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Here’s what happened in crypto today

  • August 29, 2023
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Need to know what happened in crypto today? Here is the latest news on daily trends and events impacting Bitcoin price, blockchain, DeFi, NFTs, Web3 and crypto regulation.

Crypto asset manager Grayscale has scored a major victory in its battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Binance has removed Banco de Venezuela, one of the largest banks in the country, as a payment method on its peer-to-peer (P2P) trading service, in efforts to comply with international financial sanctions. Meanwhile, Shibarium, the new layer-2 blockchain launched by the developers of Shiba Inu (SHIB) has reached a new wallet and transaction milestone just hours after relaunching its bridge to the public.

A United States Court of Appeals has sided with Grayscale in its lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a major victory in the crypto asset manager’s pursuit of a spot Bitcoin ETF.

On Aug. 29, the U.S. District Court of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled that the SEC was wrong in rejecting Grayscale’s application to convert its GBTC fund into a Bitcoin ETF. Previously, Grayscale’s attempt to launch an ETF application was rejected by the regulator because it supposedly was not “designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices.”

According to Judge Rao, the SEC failed to “offer any explanation” on why it denied Grayscale’s application.

The court ruling does not mean Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETF application will succeed. However, the ruling could factor into the SEC’s deliberations on several outstanding Bitcoin ETF applications, including those filed by BlackRock, Fidelity and WisdomTree.

Grayscale clears major hurdle in pursuit of Bitcoin ETF

Binance excludes Banco de Venezuela from P2P payments

The world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, has removed Banco de Venezuela as a payment method on its peer-to-peer (P2P) trading service. This follows similar moves with sanctioned Russian banks last week and is likely part of efforts to fall in line with international financial sanctions.

According to Venezuelan users, Banco de Venezuela has vanished from the P2P payments options this week, following a series of such removals of Russian banks by Binance. The obvious reason behind this step is the Aug. 24 Wall Street Journal report about the exchange’s participation in circumventing international financial sanctions.

Banco de Venezuela is one of the largest financial institutions in the country — according to the available stats from the end of the 2000s, it held third spot with over 11% share of the local market. In 2009, it was sold to the state by a private holding company, Grupo Santander, for about $1 billion. The sanctions in response to the repression of the 2014 and 2017 protests were imposed on Venezuelan government officials and affiliated institutions by the United States Treasury Department in 2018 and 2019.

As local media reported, private Venezuelan banks, such as Banesco, Banplus, BBVA Provincial and others, remain on the list of Binance’s P2P platform.

The recent surge in awareness regarding the inclusion of sanctioned banks on crypto P2P payment options came to light last week when The Wall Street Journal revealed that Tinkoff Bank and Sberbank were featured as transfer methods on Binance. The same day, Tinkoff and Sberbank were no longer visible on the Binance P2P platform, although the options colored “yellow” and “green,” representative of their respective brand colors, remained. On Aug. 25, journalists confirmed that the sanctioned banks had been entirely removed from the list, citing a spokesperson from Binance.

On Aug. 28, two other major crypto exchanges, OKX and Bybit, followed Binance by excluding sanctioned Russian banks from their payment options.

Shibarium wallets surpass 100K after SHIB devs relaunch bridge

Shibarium, a new layer-2 blockchain for Shiba Inu has surpassed 100,000 wallets on its platform with 35,000 coming within 24 hours of Shibarium’s relaunch on Aug. 28.

Shytoshi Kusama, the lead developer and co-founder of Shiba Inu, confirmed Shibarium was back up and running in an Aug. 28 blog post.

At the time, Kusama noted that Shibarium tallied 65,000 wallets across 350,000 transactions — however, Shibarium’s block explorer now shows that 101,277 wallets have now facilitated 420,897 transactions across 344,614 blocks, with an average block time of 5 seconds.

Shibarium stumbled into issues not long after going live on Aug. 16.

At the time of the outage, Kusama blamed the “MASSIVE influx of transitions and users” when it went live, and later said it found a case where “thousands upon thousands of contract creation and normal transactions” in one block — which led it going into fail-safe mode.

It is estimated that about $2.5 million in funds were stuck on the bridge at the time.

In the days following, the Shibarium team claimed to have scaled the server infrastructure by 1500% to better manage congestion on-chain.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

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