Bitcoin News and Finance: What You Need to Know

Chinese authorities in Rong County recently said they have prosecuted eight individuals accused of being the masterminds behind the Magic Data Chain (MDC) pyramid scheme. The pyramid is thought to have handled transactions with a total value of over $147 million. Virtual Currency Pyramid Scheme Authorities in China’s Rong County, Zigong City, recently prosecuted eight people accused of orchestrating the MDC virtual currency pyramid scheme, a local report has said. According to the report, the prosecution of the case was handled by the Rong County People’s Procuratorate, and was only carried out some ten months after the arrest of MDC’s 12 core members. According to a report from the Sichuan Provincial Public Security Department, the MDC pyramid scheme was initially cracked in May 2021. Subsequent investigations by authorities in Rong County then determined that the scheme had been in existence since July 2019. MDC’s 2 Million Registered Members In the report, authorities said t

PRESS RELEASE. Algoracle has recently announced the close of its seed round for $1.5 million (USD) to help accelerate the development and launch of Algorand’s native decentralized oracle network. Algoracle’s seed round was led by Borderless Capital , with major contributions from the Algorand Foundation , Valhalla Capital , and Big Brain Holdings , and rounded out by strategic investors Xpand Capital , Parea Capital , OrcaDAO , GMI Capital , and EXA Finance . Thanks to the support provided by all of these organizations, the seed round was a resounding success and generated the aforementioned amount of $1.5 million, much to the delight of the community. “We are excited to back Algoracle and their vision of bringing data on-chain in a decentralized fashion. This will help developers to build more powerful and sophisticated applications and smart contracts, enabling innovative and disruptive new use cases on top of the Algorand blockchain” said David Garcia, CEO and Managing

Tesla and Spacex CEO Elon Musk says that the U.S. economy is probably in a recession and it could be “tough going” for 12 to 18 months. He added: “The honest reason for inflation is that the government printed a zillion more money than it had.” Elon Musk on U.S. Recession and Inflation Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and Spacex, talked about the U.S. economy on the All-In podcast, published Monday. Commenting on whether the U.S. economy is in a recession, Musk said: We probably are in a recession and that recession will get worse but these things pass and then there will be boom times again … It’ll probably be some tough going for, I don’t know, a year, maybe 12-18 months. He added that 12 to 18 months is roughly the amount of time for a correction to happen. Recession fears have escalated recently as the Federal Reserve tightens monetary policy to help cool down inflation. Musk explained that in his opinion, recessions are not necessarily a bad thing, emphasizing that he’s been t

South Korea’s top financial regulators have launched an emergency investigation into the collapse of cryptocurrency LUNA and stablecoin UST. The authorities have asked domestic cryptocurrency exchanges to provide information relating to transactions and investors of the two coins. South Korea’s Emergency Investigation Into LUNA, UST South Korea has launched an “emergency” investigation of domestic crypto exchange operators following the collapse of the terrausd stablecoin (UST) and terra (LUNA) cryptocurrency, Yonhap News reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources. Last week, UST lost its peg to the U.S. dollar, sending its price and the price of terra (LUNA) into free fall. At the time of writing, UST is trading at less than $0.09 while LUNA is near worthless. South Korean top financial regulators, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), have asked local cryptocurrency exchange operators to share information relating to UST and LUNA, sou

Since last week’s Terra implosion and the demise of the blockchain project’s native token LUNA — and the algorithmic stablecoin terrausd (UST) — crypto tokens based on the Cosmos ecosystem have seen significant losses. Two months ago, the top Cosmos ecosystem coins collectively were worth $61.6 billion and since then, the Cosmos economy has lost more than 75% in value, dropping to $15.2 billion. Terra’s Fallout Stirs Cosmos Token Ecosystem The blockchain project Terra is a Cosmos-based network, which leverages the consensus protocol Tendermint, the Cosmos SDK, and the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC). Terra’s network has a native token called LUNA and a suite of algorithmic fiat-pegged tokens such as terrausd (UST). Last week, UST lost its $1 parity and after the de-pegging event, LUNA’s value dropped well below a U.S. penny per unit. Terra’s fallout not only rippled across the crypto economy, but it wreaked significant havoc across the Cosmos ecosystem tokens built wi

This is the May 2022 monthly market insights report by Bitcoin.com Exchange . In this and subsequent reports, expect to find a summary of crypto market performance, a macro recap, market structure analysis, and more. Crypto Market Performance May got off to a rough start as the Federal Reserve confirmed a hawkish bias on the back of lingering inflation. Markets reacted by going risk-off. The collapse of LUNA and UST added fuel to the fire, with the result that crypto markets saw historically large drawdowns. BTC reached a low of $25.4k USD, which is 60% off its all-time high of $65k. ETH saw a comparable drawdown. Other large-cap coins fared even worse, with AVAX and SOL being down over 75% and 80% respectively from their all-time highs. During the first week of the month, gaming (play-to-earn) saw the worst performance across crypto sectors, followed by top assets (large caps) with losses of 9.6%, and Web3, which was down 8.9%.   Macro Recap: Quantitative Tightening (QT)

The Luna Foundation Guard, the entity in charge of safeguarding the peg of UST, the stablecoin of the Terra ecosystem, has revealed how it used the available Bitcoin reserve before the recent debacle involving the Terra ecosystem. The organization sold part of the bitcoins owned directly, while another part was traded on different dates to try and stabilize the value of UST. The reserve was comprised of more than 80,000 BTC . Luna Foundation Guard Clarifies Reserve Movements The Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), the organization tasked with safeguarding the dollar peg of UST, the algorithmic stablecoin of the Terra ecosystem, has broken its silence to explain the use of the assets it had under its custody. The institution had amassed more than 80K BTC , which was to be used in case of market imbalances affecting the value of terrausd (UST). According to reports on social media, the foundation spent almost all of its BTC reserves in a failed attempt to save UST. This was made in three