Welcome to our recap of the major stories in the crypto world! Here’s what has happened over the past week:
Things are getting worse for Silvergate… 🤦🏻♂️
Alarm bells were ringing when this crypto friendly bank announced that it will delay the filing of its annual report.
Once the go-to fiat on-ramp service for many crypto exchanges, Silvergate will now be undergoing a voluntary liquidation.
🚨 BREAKING: Silvergate Bank has announced that it's entering voluntary liquidation — days after warning that it wouldn't be able to survive the year https://t.co/rzGJgfynAE
— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) March 8, 2023
A voluntary liquidation results in the company selling off all of its assets to pay its debts, and this amounted to a whopping $949 million loss for Silvergate.
This was mainly due to Silvergate’s partnership with FTX, and it had to process huge amounts of withdrawals as customers rushed to get their funds out of this centralised exchange.
Major centralised exchanges now have a headache, with the likes of ByBit having to suspend USD deposits after the winding down of Silvergate.
Bybit halts deposits via USD bank transfer, citing partner 'service outages' https://t.co/KeG18ZKehu
— The Block (@TheBlock__) March 4, 2023
Are Proof of Reserves really sufficient? 🤔
Centralised exchanges attempted to show greater transparency by releasing Merkle Proof of Reserves.
These attempted to give their customers the confidence that all users’ assets were backed 1:1, so a bank run would not happen.
However, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) came out to declare that these reports are “incomplete”, and could even be “misleading and deceptive”.
Crypto entities may engage a service provider to issue “proof of reserve” reports. A new Investor Advisory from the PCAOB’s Office of the Investor Advocate urges investors to exercise caution with these reports. https://t.co/aAykzlc7k1 #PCAOBresources pic.twitter.com/7S6jLCC2np
— PCAOB_News (@PCAOB_News) March 8, 2023
Currently, some of the Proof of Reserves are incomplete, where they display a few major assets, while the centralised exchange allows you to trade a wide variety of tokens.
For example, KuCoin displays 4 different assets on its Proof of Reserves page: BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC.
Other centralised exchanges like Binance have recently made improvements to their reports, but this only covers 11 tokens.
Our Proof-of-Reserves just got an update.
— Binance (@binance) March 7, 2023
We have now increased the number of tokens we cover by 11, to a total of 24.
Find out more about our Proof-of-Reserves and this recent update with the blog below.https://t.co/4kKWhkNK3q
At Krystal, we strongly believe in the saying: ’Not Your Keys, Not Your Crypto’. The only way that you can verify your assets is by taking full custody of it, such as via our Krystal wallet.
Our wallet supports 11 blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Smart Chain and Solana.
Download our mobile wallet and obtain full portfolio visibility of your crypto assets and NFTs.
Binance.US handed major victory 🏆
The deal to buy over Voyager’s assets has now been given the go-ahead by the courts.
Binance US wont court approval to buy bankrupt Voyager Digital, despite objections from the US SEC, Department of Justice, and Texas https://t.co/Kx5Fhqc5SC
— Bloomberg Crypto (@crypto) March 9, 2023
Customers of this troubled crypto firm had their assets frozen, but they could potentially recover up to three-quarters of their holdings with Voyager.
This deal faced some friction from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who claimed that redistributing funds from Voyager to Binance.US would violate US securities laws.
However, United States Bankruptcy Judge Michael Wiles rejected these arguments as the SEC seemed to be trying to protect themselves in case the deal went awry.
A federal bankruptcy judge said he was "absolutely shocked' by the SEC's objection to the Voyager-Binance US deal, saying the regulator has not provided much guidance to explain its concerns.@jackschickler reportshttps://t.co/xf5ERqaTJv
— CoinDesk (@CoinDesk) March 2, 2023
Goodbye SaaS, say hello to WaaS
After their previous announcement regarding the launch of a new Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solution, Coinbase will now be releasing their Wallet as a Service infrastructure.
1/ Today, Coinbase is launching Wallet as a Service, a scalable and secure set of wallet infrastructure APIs, enabling companies to easily create fully customizable onchain wallets for their users and apps.https://t.co/Vm53pNuyNS
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) March 8, 2023
This makes it much easier for developers to create crypto wallets for their users, which will help to onboard even more Web2 users to the Web3 world.
You no longer need to worry about securing your seed phrase, as Coinbase secures your wallet using multi-party computation technology (MPC).
Without needing to know much about how a blockchain works, users will still be able use these wallets that provide them with a familiar Web2 experience.
A seed phrase is extremely important to secure your crypto wallet, as it acts as the master password for your funds.
You can find out how to better secure your seed phrase in our article here.
Starbucks NFTs a hit 🎯
After developing their Web3 loyalty program (Odyssey), Starbucks has released its first paid NFTs for its current members.
Did you know that @Starbucks Odyssey is releasing ‘The Siren Collection’ Stamps NFTs?
— NFT Update (@NFTupdate) March 9, 2023
This collection will only be available to current Starbucks Odyssey members.
March 9, 3PM EST – $100 – 2000 supply pic.twitter.com/9huyGkeXcl
These NFTs were sold at a price of $100 on the Polygon network, which was quickly sold out in 18 minutes despite some hiccups on the Nifty Gateway platform.
Lucky to have been able to mint the @Starbucks Siren Collection. I can’t wait for the reveal! @Niftygateway, y’all need to work on your site’s server capacity. Very rough minting experience. pic.twitter.com/zRi4DUSjp5
— Grazi (@markgrazi) March 9, 2023
Odyssey marks a success story of a Web2 company trying to get into Web3, as the NFTs have seen significant demand from their customers.
Did you manage to purchase a Siren Collection NFT? Import your wallet to Krystal to view all of your NFTs across 11 networks!
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