The Cryptocurrency market had a big weekend! With Morgan Stanley inviting investors to purchase El Salvador Eurobonds, Gemini winning a virtual asset service provider license in Ireland, and the FBI warning the public about bogus cryptocurrency applications, the cryptocurrency business is buzzing with activity. There’s been a lot going on lately!
In this issue:
• Morgan Stanley invites investors to purchase El Salvador Eurobonds that have been severely damaged.
• Human protocol adds new blockchain layer for data contribution cooperation.
• Gemini wins virtual asset service provider licence in Ireland
• The ‘experiment’ of crypto self-regulation in Japan is failing.
• A UFC fighter will earn his whole payment in Bitcoin, ignoring market fluctuations.
• FBI warns the public about bogus cryptocurrency applications.
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Morgan Stanley invites investors to purchase El Salvador Eurobonds that have been severely damaged.
The tiny nation’s Bitcoin (BTC) investment has backfired as the main cryptocurrency trades at a 70% discount. Morgan Stanley has a buy call for Latin America’s damaged Eurobonds.
Simon Waever, global head of emerging-market sovereign credit strategy at Morgan Stanley, said investors in a note Tuesday that El Salvador’s bonds are excessively penalised by the market despite the country’s stronger financial indicators than many of its peers.
Waever said a country’s debt shouldn’t trade below 43.7 cents on the dollar, even in default, but recognised that the threshold is hard to reach owing to tightening global liquidity.
El Salvador should have no trouble servicing loans for the next year owing to its primary surplus and lower maturities than Argentina, Egypt, and Ukraine.
El Salvador adopted BTC legal money in September 2017, and everything went smoothly until the bull market crested. Since September, the nation has bought $56 million in BTC and utilised the earnings to develop schools and clinics. When the bear market hit, the nation lost most of its investment.
After a $1 billion bailout request to the IMF failed, Bitcoin volcanic bonds were discussed. The bond was touted together with a Bitcoin city, but there is no debut date.
Human protocol adds new blockchain layer for data contribution cooperation.
Thursday, Human Protocol introduced a blockchain coordination layer to simplify data routing between third-party providers. Human serves as the foundation for Routing Protocol, which enables the identification of network generators, fee agreements, consensus job requirements, proof of balance, and network upgrade governance.
The Human protocol evolved from hCaptcha, an on-chain bot blocker that rewarded users for solving CAPTCHAs, to a tokenization solution. Human thinks that the open-source Routing Protocol will facilitate Exchange Oracle management. Oracles, job exchanges, layer-one job ads, and workpool operators are coordinated using Routing Protocol.
Human network intends to employ the peer-to-peer consensus mechanism of blockchain to automate tasks that need human assistance. AI e-commerce marketing offers a comparable promise of value. Without early “training” data, a machine-learning system cannot suggest relevant advertisements to web users.
Using the Human Protocol, network clients may post smart bounties for customer reviews and reward users with the HMT token. The development team wants to create a network for decentralised data sharing. It intends to provide direct, scalable connections between workers, organisations, and machine learning.
Gemini wins virtual asset service provider license in Ireland.
Gemini, a crypto trading platform located in New York, claims to be the first virtual asset service provider (VASP) to register with the Central Bank of Ireland (CBI). A corporation was granted electronic money institution (EMI) license by the CBI earlier in February 2022.
In April 2021, the EU’s Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive, or 5AMLD, was transposed into Irish law, making it illegal to operate in the country without registering with the CBI and conducting due diligence on clients, including identification, accounting for the origin and destination of their crypto assets, and reporting suspicious financial activity.
Gemini’s e-money license, for which it sought in early 2020 and was granted in March 2022, enables it to issue electronic currency, offer electronic payment services, and process electronic payments for third parties. However, it prohibits companies from operating as exchanges.
Gemini launched its Dublin office at the beginning of 2021 and recruited Gillian Lynch, a former executive of the Irish banking platform Leveris and Bank of Ireland, to serve as head of Ireland and EU. Kraken and Ripple have also chosen Ireland as its European hub, and in September, Binance created three subsidiaries there.
The ‘experiment’ of crypto self-regulation in Japan is failing.
Local government and business experts say Japan’s crypto “experiment” isn’t operating as planned.
Since 2018, the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA), a self-regulatory organisation, has been entrusted with setting norms for the country’s crypto business.
The group was created after the 2018 $530 million Coincheck breach. It’s recognised by Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) and may pass and enforce crypto exchange regulations.
Its members include Coincheck, BitFlyer, Rakuten Wallet Co, FTX, and Coinbase’s Japanese businesses.
The FSA has allegedly criticised the JVCEA for being hesitant to implement rules.
According to the FT, the FSA noted fundamental flaws with the JVCEA, including delays in applying Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules and insufficient communication between directors, member businesses, and its secretariat.
The report noted that the FSA had issued a “extremely stern warning” to the JVCEA in December to get its operations in order and that it was “not clear what kind of deliberations the body was having, what the decision-making process was, why the situation was as it was, and what the board members’ responsibility was.”
In June, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida asked the body to speed up listing clearance for digital assets on local crypto exchanges while also protecting customers.
Another anonymous JVCEA insider said the organisation lacks crypto-savvy office employees.
A UFC fighter will earn his whole payment in Bitcoin, ignoring market fluctuations.
Luana Pinheiro, an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) athlete, has collaborated with Bitwage to earn her compensation in Bitcoin (BTC). Pinheiro said that she continues to receive fiat currency payments from her sponsors, but instantly changes them to bitcoin via Bitwage.
Pinheiro has won eight straight bouts and is now ranked fifteenth in her UFC class. The fighter said that her fiancé and fellow mixed martial artist Matheus Nicolau persuaded her to get her compensation in Bitcoin.
Pinheiro compared Bitcoin to her fighting technique, jiu-jitsu, and emphasised that she likes to be paid in BTC and is unconcerned with the volatility of the cryptocurrency. According to her, asset appreciation is mostly driven by volatility.
The Brazilian also stated that Bitcoin serves as a hedge against inflation for her, since the purchase value of fiat currencies has eroded over time due to inflation, whereas BTC maintains its ascent despite corrective fluctuations.
“Remember that I’m from Brazil, so I’m familiar with inflation and its implications. Around the time of my birth, the Brazilian Real was launched and tied to the U.S. dollar at a rate of 1:1. It is now 5 BRL to 1 USD. Bitcoin serves as a hedge against inflation,” she said.
FBI warns the public about bogus cryptocurrency applications.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States has issued a public warning regarding fraudulent cryptocurrency apps, which are believed to have defrauded U.S. investors out of $42.7 million to far.
In order to mislead investors, fraudsters have constructed applications using the same logos and identifying information as real crypto organisations, according to a Monday advice released by the securities and intelligence department. The FBI said that 244 individuals have previously fallen victim to these fraudulent applications.
In one instance, cybercriminals persuaded victims to download an app bearing the logo of a legitimate U.S. financial institution and instructed them to deposit cryptocurrencies into wallets supposedly associated with their accounts.
When victims sought to withdraw funds from the app, they would be required to pay taxes on those funds. However, this was really another pretext to separate victims from further monies, since the withdrawals would remain inaccessible even if the victims completed the payments.
Approximately $3.7 million was stolen from 28 victims between December 2021 and May 2022, according to the FBI.
Between October 2021 and May 2022, hackers operating under the firm name “YiBit” defrauded at least four victims of around $5.5 million employing a similar style of deception.
In November 2021, a third instance featured thieves operating under the moniker “Supay.” They conned two victims by convincing them to transfer bitcoin into their app wallets, which were subsequently locked until further amounts were supplied.
On Crypto Twitter, warnings concerning bogus applications have also been circulating.
A user reported that a buddy recently fell victim to a scam that originated on the internet messaging service WhatsApp, in which the victim was enticed to download a bogus cryptocurrency app and put cash into the app’s wallet. A week later, the cryptographic application disappeared.
Closing
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