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Top Stories of The Week
Musk claims X hit by ‘massive DDoS attack’ delaying Trump interview
X owner Elon Musk claimed the social media platform was hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as his slated interview with U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump was set to kick off.
“There appears to be a massive DDoS attack on X. Working on shutting it down,” Musk posted to X on Aug. 12. A DDoS attack aims to flood a network or service with traffic to disrupt and deny legitimate users from being able to use it.
The alleged attack came as technical issues plagued the X Spaces interview Musk and Trump were scheduled to hold at 8:00 pm Eastern Time, with multiple X users complaining they could not join. The site showed the stream was “not available,” but around 120,000 still managed to join. In a separate post, Musk said X tested the system earlier in the day with eight million concurrent listeners.
Musk managed to start the interview shortly after 8:30 pm ET, which he earlier said would “proceed with a smaller number of live listeners” with unedited audio to be posted “immediately thereafter.”
“As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” Musk said when opening the interview.
US Court of Appeals reboots HEX manipulation case against Binance.US
A United States appeals court has partially reversed the dismissal of a proposed class action lawsuit against Binance.US, which alleges the exchange unlawfully manipulated the price of the Hex (HEX) token.
A panel of three judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a district court’s previous dismissal of the class-action suit, and stated that the plaintiff, Ryan Cox, had made justifiable claims against Binance.US and CoinMarketCap.
Cox first filed the class-action lawsuit in 2021, claiming that Binance Capital Management and Binance.US artificially restricted HEX’s ranking on CoinMarketCap, a cryptocurrency price-tracking platform that Binance owns. Cox claimed this resulted in HEX trading at a lower price while Binance’s own cryptocurrencies were ranked higher.
A district court judge first dismissed the lawsuit in February 2023, finding that Cox had failed to make any concrete links between specific activity in Arizona and Binance.US, which would link Binance.US to the manipulation of HEX.
In an Aug. 12 opinion, the judges disagreed with the district court’s original conclusion that Cox had to establish “sufficient minimum contacts” between Binance.US and Arizona — the state in which Cox first filed the lawsuit — for a court to establish personal jurisdiction.
Kamala Harris may continue the Biden administration’s crypto crackdown
Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States and current presidential candidate, aims to maintain the Biden administration’s stringent stance on cryptocurrency regulation.
Harris is reportedly working with Brian Deese and Bharat Ramamurti, two former economic advisers of the Biden administration who have heavily opposed the previous Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act of 2023 for being too permissive for issuers.
Harris’ choice of economic advisers could signal her intention to continue the Biden administration’s hostile regulatory approach to crypto, according to Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy, who wrote in an Aug. 13 X post:
“NEW EVIDENCE THAT @KamalaHarris WILL CONTINUE CRYPTO CRACKDOWN. Her advisor choice suggests she will keep Biden’s hostile attitude to crypto.”
Harris is preparing to unveil plans regarding her economic policy agenda in a mid-August speech, which could offer investors more clues about her approach toward cryptocurrency regulation.
US gov’t $590M Silk Road Bitcoin transfer to Coinbase unlikely to be sold — Analyst
The United States government transferred nearly $600 million worth of Bitcoin to Coinbase, but it is unlikely to transform into selling pressure. Specifically, 10,000 Bitcoin, worth over $593 million, was transferred on Aug. 15, as reported by Cointelegraph.
The Bitcoin was sent to a Coinbase Prime deposit wallet, according to on-chain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence. Despite the initial concerns, the Bitcoin is unlikely to be sold, according to Ryan Lee, chief analyst of Bitget Research. Lee told Cointelegraph:
“This does not mean that 10,000 Bitcoin have already been sold. Last month, the US Marshals Service, an agency under the US Department of Justice, announced a partnership with Coinbase Prime to ‘safeguard and trade’ large digital assets.”
Whales (entities holding large amounts of Bitcoin) can have a significant impact on Bitcoin’s price. Investors often follow the transactions of large holders to gauge potential incoming selling pressure.
MetaMask launches pilot self-custody debit card with Mastercard
Popular decentralized finance wallet MetaMask has partnered with Mastercard and digital payments company Baanx to launch a self-custody debit card pilot program for select users in the United Kingdom and the European Union, with plans to roll out the product in other regions over time.
The card allows users to self-custody their funds until the moment the transaction is processed and the customer’s digital assets are converted into fiat for payment at retail outlets, online shopping outlets and other merchants.
In a statement to Cointelegraph, Lorenzo Santos, senior product manager at Consensys, explained that users need to hold their crypto on the Linea network and use Linea to set spending limits on the card.
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Santos also outlined how transactions would be processed from start to finish. According to the Consensys executive, when a MetaMask card is swiped, an on-chain transaction is created, sending tokens from the user’s wallet to the “Crypto Life” smart contract.
This allows the transaction to be authorized by the point-of-sale system used by the merchant accepting the card, and the conversion from crypto to fiat is handled by this smart contract. Finally, the payment is finalized over Mastercard’s payment network.
Winners and Losers
At the end of the week, Bitcoin (BTC) is at $59,006, Ether (ETH) at $2,597 and XRP at $0.56. The total market cap is at $2.08 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap.
Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are Aave (AAVE) at 16.01%, THORChain (RUNE) at 15.15% and SATS (1000SATS) at 8.75%.The top three altcoin losers of the week are dogwifhat (WIF) at 22.86%, Brett (Based) (BRETT) at 18.89% and Pepe (PEPE) at 15.48%. For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s market analysis.
Most Memorable Quotations
“The combination of a dollar liquidity-inspired Bitcoin and Ether rally into year-end will create a strong foundation for the return of a sexy shitcoin soiree.”
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX
“NEW EVIDENCE THAT Kamala Harris WILL CONTINUE CRYPTO CRACKDOWN. Her advisor choice suggests she will keep Biden’s hostile attitude to crypto.”
Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital
“Not every memecoin, investment or speculative investment is going to end up in a win, but it really brings people into the ecosystem.”
Dean Skurka, CEO of WonderFi
“Decentralized prediction markets are a significant innovation with real public utility.”
Tyler Winklevoss, co-founder of Gemini
“With positioning significantly cleaner after last week’s false break below $50,000 we look for Bitcoin to extend gains toward trend channel resistance near $70,000 in the sessions ahead.”
Tony Sycamore, markets analyst at IG
“The path with which we came to regulatory permission to launch Ethereum spot ETPs was quite a sprint and a little bit of a shock when I think the entirety of the market thought that we were going to be faced with denials from the SEC.”
Dave LaValle, global head of ETFs at Grayscale Investments
Prediction of the Week
Bitcoin’s bull rally will continue another 350 days: Bybit
Despite the recent Bitcoin correction to five-month lows, Bitcoin could extend its bull rally for another year.
Bitcoin’s price could rally for another 350 days, based on the current trough-to-peak ratio, which analyzes the price tops and bottoms printed by an asset or security.
Based on Bitcoin’s ratios during the previous cycles, the bull run will extend into the third quarter of 2025, according to a report by Bybit and Block Scholes, shared with Cointelegraph:
“With a current trough-to-peak ratio of 3.5x, significantly lower than the 20x observed in prior cycles, the report suggests that the rally may continue for another 350 days before surpassing previous peaks.”
Bitcoin is currently recovering from a $510 billion crypto market sell-off.
Bitcoin fell below a key post-halving growth trajectory when it dropped under $63,000, but recovering the trendline before the end of 2024 cut put Bitcoin back on track to the $100,000 mark, based on previous Bitcoin halving cycles.
FUD of The Week
ASX sued over prior statements about its now-abandoned blockchain project
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has sued the country’s leading stock exchange in Federal Court, alleging it made “misleading and deceptive” statements over its now-abandoned project to replace its aging systems with blockchain technology.
ASIC said on Aug. 14 that the Australian Securities Exchange’s (ASX) statements that the replacement project for its Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) trading platform was “on track for go-live” in April 2023 and was “progressing well” were misleading.
The regulator claimed the project “was not tracking to plan” at the time the statements were made in early February 2022, and the ASX had no “reasonable basis” to imply the project would be ready by that date.
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“We allege that the true state of affairs as at 10 February 2022 was that the project was not ‘progressing well,’ contrary to the ASX’s announcement,” said ASIC Chair Joe Longo. “We believe this was a collective failure by the ASX Board and senior executives at the time.”
Canadian crypto exchange gambled away $9.5M of users’ Bitcoin and Ether
The Canadian cryptocurrency trading platform ezBtc and its founder, David Smillie, defrauded customers by misappropriating approximately 13 million Canadian dollars ($9.5 million) of their cryptocurrency investments and using the funds for gambling.
A panel set by the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC), a provincial regulator in Canada, found that ezBtc misappropriated customer funds “for their own purposes.”
The ezBtc platform, which went offline permanently in or around September 2019 and was dissolved in 2022, had claimed to store all its users’ crypto investments in cold storage. During its time of operation, between 2016 and 2019, ezBtc amassed over 2,300 Bitcoin and over 600 Ether from crypto investors.
Solana whale continues $84M dump with $2.8M sale
A Solana whale who had regularly sold tokens since January deposited almost $2.8 million into several exchanges, bringing the investor’s total tokens sold this year to $84 million.
On Aug. 13, blockchain data analysis company Lookonchain spotted a Solana wallet dumping tokens weekly since Jan. 15. According to the data firm, the whale has transferred at least 594,000 SOL to Coinbase, Binance and OKX this year.
The tokens are worth about $84 million in total, as SOL’s price hovers at $144.30. The whale sold tokens at least once per week, with the latest sale being a 20,000-SOL (about $2.8 million) token transaction.
Apart from the Solana holder, another whale linked to the Ethereum initial coin offering (ICO) has been off-loading tokens for over a month. On Aug. 12, Lookonchain pointed out that the Ether whale deposited $13.2 million in ETH into OKX.
The whale has been selling tokens since July 8. Its total number of tokens deposited to OKX is $154 million, and the funds were deposited at an average price of $3,176. The wallet received 1 million ETH during the Ethereum ICO.
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Low users, sex predators kill Korean metaverses, 3AC sues Terra: Asia Express
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Cointelegraph Magazine writers and reporters contributed to this article.