As bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies get increasing attention from investors, Wall Street and its traditional banks continue to adjust to the shift. Catch up on this week’s top stories highlighting the intersection of these old guard and new school areas of finance with this recap compiled by The Fly.
BINANCE-LINKED BLOCKCHAIN SUFFERS $570M HACK: In a series of Thursday tweets, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said, “An exploit on a cross-chain bridge, BSC Token Hub, resulted in extra BNB. We have asked all validators to temporarily suspend BSC. The issue is contained now. Your funds are safe. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide further updates accordingly…The current impact estimate is around $100m USD equvilent, about a quarter of the last BNB burn.” On Friday, the team at BNB Chain announced an ecosystem update. The network said, “First, we want to apologize to the community for the exploit that occurred. We own this. Decentralized chains are not designed to be stopped, but by contacting community validators one by one, we were able to stop the incident from spreading. It was not that easy as BNB Smart Chain has 26 active validators at present and 44 in total in different time zones. This delayed closure, but we were able to minimize the loss. A timeline of events and details will be shared with all parties following a thorough postmortem, but in the meantime, here’s what happened: There was an exploit affecting the native cross-chain bridge between BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain, known as ‘BSC Token Hub.’ A total of 2 million BNB was withdrawn. The exploit was through a sophisticated forging of the low level proof into one common library. Thanks to the assistance of all the security experts, projects, and validators, the vast majority of the funds remain under control.” A total of 2M of the BNB cryptocurrency is worth around $570M at current prices for the virtual currency.
MASTERCARD LAUNCHES ‘CRYPTO SECURE’ SOLUTION: Mastercard (MA) announced Tuesday its launch of "Crypto Secure," which the company calls "a first-of-its kind technology solution designed to bring additional security and trust to the digital ecosystem." Crypto Secure combines insights and technology from CipherTrace with proprietary information to help card issuers stay compliant with the complex regulatory landscape of the digital assets sector.Ajay Bhalla, President of Mastercard Cyber and Intelligence, said: "At Mastercard trust is our business and with cryptocurrency more intertwined in our daily lives this is an exciting next step in our journey. Crypto Secure will provide card issuers with a platform that allows them access to insights which will improve the safety of crypto purchases, increasing consumer confidence and creating the same trust they expect when paying with Mastercard."
COINBASE ANNOUNCES WALLET MOBILE SDK: Coinbase (COIN) said in a Wednesday blog post: "We’ve launched a new open source Coinbase Wallet Mobile SDK, designed from scratch for web3 developers building native mobile applications. The Mobile SDK is the easiest and fastest way to integrate Coinbase Wallet into your mobile web3 dapps enabling you to reach millions of Coinbase users. The Mobile SDK is already live with multiple mobile dapps including dYdX, DeBank, Showtime, and Tribes… This SDK enables you to build faster, more reliable and more decentralized native mobile web3 dapps. This will be available for all major mobile development platforms, so you can install the SDK from the package manager of your choice.”
Additionally, in a series of Tuesday tweets, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said, "Big announcement: we’ve been working with director Greg Kohs on a documentary about cryptocurrency and Coinbase over the last three years, and it will be coming out this Friday on Amazon Prime/iTunes/YouTube etc.We gave Greg and his team unprecedented access inside the company, showing the crazy ups and downs of building a tech startup all the way to us becoming a public company. He shows it all – the good, bad, and ugly. I agreed to do this documentary because I wanted to demystify what it takes to build a tech startup and encourage more people to start companies. I also wanted to demystify crypto.”
ANALYST LOWERS PRICE TARGETS ON MINERS: B. Riley analyst Lucas Pipes lowered the firm’s price target on Marathon Digital (MARA) to $8 from $10 on Friday and kept a Neutral rating on the shares. The analyst tweaked his bitcoin price deck slightly lower to reflect softer market conditions. He’s also shifting the target year for valuation from 2023 to 2024, which led to an average decline in price targets of 24% given the anticipated impacts of the halving event in early 2024. Pipes also lowered the firm’s price target on Core Scientific (CORZ) to $5 from $7, Stronghold Digital Mining (SDIG) to $3 from $4 and Greenidge Generation (GREE) to $5 from $7. Pipes, who kept a Buy rating on all the shares, named his top pick in the space as Riot.
KIM KARDASHIAN TO SETTLE SEC CHARGES OVER CRYPTO PROMOTION: The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday charges against Kim Kardashian for touting on social media a crypto asset security offered and sold by EthereumMax without disclosing the payment she received for the promotion. The SEC’s order finds that Kardashian failed to disclose that she was paid $250,000 to publish a post on her Instagram account about EMAX tokens, the crypto asset security being offered by EthereumMax. Kardashian’s post contained a link to the EthereumMax website, which provided instructions for potential investors to purchase EMAX tokens. Kardashian agreed to settle the charges, pay $1.26M in penalties, disgorgement, and interest, and cooperate with the Commission’s ongoing investigation.
CRYPTO STOCK PLAYS: Cryptocurrency revenues have been pointed to as reasons to be bullish on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA) in select research. Ideanomics (IDEX), Riot Blockchain, Overstock (OSTK), Pareteum (TEUM) and SRAX (SRAX) are other stocks that have been touted, or promoted themselves, as a way to play the crypto theme.
PRICE ACTION: As of time of writing, bitcoin rose about 1% this week to $19,594 in U.S. dollars, according to TradeBlock.
Published first on TheFly
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