Elon Musk multiplies contradictions on Bitcoin

Banks and Institutions

Elon Musk multiplies contradictions on Bitcoin

Elon Musk is multiplying the contradictions on Bitcoin. Indeed, after Tesla announced on May 13 that it would no longer sell vehicles in exchange for Bitcoin, citing environmental concerns, the Bitcoin lost 6% in one hour. Elon Musk then implied on Twitter that Tesla could have resold its Bitcoins, only to backtrack and say that Tesla had not sold any yet…

Source : CBNC

Binance targeted by the IRS

A new investigation by the IRS and the U.S. Department of Justice is targeting Binance this time. Chainanalysis, a blockchain forensics firm, has concluded that Binance is believed to be the cryptocurrency exchange with the most illegal funds intended for criminal activity. U.S. authorities are looking into Binance, with possible charges of tax evasion or illegal activity against customers, and aiding and abetting the platform. Binance has announced that it will cooperate with U.S. justice.

Source : BloombergTax

Ernst & Young continues to focus on blockchain

The auditing firm EY continues to take a keen interest in blockchain. It is investing $100 million to expand its business in this area, particularly in what it calls the EY Blockchain Analyzer suite, which allows modeling, auditing and testing on decentralized finance smart contracts, as well as storing audited information.

Source : Cointelegraph

Major restrictions imposed in China

China decides to ban financial institutions and payment companies from providing services related to crypto-currency transactions, while taking care to warn potential investors about the speculative nature of cryptoassets, without prohibiting their holding. To justify the ban, China blames crypto-currencies for their high volatility and speculative nature, disrupting the balance of the "normal economic and financial order."

Source : Reuters

Fox gets into NFTs

Fox Entertainment is getting into NFTs: it has just created a subsidiary called Blockchain Creative Labs, which has already started creating content, in the form of the "first animated series entirely on blockchain", Krapopolis. It will soon be possible to buy NFTs of the series’ characters, or to get tokens giving access to exclusive content.

Source : Cryptonews

Moneygram launches Bitcoin-cash exchange service

Moneygram, which has moved away from Ripple because of its legal problems with the SEC, now plans to embrace Bitcoin. Working with Coinme Inc. which operates a large network of ATMs, MoneyGram plans to bring Bitcoin access to thousands of U.S. locations that will allow Bitcoin-cash exchanges. An international expansion plan is planned for the second half of 2021 and new cryptocurrencies will be available for exchange.

Source : Journal du Coin

Cryptoactive ecosystem

Ebay gets into NFTs aswell

Ebay joins the NFTs trend, and indicates the implementation of NFTs sales on its platform in a progressive way, by carefully listing those that can be sold there. The company has announced that it will take 8% of the final sale price for private sales, and 3 to 10% for professional sales, depending on the product sold.

Source : Journal Du Coin

Tether reveals the distribution of its asset reserves

Tether has revealed the breakdown of their asset reserves as of March 31, 2021, in an effort to provide transparency. Only 4% of their reserves are held in cash, while 65% are cash equivalents, primarily commercial paper. The remaining 24% is held in secured loans, bonds and other investments, including cryptos (less than 2%). The disclosure of this breakdown comes three months after the company paid an $18.5 million fine following doubts about its reserves. In other Tether news, the asset is now appearing on the Avalanche blockchain, the ninth network on which it is rolling out.

Source : Cryptoactu & TheBlockCrypto

Vitalik Buterin burns a lot of Shiba Inu tokens

6.7 billion worth of Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens were destroyed by Vitalik Buterin. The creator of Ethereum received a large amount of this asset for free. Not wanting to participate in the speculation around this token, Vitalik Buterin decided to donate 10% of it to an Indian aid fund to fight against Covid and destroy the rest. The price of SHIB has since lost 50% of its value.

Source : Cryptonaute

New sale of CryptoPunk NFTs

A collection of nine "CryptoPunk" non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has been sold by LarvaLabs for $16.9 million at Christie’s auction house. The CryptoPunks are a collection of 10,000 pixelated heads. A disappointing sale, as only one CryptoPunk was sold for $7.6 million earlier in the year, which is in line with the declining popularity of NFTs lately. A third sale of NFTs is scheduled for Friday, which will be based on a collaboration with Emily Ratajkowski, famous American model.

Source : TheBlockCrypto

Technology

Microsoft closes Azure Blockchain

Six years after its launch, Microsoft is closing its Azure Blockchain service. The company had launched this offer based on the principle "Blockchain as a Service", allowing users to deploy blockchain nodes easily and quickly. Microsoft will offer its customers to migrate to Quorum Blockchain Service, managed in partnership with Consensys.

Source : Zdnet

Kusama reaches a new price record

Kusama (KSM) is offering us a nice rise in its price, reaching a new price record of $591.5 after a 55% increase, following a fall that had then brought the price of Kusama below $380. This meteoric rise in price follows several new developments announced by Kusama, such as the upcoming launch of parachute auctions, but also thanks to recent integrations that have helped improve Kusama’s interoperability with other networks, and the improvement of the KSM staking service.

Source : Coin Telegraph

xToken, latest hack victim

xToken is the latest decentralized finance platform to get screwed. An attacker managed to use flash loans and a hack to manipulate prices and steal $24 million from this platform. xToken usually offers derivatives on decentralized finance tokens like SNX or BNT.

Source : TheBlockCrypto

Figures of the week

81 million
According to Chainanalysis, $81 million has been paid in cryptos to pay ransomware since the beginning of the year, at least.

21,53%
The biggest increase in Bitcoin’s difficulty since 2014 occurred this week, with 21.53% increase.

73%
73% of Bitcoin miners now report acceptance of the Taproot update.

1 billion dollars
The decentralized finance protocols on Solana now exceed $1 billion in funds under management.

2 hours
Two hours. That’s the development time it took to create Dogecoin in 2013, by copying Bitcoin’s code.