Holpop News

Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Commissioner Caroline Pham said her agency’s action against KuCoin could infringe on the authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Pham said the two agencies have been unable to reach a consensus on how to classify digital assets and have been publicly divided in their opinions.

The CFTC alleges KuCoin violated the Commodity Exchange Act, while the SEC calls similar offenses a violation of the Securities

Act.
Pham noted that this interpretation fails to distinguish between investments in funds (which the SEC regulates) and a fund’s trading activities (which the CFTC regulates).

“The CFTC’s approach could impinge on the SEC’s authority and undermine decades of robust investor protection laws by conflating a financial instrument with a financial activity, undermining the fundamentals of the securities markets. Owning stocks is not the same as trading derivatives,” she added.

WSJ reporter Alexander Osipowicz reported that former Jump Trading employee James Hunsaker appeared at the Terraform Labs trial and said he has filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against his former employer.

Hunsaker worked at Jump Crypto before leaving and co-founding Monad Labs. He said Jump and Terraform struck a deal to accelerate UST adoption.
In May 2021, UST decoupled from the dollar. At that time he was at a Zoom conference with colleagues. On that day, Jump Crypto CEO Kanav Kariya said Do Kwon was going to transfer the rights to UST to the company.

Jump Trading co-founder Bill DiSomma then began urging traders to make “aggressive trades” and accumulate USTs.

Hunsaker noted that Terra was an important project for Jump, so the company was willing to risk “a couple hundred million dollars.”

This aggressive trading helped rebind in May 2021, allowing UST to survive another year.

In those days, Kwon claimed that the UST “self-recovered automatically,” fooling investors.

Hunsaker left Jump in February 2022. In his testimony, he noted that he tried to publicize the situation anonymously on Reddit.

He filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC in August 2022.

Hunsaker invested $200,000 of his own money in UST to earn a ~20% return from Anchor Protocol. He doubted the stability of UST, but believed he could exit quickly if needed. He sold his USTs on May 7 or 8, 2022, when the depeg began.

Earlier, the SEC said Jump made about $1 billion in profits from its partnership with Terraform Labs.

Merkle Manufactory (chief developer of Web3 social network Farcaster) is close to completing a funding round that will give the company a $1 billion valuation.

Leading this round is Paradigm.

The amount of funds raised is not yet known.

Consensys (behind the development of MetaMask) has written an open letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stating that Ethereum and Proof-Of-Stake (PoS) security is superior to Proof-of-Work (PoW).
The letter also claims that the developer community in Ethereum is much larger than in bitcoin.

A comment was made urging the endorsement of a spot Ethereum ETF.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said there is currently little chance of a recession, so lowering interest rates would do no good.

He added that if the situation does not change, the Fed will maintain current interest rates for longer.

The HKVAEX exchange has withdrawn its application for a license in Hong Kong.

Earlier, Chinese media reported that HKVAEX is linked to Binance. Binance itself denies the connection.

According to the regulator’s order, the exchange must cease all its operations in the city by May 31.

According to Reuters, Brazil’s B3 stock exchange has received a license to offer BTC futures.

Trading will open on April 17.

Detained Binance manager Tigran Gambarian has filed a lawsuit against Nigeria’s National Security Adviser (NSA) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

He accused them of human rights violations and demanded compensation for it.
Also suing the Nigerian authorities was another detained Binance manager, Nadeem Anjarwalla. He managed to escape last week.