Crypto Guides, Knowledge & Insights

Do Kwon and Terraform Labs Slapped With Class-Action Suit

Do Kwon, the “heartbroken” co-creator of Terra, headlines a raft of defendants named in a class-action suit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Northern California.　　Kwon is joined by a group that includes Terraform Labs, Jump Crypto, and Three Arrows Capital. Plaintiff Nick Patterson is alleging, among other accusations, that Terra tokens were sold as “unregistered securities,” and that the Defendants made a　　series of false and misleading statements regarding the largest Terra ecosystem digital assets by market cap, UST and LUNA, in order to induce investors into purchasing these digital assets at inflated rates.　　Kwon and Daniel Shin launched Terraform Labs in 2018, initially with the goal of upending payment giants like PayPal. Later that year, the pair raised $32 million, and in 2019 an initial coin offering yielded $62 million.　　UST and LUNA imploded last month, erasing tens of billions of dollars in value, for which Kwon was pilloried online. After promising Terras dollar-pegged algorithmic stablecoin couldnt possibly collapse, while also attacking rivals on Twitter, sympathy was scarce.　　But that still didnt stop the Terra community from approving “Terra 2.0” in the wake of the stunning collapse, a project that included creating a new LUNA token and relegating the previous one to

2022-06-19Deep Dive

Dogecoin Pumps 8% After Elon Musk Says He's Still Buying

As the current crypto rout continues, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both down 30% over the past week and the entire crypto market cap fell to $830 billion. But Elon Musk declared he will “keep supporting Dogecoin.”　　That was enough to make DOGE spike 8% to $0.058.　　Of course, 5.8 cents is a far cry (a 91% drop, to be exact) from the 72 cents Dogecoin touched in May of last year, when Musk hosted “Saturday Night Live” and Dogecoin got a mention in his opening monologue and on Weekend Update. (“Its a hustle,” Musk responded to Michael Ches question about DOGE.)　　Musk has been Dogecoins most high-profile cheerleader since April 20190 when he tweeted, “Dogecoin may be my fav cryptocurrency.” Throughout 2020 and 2021, Google searches for Dogecoin spiked every time Musk tweeted about the meme coin. In May 2021, Decrypt reported that Dogecoin developers had even been in close contact with Musk about changes he wanted made to the code.　　More recently, Musk (along with Mark Cuban) has advocated for the use of DOGE for payments, which would make the joke coin a real utility and less of a joke.　　And in his recent bid to buy Twitter, Musk has repeatedly said one of

2022-06-19Deep Dive

What Is Stepn? The ‘Move-to-Earn’ NFT App That Pays You Crypto to Exercise

Stepn is the evolution of two concepts that have been gaining traction for several years now: the augmented reality (AR) game and play-to-earn gaming. 　　AR games typically feature a virtual world overlaid onto the real one. The concept properly took off in 2015 with Pokemon Go, which scattered virtual Pokemon across a real life map of the world and let users track and collect them via GPS. 　　Stepn takes that element—accruing points based on progress made via GPS—and adds onto it the newer play-to-earn model that was pioneered by crypto games like Axie Infinity, which reward players in crypto tokens. The result: A game that tracks users IRL exercise and accrues points to them in the form of crypto.　　Thus play-to-earn becomes a GPS-tracked “move-to-earn”: Think of it like Fitbit meets Pokemon Go meets Axie Infinity.What is Stepn？　　Built on Ethereum competitor Solana and created by app developer FindSatoshi Lab, Stepn is a smartphone app that lets users earn money by walking, jogging, or running for a narrowly delineated time period that refreshes every 24 hours. 　　The rewards come in Stepns native cryptocurrency, the Green Satoshi Token or GST, and are credited to a wallet created in-game or imported externally. Players must

2022-06-17Deep Dive

Elon Musk Reveals Crypto Twitter Plans in Leaked Transcript

Elon Musk shared further details of his plans for how crypto could be used on Twitter in a leaked Qs suggestion that Twitter integrate payments mirrors his earlier argument that the platform should become a WeChat-style “super app”; the Chinese social media platform brings together multiple services including ride hailing, food delivery and payments under one umbrella.Musk takes aim at Twitter crypto scams　　In the Qs code be made open-source, “so that people can critique it, improve it, identify bugs, potentially, or bias.”　　One solution Musk put forward to address the problem of fake accounts on Twitter was verification through payment for its Twitter Blue subscription service By “piggybacking on the payment system,” he suggested, “Twitter would know who you are, at least from a payment standpoint.” Musk has previously suggested—possibly in jest—that Twitter Blue subscriptions could be paid in his favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.Musks $43m Twitter bid　　Bot activity has become a key factor in Musks on-again off-again purchase of Twitter. After making his $43 million bid to buy the social media platform in April, the Tesla CEO said that the purchase “cannot move forward” until Twitter provides information on how many fake accounts exist on the platform.　　Earlier this month, Twitter reportedly gave

2022-06-17Deep Dive

Elon Musk gets hit with ‘ridiculous’ $258B Dogecoin lawsuit

The class-action lawsuit has raised many eyebrows in the crypto community, with many confident the suit will not be successful.　　Billionaire Elon Musk, along with his companies SpaceX and Tesla Inc, are all being sued for an astonishing $258 billion in damages for being “engaged in a crypto pyramid scheme” involving Dogecoin (DOGE).　　The damages sought are more than 34 times Dogecoins current market cap of $7.5 billion and nearly three times its ATH market cap of $88.68 billion in mid-2021.　　Filed in the New York District Court by an attorney at Evan Spencer Law on Thursday, the class-action lawsuit alleges that Musk “used his pedestal as Worlds Richest man to operate and manipulate the Dogecoin Pyramid Scheme for profit, exposure, and amusement.”　　In the filing, plaintiff Keith Johnson, a U.S. citizen, alleges that Musk and his corporations were “unjustly enriched” by $86 billion as a result of wire fraud, gambling enterprise, false advertising, deceptive practices, and other unlawful conduct.　　Johnson claims that he and others in the class-action have lost approximately $86 billion between May 2021 and June 2022 and is demanding that figure in monetary damages along with another $172 billion in damages and fees.　　Defendant Musk is the self-appointed ‘Dogefather,’ ‘former CEO of

2022-06-17Deep Dive

126% return for stock market short-sellers who smelled blood in crypto waters

A report from S3 Partners noted that crypto stocks with the highest short interest include Coinbase, Marathon Digital and MicroStrategy.　　Short-sellers have made a killing on various sectors of the U.S. stock market this year, but no other sector “held a candle” to the blockchain industry, with crypto company short-sellers profits up 126% in 2022, according new data.　　On Thursday, technology and data analytics firm S3 Partners published a video summarizing its recent report, which found that overall, U.S. equity short-sellers are up on average more than 30% for the year.　　Some of these profit gains were attributed to the short-selling of automobiles and components stocks (up 54%), software and services stocks (up 50%), media and entertainment stocks (up 46%) and retail stocks, (up 46%) in the year, though these all paled in comparison to crypto stocks, which saw short-selling profits up 126% in 2022.　　“But none of these industries holds a candle to short sellers in the crypto sector, up 126% on an average short interest of $3 billion dollars.”　　Crypto stocks with the highest short interest include exchange Coinbase Global (COIN), Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA), and MicroStrategy (MSTR), a software company that is also known for being the largest publicly traded

2022-06-17Deep Dive

72 of the top 100 coins have fallen 90% or more: Here are the holdouts

The vast majority of cryptocurrencies have dipped more than 90% from their all-time highs, but a core group has managed to stay ahead of the pack.　　According to price data from CoinGecko compiled by CoinGoLive, the current bear market has seen a whopping 72 out of top-100 tokens fall more than 90% from their all-time highs.　　The larger cap coins are faring better than most. Among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market cap, nine have dipped less than 90% during the current market downturn. Bitcoin (BTC), the largest crypto, is down 70.3% from its November high of $69,000. Second place is Ether (ETH) which is down 78% from its high of $4,878.　　Others in the top ten include Binance Coin (BNB), Cardano (ADA), Solana (SOL), and Polkadot (DOT) which are down between 68% and 88%, (excluding the three stablecoins USDT, USDC and BUSD). Ripple (XRP) is the exception, tracking a fall of 90.56% from its ATH.　　The average fall from ATH for these top 10 coins is 79%, while among the top 20 coins the average fall from the all-time-high is 81.1%.　　Exchange tokens appear to be doing better than many other sectors with a 68.3% average fall from their ATHs.　　The best performer there is

2022-06-17Deep Dive

Maker cuts off Aave's DAI supply as fallout from Celsius continues

The MakerDAO decided to cut off Aave from its direct deposit module as a safeguard in light of the possibility that Celsius folds and crashes the price of stETH.　　MakerDAO has voted to cut off lending platform Aave‘s ability to generate DAI for its lending pool without collateral as the risks of Celsius’s liquidity crisis loom large over the entire crypto ecosystem.　　The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) made the decision as a means of mitigating the Maker protocols exposure to the beleaguered staking and lending platform in case Celsius goes belly up and implodes the stETH peg as well.　　stETH is a token representing an amount of ETH that is staked on the Lido staking platform. Its peg to ETH has been wavering for several weeks and its currently trading about 6% below the price of ETH. Celsius invested a significant amount of user funds into stETH, which is reportedly one of the reasons it paused withdrawals.　　A June 14 governance proposal from DAO member prose11 suggested that the Maker protocol should temporarily disable the DAI Direct Deposit Module (D3M) for Aave because Celsius borrowed 100 million in DAI collateralized by stETH, which would be at risk of liquidation if Celsius fails.　　“The reason we

2022-06-17Deep Dive

Bitcoin Consumes Million Times More Energy Than Credit Cards: IMF Report

According to a new report published by the International Monetary Fund, Bitcoin, the worlds largest cryptocurrency, consumes a million times more energy than credit cards. Its calculations are based on academic and private-sector publications.　　Image by blogs.imf.org　　The report, which was panned by Xavier Lavayssièr, Germán Villegas Bauer, and Itai Agur, shows also that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and some private cryptocurrencies are actually more efficient than traditional payment systems.　　As of today, credit and debit cards account for the vast majority of all cashless transactions. For more blockchain news, please download WikiBit - the Global Blockchain Regulatory Inquiry APP.　　The paper makes a case for ditching the proof-of-work consensus system and using permissioned systems in order to major a giant green leap.　　Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain, is expected to transition to proof-of-stake later this year, which will reduce its energy consumption by a whopping 99.95%.　　The IMF researchers conclude that power usage should be also one of the considerations in debates about the future of money.

2022-06-17Deep Dive

Celsius Investigated by Regulators in Four Different States

Crypto lender Celsius is faced with an investigation from regulators from four different states for freezing customer accounts over solvency concerns.　　Multiple State Regulators Investigating Celsius　　Regulators have launched an investigation into Celsius over its decision to halt customer fund withdrawals.　　According to Reuters, state securities regulators from Alabama, Kentucky, and New Jersey are joining the Texas State Security Board in its probe into crypto lending company Celsius recent activity. Texas Director of Enforcement Joseph Rotunda said that regulators “began investigating the freezing of accounts first thing on Monday morning” and that he considered the probe a “priority.”　　Furthermore, Alabama Securities Commission Director Joseph Borg told Reuters that the Securities and Exchange Commission was also in communication with Celsius and that the company had been responsive to regulators questions so far.　　Celsius Facing Solvency Issues　　Celsius is a crypto lending platform that offers its customers up to 18% returns on crypto assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. It does so by taking advantage of the enhanced yields commonly found in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols while acting as a centralized custodian for its clients.　　The company announced on Monday that it would pause customer withdrawals, swaps, and transfers in order to protect its solvency and put itself “in

2022-06-17Deep Dive

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