Your Favorite Crypto Digest From TradeCrypto.com #166

The statistics:

Market is red. BTC is now trading above $16,600, ETH is trading around $1,150.

💪 Bitcoin dominance: 40.28%

📉 Total Cryptocurrency Market Cap: $ 0,793 tr

😲 Fear and greed index: 22 (Extreme Fear)

🚀 Gainers (Top-100)

• Maker (MKR)+13.10%

• Terra Classic (LUNC)+3.47%

• Loopring (LRC)+1.88%

😭 Losers (Top-100)

• FTX Token (FTT)-41.01%

• Solana (SOL)-22.45%

• Kava (KAVA)-18.11%

An interesting twist. One day after crypto exchange Binance announced its intent to acquire competitor FTX for an undisclosed amount, the company pulled ❌ out of the deal.

“Our hope was to be able to support FTX’s customers to provide liquidity, but the issues are beyond our control or ability to help,” Binance said in a statement. If the deal had gone through, it would have combined the two largest centralized crypto exchanges in the industry. As of Wednesday, Binance accounted for $49 💰 billion and FTX for $4 billion worth of trading volume in the past day—or roughly one-quarter of all the crypto trading volume, according to Coingecko.

Meta, the parent company of social media platform Facebook, will cut more than 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of its workforce, CEO Mark Zuckerburg revealed. Zuckerburg said that the move was one of the "most difficult" in the company’s history, which will see Meta take other steps “to become a leaner and more efficient company.” “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” 💬 Zuckerberg said in the statement. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.” Where will this lead?

A bad call? Cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com wrote to customers in an email to notify them that all deposits and withdrawals for Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC have been suspended ⛔ on the Solana network. The pause is effective immediately, but the email did not explain why the exchange chose to suspend these transfers.

The two stablecoins, USDT and USDC, exist on almost every blockchain, and the suspension only applies to users looking to move either asset on Solana. "You may withdraw 💸 USDC and USDT at any time using other supported networks, including Cronos and Ethereum," the email to Crypto.com customers read. The crypto platform's announcement comes amid one of the more chaotic weeks in crypto history.

Do they taste better when paying this way? No, it’s not Groundhog Day. Subway is accepting Bitcoin, again — but this time it’s using the fast, nearly free Bitcoin Lightning Network. The world’s largest franchise by number of restaurants is trialing Bitcoin payments at three Subways in Germany’s capital. Bitcoin is not a popular means of 💱 exchange in Europe, despite the efforts of merchants, retailers and even Lightning-enabled conferences. Hinze has encouraged Bitcoin payments by offering a 10% discount on all footlongs, meatball marinaras and sucookies paid for with BTC.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is deepening its investigations 🔍 into FTX, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is now investigating the cryptocurrency exchange as well.

The SEC and CFTC are looking into how FTX has managed its customers’ money and are trying to get a clear understanding of FTX and FTX US’s organizational structures, according to the report. Any crossover between the two would be of concern to regulators, as well as any lack of separation between customer 👥 accounts. But the SEC and the CFTC aren’t the only government agencies looking into FTX. Last month, the Texas Securities Board began investigating FTX, FTX US, and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried over alleged securities violations, according to a filing.

The largest European crypto exchange with Ukrainian roots WhiteBIT continues to scale and expand its international operations. The company absorbed Georgia's first and largest non-banking institution Unicard/Pay Unicard. It is the Georgian market leader 👑 among loyalty programs and e-wallets. Today Pay Unicard services are used by 2 million clients in Georgia. The takeover of Pay Unicard in Georgia is the next step of expanding the WhiteBIT ecosystem, improving the company's services, their functionality and opportunities for WhiteBIT users. Not a bad achievement.

Binance's CEO wrote that the FTX incident provided several lessons: "you can't use your own token for collateral and you can't borrow funds if you own a cryptocurrency business." Therefore, Changpeng Zhao believes that cryptocurrency exchanges should use "proof of reserve" based on Merkle Tree ☘ technology, for full transparency of their collateral.

Conclusion: Not a good time for crypto. CZ was sidelined by crypto enthusiasts, he destroyed the exchange and didn't want to deal with the affected depositors. Solana is facing a major asset unlocking. We've never been in such a bad storm before.

What is Crypto Ping Pong digest?

TC lads here are working quite hard and from time to time we gotta chill. Recently, we got ourselves a ping pong table to complete our lazy-bag-stuffed chill zone. As you all know our main hobby is Crypto, so even while we play we don’t really shut up about it. Ever.

So memes, leaks, gossips naturally come about – we collect them and share them with you in this interstellar space on our site we like to call Crypto Ping Pong digest.