NEW YORK: US prosecutors said they do not plan to conduct a second trial against Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted last month of stealing from customers of his now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange.In a letter filed on Friday night in federal court in Manhattan, prosecutors said the "strong public interest" in a prompt resolution of their case against the 31-year-old former billionaire outweighed the benefits of a second trial.Prosecutors s...
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was ordered to spend four months in prison for failures that allowed cybercriminals and terrorist groups to freely trade on the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.Zhao, 47, was sentenced Tuesday by US District Judge Richard Jones in Seattle. Dressed in a dark suit with a light blue tie, the billionaire arrived in court flanked by half a dozen lawyers.His mother and sister watched his sentencing from the front r...
Who exactly Satoshi Nakamoto is — a person or a group — has been subject of much speculation since Bitcoin’s launch in January 2009. A new HBO documentary about the origins of Bitcoin suggests that Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the original cryptocurrency, is likely Canadian software developer Peter Todd. Called “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” the 100-minute film on Tuesday features interviews with a handful of people who’...
NEW YORK: For the last eight months, Sam Bankman-Fried has been cooped up in his childhood home in Palo Alto, a 3,000-square-foot house, with a backyard and the company of his parents.But the FTX co-founder is now locked up inside Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, a notorious facility for defendants awaiting trial on federal charges. Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bail package was revoked last week after Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Manhattan f...
Bitcoin surpassed $45,000 for the first time in nearly two years as anticipation of an approval of an exchange-traded fund investing directly in the biggest token intensified.The cryptocurrency jumped as much as 5.2% to its highest level since April 2022 and traded at $45,443 as of 7am New York time. Other tokens also advanced with Ether, the second biggest, rising as much as 4.1%. Bitcoin has risen almost 20% since the start of December as a Jan...
Coinbase Global Inc, the largest US crypto exchange, is experiencing a system outage.The company notified users on its website at 12:19pm Singapore time on Tuesday, assuring them that their funds were safe. Over two hours later, Coinbase said in an update that it is “seeing some services recover” but is still working on fixing the issue, adding that customers may still experience “connectivity problems.”Crypto prices have fallen since the outage ...
Bitcoin last traded at $70,000 in July, and reached an all-time high of almost $74,000 in March. Bitcoin bulls are setting their sights again on the record highs reached in March with optimism building around riskier assets and the looming US elections. “After six months of price consolidation this year, the stage is set for a perfect storm in favor of Bitcoin and other crypto assets,” wrote Blockforce Capital’s Brett Munster. He cited a rise i...
NEW YORK: The top U.S. securities regulator sued cryptocurrency platform Coinbase on Tuesday, the second lawsuit in two days against a major crypto exchange, in a dramatic escalation of a crackdown on the industry and one that could dramatically transform a market that has largely operated outside regulation.The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday took aim at Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. The SEC accuse...
Bitcoin fell below $26,000 for the first time in two months as risk aversion weighs on the cryptocurrency market with global government bond yields climbing to the highest in about 15 years. “When you throw in what is happening in the bond market, it becomes easy for Bitcoin prices to soften,” Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda, said in a note.The slide has almost erased most of the gains registered in the wake of BlackRock’s surprise fi...
Wall Street may be divided over crypto’s investment credentials but for Bitcoin brethren Thursday delivered validation: The first US exchange-traded funds investing directly in the largest digital currency finally went live. It was a much-anticipated debut that came a day after the US Securities and Exchange Commission gave them the green light following a more than decade-long campaign by the digital-asset industry. The batch of almost a dozen f...
