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Russian authorities have seized approximately $10 million worth of Bitcoin from Marat Tambiev, a former employee of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF).
The seizure, reported by the local news agency TASS, involved the confiscation of 103 Bitcoin, stored in a Ledger Nano X hardware wallet, marking a significant moment in Russia’s handling of digital assets in legal contexts.
Tambiev’s conviction stems from what has been described as the largest bribery scandal in Russian history, involving a staggering 2,718 BTC bribe, which was valued at around $258 million at the time of sentencing.
The Nikulinsky District Court of Moscow had previously ordered the seizure of 1,032 BTC from Tambiev in 2023, citing the assets as derived from unconfirmed income.
The case against Tambiev came to light after his arrest in March 2022, where investigators discovered the private keys to his Bitcoin wallet in a folder named “Retirement” on his laptop.
The source of the bribe was traced back to the Infraud Organization, a notorious hacker group. Members from Kazakhstan and Estonia allegedly bribed Tambiev in exchange for favourable judicial decisions, including efforts to halt their own criminal prosecutions and hide assets worth over $138 million in cryptocurrency.
This case not only showcases the scale of corruption within certain sectors of Russian governance but also reflects the country’s evolving stance on cryptocurrency.
As part of the legal proceedings, the confiscated Bitcoin will now be integrated into Russia’s state revenue, a move that signals how the nation is dealing with digital currencies in official capacities.
This development comes as Russia is increasingly considering cryptocurrencies for international trade, especially as a means to circumvent Western sanctions.
The finance minister has indicated openness to using Bitcoin in foreign trade, showcasing a potentially dual approach to crypto — one of regulation and integration, alongside stringent action against its misuse in criminal activities.
Crypto Market News: Ripple chief executive officer Brad Garlinghouse lambasted the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for all the mess around Hinman emails and the Ripple lawsuit. In a shocking discovery in the documents, Hinman wrote that he didn’t see a need to regulate Ethereum (ETH) as a security and that he would consult Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin later that week to confirm mutual understanding about the same. During the same time period, Ripple and its executives were subjected to the lawsuit, in which the SEC argued that XRP tokens were sold as unregistered securities.
Also Read: XRP Lawsuit: Vitalik Involved In Process Of Hinman’s Infamous ETH Speech; Reveals Docs
In this context, it will be interesting to see how Judge Analisa Torres, who is overseeing the Ripple Vs SEC lawsuit, will react to the Hinman documents. The part about Ethereum not being a security may be closely looked at.
Considering the SEC’s enforcement actions on crypto businesses despite lack of regulatory clarity, the agency, according to Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse might have bluffed about its calls to come and register all through. He said the agency’s open invitations to come forward and register crypto tokens may have been a lie.
“Seeing the depth to which the SEC has essentially weaponized the lack of regulatory clarity through enforcement actions since this speech was given – it’s no surprise that we can call bluff on their claims to “just come in and register” as nothing but in bad faith.”
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen when Judge Torres will deliver the Summary Judgement, now that the Hinman emails are revealed.
Also Read: Ethereum Sees Sharp Selloff as it Got Embroiled in Hinman Email Controversy
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Crypto Market News: Empower Oversight Whistleblowers & Research (EMPOWR), an organization focused on enhancing independent oversight, on Thursday filed a complaint against the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over alleged selective enforcement on crypto market businesses by top agency officials. The organization filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to compel the SEC to comply with a December 2022 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding conflicts of interest by high level officials in the agency.
Also Read: Binance Cuts ETH Staking Withdrawal Time, Will Prices Go Down?
This complaint comes at a time when the regulatory agency faces criticism from not just crypto trader communities but also top lawmakers in the United States. Recently, Patrick McHenry, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said to SEC Chair Gary Gensler that there was clearly no clarity on regulation for crypto related activities in the US.
The complaint pertains to an August 2021 request from Empower Oversight that sought “all communications between senior SEC officials and their former and future employers and related entities regarding cryptocurrencies.” A statement from the organization said former senior SEC official William Hinman received money in compensation from his former employer Simpson Thacher, was part of a group that promoted Ethereum. Hinman had publicly declared Ethereum (ETH) was not a security while the SEC has been referring to ETH and the other similar cryptocurrencies as unregistered securities, the statement explained.
Hence, the allegation is that there was possibility of conflict of interest between the SEC officials, which explains the request for communications.
Also Read: Do Kwon Pleads Not Guilty To Allegations of Using Fake Passport
The presented content may include the personal opinion of the author and is subject to market condition. Do your market research before investing in cryptocurrencies. The author or the publication does not hold any responsibility for your personal financial loss.
Amid its ongoing crackdown on crypto entities, the SEC issued an enforcement action Wells notice to Coinbase.
According to reports, Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) could face enforcement action from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for securities law violations. Yesterday, the US regulatory agency issued a Wells notice to Coinbase warning of potential securities charges. In the notice, the SEC said it identified potential violations of US securities law and its intent to enforce action on the exchange.
However, Coinbase seems unperturbed by the looming SEC enforcement action. According to the leading crypto exchange, the Commission’s warning would not mean any changes to its current products or services. Coinbase also claimed that none of its listed assets were securities and ascribed the warning to a misunderstanding by SEC officials.
In a statement, Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal said:
“If needed, we welcome a legal process to provide the clarity we have been advocating for and to demonstrate that the Commission simply has not been fair or reasonable when it comes to its engagement on digital assets. Until then, it is business as usual.”
On the potential misunderstanding with the SEC, Grewal also stated:
“We asked the SEC specifically to identify which assets on our platforms they believe may be securities, and they declined to do so.”
In addition, the Coinbase attorney explained that the Wells notice arrived after the exchange provided multiple proposals to the Commission. According to Grewal, even though these proposals were about registration, the SEC “ultimately” refused to respond to Coinbase’s petitions.
The American crypto exchange also noted in a filing to the regulatory agency that “the company believes these potential enforcement actions would relate to aspects of the company’s spot market, staking service Coinbase Earn, Coinbase Prime, and Coinbase Wallet. The potential civil action may seek injunctive relief, disgorgement, and civil penalties.”
Coinbase’s shares slipped approximately 12% during the extended trading session after the news broke Wednesday. This decline adds to an 8.16% COIN fall sustained during the regular trading session.
The SEC notice is the second warning to a crypto entity, following February’s admonition to stablecoin issuer Paxos. Last month, the US regulator informed Paxos of its intention to sue for violating BUSD-related investor protection laws. According to the SEC, the blockchain company sold BUSD as an unregistered security.
Although Paxos remained mum on the development then, a Binance spokesperson weighed in on the impending lawsuit. According to the spokesperson, Binance merely licenses its brand for Paxos, with BUSD being a Paxos-issued and owned product.
The Paxos development and breaking Coinbase news are part of the SEC’s efforts to elicit compliance from crypto market participants. The regulatory agency previously settled with another crypto exchange Kraken following a crackdown on staking. Kraken paid $30 million to the SEC and agreed to discontinue its staking program in the US. Throughout the process, Kraken neither confirmed nor denied the SEC’s allegations.
Tolu is a cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast based in Lagos. He likes to demystify crypto stories to the bare basics so that anyone anywhere can understand without too much background knowledge.
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The biggest news in the cryptoverse for Nov. 4 includes Bitcoin’s outperformance of Nasdaq after the Fed raised interest rates, Do Kwon’s invitation to all law enforcement in the world to join an online conference, and DOGE’s 9% fall amid Twitter’s class-action lawsuit.
NASDAQ and Gold prices reacted to the Fed’s latest 0.75% interest rate hike by sinking, while Bitcoin (BTC) performed better than both and recorded a spike.
NASDAQ and Gold fell by 4.79% and 0.68%, respectively. In the meantime, Bitcoin increased by 0.55%.
On Nov.3, Korean prosecutors claimed that they obtained a private conversation between Do Kwon and one of his employees, proving that Kwon purposely manipulated the Terra (LUNA) price. The prosecutor’s office also said that the conversation proved Kwon was an illegal immigrant in Europe.
On Nov.4, Kwon Tweeted to say that he’d hold a virtual conference to end all talks of him being in hiding.
Alright ill throw a meetup/conference soon to get over this in hiding bs
Cops from world over welcome to attend
— Do Kwon
(@stablekwon) November 3, 2022
Kwon didn’t disclose a date for the virtual conference but invited all law enforcement worldwide to join.
After Elon Musk took over Twitter, he announced that he was planning to cut 50% of its workforce, which implies that he’ll fire 3,700 people. Twitter is now facing a class-action lawsuit over this, as the employers took legal action on Nov. 4.
Musk’s favorite Dogecoin (DOGE) reacted to this news by falling 9% in the last 24 hours.
Bitcoin mining difficulty will adjust on Sunday, Nov. 6. and it is expected to increase to record a new all-time-high third time in a row.
CryptoSlate analysts examined the mining difficulty and hash rate data and realized that bitcoin difficulty recorded a slight decrease on Nov. 4 while the hash rate kept increasing.
This indicates that the pressure on miners hasn’t been relieved and that the mining difficulty will likely increase this Sunday.
Ripple (XRP) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have been involved in a lawsuit since 2019.
Since then, a total of 12 companies have filed amicus briefs to support Ripple’s standing. Ripple’s general counsel, Stuart Alderoty, said:
“A dozen independent voices – companies, developers, exchanges, public interest and trade assoc.’s, retail holders – all filing in SEC v Ripple to explain how dangerously wrong the SEC is. The SEC’s response? We need more time, not to listen or engage, but to blindly bulldoze on.”
The Canadian government announced launching a consultation service on all crypto-related topics, including stablecoins and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC).
The consultations will address illicit crypto activities and provide a legislative review of the digitalization of money.
Mempol Studio is collecting milestone events of the web3 space in a 300-page limited edition hardcover yearbook. The yearbook is called “Web3 Yearbook 2022” and will be launched next year.
Inflation in developed economies like Europe and the U.S. is increasing alarmingly, primarily due to the increasing prices of energy, fuel oil, and gasoline.
In the U.S., inflation was 7.5% at the beginning of 2022, reaching 9% by June. This is much higher than the 5.4% recorded in June 2021 and 0.6% recorded in June 2020.
On the other hand, Bitcoin has been up by 184.28% since the start of 2020. In the same timeframe, gold only increased by 5.38%, which indicated that Bitcoin was a better hedge for inflation for the past two years.
Tokenist’s Chief Editor, Shane Neagle, wrote an exclusive article for CryptoSlate, discussing if this is the right time to dollar-cost average (DCA) in crypto.
DCA is a trading strategy involving buying and selling the same amount of the same asset at regular intervals. It is based on the premise of ignoring short-term price changes and behaving as a hedge against high market volatility. That’s why it is preferred by crypto investors often.
However, Neagle draws attention to the fact that Bitcoin prices are highly exposed to the overall macroeconomic conditions. Therefore, he advises investors should think twice before committing to DCA.
Neagle wrote:
“In an environment where Bitcoin prices remain highly exposed to the overall macroeconomic conditions, investors should seriously consider committing to the dollar-cost averaging approach as a means of investing in digital assets – should strong convictions be prevalent.”
blockchaincenter.net shows what would happen if MicroStategy founder Michael Saylor had bought Ethereum (ETH) instead of Bitcoin.
According to the data at the time of writing, Saylor would profit $1.76 billion if he bought Ethereum instead of losing $1.27 billion.
A U.S. nacro-millionaire was detained in Canada for using crypto to distribute drugs, according to Montreal Gazette. At the time of his arrest, he possessed around 200,000 Bitcoins, $2 million in an offshore bank account, and $4 million in Canadian Dollars.
In the last 24 hours, Bitcoin (BTC) increased by +4.05% to reach $21,064, while Ethereum (ETH) also spiked by +6.61% to trade at $1,643.
Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson doesn’t think highly of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) lawsuit against Ripple.
The SEC sued Ripple in late 2020, alleging the payments firm sold XRP as an unregistered security.
In a new interview with BitBoy Crypto, Hoskinson says regulators shouldn’t operate on a case-by-case basis, which he says makes everybody “live in fear.”
“It’s just an example of what happens when you do regulation through enforcement instead of legislation… You should have clear, understandable standards. And there should be a clear process for people to adhere and comply with those standards. For example, with the Ethereum crowd sale in Switzerland, we just asked the Swiss government, and after a few weeks of haggling, they told us what to do, and we had a thing, and it was over.
The SEC tends not to issue no-action letters in a meaningful way for the industry. So there’s no real good means of interfacing and integrating, and in the absence of that, people have different opinions, and there are winners and losers, and sometimes people get away with crazy stuff.”
According to Hoskinson, the SEC’s current approach is not conducive to the growth of the industry in the country as it forces crypto-native firms to move elsewhere.
“I think it creates perverse incentives inside the marketplace and ultimately, regulatory arbitrage, because basically those jobs go to Singapore, and they go elsewhere. So I don’t like the destruction of American jobs, the inconsistent clarity, the changing administrations having a big influence on the change of policy. There should be universal standards and there should be universal definitions, and hopefully, this case resolves in a way that’s good for the industry, but it’s just an indication of what happens in the absence of good leadership.”
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Cardano (ADA) creator Charles Hoskinson says that the US needs a new system for regulating crypto.
In a new interview on Thinking Crypto, the CEO of the technology company behind the blockchain platform Cardano, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), says that current regulatory approaches do not work well with crypto assets.
“The US needs to move to a functional regulation system instead of a definitional system. We’ve moved beyond the world that something’s a commodity and something’s the currency and something’s a security.
It needs to be regulated based on how it’s used. You need a different regulatory system and that doesn’t really map so well in the US because, usually, what we do is we create a regulatory body for an asset type: the CFTC handles commodities, derivatives as the Securities Exchange Commission handles securities…
We need to move to a system for regulation that has much better definitions of things. We don’t really have a good definition of virtual asset service provider in the United States. We don’t really have a definition of what is a utility token, versus a security token, these types of things. We need a better functional model and we need a better asset definitional model and they need to be applied together.”
Hoskinson says a new enforcement approach is also needed, saying that private financial surveillance does not work for crypto. He explains the downsides of the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) that traditional financial institutions, such as banks, currently submit if they detect potential cases of illegal money transactions.
“That means 99% of the time, it’s not the IRS discovering something on its own, or the SEC discovering something. It’s actually reported to them by a financial intermediary.
When you remove all these financial intermediaries, suddenly you have this issue that you have made all the regulators blind. They actually don’t know what’s going on. They can’t see things.”
Hoskinson then proposes an approach that is suited for crypto.
“I think the solution to it is just through open standards. Basically saying, we can build into the transaction, into the settlement of the transaction itself, as some adherence to regulation. That’s not necessarily compulsory. It can be optional, but it’s something that you can do.”
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Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia Justice Ministry announced the auction of the hefty Bitcoin amount that it had seized from cybercriminals. While the auctioning off of confiscated cryptocurrencies is a routine, the response to this Bitcoin bargain was extraordinary with approximately 4,000 new user registrations on the auction platform in the last few days.
According to Bloomberg, Prosecutors in Germany are not permitted to sell seized goods on the market, henceforth this Bitcoin auction was also the cause of the German policy around seized goods including cryptocurrencies. The German law enforcement agencies had set the minimum bid at 42,400 euros, which amounts to $49,281. The minimum price was quickly replaced by the first bidder who offered 56,060 euros for the stash of seized Bitcoins.
“Each euro that’s extracted from criminal networks helps weakens them,” the Justice Ministry said on Twitter.
While Bitcoin prices are currently rallying above $62K with a market cap of $1.18 trillion, at the time of reporting, getting your hands on the state auction’s discounted rates could be considered bargain of the quarter. Especially, since the implementation of the first-ever Bitcoin ETF in the US, many analysts debate that Bitcoin will easily cross the $70K price mark, with the next two months before the year ends.
With Bitcoin’s bright future, retailers, institutions, as well as governments are seeking to get the OG crypto for a fair price before entering Web3. Last week, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele took to Twitter to rant about Bitcoin’s weekly correction being too small to be bought as a dip. However, this further strengthened Bukele’s stance on Bitcoin, confirming that the President who implemented the world’s first-ever Bitcoin legal tender still believes in BTC regardless of the substantial backlash.
Furthermore, earlier today, Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital also reinstated Bitcoin’s dominance, asserting that Bitcoin is going to be a “gigantic asset class”, further identifying it as “digital gold”. Scaramucci also noted that “Anybody that does the homework…ends up investing into it (Bitcoin)” and advised traders to get their hands on the inevitable crypto.
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The presented content may include the personal opinion of the author and is subject to market condition. Do your market research before investing in cryptocurrencies. The author or the publication does not hold any responsibility for your personal financial loss.
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