An inside joke about the “insolvency” of Wrapped Ethereum (wETH) over the weekend has forced influencers to explain it was just a “shitpost” after members of the community took it as real. The wETH insolvency FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) seemingly began to make the rounds on Nov. 26, with false rumors alleging that wETH isn’t backed 1:1 by Ether (ETH) and is insolvent. Blockchain developer and contributor to the ERC-721A token standard “cygaar” was one of the first to spread the joke, before confirming in a subsequent post that it was in fact a “shitpost” to see who was …

Bitcoin (BTC) has been trading in a tight range since Thanksgiving Nov. 24, as traders are uncertain about the next directional move. Usually, in a bear market, analysts tend to become uber-bearish and project targets that tend to scare away investors. The failure of Bitcoin to start a strong recovery has given rise to several bearish targets, which extend up to $6,000 on the downside. Although anything is possible in a bear market, traders who have a long-term view could try to accumulate fundamentally strong coins in several tranches. Because a bottom will only be confirmed in hindsight and trying …

New York City mayor Eric Adams is still focused on making New York a crypto hub, but he believes that goal can be combined with statewide efforts to curb environmental costs related to crypto mining, according to reports on Nov 25. The comments follow the new law signed by New York governor Kathy Hochul, banning proof-of-work (PoW) mining activities for two years in the state. The mayor, known as a crypto proponent, said in June he would ask the governor to veto the bill. The city will work with legislators to find a balance between the crypto industry development and …

Alameda Research withdrew over $200 million from FTX.US before it filed for bankruptcy, according to analysis from blockchain firm Arkham Intelligence disclosed on Nov. 25. In a Twitter thread, Arkham revealed that Alameda Research, FTX's sister company, pulled $204 million from eight different addresses of FTX US in a variety of crypto assets, the majority of them stablecoins, in the final days before the collapse. Arkham analysed flows from FTX US in the final few days before the collapse, finding that Alameda withdrew the most funds, at $204M. Below is a diagram of withdrawals to Arkham-identified entities from FTX US. …

Despite the market downturn and the widespread negative sentiment in the industry in the wake of the FTX collapse, on-chain data still show reasons to be bullish on Bitcoin. As pointed out by on-chain analyst Will Clemente, it’s enough to look at the long-term holders’s Bitcoin positions: they reached an all-time high despite their profitability being at an all-time low. “Long-term holders buy heavily into the bear market. They set the floor[...] and then those long-term holders distribute their holdings to new market participants in the bull market”, he told Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview. Another positive trend worth noticing …

FTX’s collapse dealt a major blow to the already fragile sentiment among cryptocurrency investors. Although a quick recovery is unlikely, Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said that the crypto universe could emerge stronger from this crisis. Chainalysis’ research lead Eric Jardine arrived at the conclusion after comparing FTX’s fall to that of Mt. Gox. Another calming statement came from Bloomberg Intelligence exchange-traded fund analyst James Seyffart, who said that there was a “99.9% chance” that the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) held the Bitcoin (BTC) it claimed. He added that GBTC was “unlikely” to be liquidated. The negative events of the past …

Zero-knowledge (ZK)-Rollup tech company StarkWare has officially open sourced its new programming language compiler, Cairo 1.0, which will soon be supported on Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution StarkNet in Q1 2023. The news was announced by StarkWare — the company behind StarkNet — in a Nov. 25 Twitter post. StarkWare’s rollup technology and recursive proofs offer the potential to compress millions of transactions on L2 into a single transaction on Ethereum, however the project has been criticized for maintaining control over its IP, not least of all by its more open source focused competitor zkSync. StarkWare described open sourcing Cairo as …

South Korea’s largest crypto exchanges have announced they will delist WEMIX (WEMIX) — the native token of gaming company Wemade’s blockchain platform Wemix — alleging the firm provided “false information” in response to an investment warning it was issued. Bithumb, Upbeat, Coinone, Korbit and Gopax — which are part of a collective called the Digital Asset eXchange Alliance (DAXA) — announced on Nov. 24 that they would terminate contract support for WEMIX, with trading set to end on Dec. 8. In the investment warning issued Oct. 27, DAXA alleged that there was considerably more WEMIX in circulation than Wemix had …

Crypto exchange CrossTower Inc., which is currently bidding for the assets of Voyager Digital, is reportedly window shopping for other crypto company acquisitions. In a Nov. 24 Bloomberg report, CrossTower CEO Kapil Rathi revealed that the company is looking to pick up firms with a “good set of customers” and a “good balance sheet” despite the current bear market, stating: “We’re in a great place to either acquire entities who have a good set of customers with them and a good balance sheet [...] so we are openly looking at different types of companies from an organic growth perspective.” In …

Australians have been warned to stay away from suspicious-looking fake Bitcoin paper wallets, which work by luring victims into accessing a lucrative crypto wallet but will ultimately drain them of their own crypto holdings. According to a Nov. 22 post on the Facebook page of the NSW Police Force, the scam starts as a paper cryptocurrency wallet with a QR code, which is made to appear like a legitimate Bitcoin paper wallet. These are strewn by scammers in public locations such as streets or parks. An individual that locates the paper wallet and scans the QR code is directed to …

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has once again attracted the ire of the crypto community — this time over his slated appearance at an upcoming New York City conference on November 30. Vocal members of Crypto Twitter have questioned why the former CEO of the now-bankrupt exchange continues to walk free given the events over the last month. In a Nov. 23 Twitter post, Bankman-Fried announced he will be speaking with New York Times journalist Andrew Sorkin at the DealBook Summit “next Wednesday.” The news was confirmed publicly by Sorkin, who said: “There are a lot of important questions to …

USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin issued by the U.S.-based Circle Financials Ltd, is taking the lead over its top rival, Tether (USDT), when it comes to institutional adoption, according to on-chain data. USDC daily transfer volumes are higher The market capitalization of USDC tokens in circulation comes to be around $44 billion versus USDT's $65.42 billion. However, USDC's daily transfer value on the Ethereum blockchain has been consistently higher than USDT throughout 2022, data from Glassnode shows. For instance, as of Nov. 22, the USDC daily transfer was around $14 billion compared to USDT's $5 billion. In other words, USDC …