Top cryptocurrency
On 23 March 2023, the SEC issued an alert to investors stating that firms offering crypto asset securities might not be complying with US laws. The SEC argued that unregistered offerings of crypto asset securities might not include important information types of cork.
These physical representations of cryptocurrency do not hold any value by themselves; these are only utilized for collectable purposes. For example, the first incarnation of the bitcoin Casascius, coins made of silver, brass or aluminum sometimes with gold plating, or Titan Bitcoin, which in silver or gold versions are sought after by numismatists.
The term “physical bitcoin” is used in the finance industry when investment funds that hold crypto purchased from crypto exchanges put their crypto holdings in a specialised bank called a “custodian”.
Cryptocurrency
The Bank for International Settlements summarized several criticisms of cryptocurrencies in Chapter V of their 2018 annual report. The criticisms include the lack of stability in their price, the high energy consumption, high and variable transactions costs, the poor security and fraud at cryptocurrency exchanges, vulnerability to debasement (from forking), and the influence of miners.
In 2018, an increase in crypto-related suicides was noticed after the cryptocurrency market crashed in August. The situation was particularly critical in Korea as crypto traders were on “suicide watch”. A cryptocurrency forum on Reddit even started providing suicide prevention support to affected investors. The May 2022 collapse of the Luna currency operated by Terra also led to reports of suicidal investors in crypto-related subreddits.
On November 2, 2023, Sam Bankman-Fried was pronounced guilty on seven counts of fraud related to FTX. Federal criminal court sentencing experts speculated on the potential amount of prison time likely to be meted out. On March 28, 2024, the court sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison.
According to blockchain data company Chainalysis, criminals laundered US$8,600,000,000 worth of cryptocurrency in 2021, up by 30% from the previous year. The data suggests that rather than managing numerous illicit havens, cybercriminals make use of a small group of purpose built centralized exchanges for sending and receiving illicit cryptocurrency. In 2021, those exchanges received 47% of funds sent by crime linked addresses. Almost $2.2bn worth of cryptocurrencies was embezzled from DeFi protocols in 2021, which represents 72% of all cryptocurrency theft in 2021.
A paper by John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas, and Amin Shams, a graduate student found that in 2017 the price of bitcoin had been substantially inflated using another cryptocurrency, Tether.
Cryptocurrency shiba inu
The most recent update on Shibarium came on July 20, 2023, when Shytoshi Kusama, the lead developer of the Shiba Inu ecosystem, announced that the mainnet launch of Shibarium is scheduled to take place at the Blockchain Futurist Conference in Toronto, Canada, on August 13-17, 2023.
The Shiba Inu website suggests that the act of giving this SHIB to Buterin was burning in itself, and that it was done so for safekeeping. Critics point out that it was purely a publicity stunt, performed in an attempt to gain legitimacy as an asset held by Buterin.
It has been speculated that Vitalik Buterin was behind the initial liquidity that helped set up Shiba Inu’s liquidity on Uniswap. According to Ryoshi, he had “a fren” he met at Devcon in Osaka that sent him 10 ETH to set up the liquidity pair on Uniswap. Ryoshi also stated that Shiba Inu was an experiment in decentralized community building, and he thus declined all the influencer requests and pitches from different exchanges he received. His “job” is to defend the brand and give suggestions, although he does so very sparingly, as his last blog entry dates back to May 2021.
This followed the launch of ShibaSwap’s burn portal in April 2022, which rewarded users for burning SHIB with burntSHIB tokens. This burntSHIB is used to get RYOSHI tokens, which can also be staked on ShibaSwap.