolen from crypto hacks to fund its illicit nuclear and ballistic weapons program. North Korean hackers have stolen the equivalent of billions of dollars in recent years by raiding cryptocurrency exchanges, according to the United Nations.
In addition to hacking cryptocurrency firms, suspected North Koreans have posed as other nationalities to apply for work at such firms and send money back to Pyongyang, US agencies have publicly warned.
In general, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols were the main target of hackers, accounting for more than 80% of all cryptocurrency stolen for the year, according to the report. These protocols are used to replace traditional financial institutions with software that allows users to transact directly with each other via the blockchain, the digital ledger that underpins cryptocurrencies.
Of the attacks on DeFi systems, 64% targeted cross-chain bridge protocols, which allow users to exchange assets between different blockchains. Bridge services typically hold large reserves of various coins, making them targets for hackers. (The thefts on Axie Infinity and Harmony were both bridge hacks.)
While crypto hacks continued to rise last year, there is some cause for hope. Law enforcement and national security agencies are expanding their abilities to combat digital criminals, such as the FBI’s recovery of $30 million worth of cryptocurrency stolen in the Axie Infinity hack.
Those efforts, combined with other agencies cracking down on money laundering techniques, “means that these hacks will get harder and less fruitful with each passing year,” according to Chainalysis.
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