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bitcoinadmin April 11, 2023 No comments News permalink

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4/11 News Review: Coinmotion, SushiSwap, Ethereum, Dogecoin, FTX

Coinmotion added Tether stablecoin to its selection, while Northcrypto has Apecoin available for trading. SushiSwap was hacked and sued by the SEC. Ethereum’s Shapella update is happening this week. Elon Musk caused Dogecoin’s price to rise. A recent report reveals harsh facts about the operations of FTX and Alameda.

The selections of Northcrypto and Coinmotion expanded

Let’s start the news review from Finland and Northcrypto. Northcrypto surprised us last week when the company announced that it had added Apecoin to its selection. Apecoin is still quite an unknown cryptocurrency for many investors. It did not enter the market until spring 2022 in an airdrop.

Northcrypto COO Miikka Laukkanen commented on the news to AboutBitcoin as follows:

ApeCoin is one of the most interesting ERC-20 tokens in our opinion. It is strongly linked to the Otherside metaverse of Yuga Labs and thus to the future of the entire metaverse ecosystem. We are constantly exploring opportunities to add new currencies, and we will probably expand our selection further in the coming year.

We are eagerly awaiting more news about the expansion of Northcrypto’s selection! Of the top 10 cryptocurrencies, XRP, Cardano, and Dogecoin are certainly on the wish list of many investors.

Another Finnish crypto exchange, Coinmotion, has also updated its offering. You can now buy the largest stablecoin on the market from Coinmotion!

The popularity of Tether (USDT) increased in 2023 due to the US banking crisis and the regulatory war. These events have weakened the status of the biggest competitor, USDC, and caused many investors to switch to Tether.

Coinmotion’s Pessi Peura commented on the news on Twitter:

Many Coinmotion users also use other services where the most liquid exchange pairs are against USDT. This makes it easier, for example, to repatriate profits from elsewhere to Coinmotion. The addition, USDT has also been requested by our users.

Tether was certainly a welcomed addition, especially for traders and DeFi users. Tether can’t be found on Northcrypto for now, but the competing alternative USDC is listed on both Finnish exchanges.

If you want to learn more about stablecoins, read our comprehensive beginner’s guide. It has been recently re-written with fresh information. If you are not already familiar with Northcrypto and Coinmotion, click on Reviews in the main menu, and you will find beginner’s guides to both.

Millions of dollars in damages from the SushiSwap bug

SushiSwap is one of the most popular decentralized exchanges on the market. The abbreviation DEX (decentralized exchange) is commonly used for such a protocol. SushiSwap received unwanted publicity over the weekend when a bug was found in its smart contract that caused more than three million dollars in damages.

According to Coindesk, at least 190 Ethereum addresses and 2000 Arbitrum addresses have granted the buggy smart contract access. So far, the biggest damage seems to have come from the wallet of a single trader. The SushiSwap team is working to make up for the losses of all users.

SushiSwap urges the users of the exchange to revoke the rights of the infected smart contract to their wallets.

The weekend blow was a continuation of the bad news regarding Sushiswap. Three weeks ago, SushiSwap became the latest victim in the US administration’s war on the crypto industry. SushiSwap and “head chef” Jared Gray received a subpoena from the SEC. At the very least, the payment of fines or, in the worst case, a trial will be seen.

The SEC has attacked numerous crypto industry players in recent months. Until now, the list has mainly included centralized operators (exchanges). Will we see attacks in the direction of the DeFi sector next? So far, there is no detailed information about the content of the subpoena.

Ethereum’s Shapella update

Ethereum’s Shapella update is definitely one of the biggest news this week. It is a months-awaited hard fork. Epoch 194048 of the Ethereum blockchain has been locked as the schedule for Shapella, which will be executed late at night on April 12th European time. One epoch means 384 seconds or 6.4 minutes in the Ethereum blockchain.

The Shapella name comes from the Shanghai and Capella updates that will take place. Shanghai is the name for the EIP-4895 update and Capella is the name for the EIP-4844 update. Of these, Shanghai is much more important for Ethereum investors.

The Shanghai update unlocks Ethereum staking. What are the effects of this on Ethereum’s price? The topic has been heavily debated in recent months, and opinions vary from one side to the other.

Staking is a massive business at the moment. As much as 14 percent of all Ether is staked, which means 16 million ETH tokens worth $30 billion. If even ten percent of stakers decided to dump their tokens on the market, the price would collapse significantly.

Everyone should expect to see short-term price fluctuations. However, it is hard to see a reason why a large number of stakers would suddenly want to dump their Ether on the market. In addition to this, locked ETH tokens can only be released gradually.

Most of the stakers probably have Ether in their wallet for trading. In addition to this, a lot of staking is done through liquid staking services, from which stETH tokens have already been freely sold.

Unlocking the staking is very positive in the long run and will bring thousands and thousands of new stakers. This, in turn, locks Ether out of the market, and the decrease in supply is positive for Ethereum’s price development. We will report more on Shapella’s effects in future news articles.

A regular Ethereum investor does not need to do anything for the upgrade. It is good to note that exchanges will close Ethereum deposits and withdrawals during the update. Transfers will open as long as the success of the update has been confirmed.

Elon Musk caused a Dogecoin price rise

In recent years, Elon Musk has become known for his comments related to Dogecoin. If Musk has tweeted anything related to Dogecoin, the price of the meme coin has almost always reacted with an increase of tens of percent. In 2021, we saw even moves of hundreds of percent in one day.

Elon Musk caused a significant price increase in Dogecoin last week by changing the Twitter logo to Doge. Musk also tweeted a screenshot of a conversation that took place in March 2021, where the idea of ​​buying Twitter and changing the logo to Doge was thrown at him as a joke. “As promised”, says Elon.

The price of Dogecoin rose by 30 percent in a couple of minutes after the update. The DOGE price also crossed the $0.10 mark for the first time since June 2022. At the time of writing the article, Dogecoin’s price has returned to the level of around $0.085, meaning that half of last week’s move has melted away.

Why is Dogecoin going up from such an event? The reason for this is the automated bots that start buying Dogecoin whenever there is a buzz on social media related to Dogecoin and Elon Musk. Of course, updating the Twitter logo does not affect Dogecoin’s fundamentals in any way.

Dogecoin’s market cap is currently so high that increases of 100+ percent are no longer easy. In all likelihood, such a move would require news of Dogecoin being adopted as Twitter’s official means of payment. That may still be possible one day.

A recent report reveals details of FTX’s operations

The year 2023 has been so full of events that many crypto investors have already begun to forget FTX. However, the case is far from over. The bankruptcy estate is trying to gather billions of dollars worth of funds every day. In addition to this, the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried will also be seen later in 2023.

FTX has made headlines in recent days because a 43-page report on the company’s operations has been published. The Block has highlighted some interesting details, which will be reviewed next.

According to the report, FTX’s security protocols were extremely vulnerable (or non-existent). In practice, all funds were kept in online wallets. According to industry standards, customer funds should be stored in cold wallets, and the hot wallet only contains a small portion for withdrawals. Below is a picture of the Ledger Nano X cold wallet, which is used by many companies in the industry.

ledger nano x

SBF also lied to investors about the company’s security practices. FTX also did not use standard multi-sig wallets, so a single employee could have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. In addition, private keys to wallets were stored on AWS servers.

Alameda Research, which is tightly linked to the FTX exchange, was also a complete mess. According to Sam Bankman-Fried, the company had lost control of its funds and could sometimes find $50 million worth of cryptocurrency in wallets. The quote below is from SBF.

Alameda is unauditable. I don’t mean this in the sense of ‘a major accounting firm will have reservations about Auditing it’; I mean this in the sense of ‘we are only able to ballpark what its balances are, let alone something like a comprehensive transaction history.’ We sometimes find $50m of assets lying around that we lost track of; such is life.

It should come as no surprise that personnel management was also chaotic. FTX and Alameda did not have an up-to-date list of the companies employees. Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire also included more than 100 other companies, and there was no documentation of the mutual relations between these companies.

Internal conversations took place in the Signal and Telegram instant messaging services, which had the function of automatic deletion of messages turned on. Invoices were accepted in Signal and Telegram by acknowledging with emoticons.

This was just scratching the surface of the activities of FTX, Alameda, and other Sam Bankman-Fried companies. If FTX hadn’t crashed in November 2022, it would have been hacked or collapsed for other reasons sooner or later. It seems unbelievable what kind of chaos was really going on behind the scenes.