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Silvergate Capital Corp reported a sharp drop in fourth-quarter crypto-related deposits on Thursday and said it would cut its workforce by 40%, or about 200 employees, as withdrawals surged following the collapse of industry major FTX. Shares in the company, which lost roughly 88% of their value in 2022, were down 40% in premarket trading. Total deposits from digital asset customers declined to $3.8 billion at the end of December 2022, compared with $11.9 billion at Sept. 30, 2022, the crypto-focused bank said in a preliminary earnings report. To maintain liquidity, the bank sold $5.2 billion of debt securities at...

Crypto payments and infrastructure provider company Wyre is shutting down ... Wyre was first founded in 2013 by Michael Dunworth and Ioannis Giannaros and had raised a total $29.1 million across nine rounds of funding, data from Crunchbase shows. Some of its investors include Pantera Capital, Stellar Development Foundation and Amphora Capital.

A bankruptcy judge ruled that digital coins deposited in Celsius Network LLC’s interest-bearing accounts belong to the firm, ruling against thousands of customers and deciding a key legal issue in crypto-related insolvencies.

Bitcoin miners had a rough 2022, showing “how to not build a mining business,” However, industry experts don’t see 2023 as any better, unless markets improve significantly. high energy prices, increasing competition for Bitcoin blocks and a bear market hit miners, knocking out those with high leverage. The sector was shaken by bankruptcies and loan defaults, and next year will likely bring even more pain. lots of money was spent over the last year to boost hashrate ... but those investments didn’t pay off, as companies loaded up on debt to finance the growth only to see the economics of...

Solana has lost over $50 billion in value since the beginning of 2022, a year marked by outages, overloads, and significant exposure to Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange. Proponents argue that Solana is more critical than ever as a decentralized finance platform Solana was touted as the cryptocurrency that would challenge ether with an eco-friendlier approach, faster transaction speeds and more consistent costs. Developers raved about Solana's support for smart contracts Consensus mechanisms are how blockchain platforms assess the validity of an executed transaction Barely a month into the year [2022], a network outage took Solana down for over 24 hours....

It’s been a brutal year for the cryptocurrency market. In the latest blow to the crypto space, Core Scientific, one of the largest publicly traded crypto mining companies in the U.S, which primarily mints bitcoin, filed for bankruptcy on Dec. 21, citing falling crypto prices and rising energy costs. And the implosion of FTX, a now-bankrupt crypto trading platform that was once valued at $32 billion, has shattered investors’ confidence as the ripple effects of the company’s collapse continue to spread throughout the crypto industry. “Many Americans are coming to realize that cryptocurrency is just a speculative mania and the...

Data negates the possibility of liquidators behind the fund transfers due to the use of mixing tools and extensive planning to hide transaction paths. 30 cryptocurrency wallets linked to Alameda Research, the bankrupt sister company of crypto exchange FTX, became active on Dec. 28 following four weeks of inactivity. These wallets swapped and mixed over $1.7 million worth of crypto assets through various crypto-mixing services. As Cointelegraph reported on Dec. 28, the sudden movement of funds from Alameda wallets just days after Sam Bankman Fried was released on bail raised suspicions across the crypto community. Nearly 24 hours later, it...

in its 14-year existence, the cryptocurrency world has failed to generate any significant real-world use case apart from the financing of crime. It has mainly been a speculative investment, which only worked as long as real dollars were entering the system. Crypto has never known anything but easy money ... There’s a brutal liquidity squeeze going on in global markets, and money is being sucked out of risky asset classes.” Cryptocurrencies have been about as risky as it gets. But the real promise was that cryptocurrency would always go up in price ... The promise in cryptocurrencies has always been...

Core Scientific, one of the largest publicly traded crypto mining firms in the U.S. listed on Nasdaq as $CORZ, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy [ruh roh] Core Scientific is still generating positive cash flow, but it is insufficient to repay the financing debt Instead of liquidating, the company will continue regular mining operations while trying to reach a deal with senior security noteholders The company owns approximately 5% of Bitcoin’s global hash rate The loss in Bitcoin’s value and higher energy prices have narrowed profit margins of BTC miners worldwide [bummer]

crypto trading looks a lot like the forms of finance we’re all familiar with. It’s made up of things called “exchanges,” “brokers,” “lenders,” “deposits” and “hedge funds.” Crypto also carries the special mystique of the blockchain, which has let traders treat critics as anti-innovation Luddites. [however] the purposelessness of the crypto trading system emulates finance the same way the board games Risk and Monopoly emulate war and real-estate investing. Crypto trading is also gambling. It performs no intermediation function to help expand the economy or improve society. Crypto trading is, as “Seinfeld’s” George Costanza might have said, finance about nothing....

even though the Mazars report ... suggested Binance's situation was solid, it also showed bitcoin liabilities were $245 million bigger than assets, the WSJ reported. Nearly half of the company's $75 billion reserves are in its own stablecoin BUSD and its native token binance coin (BNB) ... On Friday, the accounting firm suspended its proof-of-reserves work with Binance and other crypto clients "due to concerns regarding the way these reports are understood by the public, Investors are worried that cracks are starting to appear at Binance after the shocking collapse of FTX. The crypto exchange giant faces questions about its...

Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has cautioned the crypto community about self-custody, suggesting that 99% of people choosing to take possession of their crypto will likely lose it one way or another.

Bitcoin's conceptual design and technological shortcomings make it questionable as a means of payment: real Bitcoin transactions are cumbersome, slow and expensive. Bitcoin has never been used to any significant extent for legal real-world transactions. Bitcoin is also not suitable as an investment. It does not generate cash flow (like real estate) or dividends (like equities), cannot be used productively (like commodities) or provide social benefits (like gold). The market valuation of Bitcoin is therefore based purely on speculation. Speculative bubbles rely on new money flowing in. Bitcoin has also repeatedly benefited from waves of new investors. The manipulations by...

Institutional investors were souring on cryptocurrencies even before this week. The sudden downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.com may have permanently damaged their prospects of being included in mainstream portfolios. While plenty of industry die-hards remain, many professional money managers are saying the case for crypto as a portfolio diversifier or digital gold has been debunked. The losses are too great and the market structure is too risky, they say. “What’s become clear is it will not find a home in institutional asset allocation,” said Hani Redha, a multi-asset portfolio manager at Pinebridge Investments in London. “There was a period when...

The “crypto winter” that hit earlier this year walloped digital asset prices and served as a healthy reminder that cryptocurrencies are highly risky, volatile investments. But now, in the wake of crypto exchange FTX’s implosion, crypto investors were reminded of another risk they face: Crypto accounts lack guaranteed protections when the exchange or platform provider goes belly up. Traditional savings and investment accounts can never be 100% safe in the event an institution becomes insolvent, either. But most banks and brokerages, as well as 401(k) plans, do provide federally guaranteed protections and other insurance. Crypto custodial accounts, however, do not...

Crypto.com just admitted to making another very large and concerning clerical error: it mistakenly sent 320,000 in Ethereum (~$416 million USD) to another cryptocurrency exchange, called Gate.io, about three weeks ago (via Web3 Is Going Just Great). In a post on Twitter, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek says the company was supposed to send the crypto to one of its cold, or offline, wallets, but accidentally sent it to a “whitelisted” address belonging to its corporate account at Gate.io. [competitor] Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao appeared to allude to the situation in a tweet on Sunday morning, stating: “If an exchange...

California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill crafted to create a licensing and regulatory framework for cryptocurrency firms in the state, Under the bill, crypto companies wishing to serve California residents would be required to first receive a license to do so, and it would have also formally adopted new rules governing stablecoins. This includes a requirement that licensed companies only engage with bank-issued stablecoins, which must remain 100% backed by reserves.

The city of Longmont has postponed the expansion of its Nelson-Flanders Water Treatment Plant because inflation has pushed the estimated cost of the project to roughly $27 million over budget. Originally, the construction was estimated to cost $46.7 million but has since ballooned to $73.8 million, Longmont Senior Civil Engineer Joe Michalski said in an email Monday. In particular, the cost of wood, steel, pipes and fuel have driven up the cost dramatically, Michalski said.

An entirely new type of flu vaccine could better protect people from influenza, and clinical trials of the vaccines are starting this month. The new flu vaccines are based on mRNA technology, the same method that was used to create the most common and successful U.S. COVID-19 vaccines, those made by Pfizer and Moderna. These vaccines use messenger RNA (or mRNA) to “teach” cells to make proteins. These proteins don’t cause illness, but are the same type that we’d get during a COVID-19 or flu infection. The vaccines then train the immune system to prevent actual infections. The first group...

The Bureau of Economic Analysis on Thursday is set to release the second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) numbers. And if they’re negative, that will mark two consecutive quarters in which the economy has contracted — something that is generally understood to mean a recession. How real and politically sensitive is that possibility? Real enough that the Biden administration is seeking to preempt it. Late last week, the White House issued a document stating that two straight quarters of negative GDP “is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.” Treasury Secretary Janet L....