CoinDesk Crypto

TeraExchange LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tera Group Inc., was reinstated as a swap execution facility through a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) order on Monday. 

• According to the press release posted on the CFTC website, TeraExchange was deemed dormant by the regulator in 2019 after it saw no trading activity in the three years following registration. 
• An early entrant into the bitcoin derivatives market, TeraExchange had been granted a full registration to offer a bitcoin forwards contract and run a bitcoin price index in May 2016. 
• According to the CFTC’s release on Monday, there are currently 19 swap execution facilities registered with the regulatory body, including the newly reinstated TerraExchange’s. 

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Three men accused of passing themselves off as pastors to get churchgoers and other investors to put money into what prosecutors say was a $28 million Ponzi scheme have been indicted by a federal jury in Maryland. 

According to the indictment unsealed on Friday, Denni Jali, a South African citizen who used to live in Maryland, together with Maryland residents Arley Ray Johnson and John Erasmus Frimpong, persuaded people to invest in a cryptocurrency and foreign-exchange trading fund they ran. 

Instead of investing it, the three men allegedly used the money to fund their extravagant lifestyles, the indictment notes. 

• “They used the victims’ hard-earned money for luxury cars, private jets and family vacations while the victims ended up with false promises,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Boone, in the press release posted on the DOJ’s website. 
• While those looking to defraud people have often used complex financial products as cover, behavior like what is alleged to have occurred here highlights how a key part of democratizing any financial market is ensuring consumers have better information about what they’re buying.
• According to the indictment, the three men marketed their firm, 1st Million, as a wealth management and financial literacy firm and attracted investors by hosting events at expensive venues and attending church-sponsored events.
• 1st Million allegedly offered contracts guaranteeing investors would have monthly rates of return ranging from 6% to 35% of their initial investments “regardless of market volatility,” according to the indictment.
• Jali left the United States in May 2019 but was later arrested in South Africa, according to the DOJ’s press release. According to court documents, Frimpong was arrested in Maryland and, as reported by the Associated Press, Johnson is expected to surrender to authorities today. 
  
• The Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission  also filed civil actions against the accused pseudo-pastors on Friday. 

Related Stories

• Binance and Oasis Labs Launch Alliance to Combat Crypto Fraud and Hacks
• Inside a Crypto ‘Ponzi’: How the $6.5M Banana.Fund Fraud Unravelled
• Wanted Wirecard Exec Said to Be Sheltered by Secret Service in Russia
• Third Centra Tech Founder Pleads Guilty to ICO Fraud

Huobi Futures, the crypto derivatives unit of Huobi Group, said Monday it will offer trading in bitcoin options starting Tuesday, aiming to meet a surging demand from traders to hedge against risks in cryptocurrency markets.

• Options contacts on bitcoin (BTC) will be available for trading, starting from 10:00 UTC on Sept. 1, according to a press release. 
• Huobi’s options will be quoted in tether (USDT), a dollar-backed stablecoin.
• The exchange will offer weekly, bi-weekly and quarterly options contracts. Option purchasers will be able to exercise their right to buy or sell only on expiry.
• A call option represents a right but not the obligation to buy the underlying asset at a predetermined price on or before a specific date. A put option represents a right to sell.
• “Options will give users a robust set of tools to execute more sophisticated trading strategies,” said Ciara Sun, vice president of global business at Huobi Group.
• Huobi’s decision to launch bitcoin options comes at a time when institutional participation in the cryptocurrency is growing and bitcoin is increasingly taking cues from traditional markets and central bank decisions.
• Currently, Deribit is the largest bitcoin options exchange by open interest and daily trading volume. The exchange accounts for more than 85% of total options trading volume of $136 million, according to data source Skew.
• Other exchanges competing for a share of bitcoin options trading include CME, LedgerX, Bakkt and OKEx, according to Skew.

Related Stories

• First Mover: Huobi Takes On OKEx in Futures, Opening New Front in ‘Chinese’ Rivalry
• US Stocks Closing on Bigger August Gain Than Bitcoin
• Someone Just Lost $16M in Bitcoin by Using a Malicious Install of the Electrum Wallet
• Huobi and OKEx Battle for Supremacy in China

Signature Bank gave out dozens more small business PPP loans to crypto firms than previously known, Ethereum Classic has suffered another 51% attack and a digital yuan wallet went live and disappeared this weekend.

You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. 

Top shelf

Third attack
The Ethereum Classic blockchain suffered its third, and worst, 51% attack in a month Saturday evening. Spotted by mining company Bitfly, the attack reorganized over 7,000 blocks, or two days’ worth of mining, compared to 3,693 and 4,000 blocks in the first two attacks, CoinDesk Zack Voell reports. ETC Cooperative, a foundation supporting the network’s development, said it was “aware” of the attack and “working with others to test and evaluate proposed solutions as quickly as possible.” FTX will reconsider its ETC perpetual futures contracts, CEO Sam Bankman-Fried told CoinDesk, following actions earlier this month by OKex and Coinbase to consider delisting ETC and extending confirmation times for the cryptocurrency, respectively. ETC Labs, recently announced it would implement additional security features.

Related: First Mover: Huobi Takes On OKEx in Futures, Opening New Front in ‘Chinese’ Rivalry

Crypto loans
Signature Bank extended about $20 million to roughly 40 firms in the digital asset space under the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), dozens more than was previously reported. CEO Joseph DePaolo would not name nor confirm the number of firms receiving PPP loans, though he said the bank’s crypto PPP loan volume was due to other banks serving crypto not having the resources to offer the same kind of program. Previously, CoinDesk reported that at least $30 million had been extended to crypto companies by several banks including JPMorgan Chase, Silicon Valley Bank, Cross River Bank and others. Signature loaned a total $1.9 billion, roughly .55% of the entire $350 billion that was disbursed, through the emergency relief program.

Backdoor hack
An Electrum wallet user claims to have lost 1,400 bitcoin (~$16.2 million) after installing an older version of the software from a malicious source, CoinDesk’s Sebastian Sinclair reports. In a Sunday Github post, pseudonymous user “1400BitcoinStolen” said they downloaded a version of the wallet and installed a security update pop-up that triggered a transfer of the user’s entire BTC balance to an address in the possession of a hacker. Electrum allows anyone to “run their own servers or use servers that they trust,” according to another Github user seemingly associated with Electrum. If users download a version from a different source than Electrum and don’t check signatures, they may “install a backdoor.”

Yuan wallet?
A public version of a digital yuan wallet quickly went live and was disabled this weekend, CoinDesk’s Wolfie Zhou reports. Around noon on Saturday local time, users of China Construction Bank (CCB), one of the big-four state-owned commercial banks, had access to a DCEP (digital currency, electronic payment) wallet feature via the bank’s mobile app. The wallet was registered with a phone number associated with their bank accounts and could be linked with their bank funds. It is unclear when CCB opened up the service, but news of the feature quickly spread Saturday among the Chinese cryptocurrency community and media, before being disabled. In app searches for “digital currency” now display: “This function is not yet officially available to the public. Please wait patiently.”

Micro taxes?
Crypto microtransactions worth less than $1 are taxable events, according to a U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) memo. Responding to a request for clarification from the tax agent’s own Small Business/Self Employed Division, the IRS senior technician Ronald Goldstein said cryptocurrency “acts as a substitute for real currency” and considered property for federal income tax purposes. One might imagine it’s like reporting cash tips. Examples of microtransactions include crypto rewards earned from downloading an app and leaving a positive review; downloading games and reaching particular milestones; completing online quizzes; or registering accounts with various online services.

Quick bites

• DeFi Is a ‘Complete Scam,’ Says Controversial Entrepreneur Craig Wright (Sebastian Sinclair/CoinDesk)
• Rep. Davidson: DeFi ‘gets at the heart’ of debate on financial regulation (Michael McSweeney/The Block)
• Maria Bustillos on Tokenizing Journalism, the Death of Civil and Rise of Brick House (Daniel Kuhn/CoinDesk)
• Money Reimagined: From COVID Generation to Crypto Generation (Michael Casey/CoinDesk)
• Chainlink Acquires Blockchain Oracle Solution From Cornell University (Will Foxley/CoinDesk)

At stake

Related: Blockchain Bites: Winklevoss’ Wild Prediction, Bitcoin Miners’ Horde, Ethereum’s ‘Critical Bug’

Warring exchanges
OKEx and Huobi are caught in a battle for supremacy in the crypto derivatives market, as well as a Chinese market said not to exist, CoinDesk’s Muyao Shen reports.

The battle began in 2018, when then-OKEx CEO Chris Lee defected to Huobi to become vice president of global business development. 

“There’s a natural friction between OKEx and Huobi,” Matthew Graham, chief executive officer of Beijing-based crypto consultancy Sino Global Capital, said. “While they have both pushed to enlarge their international footprints, they still prioritize their Chinese user base.” 

A regional turf war takes place in the context of crypto’s illegality. Officially, Huobi doesn’t acknowledge the Chinese cryptocurrency market exists: “There is not a market in China. That is not legal,” a representative said, though Huobi appears to be getting nearly a third of its website traffic from Chinese visitors, versus 14% for OKEx, according to a website tracker.  

However, other competitive fields are easier to quantify. OKEx is the world’s biggest crypto derivatives exchange, with outstanding contracts valued at $1.26 billion. Huobi trails with $1.25 billion in outstanding contracts. 

The close competition has led to novel derivative products from both exchanges – though some see the real prize as winning a favored position with the Chinese government.

Last year, President Xi announced China would “seize the opportunity” of blockchain, spurring increased testing of a digital yuan, the establishment of  an open blockchain-based services network and other digital infrastructure development.

On that count, Huobi might be one move ahead of OKEx: The Chinese branch of Huobi has joined the Blockchain-Based Service Network (BSN) Development Alliance, which aims to be one of the most influential infrastructure services providers in the country.

Market intel

August’s end
Bitcoin is eyeing an August gain for the first time in three years, but is lagging behind U.S. stocks for the month. The cryptocurrency is trading near $11,610 at press time, representing a 2.27% gain on a month-to-date basis, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index, while the S&P 500 is on track for a 7.25% gain this August. Bitcoin faced rejection at highs above 12,400 on Aug. 17 and has been restricted largely to a range of $11,100 to $11,800 ever since, CoinDesk’s markets reporter Omkar Godbole said. 

Tech pod

Web3 wallet?
Private key management specialist Torus unveiled a one-click Chrome and Brave browser extension to provide Web3 experiences. Called tKey, the product is a custom version of two-factor authentication (2FA), that enables single login for their wallet and could be used to secure other devices – like a mobile phone. At a high level, Torus splits and distributes sensitive data needed to construct a user’s private key between the user and nodes on the Torus network, which includes Binance, Ethereum Name Service (ENS), Etherscan, Matic Network, Ontology, Skale, Tendermint Core and Zilliqa, CoinDesk’s Ian Allison reports.

Op-ed

Profound shift
Last week, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Jerome Powell announced the central bank will allow inflation to run higher than its longstanding 2% target, without raising interest rates. CoinDesk’s Head of Research Noelle Acheson sees this as a profound shift in the role of the central bank, which might have repercussions for the crypto industry. “If 2020 teaches us one thing, it has to be that assumptions don’t last, and that we all need to be flexible. In a world where everything is undergoing a transformation, barriers come down faster. And, as uncomfortable as it may be, change is always an opportunity, especially when it comes from unexpected areas. In our industry, it’s what we’ve been hoping for,” she writes. 

Inflation solution
Frances Coppola, a CoinDesk columnist and author of “The Case for People’s Quantitative Easing,” thinks one way to increase inflation, which has consistently fallen below a targeted 2%, is to just give people money. “From beyond the grave, [John Maynard] Keynes sends a powerful message to today’s leaders. If you want inflation to rise, Mr. Powell, you need to get people spending. Announcing that you will permit prices to rise more quickly won’t achieve this. And neither will increasing the money supply, unless that money goes to people who are likely to spend it,” she writes.

Who won #CryptoTwitter? Related Stories

• Money Reimagined: From COVID Generation to Crypto Generation
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Customers reported experiencing issues logging into Robinhood, Charles Schwab and multiple other trading platforms Monday morning, according to a flurry of tweets.

• CoinDesk confirmed the degraded performance on Robinhood via the website’s status page. The popular retail trading platform posted a notice saying, “Some users are experiencing issues with delayed order status updates. These are display issues only, and should not impact order execution. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible.”
• Issues on TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab have also been detected over the past few hours by downdetector.com.
• On Twitter, Charles Schwab said its website may be “intermittently inaccessible for some clients” due to “a technical issue” resulting in possibly longer-than-usual hold times.
• U.S. consumer protection agencies have received more than 400 complaints about Robinhood from its users during the first half of 2020, according to a Bloomberg report, roughly four times the amount of complaints filed about its competitors.

UPDATE (Aug. 31, 15:31 UTC): Adding comment from Charles Schwab.

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Five of CoinMarketCap’s (CMC) top executives, including the interim CEO, have left the cryptocurrency-ranking website only months after the firm’s purchase by Binance.

• The Monday departures includes interim CEO Carylyne Chan and executives Spencer Yang, Jeremy Seow, Jared Chin and Matthew Lippl.
• Binance plans to replace the all five with in-house staff but says CMC will maintain operational independence.
• Binance purchased CMC for an undisclosed sum in early April. Founder and CEO Brandon Chez departed soon thereafter, leaving Chan, who had joined CMC in 2018, as the interim chief.
• In a blog post announcing her departure, Chain said she hoped CMC will continue to uphold “its core values of transparency, integrity, non-censorship and accountability.” She also indicated that she and Chez may write a book about their experiences at CMC.

Read more: ‘They Have the Users’: Binance CEO Explains Why He Bought CoinMarketCap

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• Japanese Financial Giant SBI Holdings Launches Short-Term Crypto Derivatives

Coinbase has added legendary investor Marc Andreessen of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Gokul Rajaram, a DoorDash executive, to its board of directors.

• Andreessen, whose tech-focused venture firm manages $12 billion, will operate as a board observer and Rajaram, who oversees Caviar, will become a board director, according to a Monday blog post.
• The pair replace outgoing board members Chris Dixon and Barry Schuler. Dixon, a board observer, was an early investor in Coinbase, and Schuler, the Series C director, will now become an observer too.
• The high-profile board additions bring major boardroom clout to the one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges in the U.S. and comes as Coinbase is reportedly considering going public.

Read more: Coinbase Plans First-Ever Investor Day Amid Talk It May Go Public

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The Russian government wants to know what the country’s data centers are up to, and that includes cryptocurrency mining farms.

The Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media has published a proposed bill for public feedback, which firstly provides a definition of precisely what counts as a data center.

The bill, if passed, would also obliges data centers within the nation to report their operations to the ministry’s supervising agency, the internet censor Roskomnadzor.

Related: DCG to Invest $100M in Bitcoin Mining Venture

According to the draft document, published on the government portal Friday, a data center is defined as an “object with its own infrastructure for hosting hardware providing storage, processing and access to data, with guaranteed levels of accessibility, security and management.”

An operator of a data center must provide the agency with information about the computing capacity of such a facility, how the data is stored, which services the center provides and at what cost.

In addition, the regulators wants to know about the land and buildings in which the data center is housed, even down to how many shelves it has and to what extent the shelves are filled, how it’s connected to the electricity grid and how it’s certified.

They know already

Igor Runets, CEO of Bitriver, one of the largest mining farms in Russia located in Siberia, believes the new rules will apply to miners and that, most likely, they will have to file a report every quarter.

Related: Russia Is Blocking Bitcoin-Related Websites Again

“The government needs this data to monitor the digital economy development. Right now, nobody is gathering information about data centers. On the other hand, including commercial information into such reports seems redundant,” Runets said.

The government already knows all the larger mining operators anyway, he said, as any farm consuming more than one or two megawatts of power can be detected by the electric grid operator.

See also: Putin Signs Russian Crypto Bill Into Law

Artem Kozlyuk, founder of RosKomSvoboda, a non-profit monitoring online censorship and surveillance practices in Russia, says that gathering such a massive amount of information about all the data centers in one place can potentially open them up to security threats.

“It can attract attention of people from the [foreign] intelligence services to criminal actors,” Kozlyuk said. The parameters for data storage, which are on the list to be reported, include sensitive information like hardware manufacturer, technical settings and software updates, he added.

“We all know how easily the data has been leaked from the government agencies over the recent years. Centralization of the sensitive information like this is an opening for illegal access,” Kozlyuk said.

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Signature Bank extended dozens more loans under the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to cryptocurrency businesses than was previously reported. 

Around $20 million of the $1.9 billion in PPP loans the bank extended was given to roughly 40 firms in the digital asset space, said CEO Joseph DePaolo. The executive would not name the firms it gave PPP loans to or give an exact number of firms who took out a loan through the relief program. (Signature’s $1.9 billion in loans accounts for roughly .55% of the entire $350 billion that was disbursed through the U.S. Small Business Administration.)

Public records show that Signature issued loans to a number of prominent firms in the space, including Ethereum venture studio ConsenSys, VC firm Polychain Capital and crypto lender Celsius Network.

Related: The OCC’s Crypto Custody Letter Was Years in the Making

DePaolo said the bank’s crypto PPP loan volume was due to other banks serving crypto not having the resources to offer the same kind of program. Previously, CoinDesk reported that at least $30 million had been extended to crypto companies by several banks including JPMorgan Chase, Silicon Valley Bank, Cross River Bank and others. (CoinDesk also reported Signature had extended only nine PPP loans to crypto firms.)

Not PPP-proof

The news further reveals a deeper need in the crypto industry for relief in the wake of the global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Likewise, Signature’s program proves the bank’s commitment to the digital asset space. 

Read more: Blockchain Startups Got $30M+ in US ‘PPP’ Bailout Loans

While Signature’s business is primarily focused on serving high-net-worth individuals and it does not call itself a crypto bank or refer to its digital asset team as a crypto banking division, the bank did rake in $1 billion in deposits from the sector in the second quarter 2020 alone. 

Related: Crypto Savings Accounts Are Coming to Fintech Firms That Use Wyre

“I believe I said it about a year and a half ago, that if you weren’t into blockchain technology and the digital world in five years, you would have a problem as a bank. There’s three and a half years left, and it may be sooner,” DePaolo told CoinDesk in a recent interview. “I think the situation we have right now with this pandemic and the quagmire, it’s going to make the public look at digital currencies.”

Signature Bank’s crypto awakening

In January 2018, the bank hired Joseph Seibert as the senior vice president for its digital asset banking team. Seibert started with three employees and has grown the team to 12 as of August 2020. He was previously a vice president at similarly crypto-friendly Metropolitan Commercial Bank.

The bank’s Signet payments platform is a proprietary blockchain based on the Ethereum protocol which allows for fee-less instant fiat settlement. While it’s popular within the digital asset space, firms outside of the space, such as renewable energy companies, use Signet to settle thousands of transactions a day without dealing with the payment friction between suppliers and wholesale distributors. 

Read more: Signature Bank’s Crypto Deposits Grew $1B in Q2

Seibert added that Signet has the same capabilities as the Silvergate Exchange Network but is built on blockchain versus the bank’s internal systems. 

“We have the same ecosystem they have and did it in under three years,” he said. 

‘Octopus’ approach

The bank started out by serving exchanges, which Seibert calls “the octopus” because of how many firms that need banking services in crypto are tied directly to the exchanges. The bank now serves proprietary traders, hedge funds, custody firms, mining farms and other verticals in the space, he said. 

Signature does treat firms in the digital asset space carefully, to offset transactional costs for traditional payment rails (wires and ACH payments). For instance, digital asset exchanges on Signet have to keep 30% of their balance in a non-interest bearing account. 

Read more: Institutional Trading House ErisX Joins Silvergate Exchange Network

Signature’s PPP program and recent growth in deposits from crypto customers makes it confident as a leader in the cryptocurrency banking space, Seibert said. 

“There’s more bank competition overseas, but they are always going to need the U.S. dollar on-ramp,” he said. 

The bank is now looking to expand its Signet offering beyond U.S. dollars with the launch of a foreign currency exchange wallet sometime in the near future. A number of the bank’s clients are FX liquidity providers, and Seibert believes foreign exchange is a large component of the crypto space, with some FX trades still taking weeks to settle if a bank is not crypto-friendly. 

“Ideally we would like to launch that sooner rather than later, hopefully next year,” Seibert said of the new forex service.

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The Bank of Korea is moving to a more technical phase of its accelerated push to develop a central bank digital currency, or CBDC.

• The Korea Times reported Monday that the Bank of Korea (BoK) is now seeking a consulting partnership to bring the second phase of its CBDC plan to fruition.
• Once through the application process, the successful local company would assist the central bank in building the architecture for the CBDC, which is being prepared in the face of China’s drive to be the first major nation to launch a digital version of its fiat currency.
• China’s “DC/EP” digital yuan system is now in testing at banks and commercial enterprises in a number of regions.
• The first review phase of the BoK’s work on a CBDC was completed last month, per the report, and the findings will feed the next stage of the work.
• The architecture would set out aspects of the planned system such as security, how data is handled and possible applications.
• The Times said a pilot is planned for late 2021.
• “The BOK will team up with a consulting partner to map out the overall work process and architecture to operate the digital currency system,” a BoK official was quoted as saying.
• They would also arrive at “specific action plans” to deliver the pilot in time, they added.
• Will the development has been hastened this year, the central bank doesn’t plan to launch a CBDC soon, but is rather preparing the ground for a time when other national currencies go digital.

Also read: Chinese Bank Disables Digital Yuan Wallet After Soft Launch Draws Wide Attention

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• APIs Will Decentralize CBDCs

You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team and edited by Bradley Keoun, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. We follow the money so you don’t have to. You can subscribe here.

Market moves

Cryptocurrency exchange Huobi is taking aim at competitor OKEx in the business of trading bitcoin futures and other derivatives contracts, opening up a new front in a longstanding rivalry between the Chinese-led exchanges. 

OKEx, which is led by Chinese executives and based in Malta, is the world’s biggest crypto derivatives exchange, with outstanding contracts valued at $1.26 billion, according to the data site CoinGecko. Huobi, also led by Chinese brass but based in Singapore, is close behind, tied for second place with another exchange, BitMEX, at $1.25 billion. 

Related: US Stocks Closing on Bigger August Gain Than Bitcoin

In a report this month, Huobi said it has “managed to push new boundaries against other well-established exchanges when it comes to futures trading volume.” Huobi is already beating OKEx in a few market segments, according to the report, including “coin-margined futures” – where traders can post their initial down payment, known as margin, using cryptocurrencies. Huobi claims to also regularly beat OKEx in weekly and quarterly bitcoin futures contracts.

“Before Huobi launched its futures contract in December 2018, OKEx had the largest market share of the world,” Ciara Sun, vice president of Huobi Global Markets, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “Huobi Futures always looks up to the best of the market.” 

The battle for supremacy in cryptocurrency futures – and China – adds to the tension between the two exchanges, which have been at loggerheads at least since 2018, when then-OKEx CEO Chris Lee defected to Huobi to become vice president of global business development.

OKEx CEO Jay Hao, in a company update in March, called Huobi “our doppelgänger,” insisted “imitation was the sincerest form of flattery” and said he “would like to think that Huobi was able to withstand this market volatility by following our footsteps.”

Related: Someone Just Lost $16M in Bitcoin by Using a Malicious Install of the Electrum Wallet

Experts on China’s often-murky cryptocurrency markets say the rivalry between the two exchanges likely stems from the fight for customers in the world’s second-largest economy. 

“There’s a natural friction between OKEx and Huobi,” Matthew Graham, chief executive officer of Beijing-based crypto consultancy Sino Global Capital, told CoinDesk in an email. “While they have both pushed to enlarge their international footprints, they still prioritize their Chinese user base.” 

Read more: Huobi and OKEx Battle for Supremacy in China

– Muyao Shen

Bitcoin watch

While bitcoin is eyeing an August gain for the first time in three years, the cryptocurrency is lagging U.S. stocks over the month. 

• Bitcoin is trading near $11,610 at press time, up 2.3% on the month, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index.
• It was the first time the cryptocurrency gained in August since 2017, when prices rallied by 66%. 
• As of Friday, the S&P 500, Wall Street’s benchmark stocks index, was eyeing a 7.25% gain for August, as per data provided by TradingView.
• Bitcoin faced rejection at highs above 12,400 on Aug. 17 and has been restricted largely to a range of $11,100 to $11,800 ever since.
• The rally from July lows below $9,000 has stalled with the weakening of demand from institutions and macro traders, as indicated by the recent 30% decline in open positions in futures listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Click here for the full story: U.S. Stocks Closing on Bigger August Gain Than Bitcoin

– Omkar Godbole

Token watch

SushiSwap (SUSHI): Alternative to Uniswap is poised to become next DeFi meme with new liquidity incentive.

YearnFinance (YFI): Delta Exchange launches perpetual swaps for YFI tokens, with 20x leverage and margined and settled in bitcoin, as Forbes calls YFI ” the altcoin star.”

Chainlink (LINK): DeFI oracle provider buys Cornell University’s privacy oracle solution DECO for undisclosed sum, as Oasis Network announces integration. 

Ethereum Classic (ETC): Frequently-attacked blockchain gets hit by third 51% attack in a month. 

What’s hot

Japan’s SBI Holdings launches short-term crypto derivatives (CoinDesk)

Inflation will outstrip both bond yields and corporate earnings for the foreseeable future (CoinDesk)

Bitcoin locked in DeFi rises to record 55,000 as HODLers hit with FOMO (CoinDesk)

Chinese bank disables digital yuan wallet after soft launch drawing widespread attention (CoinDesk)

Mr. Powell, if you want higher inflation, give people money (CoinDesk)

Analogs The latest on the economy and traditional finance

Tens of thousands of furloughed U.S. jobs at risk of becoming permanent (WSJ)

Worries persist over whether ratings firms are accurately assessing the risks in CLOs (WSJ)

American households and businesses are too indebted to cope with sustained deflation (CoinDesk)

Wall Street’s fear gauge is rising again, even as stocks keep pushing higher (Reuters)

Australia’s reserve bank says home prices could fall as much as 40% (News.com.au)

Inflation needs to average 3.2% over next five years to average 2% over decade through 2025 (WSJ) 

The Fed is basically “green lighting” consumer prices, and inflation expectations are rising in the bond market (Bank of the West)

Tweet of the day Related Stories

• Huobi and OKEx Battle for Supremacy in China
• The Case for $500,000 Bitcoin

People may like the idea of blockchains and web 3.0, but they tend to hit an immediate obstacle in the form of private cryptographic keys and mnemonic seed phrases that cannot be lost, forgotten or divulged at any cost. 

Private key management specialist Torus replaces that jarring user experience with what appears to be a familiar single login, but one that’s reinforced behind the scenes by a clever distributed architecture built for web 3.0.

Announced Monday, the Singapore-based startup has released a one-click Chrome browser extension for its Torus wallet and added a new product called tKey, a custom version of two-factor authentication (2FA). The extension will also work in Brave.

Related: Someone Just Lost $16M in Bitcoin by Using a Malicious Install of the Electrum Wallet

Read more: Torus Goes Blockchain-Agnostic With New DirectAuth Dapp Login Tool

When information is exchanged online, users don’t want to know about the underlying public key infrastructure (PKI) – and so it should be with blockchains and the next generation of the internet, or “Web3,” said Torus Labs CEO Zhen Ju Yong.

But while people don’t want that tricky user interface, they do, of course, want to control the process in a decentralized manner, Zhen added.

“Our goal is to make key management convenient to the mainstream user – my parents, for example – to be able to use crypto, while still retaining the level of security and non-custodiality which is needed for decentralized applications,” Zhen said in an interview. “We’ve always seen ourselves more as a key management company rather than a wallet. We are kind of a step up for wallets, more like an infrastructure layer.”

How Torus works

Related: LINE Launches Digital Asset Wallet and Blockchain Development Platform

At a high level, Torus splits and distributes sensitive data needed to construct a user’s private key between the user and nodes on the Torus network, which includes Binance, Ethereum Name Service (ENS), Etherscan, Matic Network, Ontology, Skale, Tendermint Core and Zilliqa. 

Distributed key generation is generally divided into three parts, or “secret shares” (Shamir’s Secret Sharing, or SSS, for the technically conversant), with two held by the user and the third further split across the Torus network. 

Read more: Torus Launches to Bring One-Click Login to Web 3.0

The new tKey release allows users to easily add and control incremental layers of security, a kind of customizable 2FA that works like a smart contract, said Zhen. An obvious extra security layer to add would be a mobile phone, which could store a user’s additional secret share in its secure enclave, protected by a biometric passcode. If the user has more than one mobile device, they could add as many layers of security as they want. 

Similar to other 2FA systems, as long as the user has access to two out of three of their secret shares, they will be able to retrieve their private keys and login.

‘On the shoulders of giants’

For many users, logging into dapps is done by authenticating with MetaMask, the kind of default Ethereum browser wallet. Torus has built on top of MetaMask (although it should be mentioned that the ConsenSys-backed plugin recently changed its licensing) to create its new Chrome extension.

“We greatly appreciate the MetaMask team’s hard work and development,” Torus wrote in a press statement. “However, due to Torus’ necessity of being open source, Torus Extension (forked from 22 June 2020) continues to use its older MIT license.”

Zhen described the arrangement as “building on the shoulders of giants” and stressed that Torus is not seeking an edge over MetaMask. 

“By no means do we feel like we want to compete with MetaMask. We’re actually in talks with MetaMask with regards to their licensing changes, and about potentially integrating,” he said.

Read more: Multicoin, Binance, Coinbase Invest in Startup Keeping Private Keys Secure

In July of last year, Torus raised a $2 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital including Coinbase Ventures and Binance Labs, while testing the first version of hassle-free login using Gmail, akin to OAuth protocol on the internet. 

Torus has always had a close relationship with Binance, which invested $500,000 in the seed round, and the largest exchange by volume is now playing a central role in the new Torus product releases. 

“We’re super-excited that Binance actually co-developed tKey with us, and it’s going to be an open-source SDK,” said Zhen. “We are launching this together. Along with this SDK, Binance itself and the Chrome extension for Binance DEX and Smart Chain is going to have both Torus and tKey integrated into it as one of the core key management flows.”

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While bitcoin is eyeing an August gain for the first time in three years, the cryptocurrency is still lagging U.S. stocks for the month.

• Bitcoin is trading near $11,610 at press time, representing a 2.27% gain on a month-to-date basis, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index.
• The cryptocurrency last printed gains in August in 2017, when prices rallied by 66%.
• As of Friday, the S&P 500, Wall Street’s benchmark stocks index, was eyeing a 7.25% gain for August, as per data provided by TradingView.

• Bitcoin faced rejection at highs above 12,400 on Aug. 17 and has been restricted largely to a range of $11,100 to $11,800 ever since.
• The rally from July lows below $9,000 has stalled with the weakening of demand from institutions and macro traders, as indicated by the recent 30% decline in open positions in futures listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

• On Friday, CME-listed open interest was $653 million, down from the record high of $948 million reached on Aug. 17, according to data source Skew.
• Bitcoin’s rally from $9,000 to $12,400 observed in the four weeks to Aug. 17 was accompanied by a 150% surge in open interest.
• It’s possible investors have been rotating money out of bitcoin and into cryptocurrencies linked to the white-hot decentralized finance (DeFi) space.
• The Lend token from decentralized lending platform Aave has gained 150% this month.
• Other DeFi names like oracle provider Chainlink’s LINK token and lending project Compound’s COMP token have added 108% and 55%, respectively.
• Ethereum’s ether cryptocurrency is also outshining bitcoin on a monthly basis with over 20% gains.
• Looking ahead, however, negative-yielding government bonds are expected to continue powering gains in both bitcoin and stocks.
• And bitcoin, a perceived store of value, may draw stronger buying interest than stocks, with expectations for U.S. inflation beginning to accelerate in response to the Federal Reserve’s recent decision to signal tolerance for higher prices.
• Bitcoin is still down 40% from its record high of $20,000 and looks relatively undervalued compared to U.S. stocks, which are trading at record highs even amid the ongoing coronavirus epidemic.
• A potential correction in stocks still poses downside risks to bitcoin, according to Joel Kruger, a currency strategist at LMAX Digital.
• “Bitcoin is still an emerging asset and therefore still somewhat exposed in periods of risk-off,” Kruger told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat.

Also read: Winklevoss Brothers Say Bitcoin Could Reach $500K as the ‘Only’ Long-Term Inflation Hedge

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An Electrum wallet user claims to have lost a fortune in bitcoin after installing an older version of the software from a malicious source.

• In a Sunday post on GitHub, the individual described the loss of more than 1,400 bitcoin (worth around $16.2 million at press time) as a result of “foolishly” installing an old version of the lightweight wallet.
• Going by the username “1400BitcoinStolen,” they described how a pop-up message asked to update their security prior to being allowed to transfer any funds.
• Upon installing a purported “security update” for the wallet, it immediately triggered a transfer of the user’s entire balance to an address in the possession of a hacker.
• Binance’s CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has moved to blacklist the stolen funds from his exchange, stating users should “beware of this Electrum official update.”
• 1400BitcoinStolen said they had contacted blockchain analytics company Coinfirm for assistance in tracking the bitcoin and were awaiting a response.
• Electrum has been around since 2011 and has gone through multiple updates while also being unable to stop bad actors exploiting previous versions by Sybil attacks using malicious servers.
• Another member on the GutHub thread, “gits7r” – who seems to be associated with Electrum – said the problem comes from the decision by the team early on to allow users to “run their own servers or use servers that they trust.”
• If users download a version from a different source than electrum.org and don’t check signatures, they may “install a backdoored Electrum,” gits7r said.
• In 2018, the Electrum network suffered such an attack from a bad actor who created multiple fake servers on the Electrum network that saw 245 bitcoin siphoned from unsuspecting victims.

See also: Crypto Wallet Maker Ledger Loses 1M Email Addresses in Data Theft

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• First Mover: Huobi Takes On OKEx in Futures, Opening New Front in ‘Chinese’ Rivalry
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• DeFi Is a ‘Complete Scam,’ Says Controversial Entrepreneur Craig Wright

An Electrum wallet user claims to have lost a fortune in bitcoin after installing an older version of the software from a malicious source.

• In a Sunday post on GitHub, the individual described the loss of more than 1,400 bitcoin (worth around $16.2 million at press time) as a result of “foolishly” installing an old version of the lightweight wallet.
• Going by the username “1400BitcoinStolen,” they described how a pop-up message asked to update their security prior to being allowed to transfer any funds.
• Upon installing a purported “security update” for the wallet, it immediately triggered a transfer of the user’s entire balance to an address in the possession of a hacker.
• Binance’s CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has moved to blacklist the stolen funds from his exchange, stating users should “beware of this Electrum official update.”
• 1400BitcoinStolen said they had contacted blockchain analytics company Coinfirm for assistance in tracking the bitcoin and were awaiting a response.
• Electrum has been around since 2011 and has gone through multiple updates while also being unable to stop bad actors exploiting previous versions by Sybil attacks using malicious servers.
• Another member on the GutHub thread, “gits7r” – who seems to be associated with Electrum – said the problem comes from the decision by the team early on to allow users to “run their own servers or use servers that they trust.”
• If users download a version from a different source than electrum.org and don’t check signatures, they may “install a backdoored Electrum,” gits7r said.
• In 2018, the Electrum network suffered such an attack from a bad actor who created multiple fake servers on the Electrum network that saw 245 bitcoin siphoned from unsuspecting victims.

See also: Crypto Wallet Maker Ledger Loses 1M Email Addresses in Data Theft

Related Stories

• Meet Torus, the One-Click Blockchain Wallet Trying to Make Web3 as Easy as Chrome
• US Stocks Closing on Bigger August Gain Than Bitcoin
• DeFi Is a ‘Complete Scam,’ Says Controversial Entrepreneur Craig Wright
• Cryptocurrency Earned From Carrying Out Microtasks Is Taxable, Says IRS Memo

Cryptocurrency exchange Huobi is taking aim at competitor OKEx in China, specifically the business of trading bitcoin futures and other derivatives contracts. The fight opens a new front in a longstanding rivalry. 

OKEx, which is led by Chinese executives and based in Malta, is the world’s biggest crypto derivatives exchange, with outstanding contracts valued at $1.26 billion, according to the data site CoinGecko. Huobi, also led by Chinese brass but based in Singapore, is close behind, tied for second place with another exchange, BitMEX, at $1.25 billion. 

In a report this month, Huobi said it has “managed to push new boundaries against other well-established exchanges when it comes to futures trading volume.” Huobi is already beating OKEx in a few market segments, according to the report, including “coin-margined futures” – where traders can post their initial down payment, known as margin, using cryptocurrencies. Huobi claims to also regularly beat OKEx in weekly and quarterly bitcoin futures contracts.

Related: Bitmain, Ebang Among 21 Bitcoin Mining Farms Stripped of Energy Perks in Inner Mongolia

“Before Huobi launched its futures contract in December 2018, OKEx had the largest market share of the world,” Ciara Sun, vice president of Huobi Global Markets, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “Huobi Futures always looks up to the best of the market.” 

The battle for supremacy in cryptocurrency futures – and China – adds to the tension between the two exchanges, which have been at loggerheads at least since 2018, when then-OKEx CEO Chris Lee defected to Huobi to become vice president of global business development.

OKEx CEO Jay Hao, in a company update in March, called Huobi “our doppelgänger,” insisted “imitation was the sincerest form of flattery” and said he “would like to think that Huobi was able to withstand this market volatility by following our footsteps.”

Last week, Hao told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat: “At OKEx, we seldom judge or compare our performance with our peers” because the competition is not easily “defined simply with data or certain metrics.”

Chinese crypto markets are big, lucrative and up for grabs

Related: Bitstamp to Move Clients’ Accounts From London to Luxembourg

Experts on China’s often-murky cryptocurrency markets say the rivalry between the two exchanges likely stems from the fight for customers in the world’s second-largest economy. 

“There’s a natural friction between OKEx and Huobi,” Matthew Graham, chief executive officer of Beijing-based crypto consultancy Sino Global Capital, told CoinDesk in an email. “While they have both pushed to enlarge their international footprints, they still prioritize their Chinese user base.” 

China has been pushing to become a global leader in blockchain, in what some observers say could become a hotspot in an emerging cold war between the country and the U.S. for technological supremacy. Chinese banks are already testing a digital version of its national currency, the yuan, while American officials have said they’re merely studying a digital dollar.

Read more: More Than 95% of Crypto Futures Volume Is in Asia: Report

Under the current rules, Chinese exchanges can’t technically sell cryptocurrencies for yuan, and there has been a crackdown from authorities. But many residents in the country buy bitcoin (BTC) or dollar-linked stablecoins like tether (USDT) from over-the-counter brokers, then use those tokens for trading, according to an Aug. 20 report from Chainalysis. The report called the East Asia region the world’s biggest cryptocurrency market, accounting for 31% of all transactions in the past 12 months. 

“By using tether as a fiat stand-in instead of, say, bitcoin, traders can lock in gains without off-ramping into fiat by simply converting other currencies into tether and leaving the tether in their wallet or exchange account,” Chainalysis wrote. 

According to Graham, the friction between the two exchanges has only intensified as they fight to obtain a more favored position with the Chinese government.

On that count, Huobi might be one move ahead of OKEx: The Chinese branch of Huobi has joined the Blockchain-Based Service Network (BSN) Development Alliance, which aims to be one of the most influential infrastructure services providers in the country.

“Is there room for two crypto-focused exchanges at the table?” Graham said. “We aren’t certain. But if there’s only one position, that position is highly coveted by both OKEx and Huobi.”

Officially, Huobi doesn’t even acknowledge the Chinese cryptocurrency market exists: “There is not a market in China. That is not legal,” Sun said. 

According to the website tracker, Huobi appears to be getting nearly a third of its website traffic from Chinese visitors, versus 14% for OKEx.  

“We don’t know the exact trading volume being done in China, unfortunately, but we can see bitcoin flow changes when the Chinese government announces something,” says Ki Young Ju, CEO of the Korean blockchain data tracker CryptQuant. 

The regional turf war between Huobi and OKEx now serves as a backdrop in their competition for more futures-trading business. 

“Huobi has managed to push new boundaries against other well-established exchanges when it comes to futures trading volume,” according to the company’s Aug. 14 report. 

The exchange says it’s also beating OKEx on “market depth,” a gauge of how many buy and sell orders are waiting at any given price point. 

Tom Wang, chief operating officer of Huobi Futures, told CoinDesk the company’s newly launched perpetual-swap product, which functions similar to futures but without expiry dates, also contributed to the second-quarter growth.

“Huobi’s perpetual swap’s 24-hour trading volume was at $5.37 billion, surpassing BitMEX’s $5.22 billion on May 12, 2020,” he said. “On this particular product, OKEx remains less competitive to us.”

Customers are seeing at least one benefit from the feud: more choices. Huobi announced in July it will launch bitcoin option trading in the third quarter, while OKEx said around the same time it has added three more expiration dates – daily, two-day and monthly – to its options-trading suite.

“We appreciate a healthy competition,” Lennix Lai, director of financial markets at OKEx, told CoinDesk.

Dovey Wan, a partner at crypto asset investment fund Primitive Ventures, told CoinDesk in a Twitter direct message the squabble reminds her of the way Chinese tech giants vie for dominance in the domestic market. 

“It’s like Alibaba and Tencent never fight Google and Facebook,” said Wan, who also serves as a member of CoinDesk’s advisory board. “But they fight bitterly in China.”

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nChain chief scientist Craig Wright has delivered an obscenity-laden interview discussing decentralized finance (DeFi) and stablecoins, calling such projects a “complete scam” and “illegal.”

• Taking part in the virtual conference Reimagine 2020 published Saturday, the controversial figure told host Patrick MacLain that both DeFi schemes offering lending and borrowing, and stablecoins, are “illegal, unregistered and unlicensed.”
• Creators of DeFi projects are “conmen … criminal a**holes taking money, full stop,” he told MacLain, adding an inflammatory take on oracle networks such as Chainlink.
• “‘We’ve got a decentralized oracle.’ Bullshit you do! Sue me!” Wright said, making an obscene gesture to the camera.
• “Where is the damn backing?” Wright asked, when discussing his thoughts on stablecoins.
• Wright appeared to conflate all stablecoins – cryptocurrencies that aim to hold a stable value with backing from an asset such as the U.S. dollar or gold – with tether, a widely used USD-linked crypto that has never released a comprehensive audit of all its reserves.
• Other stablecoins, such as USD Coin, have done so.
• When MacLain asked Wright for his view on decentralized exchanges, Wright claimed there was “no such thing, full stop. … [T]he exchanges are still run by a person.”
• Wright has said he is the creator of bitcoin, but has yet to provide convincing evidence to back up his claim and has faced allegations of fraud, which he contests vigorously through lawsuits.
• “I fight in court, I’m not a cowardly you-know-what who runs away,” Wright told MacLain, taking a swipe at bitcoin investor Roger Ver, who he is suing for libel over such fraud accusations.
• Wright is also fighting an ongoing court case involving the estate of his deceased former business partner, David Kleiman, that relates to the ownership of a 1.1 million ($12.8 billion) bitcoin fortune.
• Wright’s credibility as the supposed inventor of bitcoin has suffered somewhat during the process, with a judge saying he has at times argued in bad faith, perjured himself and admitted false evidence.
• In May, a message also alleging Wright is a fraud was cryptographically signed with over 100 bitcoin addresses he has claimed to own in Kleiman case evidence.
• Cryptography experts have described his subsequent claims about how bitcoin signing works as “nonsense.”
• Wright is a proponent of a bitcoin alternative cryptocurrency called Bitcoin SV (for Satoshi’s Vision).
• He further took the chance to knock bitcoin in his interview, saying that it “isn’t a decentralized network of every node running things.”
• “Your node doesn’t help the network unless you’re a miner,” he claimed.

See also: Craig Wright Called ‘Fraud’ in Message Signed With Bitcoin Addresses He Claims to Own

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Cryptocurrency earned from carrying out small tasks valued as low as $1 is taxable, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said in a memo Friday.

• In a memorandum first reported by The Block, the IRS’s Office of Chief Counsel published a response to a June 29 request for clarification from the tax agent’s own Small Business/Self Employed Division.
• The question centered around whether crypto earned by an individual for performing a microtask through a crowdsourcing or similar platform was a taxable income.
• “Yes,” IRS senior technician reviewer and memo author Ronald Goldstein said, “the convertible virtual currency received is taxable as ordinary income.”
• Goldstein added that cryptocurrency “acts as a substitute for real currency” and is therefore considered property for federal income tax purposes pertaining to section 61(a) of the IRS tax code.
• An example of microtasking included a company offering to pay workers in bitcoin for processing data or reviewing images.
• The value of crypto paid in exchange for microtasks are often small amounts that could be less than $1.
• Other examples included downloading an app and leaving a positive review; downloading games and reaching particular milestones; completing online quizzes; or registering accounts with various online services.
• According to the memo, these types of microtasks “may provide individuals with rewards” in the form of cryptocurrency and are thereby subject to the same regulations as regular money.
• The guidance comes at a time when the tax agency has been in crackdown mode to end suspected crypto tax avoidance, seemingly contradicting the advice of its own watchdog.

See also: Bitwage Rolls Out Tax Calculator Tool as IRS Ramps Up Crypto Pressure

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The Ethereum Classic blockchain suffered a 51% attack Saturday evening, its third such attack this month, noticed by mining company Bitfly, which also spotted the first attack on Aug. 1.

• The attack reorganized over 7,000 blocks, or two days’ worth of mining, according to a tweet shared by Bitfly. The first two attacks reorganized 3,693 and 4,000 blocks respectively.
• Notably, a leading organization behind the Ethereum Classic network, ETC Labs, announced its strategy to protect the network from additional attacks last week, including defensive mining that is intended to stabilize the network’s plummeting hashrate and resist future 51% attacks.
• Stevan Lohja, technology coordinator at ETC Labs, in a private message with CoinDesk, said he finds the timing of the attack “very suspicious” as it came just a day after a meeting of Ethereum Core developers regarding “aggressive innovation” in the blockchain’s proof of work.
• ETC Cooperative, another prominent foundation supporting the network’s development, took to Twitter following Saturday’s attack saying, “We are aware of today’s attack and are working with others to test and evaluate proposed solutions as quickly as possible.”
• After the first two attacks, exchange OKEx responded by saying it will consider delisting the asset due to the network’s severe lack of security. Coinbase also took drastic measures by extending deposit and withdrawal confirmation times for ETC to roughly two weeks.
• Following the latest attack, leading cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX will reconsider its ETC perpetual futures contracts, according to CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in a private message to CoinDesk. He said this is so even though FTX doesn’t support spot trading and the cryptocurrency network’s insecurity has less of a direct effect on the risk of offering futures trading.
• The cryptocurrency seems largely unaffected by the series of attacks, trading at $6.86 at last check, less than 4% below its price during the second attack. The coin has traded hands between $6 and $8 for nearly the entire month of August.

UPDATE (Aug. 29, 23:03 UTC): Adding comment from ETC Cooperative.
UPDATE (Aug. 30, 01:05 UTC): Adding comment from ETC Labs’ technology coordinator.

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The Ethereum Classic blockchain suffered a 51% attack Saturday evening, its third 51% attack this month, noticed by mining company Bitfly, which also spotted the first attack on Aug. 1.

• The attack reorganized over 7,000 blocks, or two days’ worth of mining, according to a tweet shared by Bitfly. The first two attacks reorganized 3,693 and 4,000 blocks respectively.
• Notably, a leading organization behind the Ethereum Classic network, ETC Labs, announced its strategy to protect the network from additional attacks last week, including defensive mining that is intended to stabilize the network’s plummeting hashrate and resist future 51% attacks.
• ETC Cooperative, another prominent foundation supporting the network’s development, took to Twitter following Saturday’s attack saying, “We are aware of today’s attack and are working with others to test and evaluate proposed solutions as quickly as possible.”
• After the first two attacks, exchange OKEx responded by saying it will consider delisting the asset due to the network’s severe lack of security. Coinbase also took drastic measures by extending deposit and withdrawal confirmation times for ETC to roughly two weeks.
• Following the latest attack, leading cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX will reconsider its ETC perpetual futures contracts, according to CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in a private message to CoinDesk. He said this is so even though FTX doesn’t support spot trading and the cryptocurrency network’s insecurity has less of a direct effect on the risk of offering futures trading.
• The cryptocurrency seems largely unaffected by the series of attacks, trading at $6.86 at last check, less than 4% below its price during the second attack. The coin has traded hands between $6 and $8 for nearly the entire month of August.
• An email to ETC Labs seeking comment wasn’t immediately returned.

(UPDATE 23:03 UTC): Adding comment from ETC Cooperative in third bullet point.

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