CoinDesk Crypto

Ethereum is still the most popular off-chain destination for bitcoins as its supply of tokenized bitcoin (BTC) grew more than 70% in July.

• More than 20,000 BTC — worth roughly $225 million — are now tokenized and used in Ethereum-based protocols.
• Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) represents over 76% of the total tokenized bitcoin supply with over 15,500 BTC tokenized.
• The total supply grew by roughly $96 million in July, following June’s record growth.
• Tokenized bitcoins allow traders and investors to denominate transactions in bitcoin while using applications built on other blockchains.
• “We experienced a dramatic WBTC growth in July, led by our retail users,” said Matthieu Jobbé-Duval, head of financial products at CoinList, a token launch and exchange platform that minted 7,079 WBTC in July.
• renBTC, the second largest supply of tokenized bitcoin, holds approximately 2,068 BTC.
• Tokenizing bitcoins on Ethereum is “the biggest opportunity for decentralized finance’s growth today,” said Andy Bromberg, president of CoinList in an email to CoinDesk.

Related Stories

• CoinList Launches ‘Pro’ Exchange for Token Sale Buyers
• Nearly $60M in Bitcoin Moved to Ethereum in June
• Trio of Bitcoin Tokens Lures DeFi Yield Farmers to New Pastures
• Ethereum Has Become Bitcoin’s Top Off-Chain Destination

July trading volume on decentralized exchanges set its second consecutive record high, rising 174% from June, according to data from Dune Analytics.

• Aggregate trading volume on decentralized exchanges reached $4,32 billion in July, up from $1.52 billion in June.
• 41% of July’s volume came from Uniswap, on which traders speculate on assets ranging from “a better Bitcoin” to a coin named after fried chicken.
• CoinDesk previously reported trading volume topped June’s record part way through July.
• “Decentralized finance has exploded over the past couple months.  We’ve seen the largest use cases as trading, and borrowing and lending,” said Kyle Davies, co-founder of Three Arrows Capital. “I expect this trend to continue.”

Related Stories

• KeeperDAO Raises Seven-Figure Seed Investment From Polychain, Three Arrows
• Dharma Adds Uniswap Trading in Bid to Become ‘the Robinhood of DeFi’
• CoinDesk Live Recap: Ethereum’s DeFi Luminaries Discuss What’s Next
• Pantera Capital Leads $2.6M Seed Round for DEX Protocol Injective

Bitcoin closed the month of July at $11,351, its highest monthly close since the bellwether cryptocurrency’s all-time high nearly two-and-a-half years ago. 

• Prior to this month, Bitcoin had closed below $11,000 every month since nearly reaching $20,000 in December 2017.
• Bitcoin futures on CME closed July at $11,620.
• Bitcoin gained 24% in July, according to Messari, a relief to bullish traders after a 3% loss in June.
• Bitcoin’s investor base is “highly favorable” for a continued move up, said Yan Liberman, former associate at Deutsche Bank and co-founder of Delphi Digital.
• “The supply on exchanges is close to 12-month lows,” said Liberman, who said this signals a strong commitment to hold bitcoins for the long term. The percent of bitcoin’s supply that has not moved in the past year is at all-time highs, he added.

Related Stories

• Market Wrap: Bitcoin Pushes to $11,450, DeFi Value Locked Now at $4B
• Bitcoin’s Option Market Is Now Skewed Bullish
• Bitcoin on Track for Highest July Price Gain in 8 Years
• Market Wrap: Bitcoin Clings to $11,000 as Ether Futures Top $1B

Bitcoin and ether continue to make gains Friday and stakeholders are increasingly investing their crypto into DeFi.

• Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $11,333 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 2% over the previous 24 hours.
• Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $10,974-$11,460
• BTC above 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians.

Bitcoin’s price pushed as high as $11,460 on increased buying volume Friday, continuing its bullish run to cap a week of economic uncertainty. 

Read More: Bitcoin on Track for Highest July Price Gain in 8 Years

Related: Bitcoin’s Option Market Is Now Skewed Bullish

“The U.S. Q2 GDP results were rough and traditional markets are seeing a bit of risk off – a sharp move lower in yields and weakness in stocks,” Dan Koehler, liquidity manager for cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin, told CoinDesk. “It’s a crucial time for bitcoin, in my view.”

Indeed, stocks are taking a beating Friday, with major global indexes down or flat.

• Asia’s Nikkei 225 ended the day down 2.8% as coronavirus case increases in Japan and poor company earnings dragged stocks lower.
• Europe’s FTSE 100 closed in the red 1.2% after the U.K. locked down some regions and dismal Q2 GDP results hit the European continent.
• The United States’ S&P 500 index of stocks gained a mere 0.70% thanks to the performance of tech stocks including a 10% gain for Apple.

Bitcoin beat major equity indexes for July, up over 20% for the month. “It will be interesting to see how bitcoin behaves in a risk-off environment this time around, having broken and thus far held above $10,400,” added OKCoin’s Koehler.

Read More: Banks in US Can Now Offer Crypto Custody Services, Regulator Says

Related: Ethereum 2.0: Closer Than Ever, Still Plenty of Work to Do

Michael Rabkin, head of institutional sales at crypto trading firm DV Chain, said a positive news cycle on the crypto front is helping the market. “We’ve been seeing more buying over the last few days, specifically since the past week’s announcement which would allow banks to hold custody,” he said. 

“There’s definitely a more bullish sentiment since that announcement came out and as we’ve seen, has resulted in upward momentum,” Rabkin added

Mostafa Al-Mashita of Global Digital Assets, a digital assets-focused merchant bank, said alternative cryptocurrencies, or altcoins, is where he expects traders to take profits near-term. “The market is consolidating as altcoins catch up to the recent bitcoin pump,” he said. “I would expect altcoins to lead for a few days before bitcoin rising again.”

Read More: Coinbase Considering 19 Additional Cryptos for Exchange Listing

DeFi locked at $4B

Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was up Friday, trading around $344 and climbing 3.1% in 24 hours as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET). 

Since June 1, the total value locked in Ethereum-powered decentralized finance, or DeFi, has risen 300% from $1 billion to $4 billion, according to data aggregator DeFi Pulse.

In just two months, total bitcoin locked in DeFi more than quadrupled from 4,975 to 20,610 BTC. Total ether locked in DeFi has grown 60%, from 2.6 million to 4.2 million ETH. Stablecoin dai locked is up 19%, from 365 million to 435 million. 

Read More: Aave’s LEND Token Jumps 23% on Plan for Liquidity Mining

Azamat Malaev, co-founder of HodlTree, a new DeFi protocol for interest-yielding tokens, said the catalyst for this growth was investors locking crypto with a particular big DeFi lender to achieve “yield” or profit. ”It started with the launch of the Compound token distribution on June 15,” he said. “And, of course, with a time delay information began to spread.” 

Other markets

Digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly higher Friday. Notable winners as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET): 

• bitcoin sv (BSV) + 7.1%
• xrp (XRP) + 3.7%
• bitcoin cash (BCH) + 3.3%

Notable losers as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):

• 0x (ZRX) – 1.8%
• cardano (ADA) – 1.8%
• decred (DCR) – 1%

Read More: Chainlink’s Soaring Token Shows Lucrative ‘Oracle’ Role 

Commodities: 

• Gold is up 0.90% and at $1,973 as of press time.
• Oil is flat, in the green 0.12%. Price per barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude: $40.37

Read More: Dollar Falls to Lowest Level in 2 Years While Gold, Silver, Bitcoin Shine

Treasurys:

• U.S. Treasury bonds all slipped Friday. Yields, which move in the opposite direction as price, were dow most on the two-year, in the red 12%.

Read More: Ripple Paid MoneyGram $15.1M in ‘Market Development Fees’ in Q2

Related Stories

• CoinDesk Live Recap: Co-Founders Revisit Ethereum’s Launch Drama
• First Mover: Chainlink’s Soaring Token Shows Lucrative ‘Oracle’ Role in Fast-Growing DeFi

Bitcoin’s price jumped to a fresh 11-month high on Friday, with the options market betting on a sustained bull move. 

• The top cryptocurrency by market cap rose to a high of $11,467 during the U.S. trading hours, surpassing the previous multi-high month high of $11,394 reached on Monday.
• Bitcoin has rallied 24% in July and looks overbought as per the 14-day Relative Strength Index, a widely tracked technical indicator.
• Options market data shows sentiment is quite bullish. Options are derivative contracts that give the purchases the right but not the obligation to buy or sell the underlying asset at a predetermined price on or before a specific date. A call option represents the right to buy and the put options gives the buyer the right to sell.
• The one-, three- and six-month put-call skews, which measure the price of puts relative to that of calls, are negative. This is a sign calls, or bullish bets, are drawing higher value than puts, or bearish bets.

• Investors appear to be selling more put options and buying call options because the put-call open interest ratio that measures the number of put options (or bearish bets) open against calls (or bullish bets) has risen to a two-month high of 0.63, according to data source Skew.

The put-call open interest ratio looks to have risen from 0.50 to 0.63 this week due to greater selling in put options.

With the combination of negative skews and a rising put-call open interest ratio, bitcoin’s latest move above $10,000 looks like it can be sustained.

Related: Market Wrap: Bitcoin Pushes to $11,450, DeFi Value Locked Now at $4B

See also: Deribit Reports Daily Record $539M of Bitcoin Options Traded, More Than Double Prior High

Related Stories

• Bitcoin on Track for Highest July Price Gain in 8 Years
• Market Wrap: Bitcoin Clings to $11,000 as Ether Futures Top $1B
• Dollar Falls to Lowest Level in Over 2 Years While Gold, Silver, Bitcoin Continue to Shine

The FBI and local officials have arrested three individuals who allegedly committed the largest hack in Twitter’s history. 

Florida resident Graham Clark was arrested Friday morning, according to Florida news channel WFLA. State Attorney Andrew Warren filed 30 felony charges, including organized fraud, communications fraud, fraudulent use of personal information and access to computer or electronic devices without authority, WFLA reported.

Federal officials are also charging Nima Fazeli and Mason John Sheppard with aiding in the “intentional access of a protected computer” and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, according to criminal complaints published Friday.

Related: Twitter Says ‘Phone Spear Phishing’ Let Hackers Gain Employee Credentials

Warren intends to try Clark as an adult; Florida law allows minors to be charged as adults in some financial fraud cases.

The Twitter hack compromised the accounts of top cryptocurrency exchanges, and prominent crypto twitter accounts (including CoinDesk), before moving on to mainstream accounts including Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Kanye West, Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama. 

Overall 130 accounts were compromised, according to Twitter. 

The accounts all tweeted a bitcoin scam, promising to double senders bitcoin if they sent them to a specific address. It only netted the hackers about $120,000. The hack went on for hours, highlighted extensive security breaches, and led to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey being added to the others testifying before a congressional anti-trust hearing. 

Related: CoinDesk’s Twitter Hack Proved the Media Can’t Rely on Web 2.0

In a tweet Friday, Twitter said, “We appreciate the swift actions of law enforcement in this investigation and will continue to cooperate as the case progresses.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Secret Service, Florida law enforcement and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California assisted in the investigation, according to Warren’s press release.

‘Breathtaking impact’

In an effort to stop the hackers, Twitter locked some verified accounts out, stopping them from changing their password, or being able to tweet. CoinDesk was one such account, and we did not regain our ability to tweet again until Thursday, over a week after the hack. With as much access as the hackers seemingly had, security experts were particularly concerned about the security of accounts direct messages. 

The day after the hack, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said he met with Dorsey privately in 2018 and discussed implementing end-to-end encryption of users’ direct messages. Wyden says Dorsey told him at the time that Twitter was working on encrypted DMs, but by 2020, it was clear the company hadn’t delivered. 

“This is a vulnerability that has lasted for far too long, and one that is not present in other, competing platforms. If hackers gained access to users’ DMs, this breach could have a breathtaking impact for years to come,” Wyden said in a statement. 

Thirty-six accounts, including CoinDesk, were told by Twitter that the hackers had the ability to access their DMs.

Twitter has previously said the attackers downloaded account information from eight victims, though none of those victims were verified. 

Reuters also reported over 1,000 employees and contractors, or nearly a fifth of the company, had access to the tools that were used to access the accounts. 

“We fell behind, both in our protections against social engineering of our employees and restrictions on our internal tools,” Dorsey told investors on a Twitter earnings call in July. 

In a tweet Thursday, Twitter gave further details about how the attack occurred. 

“The attack on July 15, 2020, targeted a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack,” the company tweeted. “This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems.”

In the days following the hack, reporting from numerous outlets not only followed the flow of where the money was going, by tracking the bitcoin wallet the funds were sent to, but also started to unwind the story behind the hack. 

Numerous hackers flipped on “Kirk”, as identified by the New York Times, who was selling access to a Twitter admin panel. They allegedly bailed after larger account takeovers spooked them, given the likelihood that compromising such accounts would attract law enforcement attention. 

Given that the FBI was on the case from the start, as CoinDesk reported, those concerns seem to have played out.

UPDATE (July 31, 2020, 20:15 UTC): This article has been updated with additional information.

Related Stories

• Twitter Hackers Saw DMs From 36 Accounts, Including CoinDesk’s
• Last Week’s Big Twitter Hack Was Years in the Making

The FBI has arrested an individual allegedly behind the largest hack in Twitter’s history. 

Florida resident Graham Clark was arrested Friday morning, according to Florida news channel WFLA. State Attorney Andrew Warren filed 30 felony charges, including organized fraud, communications fraud, fraudulent use of personal information and access to computer or electronic devices without authority, WFLA reported.

Warren intends to try Clark as an adult; Florida law allows minors to be charged as adults in some financial fraud cases.

Related: Twitter Says ‘Phone Spear Phishing’ Let Hackers Gain Employee Credentials

The Twitter hack compromised the accounts of top cryptocurrency exchanges, and prominent crypto twitter accounts (including CoinDesk), before moving onto mainstream accounts such as Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Kanye West, Joe Biden, and former President Barack Obama. 

Overall 130 accounts were compromised according to Twitter. 

The accounts all tweeted a bitcoin scam, promising to double senders bitcoin if they sent them to a specific address. It only netted the hackers about $120,000. The hack went on for hours, highlighted extensive security breaches, and led to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey being called to testify in front of Congress. 

In a tweet Friday, Twitter said, “We appreciate the swift actions of law enforcement in this investigation and will continue to cooperate as the case progresses.”

Related: CoinDesk’s Twitter Hack Proved the Media Can’t Rely on Web 2.0

The FBI, IRS, Secret Service, Florida law enforcement and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California assisted in the investigation, according to Warren’s press release.

‘Breathtaking impact’

In an effort to stop the hackers, Twitter locked some verified accounts out, stopping them from changing their password, or being able to tweet. CoinDesk was one such account, and we did not regain our ability to tweet again until Thursday, over a week after the hack. With as much access as the hackers seemingly had, security experts were particularly concerned about the security of accounts direct messages. 

The day after the hack, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said he met with Dorsey privately in 2018 and discussed implementing end-to-end encryption of users’ direct messages. Wyden says Dorsey told him at the time that Twitter was working on encrypted DMs, but by 2020, it was clear the company hadn’t delivered. 

“This is a vulnerability that has lasted for far too long, and one that is not present in other, competing platforms. If hackers gained access to users’ DMs, this breach could have a breathtaking impact for years to come,” Wyden said in a statement. 

Thirty six accounts, including CoinDesk, were told by Twitter that the hackers had the ability to access their DMs.

Twitter has previously said that the attackers downloaded account information from eight victims, though none of those victims were verified. 

Reuters also reported that over 1,000 employees and contractors, or nearly a fifth of the company, had access to the tools that were used to access the accounts. 

“We fell behind, both in our protections against social engineering of our employees and restrictions on our internal tools,” Dorsey told investors on a Twitter earnings call in July. 

In a tweet Thursday, Twitter gave further details about how the attack occurred. 

“The attack on July 15, 2020, targeted a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack,” the company tweeted. “This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems.”

In the days following the hack, reporting from numerous outlets not only followed the flow of where the money was going, by tracking the bitcoin wallet the funds were sent to, but also started to unwind the story behind the hack. 

Numerous hackers flipped on “Kirk”, as identified by the New York Times, who was selling access to a Twitter admin panel. They allegedly bailed after larger account takeovers spooked them, given the likelihood that compromising such accounts would attract law enforcement attention. 
Given that the FBI was on the case from the start, as CoinDesk reported, those concerns seem to have played out.

Related Stories

• Twitter Hackers Saw DMs From 36 Accounts, Including CoinDesk’s
• Last Week’s Big Twitter Hack Was Years in the Making

The Securities and Exchange Commission appears to be interested in Binance’s eponymous blockchain, 132% of ether wallets are in profit and the Bank of Japan is getting serious about CBDC R&D.

You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. 

Top shelf

Binance Sleuths 
The SEC appears to be gearing up for a closer look at Binance coin (BNB) and other tokens on cryptocurrency exchange giant Binance’s eponymous blockchain. The U.S. securities regulator disclosed in a Wednesday memo its intention to award Menlo Park, Calif.-based CipherTrace a single-source contract (because it’s the only blockchain analysis firm capable of tracing Binance Chain transactions). CipherTrace previously partnered with Binance to bring anti-money laundering tracing tools to Binance Chain.

Related: First Mover: Chainlink’s Soaring Token Shows Lucrative ‘Oracle’ Role in Fast-Growing DeFi

Coinbase Considering
Coinbase is considering listing ampleforth, hedera hashgraph, blockstack and 16 other digital assets in the cryptocurrency exchange’s latest exploratory review. On Friday, The San Francisco-based exchange announced it will evaluate 19 additional cryptocurrencies against its “Digital Asset Framework” for potential inclusion on its popular trading platform. The announcement did not state a timeline and gave no guarantees on “whether or when” any of the contenders would actually be listed.

Splinternet
The Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), a state-backed digital infrastructure project in China, aims to be the dominant internet services provider for decentralized applications (dapps). BSN’s global expansion is built using U.S. technologies, another possible vector in the tense U.S.-China trade war. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google are among the major cloud service providers for BSN’s overseas data centers. “The world is clearly becoming a ‘splinternet’ with national boundaries and domestic regulations overturning the previous ‘techno globalism’ motif,” said James Mulnevon, director of intelligence integration at SOS International. 

Music Makers
Audius, a streaming service that connects music fans directly with artists, has raised $3.1 million in a strategic round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures. Audius has now raised a total of $8.6 million as the platform prepares for prime time, having grown in less than a year to more than 250,000 monthly users and 40,000 artists. EDM artists seem to be the site’s burgeoning specialty with notables including RAC, deadmau5, Lido, 3LAU, Zeds Dead, Mr. Carmack and REZZ all signed on. The blockchain use case for music is a familiar one: the inequity and tardiness of the revenue model of streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify.

In Profit
Profitable ether addresses have grown by a hefty 132% since last July. In the last week, ether has established a foothold above $300 for the first time in 12 months. While the second-largest cryptocurrency is trading with only a relatively small price increase year-on-year, the number of profit-making or “in the money” ether addresses has more than doubled to 31.37 million from 13.5 million over that time, according to blockchain analytics firm IntoTheBlock. The numbers indicate many took advantage of the opportunity to buy ether under $300, resulting in almost 18 million more in-profit addresses.

Quick bites

• Elrond mainnetted and cut its token supply from 20 billion to 20 million.
• KeeperDAO raises seven-figure seed round from Polychain, Three Arrows.
• Why oracles are key to DeFi.
• The history of Ethereum in five charts.
• Twitter employees were spearphished.

At stake

Related: Blockchain Bites: Plus Token Ponzi Popped, Cardano Forked and tZERO Cut

It seems like every day or so the Bank of Japan, the nation’s central bank, is pushing forward with plans for a central bank digital currency (CBDC). 

Friday, it was reported the BoJ’s most senior economist will lead the department responsible for CBDC research and development. This department has been involved in a digital currency working group alongside five other central banks since the start of the year, and runs a task force to study CBDC implications.

This bit of news comes on the heels of another senior official who said digital currency research was a “top priority” for the central bank. 

Analysts, and members of the BoJ itself, have noted the context. China has taken the lead in CBDC development – with major retailers and ecommerce giants involved in plans to test what’s officially known as the DC/EP.

While Japan is testing a digital yen and involved in European Central Bank research to study DLT’s use in global financial infrastructure, it has no definitive plans to use it. 

Yet, a digital yen could be a welcome change for a nation whose economy draws constant comparisons to the living dead. In 2009, the Wall Street Journal said Tokyo’s efforts to bring “Japan’s dead economy” back to life created a Frankenstein monster. The concept of “zombie companies,” those that bring in only enough revenue to finance their debts, was dreamt up to describe Japanese firms. 

The BoJ has always been willing to experiment. But these attempts at resurrecting a deflationary economy have met with mixed results. Negative interest rates and the central bank’s policy of buying corporate exchange-traded funds (a novel strategy the U.S. Federal Reserve is considering) haven’t spurred growth or brought the nation out of its three decade long “lost decade.”

While a CBDC could give more granular control over monetary policy and maybe leading to further economic experiments, it likely isn’t a solution in itself. 

Market intel

July Jubilee 
Bitcoin may have its best July in eight years and confirm a major bullish breakout in the process. Bitcoin is trading near $11,190 at press time, up nearly 22% this month, according to data from CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price index. The cryptocurrency now needs to hold above $11,145 till Friday’s close (in UTC time) to confirm the biggest July gain (at 22%) since 2012, when prices rallied by 40%. If bitcoin closes below $11,050, the resulting monthly gain would be less than the 21% rise seen in July 2018.

Summer Bummer?
Meanwhile, the dollar has dropped to its lowest level since May 2018 as the Federal Reserve said it plans to keep interest rates close to zero. The dollar’s trade-weighted index – a measure of its value relative to a basket of other dominant currencies – dropped to $93.04 Thursday afternoon. The last time the index traded this low was on May 15, 2018, according to TradingView.

Aave’s Wave
Aave’s lend token has rallied by 23% in the past 24 hours and is trading at $0.3440 at press time, according to data source Messari. It’s the day’s top performer among cryptocurrencies with at least $100 million market capitalization. On Wednesday, the protocol announced the Aavenomics Proposal, a plan to transition to decentralized governance by token holders, featuring a liquidity-mining rewards system similar to the one that helped drive growth recently in Compound, a rival decentralized lender.

Opinion

Too Big to Fail
Jenny Leung, a blockchain and fintech attorney at Blakemore Fallon PLLC dba Ketsal, thinks social media firms have become too big to fail. During the COVID-19 crisis, the recent civil rights protests and Twitter hack, social media institutions showed that “their failure would pose a significant threat to society due to their outsized influence, size, reach, society’s co-dependence on them and ‘their power to shape the interpretation of public events,’” she writes. If Wall Street giants are systemically important financial institutions (SIFI), then firms like Twitter and Facebook have become systemically important social media institutions (SISMI).

Podcast corner

Bonding Moment
A veteran bond strategist, George Goncalves, gives his take on why the bond market has a better read than equities on short-term and long-term macro trends.

Who won #CryptoTwitter? Related Stories

• First Mover: Sleepy Fed Meeting Belies Tense Economic Reality (Brrr) That May Buoy Bitcoin
• Blockchain Bites: Ledger’s Breach, Celsius’ Contradictions and DeFi’s Next Frontier

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a warning on COVID-19 related financial scams on Thursday. 

• Firms dealing with virtual currencies need to be especially careful as their services might be used to launder funds collected from illicit activity, the regulator said. 
• The advisory added attackers have been using phishing emails, malware and ransomware to carry out such attacks.
• Referring to last month’s massive Twitter hack, FinCEN said the cybercrime techniques could also be applied to a larger attack involving social media.
• That attack, which took over multiple big-name Twitter handles, involved a scam message seeking bitcoin for COVID-19 relief that would supposedly be doubled and donated.
• According to a list of red flags compiled by FinCEN, indicators that can be used to identify fraudulent activity include unsolicited emails with attachments, text messages with embedded links, unusual URLs linked in emails and attached email images that seem to be digitally altered.
• The warning added the shift to remote work has increased the vulnerability of firms to such attacks, and that cybercriminals have been targeting weak log-in processes by using digitally altered identity documents to gain access to sensitive information online. 

Also read: Twitter Says ‘Phone Spear Phishing’ Let Hackers Gain Employee Credentials

Related Stories

• Police Arrest 27 Alleged Masterminds Behind $5.7B Plus Token Crypto Scam
• Scammers Are Forging CoinDesk Emails – Here’s How to Protect Yourself
• YouTube Seeks to Dismiss Ripple Lawsuit Over XRP Giveaway Scams
• Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Sues YouTube Over Bitcoin Giveaway Scams

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the first of two bills on digital assets into law on Friday, according to Russian media.

• The bill, approved by the country’s parliament last week, says companies can issue digital securities on a blockchain if they are properly registered with the Bank of Russia as issuers and satisfy certain criteria.
• Decentralized cryptocurrencies are considered a type of property, which should be reported for tax purposes and cannot be used to pay for good and services.
• A more detailed law regulating crypto-related businesses is expected to be passed later this year, although no timeline has been disclosed.
• The previous version of that bill, which has been introduced to the Russian parliament, would make it illegal to issue and trade crypto on Russia-based infrastructure.
• The draft generally reflected the skeptical stance of the country’s central bank.
• It provoked an outcry from the crypto community and criticism from both Russia’s Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Economic Development.

Also read: Paxful Chips Away at LocalBitcoins’ Russian P2P Market Dominance

Related Stories

• Paxful Chips Away at LocalBitcoins’ Russian P2P Market Dominance
• Australian State Treasury Proposes ‘Flexible’ Regulatory Reform for Blockchain
• Bitcoin Is a Form of Money in DC, Federal Court Rules
• Russia’s FSB Is Making Life Harder for Blockchain Companies

MoneyGram received over $15 million from Ripple in Q2 for providing liquidity for Ripple’s XRP-based cross-border settlement network.

• In its second-quarter results Thursday, the Texas-based remittances company said it received $15.1 million from Ripple in what it called “market development fees.”
• Offsetting transaction expenses, MoneyGram said it made $8.8 million net benefit.
• In its 2019 annual report, MoneyGram defined market development fees as the compensation for providing liquidity to Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) network – the settlements layer using the XRP token to send money across borders.
• MoneyGram received $16.6 million in Q1 2020, taking total compensation to $31.7 million in H1 2020. It also received a total of $11.3 million in H2 2019.
• Ripple has so far paid MoneyGram $43 million to provide liquidity for its ODL network.
• MoneyGram started using ODL for some of its global remittance operations in June last year.
• Ripple completed the purchase of a $50 million equity stake in MoneyGram in November.

See also: Ripple Says XRP Lawsuit Based on ‘Unsupported Leaps of Logic’

Related Stories

• Coinbase Considering 19 Additional Cryptos for Exchange Listing
• Bank of Japan Puts Top Economist in Charge of Digital Yen Initiative
• Elrond Launches Onto Mainnet, Reduces Token Supply by 99%
• KeeperDAO Raises Seven-Figure Seed Investment From Polychain, Three Arrows

Coinbase is considering listing ampleforth, hedera hashgraph, blockstack and 16 other digital assets in the cryptocurrency exchange’s latest exploratory review.

• On Friday, the San Francisco-based exchange announced it will evaluate 19 additional cryptocurrencies against its “Digital Asset Framework” for potential inclusion on its popular trading platform.
• This latest round includes ampleforth, band protocol, balancer, blockstack, curve, fetch.ai, flexacoin, helium, hedera hashgraph, kava, melon, ocean protocol, Paxos gold, reserve rights, tbtc, the graph, theta, uma and wbtc.
• The announcement did not state a timeline and gave no guarantees on “whether or when” any of the contenders would actually be listed.

Related Stories

• Ripple Paid MoneyGram $15.1M in ‘Market Development Fees’ in Q2
• Bank of Japan Puts Top Economist in Charge of Digital Yen Initiative
• Elrond Launches Onto Mainnet, Reduces Token Supply by 99%
• KeeperDAO Raises Seven-Figure Seed Investment From Polychain, Three Arrows

“Though now evolved in many ways,” Gavin Wood wrote in Ethereum’s 2015 yellow paper, “the key functionality of a blockchain with a Turing-complete language and an effectively unlimited inter-transaction storage capability remains unchanged.”

Five years and thousands of bits later, Ethereum is still chugging along as a decentralized platform for self-executing code.

And it has “evolved in many ways,” with the largest yet to come: Ethereum 2.0.  

Related: CoinDesk Live Recap: Co-Founders Revisit Ethereum’s Launch Drama

Call it Slasher or Casper, Shasper or Serenity, Eth 2.0 has had as nearly many names as unrealized goals. For all the hubbub, a physical implementation is knocking on the cryptocurrency gates and is set to debut (by most estimates) this fall.

Proof-of-Stake

Eth 1.x (the current blockchain) and Eth 2.0 will have some similarities, namely blocks attached in chains. But as CoinDesk’s Michael Casey pointed out recently, much rests on the technical ideas Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and others like Wood or Vlad Zamfir staked their reputations to in the project’s early days. 

Read more: Ethereum’s Renaissance Creates an Opportunity – And a Major Test

The most important idea being the transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm from Proof-of-Work (PoW). Indeed, a future swap of the Ethereum blockchain’s consensus algorithm has been a core part of the network’s thesis from its early days.

Related: Ethereum History in 5 Charts

In short, PoS verifies a transaction getting from point A to point B by having coin depositors agree to validate the transfer in return for a small reward. If the depositor interferes with the transfer and commits fraud, then their funds can be seized by the network.

Congrats! If you’re reading this, you found the Easter egg in our series. Click here to see it.

The algorithm pulls from older Bitcoin-based projects as well as Buterin’s “weak subjectivity” model to create a more elastic consensus model with reasonable boundaries for transaction success.

Yes, PoS systems should theoretically send more coins more quickly than Bitcoin’s PoW. Other projects such as Tron, EOS and Tezos use variations of PoS, too. How to implement PoS without fraud is what the Eth 2.0 project has mainly been about.

The playing field

Not switching over to PoS has consequences, however.

Eth 1.x has seen outsized pressure from users demanding to use its blockspace over the past four months in what is turning into a constant friction for applications. Ethereum “killers” such as the NEAR Protocol are banking on a future where applications migrate to other blockchains in order to escape Ethereum’s fee pressure. Other technical upgrades such as optimistic rollups or EIP 1559 don’t present the optimal solution, but only complement the decentralized tech stack Buterin and others envision.

Today, nine teams are coding Eth 2.0 in various programming languages in what are called clients. Most teams expect the project to rollout by October to November. (In fact, you can bet on when the network will deploy in this Omen prediction market.)

Eth 2.0 will be deployed in multiple steps, beginning with the Beacon chain. This chain will act as the orchestrator of the new PoS network, which will be separated into multiple blockchains called “shards.” Just last week, a new and “final” testnet was announced to precede the multi-client release of Eth 2.0’s first part, called phase 0.

Read more: Ethereum 2.0 Developers Announce ‘Final’ Testnet Before Network Launch

“Maintaining the set of validators and progressing the beacon chain and reaching finality come with phase 0,” Prysmatic Labs founder Preston Van Loon told CoinDesk. “The hardest part of [Eth 2.0] is getting this backbone together. … Everything revolves around the beacon chain and then we can add other layers on top of it.”

All that to say, Eth 2.0 is quite close, but for real this time.

Eth 1.x

The network’s long-awaited launch also allows for reflection on the road to Serenity. Ideas only alluded to by Buterin in the project’s white paper have come to fruition with market value (though many still lack maturity).

“The first category is financial applications, providing users with more powerful ways of managing and entering into contracts using their money. This includes sub-currencies, financial derivatives, hedging contracts, savings wallets, wills, and ultimately even some classes of full-scale employment contracts,” Buterin wrote in 2013.

Take for example the charcuterie board of lending and trading applications known as decentralized finance (DeFi) with nearly $4 billion in crypto assets locked in various protocols, according to DeFi Pulse.

Read more: One Billion, Two Billion, Three Billion, Four? DeFi’s Knocking on TradFi’s Door

Quantstamp CEO Richard Ma told CoinDesk in a phone interview that the ecosystem around Ethereum has grown horizontally as much as it has aspired to new heights with Eth 2.0. He pointed to the Solidity programming language and tooling set around it as one poignant example.

Kosala Hemachandra, CEO and co-founder of MyEtherWallet, told CoinDesk that Etheruem has mainly grown in stages. Hemachandra said the beginning years were all about “documentation” with the current story being DeFi. 

Hemachandra said Ethereum has matured over the years, regardless of Etheruem’s central story rapidly blinking from decentralized organizations (DAOs) to stablecoins to DeFi. The next Ethereum needs to be even more robust than the current blockchain if it is to build a new financial backbone as intended.

To those currently building their livelihoods on Ethereum, Eth 2.0 needs to work. 

“Ethereum is no longer a brand-new child, a brand-new baby,” Hemachandra said.

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Several Ethereum co-founders view the project as a wild success and some are even more bullish now than they were back in 2015, when the cryptocurrency project first launched.  

“We brought in an HR person to start building up the team, I brought in my lawyer to be the first lawyer on the project. It was a risk,” said Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio, one of the first people to see Vitalik Buterin’s original Ethereum white paper. 

Back in 2014, no one knew what to expect from a token sale that promised to kick-start a whole new type of cryptocurrency, something that would become more than digital money. In the early days, before fundraising with tokens became normalized, the experiment seemed unlikely to pay off. It was a long shot at best. But early investor Ken Seiff of Blockchange Ventures said that for him it was all about the founding team. 

Related: Ethereum 2.0: Closer Than Ever, Still Plenty of Work to Do

Seiff and Di Iorio were joined by The Defiant newsletter founder Camila Russo, fellow Ethereum co-founder Anthony D’Onofrio and CoinDesk podcast producer Adam Levine to talk about the early days of “the world computer.” 

Di Iorio infamously was one of the dozen or so original contributors who wanted to create Ethereum as a startup rather than an open-source project shepherded by a nonprofit. There were fierce debates in the early days. Levine, a longtime Ethereum fan, said he was kicked out of the group Skype channel for criticizing plans for a pre-mine, which eventually made a few Ethereum co-founders very rich. 

“I was concerned about the legitimacy of the project and the ability of it to succeed,” Levine said. “Bitcoin never had the ‘Bitcoin team.’ … Bitcoin was never a startup.” 

Now, looking back, Levine said Ethereum fans weren’t deterred by the token sale and he thinks the token-fueled nonprofit route appears to have been successful. 

Related: Ethereum History in 5 Charts

D’Onofrio added that other members of the founding team didn’t have entrepreneurial experience, but he avoided mentioning venture capital norms at the time because he was nervous about whether the token launch would work at all. 

“I almost sold my ether before Ethereum launched,” D’Onofrio said. “I didn’t want to get trapped in a four-year vesting period.”  

There were rumors of betrayal among many of the co-founders. By the time Seiff met Buterin and the others, these entrepreneurial bitcoiners had already developed a reputation.

Read more: Ethereum as Lifestyle Brand: What Unicorns and Rainbows Are Really About 

“I had heard about [Gavin Wood] and Vitalik a week before I met them. … [Vitalik] clearly had fanboys and was a matinee idol,” Seiff said. “Ethereum was different than Bitcoin. … Ethereum was the internet and Bitcoin was email, because there was no [Web3] internet when bitcoin was built, [Bitcoin] had to build its own protocol.” 

The language chosen in the early days was very deliberate, these long-time observers said, such as choosing to call projects decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) rather than corporations.

“I think we’ll never know how it might have happened if it went in a different direction,” Di Iorio said. 

‘Second life’

Everyone agreed Ethereum successfully decentralized, thanks to the founding team’s tireless outreach efforts, and became an emerging technology sector in its own right. 

In particular, Seiff said that “Ethereum got a second life this year” with the decentralized finance (DeFi) boom. As of 2020, there are now billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency locked in Ethereum-based financial products. 

In fact, Di Iorio said he’s more bullish on Ethereum now than he’s ever been before. 

This CoinDesk Live session was the fourth program in a five-day series of live-streamed conversations. It comes as part of CoinDesk’s Ethereum at Five package.

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Chainlink’s LINK tokens have quadrupled in price this year to become one of the biggest success stories this year in cryptocurrency markets.

The project’s market capitalization, now the 12th highest among all digital assets at $2.7 billion, according to CoinGecko, reflects investor perceptions of Chainlink as the leading crypto “oracle” provider. That means it supplies prices and data streams to semi-automated lending and trading systems built atop blockchains.

You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. We follow the money so you don’t have to. You can subscribe here. 

Related: Bitcoin on Track for Highest July Price Gain in 8 Years

The function is crucial in the fast-growing arena of decentralized finance, or DeFi, which has generated such a speculative fervor in recent months that supposed money-of-the-future bitcoin has almost started to look passé.

But now Chainlink’s early lead as the dominant DeFi oracle is starting to attract competitors, and cryptocurrency investors are wondering if the niche industry might be due for a shakeup. Given the key role played by oracles in DeFi, users of the decentralized systems also stand to benefit.   

Potential rivals could include dedicated oracle upstarts like Tellor as well as leading DeFi projects like MakerDAO that are developing their own solutions. Another data oracle, Band Protocol, launched a new version of its network on the Cosmos blockchain last month, to avoid congestion on the more popular Ethereum network, on which Chainlink runs. Others in the space include Augur and Nest, according to the industry-tracking website DeFi Pulse.

“I think it’s good that there are different projects that are offering this, obviously,” Niklas Kunkel, head of backend services for MakerDAO, said in a phone interview.

Related: KeeperDAO Raises Seven-Figure Seed Investment From Polychain, Three Arrows

Chainlink has taken a commanding lead among DeFi oracles, a perch that’s been strengthened with frequent announcements of new partnerships and node operators. Just last week, Deutsche Telekom’s IT subsidiary, T-Systems, announced plans to join Chainlink as a node operator. This past Friday, Korean banks IBK Bank, Shinhan Bank, KEB Bank, NH Bank and CenterPrime announced they plan to provide oracle data for Chainlink.

The project even has galvanized a community around it, and its most ardent supporters are known as Chainlink Marines on social media.

DeFi applications are built using “smart contracts” – strings of computer programming that are embedded into blockchain networks and designed to automate specific functions like lending or cryptocurrency swaps, based on incoming data inputs. There’s no human middlemen as in the case of centralized banks and Wall Street trading firms to monitor pricing, so the smart contracts rely on distributed input sources, known as oracles.

Under Chainlink’s protocol, data is aggregated from third parties and then batched into oracle feeds that are streamed out to DeFi systems. Various information providers, mostly from the cryptocurrency ecosystem, provide the data as “node operators” and are rewarded with payments in LINK. Many of Chainlink’s oracles have over a dozen participants. 

Chainlink’s most popular product is pricing for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin; the platform lists 36 trading pairs on its website. 

“If you don’t have data on-chain, you can’t build a contract for a certain market,” Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, told First Mover in a phone interview. “We don’t make contracts. We don’t secure blocks. We don’t secure transactions. We just feed data into various systems.” 

But in the fast-moving DeFi industry, where anything resembling an establishment could be years or even decades in the making, few competitors are ready to concede. 

MakerDAO, the decentralized-lending project behind the dollar-linked stablecoin dai, has provided its own distributed oracles since 2017 and now lists seven price feeds on its website.

DeFi projects including 0x, Gnosis and Kyber Network are using MakerDAO’s oracle feeds as well as contributing to them as third-party data sources, according to Kunkel. Node operators in MakerDAO oracles are chosen and paid in the project’s cryptocurrency, dai. 

“When we started building dai, there weren’t any existing oracles that we could utilize,” Niklas Kunkel, head of backend services for MakerDAO, told First Mover in a phone interview. 

A newer entrant is Tellor, which uses a complex algorithm, based on the SHA-256 hash function that’s used in bitcoin mining, to assure the integrity of its data.  

“Miners compete for the right to submit the data,” Tellor CEO Michael Zemrose said in a Telegram chat. 

The rewards for providing data are paid out in Tellor’s native token, TRB. Its price has nearly quadrupled this year, but off of a smaller base: The token’s market capitalization stands at just $16 million according to CoinGecko, a tiny fraction of LINK’s. 

At this point, the DeFi oracle market is Chainlink’s to lose. 

Tweet of the day Bitcoin watch

BTC: Price: $11,196 (BPI) | 24-Hr High: $11,214 | 24-Hr Low: $10,847

Trend: Bitcoin has been struggling to maintain momentum since a quick rush of volatility and a price surge to multi-month highs above $11,300 on Monday.

Since then, the price action has been largely centered around $11,000, with both lower highs and higher lows setting up a contracting triangle on the hourly chart. Such a pattern atop a prior bullish run ($9,000 to $11,300) is known as a bull pennant. 

Chart analysts consider a bull pennant as a continuation pattern – one that recharges the bulls’ engines for an extension of the preceding rally. As such, we may see a bullish breakout and a rally toward the resistance at $12,000. A move above the upper end of the pennant, currently at $11,317, is needed to confirm the breakout. 

That said, the possibility of the breakout failing to accelerate the uptrend cannot be ruled out, as the 14-day relative strength index is reporting overbought conditions with an above-70 print. In addition, Thursday’s doji candle is signaling buyer exhaustion. 

If prices drop below the pennant support, currently at $10,920, a deeper decline toward the former hurdle-turned-support at $10,500 (February 2018 high) may be seen. 

At press time, though bitcoin had risen to near $11,200, representing a 0.66% gain on the day.

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The Bank of Japan (BoJ) has moved its most senior economist to lead the department responsible for research and development into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

• Kazushige Kamiyama, formerly director-general of the BoJ’s Research and Statistics Department, has moved to the Payments and Settlements Systems Department, Reuters reported Friday.
• The department has been heavily involved in a digital currency working group alongside five other central banks since the start of the year.
• It also runs the task force, set up earlier this month, that examines the possible implications of launching a CBDC in Japan.
• A former academic, Kamiyama has been at the BoJ for more than six years, spending two at the central bank’s New York offices.
• As head of the research department, he advocated the bank use big data to better monitor and capture economic trends in real-time.
• Having initially discounted CBDCs, the BoJ has revisited the idea of launching its own digital currency as geopolitical rival China has taken the lead in CBDC development.
• A senior official told local media this week that digital currency research was now a “top priority" for the central bank.

See also: Japan Is Seriously Considering a Digital Yen: Report

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Bitcoin looks set to register its best July price performance for eight years and confirm a major bullish breakout in the process. 

• Bitcoin is trading near $11,190 at press time – and is up nearly 22% this month, according to data from CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price index.
• The cryptocurrency now needs to hold above $11,145 till Friday’s close (in UTC time) to confirm the biggest July gain (at 22%) since 2012, when prices rallied by 40%. 
• If bitcoin closes below $11,050, the resulting monthly gain would be less than the 21% rise seen in July 2018.

• July’s double-digit monthly gain marks an end of a two-month-long price consolidation in the range of $9,000–$10,000.
• The cryptocurrency sprang into action amid the U.S. dollar’s broad-based sell-off on the foreign exchange market and gold’s rally to record highs above $1,950 per ounce.
• “Bitcoin stands out this year against a backdrop of massive stimulus measures from central banks and a failing financial system,” Paolo Ardoino, CTO of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, told CoinDesk.
• A resurgence of institutional participation and bearish sentiment around the dollar may power stronger gains over the coming months.
• The bullish trend looks strong with the cryptocurrency showing few signs of stress, despite increased miner sales observed earlier this week.
• Poolin, the biggest mining pool globally, transferred 435 bitcoin to exchanges on Wednesday – the biggest single-day outflow since May 3, according to Glassnode.
• Technical charts also paint a bullish picture.

• The monthly chart shows an upside break of a 2.5-year-long descending triangle. 
• The breakout has exposed resistance located at $13,880 (June 2019 high).
• “Bitcoin’s break above $10,500 marks a significant change in the direction of the market,” popular analyst Lark Davis tweeted on Wednesday. 
• That possibility of a minor drop can’t be ruled out, as bitcoin is looking overbought on the relative strength index.

Also read: Bitcoin’s Latest Rally May Have Staying Power, Exchange Flows Suggest

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Scalable blockchain Elrond has made the leap onto its mainnet and drastically reduced the token supply in the process.

• As part of the transition, Elrond said total token supply had been drastically reduced from 20 billion to just 20 million.
• Rather than burning tokens, Elrond is using an exchange swap where 1,000 testnet ERD tokens translate into just one token on mainnet – called Elrond Gold (eGLD).
• ERD tokens are currently trading at $0.02, according to CoinGecko, up 1,200% year-to-date.
• The redenomination means new eGLD tokens will be worth $24.8.
• At the present market cap, the move onto mainnet means $473 million worth of tokens have been redenominated.
• Starting in 2018, Elrond describes itself as an interoperable blockchain network that uses sharding to scale to up to 250,000 transactions per second.
• It raised $3.2 million by selling 25% of the token supply in an exchange offering on Binance Launchpad in 2019.

See also: Elrond Will Pay You $60,000 to Break Its Blockchain

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Crypto venture capital firm Polychain Capital and fund manager Three Arrows Capital have backed liquidity protocol KeeperDAO in a seed funding round announced Friday.

• Polychain and Three Arrows were KeeperDAO's only investors in the round that raised a “seven-figure sum,” KeeperDAO founding member Tiantian Kullander told CoinDesk.
• KeeperDAO is a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol that lets participants in communal liquidity pools (known as keepers) participate in strategies involving margin trading and lending.
• Keepers pool are able to pool their capital into Ethereum’s smart contracts and profit as a group from on-chain arbitrage and liquidation opportunities.
• Three Arrows Capital’s CEO Su Zhu said KeeperDAO would help to keep liquidations on Ethereum “efficient” while making sure participants “earn their keep.”
• Going forward, KeeperDAO plans to issue its own governance token as a tool for balancing incentives between keepers and liquidity providers.
• Thanks to the project, DeFi protocols based on on margin and borrowing would be able to “lower collateralization levels over time,” according to Sherwin Dowlat, investments at Polychain
• Three Arrows recently participated in a $3 million investment in Aave the firm behind the third-largest lending platform in DeFi.

See also: Three Arrows Capital Now Holds More Than 6% of Grayscale’s $3.6B Bitcoin Trust

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The lead plaintiff in an ongoing class-action lawsuit accusing Ripple of securities fraud has not demonstrated that statements made by CEO Brad Garlinghouse in 2017 are false, Ripple claims in court documents filed Wednesday.

• The document (see in full below), filed at the Northern California District Court, comes in response to accusations that Ripple failed to register XRP as a security with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and used deceitful tactics to defraud investors leading to false inflation in XRP’s price.
• Ripple’s legal team said lead plaintiff Bradley Sostack’s allegations relating to Ripple’s purported misrepresentations about XRP were based on “unsupported leaps of logic.”
• Sostack has not been able to explain why the alleged statements made by Garlinghouse are false, they claim.
• Ripple’s team also took aim at Sostack’s “artful pleading” saying he “studiously avoids absolutes” in his allegations.
• The class-action lawsuit was originally filed against Ripple and Garlinghouse in May 2018.
• As one example in the original complaint, plaintiffs allege Garlinghouse had stated on Dec. 14, 2017, he was “very, very long XRP as a percentage of my personal balance sheet.”
• Around the same time, Garlinghouse is claimed to have sold 67 million XRP (worth around $16.4 million at press time). This is a misrepresentation, plaintiffs argue, coming at the time he said he was long on the cryptocurrency.
• Ripple filed a motion to dismiss the suit in part in June, asking the court to dismiss all three counts of fraud without leave to amend.
• A month later, Sostack filed an opposition to the motion, saying the suit had met the demands of U.S. fraud law having identified “over a dozen false or misleading statements made by Ripple and its CEO.”

See Ripple’s filing in full below:

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