BTC Maybe-Uppers, Firms Under Investigation, Possible Compensation and 20 Crypto Jokes

by Arthur · October 22, 2022

This week in crypto: Kevin O’Leary, aka Mr. Wonderful, argued that if a US stablecoin law was passed, the bull market would restart, Michael Saylor pitched bitcoin to US investor Ray Dalio, and John Mack suggested that crypto can become part of the increasingly digitized trading world. Meanwhile, Bitcoin earned several Guinness World Records titles, 77% of El Salvador citizens surveyed said the country’s bitcoin adoption strategy has “failed”, a Bank of America survey found that Americans between the ages of 21 and 42 have 7.5 times more likely to hold crypto, Brazil’s eighth largest city is set to allow residents to pay taxes in crypto starting next year, and Fidelity decided to enable ETH trading starting October 28. South Korea may roll out digital IDs as banks push for blockchain driver’s licenses, and Walmart-backed Indian retail giant Flipkart will allow customers to buy goods in the metaverse.

While that was happening, Moola Market was exploited for over $8.4 million and the North Korean hacking group Lazarus is targeting Japanese crypto asset companies. Do Kwon said the collapse of Terra due to design weaknesses was his sole responsibility, Terra developers unveiled a $248 million ecosystem financing program, German neobank Nuri shut down, and Upbit said it would compensate traders who lost money during the outage if they can prove that they were really going to sell their coins during the blackout. Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky also revealed a roadmap and website for an open and decentralized “social protocol,” a former Celsius executive was hired by JPMorgan as head of crypto, and Tesla still has more than $200 million in digital assets,

Then we learned that Three Arrows Capital is under investigation by the US SEC and CFTC, FTX.US and Sam Bankman-Fried are being investigated by the Texas Securities and Exchange Commission, Celsius has so far paid out more than $3 million in legal fees and most of that to one company for two weeks work, a New York man faces 25 years in prison after being convicted of money laundering, and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse expressed his “outrage” at the SEC over the lawsuit against Ripple. A European commissioner asked US politicians to draft new rules to govern the crypto industry, and the IRS issued new reporting guidelines for digital assets, while an audit in South Korea found that a KBS executive news director received “crypto” from a North Korean leader -affiliated agency, prosecutors said they would spend money on crypto-tracing tools, police seized $1.3 million worth of crypto in criminal investigations so far this year, and prosecutors and police said Do Kwon left Singapore last month for Dubai.

Now let’s check out the jokes of the week.

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Good morning, CT!

Decentralization, bishes!

Let’s check BTC, see how it’s doing these days, or weeks.