New York Financial News

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has announced the sentencing for an individual who pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges connected to “unlawfully obtained” Bitcoin from the Silk Road marketplace in 2012.

BlackRock's profit fell nearly 20% in the first quarter, despite pulling in $110bn of new money and increasing its overall assets under management.

On April 12, cryptocurrency exchange Gemini announced it filed a pre-registration undertaking with the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), which oversees capital markets in Canada's most populous province. The undertaking is a prerequisite to becoming a restricted dealer in Canada and is necessary for all cryptocurrency exchanges wishing to conduct business in the country. Cynthia Del Pozo Garcia, Gemini's director of strategy and corporate development, wrote:

A United States court has issued a summons to Tron founder Justin Sun’s Singapore address in connection to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) civil case.

A new report published by Galaxy Digital traced the trends in venture capital investing in the crypto industry. The New York-based crypto investment firm found that crypto VC funding has decreased significantly over the past two years.

United States Congressman Byron Donalds criticized the country's regulatory agencies on April 12 at the NFT.NYC 2023 conference in New York. According to Donalds, agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and others are being used to activate "Operation Choke Point 2.0" by limiting crypto business access to banking services. 

JPMorgan Chase was aware in 2006 of accusations that disgraced former financier Jeffrey Epstein paid to have underaged girls brought to his home, according to the latest allegations in a high-profile legal case.

Apollo is doubling down on supplier diversity across its private equity portfolio, which includes major companies such as security services provider ADT and digital media company Yahoo.

The federal court in Brooklyn, New York, charged a former investment banker and registered broker for allegedly defrauding numerous investors by promising profits on fake cryptocurrency investments and misappropriating the funds received to finance his lifestyle. 

The New York Times' recent report on Bitcoin mining, «The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin,» has been met with criticism from BTC proponents. The article claims that Bitcoin mining has a «voracious» appetite and uses as much energy as all residences in New York City. However, some analysts have pointed out that the article cherry-picks data and neglects the increasing use of renewable energy in the mining sector.

The brother of a former Coinbase employee has agreed to pay the cryptocurrency exchange nearly $470,000 for his role in an insider trading scheme.

While regulators and policymakers dither and try to decide if cryptocurrencies have a future in the economy, early adopters, including terrorists and violent extremists, are exploiting a law enforcement blind spot. The ease by which money laundering and terrorism financing take place with cryptocurrencies and the more dangerous privacy coins are becoming a security threat of our own making through bureaucratic inaction.

The International Monetary Fund, or IMF, has pointed to the collapse of FTX as well as “turmoil” in the banking sector in its calls for regulation of digital assets.

Regulators in the United States have been piling on the pressure on the crypto space over the last year, even more so in light of the FTX demise and collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

According to a 10 April Bloomberg report, Gemini co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have made a personal loan worth $100 million to the cryptocurrency exchange. The news comes as attempts to raise funds from outside investors for the United States-based exchange failed.

For the first time in ten months, Bitcoin [BTC] hit and rose above the $30,000 mark. The increase in the king coin’s price has been a significant milestone for the cryptocurrency market, sparking renewed interest and speculation among investors and traders. 

Beijing-based cryptocurrency mining firm Bitmain has reportedly violated tax regulations in China, with local authorities imposing major fines.

Arkansas has become the latest state in the United States to pass a bill seeking to regulate Bitcoin mining activity within its borders. The bill, which has been named the Arkansas Data Centers Act of 2023, will now move to the governor's office for final approval. If passed, the legislation would create guidelines for miners and protect them from discriminatory regulations and taxes.

Meanwhile, in the husk of a onetime aluminum smelting plant an hour outside of Austin, row upon row of computers were using enough electricity to power about 6,500 homes as they raced to earn bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency. The computers were performing trillions of calculations per second, hunting for an elusive combination of numbers that bitcoin’s algorithm would accept. About every 10 minutes, a computer somewhere guesses correctly and wins a small number of bitcoins worth, in recent weeks, about $170,000. Anyone can try, but to make a business of it can require as much electricity as a small city. In Texas, the computers kept running until just after midnight. Then the state’s power grid operator ordered them shut off, under an agreement that allowed it to do so if the system was about to fail. In return, it began paying the bitcoin company, Bitdeer, an average of $175,000 an hour to keep the computers offline. Over the next four days, Bitdeer would make more than $18 million for not operating, from fees ultimately paid by Texans who had endured the storm.

Bitcoin’s rally this year has caught a lot of attention. Yet the coin has seemingly stopped its advance at $28,000, a key trading point around which it’s been meandering in recent days. The largest cryptocurrency has hit a proverbial wall at that level, moving slightly above or below it in what analysts are calling range-bound trading. For the last three weeks of trading, Bitcoin has been trading within 15% of a key trendline — its average price over the past 30 days. Bitcoin was little changed at around $28,280 as of 4:25 p.m. in New York. “It’s chopping around that level right now,” Alex Coffey, TD Ameritrade senior trading strategist, said in an interview. “It’s sort of just drifting.” Bitcoin, in the wake of the fallout of a handful of US lenders last month, staged a rally that brought it from around $20,000 to $28,000 in a matter of days. As reasons for its surge, investors resurfaced longtime narratives — that the coin is a hedge against inflation and can be a safe haven amid turmoil at traditional banking institutions. The uptick — along with a broader year-to-date surge — helped it score the top spot among major assets in terms of performance in the first quarter.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, co-founders of the United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, have reportedly dipped into their own pockets to fund the business amid the crypto market downturn.