Day: June 14, 2023

AWS went down in the US, but Ethereum kept humming

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a minor outage but there was no impact on Ethereum network nodes which largely rely on Amazon’s hosting. On June 13, the cloud service provider went down temporarily for around three hours. At 12:08 PM PDT, the company first reported it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies” in parts of the United States. Many mainstream news organizations such as the Associated Press were affected and unable to publish articles. Ethereum advocate Evan Van Ness observed the outage noting that the Ethereum network was not…

Ripple’s CEO sees release of Hinman documents as positive

Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, has expressed his anticipation for the upcoming release of the Hinman documents, hinting at potential positive implications for the legal status of XRP. The documents are scheduled to be unsealed on June 13, and according to Garlinghouse, they have been “well worth the wait.” The Hinman documents refer to a deposition of William Hinman, the former director of the Division of Corporation Finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The deposition is part of the ongoing legal battle between Ripple and the…

Privacy should be considered in ‘potential retail CBDC’ — Treasury official

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Privacy and the ability to transact anonymously should be considerations in the design of a digital dollar, a United States Treasury official has said. On June 13 the Treasury Department’s Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Graham Steele spoke at a payments-focused conference in Texas about the Federal Reserve’s controversial FedNow system and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Steele said one challenge of a retail CBDC is minimizing illegal transactions while maintaining user privacy. He said considerations should still be made about how to protect user anonymity: “It is important that…

Ripple’s Alderoty calls for probe into Bill Hinman and his infamous speech

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Ripple’s chief legal officer Stuart Alderoty has called for an investigation into the motivations that led to former SEC official William Hinman delivering his now-infamous speech in 2018. Alderoty’s demand for an investigation came as part of a June 13 Twitter thread following the public release of the Hinman documents. The documents revealed that Hinman’s speech was delivered despite warnings from other SEC divisions. 13/An investigation must be conducted to understand what or who influenced Hinman, why conflicts (or, at the very least, appearances of conflicts) were ignored, and why…

Bank of Thailand announces CBDC pilot project

The Bank of Thailand has announced its commencement of a pilot project, set to launch this month, for testing a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) within a regulatory sandbox. With a goal to involve up to 10,000 users, the project is scheduled to run until August 2023, providing insights into the implementation and feasibility of a CBDC in the retail sector. The launch of an exclusive app In a June 12 announcement, Prominent financial institutions, including Bank of Ayudhya (Krungsri), Siam Commercial Bank, and Singaporean payments service provider 2C2P, have…

SEC and Binance.US to negotiate deal avoiding total asset freeze

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Binance.US and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have agreed to work on an arrangement that will allow the exchange to avoid freezing all of its assets. On June 14, Bloomberg reported U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson referred the two organizations to a magistrate judge to work towards a compromise arrangement that can protect customer funds without having to shut down the exchange. “Shutting it down completely would create significant consequences not only for the company but for the digital asset markets in general,” Jackson said at…

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao denies rumors of selling Bitcoin to bolster BNB

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Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has refuted accusations that Binance has been secretly selling Bitcoin (BTC) to artificially stabilize the price of its native token Binance Coin (BNB). The rumors have come from several market commentators, including analyst Dylan LeClair and Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten, who have accused Binance of intentionally manipulating the market to artificially inflate the value of BNB. In a June 13 tweet, CZ said that Binance had not sold any of their BTC or BNB, adding that the crypto exchange still held “a bag” of FTX Token…

SEC emails show multiple officials examining ethereum in 2018

Email correspondence from 2018 have uncovered that several officials within the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) engaged in discussions regarding the classification of ETH as a security. The release of these emails comes as part of Ripple’s legal dispute with the SEC, where Ripple is being accused of unlawfully selling XRP as unregistered securities over a span of more than seven years. Internal communications revealed Internal communications within the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have revealed debates surrounding the interpretation of a 2018 speech by former director of corporation finance,…

SEC asks for more time to respond to Coinbase call for crypto clarity

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The United States securities regulator has asked for four more months to provide a response to Coinbase’s request for crypto regulatory clarity. In a June 13 letter submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it needs an additional 120 days to reply to Coinbase’s request that it adopt new rules and provide further clarity on the laws governing crypto. The letter was in response to the court’s June 6 order to the SEC which asked the regulator to address…