The report includes types of “threats”, how to deal with them, and government challenges. The agency praises the technology but expects an increase in its criminal use.

In recent days, the US Department of Justice issued a legal action framework for the regulation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies through the Attorney General’s office. According to the document, cryptocurrencies could change the way human beings interact and organize as a society.

However, the report warns that technological evolution; its potential expansion will create opportunities to commit crimes, thus jeopardizing public security and that of the United States.

The document, entitled “Cryptocurrencies: an application framework”, includes the types of “emerging threats”, explains how to face them, and mentions the challenges for the country.

Concerning threats, these would be of three types: financial transactions related to the commission of crimes, money laundering, and robberies, which also include cryptocurrency markets.

The second part shows a list of the legal instruments and regulations that the government has in place to minimize threats. These include the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), units of the Treasury Department, and the Department of Justice itself.

The third part reviews the challenges that government authorities have to overcome regarding “business models”. In other words, this explains how Bitcoin exchanges, cryptocurrency exchange kiosks, or casinos that operate with crypto assets work. Regarding obfuscation techniques, it mentions the different types of cryptocurrency mixing that “can facilitate criminal activity.”

One of the conclusions of the report highlights that “criminals expand and perfect techniques designed to evade detection and arrest.” It states that “Illicit uses of cryptocurrencies threaten not only public security, but also national security.” It also says that “cryptocurrencies can provide terrorist organizations with an instrument to bypass traditional financial institutions to obtain, transfer and use funds.”

The document highlights that cryptocurrencies can help individuals evade international sanctions. According to the Justice Department, this is “a new worrying opportunity to undermine traditional financial markets.”

Department of Justice Has an Eye on Bitcoin

According to the report’s conclusion, the agency aims to ensure that the law effectively regulates cryptocurrencies and that they are compatible with established legislation and national security. Otherwise, “the true transformative potential” would be at risk, as the final part of the document reads.

The Digital Cyber Task Force, a unit of the Attorney General created in 2018 to counter “global cyber threats”, is in charge of developing the legal action framework.

The Attorney General submits a framework, which is not yet a final law or standard on how to use cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The document provides an overview of the current scenario in the Bitcoin ecosystem and its potential benefits, as well as its possible risks.

One of the institutions that have been most interested in knowing how cryptocurrencies work is precisely the US Department of Justice. In November 2015, the agency even discussed crypto assets and blockchain.

Various representatives of regulatory agencies and companies, such as BitFury, BitPay, Circle, Coinbase, Kraken, and XAPO, contributed to the debate. They were seeking to promote dialogue and mitigate potential cybercrime.

Last May 2018, the department announced an investigation into possible manipulation of the cryptocurrency market. The investigation sought to determine the execution of false orders for the purchase or sale of crypto assets.

By Alexander Salazar

Arthur Hayes, Samuel Reed, and Ben Delo, all directors and co-founders of BitMEX, announced their departure from the exchange’s executive positions following the lawsuit filed by the United States government.

This Thursday, October 8, BitMEX’s parent company, 100x Group, announced that the three co-founders of the exchange, all indicted in the case, will no longer hold executive positions, while Greg Dwyer, the fourth executive to be indicted, will be temporarily absent from his role as head of business development.

And while the speed of ATM installation in the United States is 18.3 per day, the speed of Canada (second in ATMs) is 1.3 per day. At the same time, the speed of Spain (the fifth country with the most ATMs) is just 0.1 per day, which indicates the lag. Not to mention the Latin American countries, which mostly have less than 3 ATMs in total.

Let’s see the numbers of ATMs in some Spanish-speaking countries. Spain is the one with the most ATMs, with 104 teams to date, 18 of them located in the capital, Madrid, and 26 in Barcelona.

Regarding Latin America, in the first place, we can find Colombia, with 59 ATMs, followed closely by Panama with 18, the Dominican Republic with 16, Argentina with 13, Mexico with 10, Chile with 4, Peru with 3, Costa Rica with 2. And finally, with a single ATM recognized by CoinATMRadar, are Venezuela, Ecuador, and El Salvador.

To replace Hayes, 100x Group announced the arrival of Vivien Khoo as the new interim CEO. Khoo was until now the COO of 100x Group. She first joined the company in 2019, having served as the Chief Compliance Officer for Asia-Pacific at Goldman Sachs, and has a background with the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission.

New faces and new responsibilities

100x Group Chief Commercial Officer Ben Radclyffe will assume increased responsibilities in managing customer relationships and overseeing financial products. Radclyffe has 20 years of finance and trading experience at Deutsche Bank, UBS, and Tower Research Capital.

In an official comment, 100x Group President David Wong said that the leadership “is well prepared to continue the growth and development of the 100x Group, including the completion of the BitMEX User Verification Program.”.

By: Jenson Nuñez.

Will they return the bitcoins they owe? Is the question that echoes in every corner, the final deadline imposed by the Tokyo District Court to present a rehabilitation plan for those affected by the fall of the Mt. Gox exchange is approaching, which is estimated for October 15, 2020, and it’s still unknown what will happen.

There are some speculations about the refund of 150,000 BTC and the resulting liquidation that could negatively affect the Bitcoin markets. Others are much more incredulous and are confident that the court will continue to announce further delays and that the reimbursement will spread out over time.

The final deadline to submit a rehabilitation plan for those affected by the fall of Mt, Gox is approaching. As such, speculation about what it means for hack victims and for the Bitcoin market itself is growing, Mt.Gox highlights.

In a document published on June 30, the Tokyo District Court issued an order to extend the deadline for filing the rehabilitation plan to reimburse creditors until October 15.

After many years, dozens of lawsuits, and a plan to relaunch the exchange, the rehabilitation plan was established to compensate the victims. The court has already delayed this deadline numerous times, but if it doesn’t do so again, this is the date by which it will be clear how and when creditors can expect repayment.

In terms of selling pressure, 150,000 BTC at today’s prices is close to $ 1.6 billion. While only the volume of operations with Bitcoin in the last 24 hours is USD 58,000 million. That is, we are talking about a volume (in the case that all BTC were exchanged on the same day) of just 2.76%.

But most likely, according to many insiders, this return will be postponed even longer. Correspondence from the Tokyo District Court (dated October 1) was revealed in a letter posted on a website for MtGox victims that discouraged people from attending proceedings due to COVID-19. This may be clear evidence that delays will continue.

The beginnings of the largest Bitcoin exchange

Mt Gox was initially founded in 2007 by programmer Jed McCaleb. At that time, it functioned as an online portal for the exchange of letters of the well-known game Magic: The Gathering. The name Mt Gox was an acronym for “Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange.”

But the use and purpose of the site would begin to change. In July 2010, McCaleb read about Bitcoin on Slashdot. After learning about the cryptocurrency, he decided that the bitcoin community needed an exchange.

Its users could trade bitcoin and other regular currencies. Another point stated on July 18 says that McCaleb launched its exchange and price quotation service by deploying it under the domain name mtgox.com.

However, by March 2011, McCaleb sold Mt. Gox to French programmer and Bitcoin enthusiast Mark Karpeles. It was Karpeles who served as the CEO of Mt Gox, becoming its largest shareholder.

By: Jenson Nuñez.

A report recently published by the news portal Trustnodes indicates that the Medalla testnet already exceeded 75 GB per node, so this will be the estimated space that everyone who wishes to operate their own must have available.

The main developers point out that Medalla works with nodes under different operational systems such systems are different from those of the main network. Since the latter must be complete to handle the whole record of operations in the network, those belonging to the test network are classified as “archive”, so its importance is mainly based on being stable before each change within the Blockchain.

On the one hand, Ethereum 2.0 network should theoretically solve scalability problems. On the other hand, it is not very clear if, under these metrics, it would be practical for stakeholders to support the processing of the blocks. Although the size of a full node for the network has not been defined at this time, it is estimated that it should be about 18 GB.

On the other hand, as the size of the testnet nodes grows, the amount of ETH available as collateral by the block validators in the Medalla testnet also increases.  Figures published by beaconcha.in indicate that the number of ETH tokens available as collateral already exceeds 2.1 million units, while the number of validators is already close to 70,000 members.

According to information published by the price calculator Ethven.com, with an Ether trading at about USD 353 per unit, it is estimated that Medalla has more than USD 742.1 million in ETH funds guaranteed. In perspective, this amount exceeds the assets in custody managed by DeFi protocols such as Aave (LEND) or Yearn. Finance (YFI).

As support for Ethereum 2.0 grows, Ethereum lead developer Vitalik Buterin commented last week in an interview that we are still far from seeing solutions to improve the scalability of the currently used Blockchain network. At the moment, it only remains to see how the development stages for the project evolve.

Ethereum 2.0 development continues to advance

Although Medalla testnet seems to have achieved success with the support of the validator community and such amount of ETH funds as collateral, various news portals report that the development of Ethereum 2.0 continues to advance, for which the launch of a second parallel test network called Spadina, which would be a short-term systems test.

In light of the great growth that the Ethereum ecosystem once had, especially in recent months due to the boom in the DeFi sector, expectations grew up about the benefits that Ethereum 2.0 will bring in terms of scalability.

Data reported by the development team ensure that the update for the protocol will lead the network to have enough capacity to support more than 100,000 transactions per second, improving latency times and reducing costs for operations

By: Jenson Nuñez.

Two unknown persons tried yesterday to rob a Bitcoin ATM in a store located in Kelowna, Canada, for which they took a vehicle and crashed it into the establishment. The attack took place at night, and they failed to rob the ATM.

The event caused large material losses for the affected premises, as Kelowna police indicated that the exterior of the property suffered extensive damage by criminals.

The authorities’ report details that the criminals were only interested in the Bitcoin ATM, as the investigation details that beyond the destruction, they did not steal anything of value from the affected premises.

Although many people could claim ignorance on the part of criminals believing that by taking the ATMs they could get hold of the bitcoins stored there, the authorities emphasize that this hypothesis is not entirely true, since many of these devices admit payments with money in cash, and this would be the main interest of people who have carried out similar deeds elsewhere.

Cashiers and other crimes

On the other hand, beyond the criminals who try to steal this type of device, authorities in various countries expressed their concern about the increase in the number of operational devices.

In this regard, they assure that these devices became a vehicle for criminals to access digital currencies, especially since KYC measures and money laundering are insufficient to stop the operations of those who try to legitimize capital.

Information published by CoinATMradar indicates that there are almost 10,780 operating devices around the world, with the US being the country with the largest number of devices (8,694 units), followed by Canada with about 900 functional devices.

 The boom of Bitcoin ATMs around the world.

Bitcoin ATMs are still a boom, and this is the year that boom is at its peak. Today crypto ATM volume surpassed 10,000 (in fact, at the time of writing, it is 10,025).

However, this growth is relative, given that the development and propulsion of ATMs are not the same in all parts of the world and is, if you will, proportionally very unfair.

The United States far exceeds the other countries and has almost 80% of the pieces of the cake: there are currently a total of 7,914 ATMs in that country, while the second on the list, Canada, has 877 ATMs, and the next, UK, 281.

Undoubtedly, there is great inequality, which can appear in case the continents are analyzed. While the North American subcontinent has 85.6% of the world’s ATMs, Europe has 12.2%, Asia 1.3%, South America 0.6%, Oceania 0.2%, and Africa 0.1%.

By: Jenson Nuñez.

A new week begins, and then we review the price of Bitcoin (BTC), a digital currency that at the time of publication is quoted at about $10,787 per unit, with slight gains of 1% compared to yesterday.

According to the information recorded, there is a chance that the price experienced some interesting fluctuations between last night and early morning today. By 8:00 pm (New York time), the price was above $10,700 per unit, but at 3:00 am it fell below $10,650. The price of the digital currency suffered an increase and remained partially stable.

It is important to note that in the last 24 hours the BTC market records the movement of about $54,631 million, being the Tokenize Xchange platform, the one that capitalizes at least 65% of all that capital. There, the largest volume of exchange operations is made in USD and SGD, trading the digital currency at least $10,710 per unit.

Regarding the evolution estimated for this October, our actionable signals service indicates possible falls for the next few hours, pushing an increase in concentration levels but a fall in the volume of large transactions. We recommend people to be very attentive and take precautions in case of trading through the main markets.

Top altcoins partially on the rise

Currencies with increases of more than 1%, such as Ether (ETH), Polkadot (DOT), Chainlink (LINK), Crypto.com (CRO), Litecoin (LTC), Cardano (ADA), Bitcoin SV (BSV), EOS, and Stellar (XLM). Ripple (XRP) and Yearn. Finance (YFI) stands out with steep increases, which exceed 7% at the time of publication.

Meanwhile, other tokens such as Binance Coin (BNB), Maker (MKR), Syntetix Network Token (SNX), UMA, and DigiByte (DGB) are on the downside with drops of more than 1%.

About the ecosystem of Decentralized Finance, DeFi, among all the exponents they jointly capitalize about $10,810 million at the time of publication, increasing more than 300% in the last three months.

According to data published by the portal Defipulse.com, the DeFi project that capitalizes the largest amount of capital is Uniswap (UNI) with some $2.34 billion in crypto funds arranged as collateral. They are followed by Maker (MKR) and Aave (LEND), which manage about $1,830 million and $1,230 million respectively. Among these three projects is 50% of the total capital available in this ecosystem.

Top winners and losers

The biggest gains are capitalized by the DeFi Xfinance (XFI) token, increasing more than 68% compared to yesterday. The largest volume of transactions is conducted on the Uniswap platform. In the next positions, there are Sentinel Protocol (UPP) and The Sandbox (SAND), which are on the rise with 23% and 21% respectively. The total capitalized is $22M.

The token for the PlayFuel (PLF) video game ecosystem is declining as the main loser after appearing as the winner last week, with losses of 18.7%. Bella Protocol (BEL) follows with a 17% drop. Another recently created DeFi token, which moves about $8.6 million.

By: Jenson Nuñez.