Your Favorite Crypto Digest From TradeCrypto.com #133

Daily statistics update:

Today's market is red. BTC is now trading above $18,800, ETH is trading around $1,250.

💪 Bitcoin dominance: 40.65%

📉 Total Cryptocurrency Market Cap: $ 0.882 tr

😲 Fear and greed index: 21 (Extreme Fear)

🚀 Gainers (Top-100)

• IOTA (MIOTA)+7.18%

• Quant (QNT)-5.58%

• Helium (HNT)+2.09%

  😭 Losers (Top-100)

• Terra Classic (LUNC)-19.43%

• Chiliz (CHZ)-9.32%

• Lido DAO (LDO)-8.91%

Happy shopping. Iris Energy, a publicly traded sustainable Bitcoin mining firm (IREN), has agreed 🤝 to sell investment bank B. Riley Financial up to $100 million in equity over a two-year period.

That’s B. Riley’s second significant investment in the mining sector (it signed the same $100💰  million deal with Core Scientific in July) despite the industry facing stiffening competition and narrowing profits amid the crypto bear market. The move shows the continued interest some traditional financial firms still have in Bitcoin even in the face of obvious headwinds.

Oops. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced settled charges against the founders of bZeroX, the company behind the bZx protocol. The CFTC fined bZx founders Tom Bean and Kyle Kistner $250,000 for allegedly 📢 “illegally offering leveraged and margined retail commodity transactions in digital assets,” as well as failing to adopt customer identification requirements known as KYC. Legal experts say the CFTC's action against the founders of bZx and Ooki DAO could have far-reaching implications for the DeFi industry.

America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, has turned to analytics firm Inca Digital to build out a new crypto mapping tool to analyze 🔍 the impact of cryptocurrencies on U.S. national security.

Specifically, Inca Digital’s government contracting division will “provide insight into the use of blockchain-based technologies linked to money 💸 laundering, terrorist financing, and sanctions evasions across systems.” A promising idea.

Compute North, a data center provider for cryptocurrency miners and blockchain companies, has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy at a Texas court, as energy costs spiral and the crypto market’s prolonged slump continues. Compute North provides data centers for crypto 💱 mining giants such as Compass Mining and Marathon Digital, and owes some $500 million to 200 creditors. Compute North estimated its assets are worth between $100 million and $500 million, according to the documents. Not a good twist.

It's questionable whether this is helpful. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill was introduced in the United Kingdom’s parliament to extend police 🚔 powers over cryptocurrencies in order to counteract cyber crime, money laundering, and “foreign kleptocrats.”

Director General of the National Crime Agency Graeme Biggar said in a statement: 💬 “Domestic and international criminals have for years laundered the proceeds of their crime and corruption by abusing UK company structures, and are increasingly using cryptocurrencies. These reforms—long awaited and much welcomed—will help us crack down on both.”

Addressing the community, CZ stated: “We will implement an opt-in button (on the Binance  exchange), for people to opt-in to pay a 1.2% tax for their LUNC trading.” A blanket trading tax of 1.2% will be implemented for all LUNC trading only after opt-in traders reach 50% of the total LUNC trading volume on the 💱 exchange. The recommendation split up the LUNA community as some supported CZ’s decision to implement the opt-in button while others interpreted it as market manipulation from a centralized entity.

There's no other way. Now that the Ethereum merge is complete, Vitalik Buterin thinks other blockchains like Dogecoin and Zcash should follow suit. 💬 “As proof of stake matures, I expect it to just increase in legitimacy more and more over time,” Vitalik said over video chat at the Messari Mainnet conference.

“I hope that Zcash moves over. I am also very hopeful that Dogecoin is going to evolve over to proof of stake at some point soon,” 📲 he added. Earlier this month, Ethereum executed its long-awaited merge event, moving its main network from the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) model to the more energy-efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) model.

Conclusion: LUNC has a number of fans, despite everything. The community is unhappy with CZ's decision pertaining to Binance and wants a solution to the trading tax situation. Many exchanges go the way of Binance and are also removing trading commissions on the spot. All of this leads to centralization and reduction of volatility.

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.