SEC Financial News

There is little agreement among Bitcoin’s commentators over the last few weeks, with crypto execs, research analysts and billionaire investors offering wildly different takes on what's in store for Bitcoin for the year ahead. 

New reports into Sam Bankman-Fried and his collapsed exchanges revealed that Alameda Research, the now-bankrupt crypto trading firm, almost collapsed in 2018, even before FTX was in the picture.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is reportedly cashing out large amounts of cryptocurrency soon after being released on bail, on-chain data suggests.

Avraham Eisenberg was arrested in Puerto Rico on Dec. 26 on commodities fraud and manipulation charges relating to the $110 million exploit of the decentralized Mango Markets exchange. Eisenberg had self-identified as the actor behind what he called a “highly profitable trading strategy” and insisted that he had taken “legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed.” 

Researchers at the South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb have predicted that trust will return to crypto markets next year – and have outlined three key reasons shaping their thinking.

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.__________

After the height of the FTX collapse, the Philippine government warned investors within the country about using unlicensed crypto exchanges. 

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has requested to seal the infamous Hinman Speech documents, claiming that they are not relevant to the court’s summary judgment decision.

Crypto exchange OKX has released its second proof of reserves (PoR) on its website, only a month after releasing its first one.

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.__________

Dan Berkovitz, general counsel for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, said he will be leaving the agency after more than a year.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued a warning regarding audits of cryptocurrency companies, saying that investors should be “very wary” about relying on a company’s proof-of-reserves.

A senior official from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission has warned investors to be “very wary” about relying on a crypto company’s “proof-of-reserves.”

Bullish, a crypto firm that came to public attention in July 2021 for seemingly being unclear on what products or services it was offering, has announced the termination of a deal aimed at taking the company public.

A little more than a year after its introduction in October 2021, Nigeria's eNaira has only managed to get an adoption rate of 0.5%. The legislation that is set to be passed comes as a result of this fact. According to recent reports, the government of Nigeria will soon approve a legislation that will officially recognize the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a method for the country to bring its practices in line with those of the rest of the world.

According to the SEC, between 2019 and 2022, Ellison, at the direction of Bankman-Fried, furthered the scheme by manipulating the price of FTT, an FTX-issued exchange crypto security token, by purchasing large quantities on the open market to prop up its price. In doing so, Bankman-Fried and Ellison caused the valuation of Alameda’s FTT holdings to be inflated, which in turn caused the value of collateral on Alameda’s balance sheet to be overstated, and misled investors about FTX’s risk exposure.In addition, from at least May 2019 until November 2022, Bankman-Fried is said to have raised billions of dollars from investors by falsely touting FTX as a safe crypto asset trading platform with sophisticated risk mitigation measures to protect customer assets and by telling investors that Alameda was just another customer with no special privileges; meanwhile, Bankman-Fried and Wang improperly diverted FTX customer assets to Alameda.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have hit former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison and former FTX co-founder Gary Wang with fresh fraud charges.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a complaint against Thor Technologies and its cofounder and CEO David Chin in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Dec. 21. The SEC claimed that Thor’s 2018 initial coin offering (ICO) constituted an unregistered securities sale under the Securities Act of 1933.

The XRP price has dropped by 0.5% in the past 24 hours, as the cryptocurrency market remains largely unchanged over the same timeframe. Its current price is $0.344898, representing a 12% fall in a week and a 5% decline in a month, following a difficult period for the entire market.

If you saw the returns in my crypto portfolio this year, you would take a pass on my predictions for the direction of the cryptocurrency market. So, I will stick to what I know and share some regulatory predictions for the crypto industry.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has pushed for stricter regulations on centralized crypto actors but says decentralized protocols should be allowed to flourish given that open-source code and smart contracts are “the ultimate form of disclosure.”