Blockchain Bites: Cred’s Missing Millions in Bankruptcy, Bitcoin Miners Quarterly Losses and More

The bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency lender Cred is more than it seems. Two publicly traded bitcoin mining companies reported this week: neither is profitable. ECB President Christine Lagarde has an “insight” on the digital euro.

Chapter … 12?
Cred Chapter 11’s filing for bankruptcy does not tell the whole story. With $ 67.8 million in assets and $ 136 million in liabilities, the cryptocurrency lender decided to close last weekend, leaving hundreds of depositors worried about the $ 100 million raised on loan to the company. Cred has officially blamed the underworld by an outside investor who was entrusted with 800 BTC, although even insiders say a $ 39 million line of credit to a Chinese lender has gone south. “There is a lot more to be done,” Daniyal Inamullah, former head of capital markets at Cred, said. CoinDesk’s Nathan DiCamillo investigates.

Bloody BTC?
Two publicly traded bitcoin mining companies are nearing profitability. Marathon and Hut 8, prominent in the industry, both reduced their quarterly losses, according to the quarterly financial statements. Marathon increased revenue to $ 835,184 in the third quarter, a 160% increase over the same period last year, while also posting a net loss of nearly $ 2 million. The company’s loss per share, however, fell from 12 cents to 6 cents per share year-over-year. Meanwhile, Hut 8 reported mining revenues of C $ 5.3 million (approximately US $ 4 million), down 43% from the previous quarter, but also managed to reduce its losses by C $ 0.07 to stock in Q3 2019 at C $ 0.01 this quarter. Both facilities plan to implement additional ASIC mining machines.

‘Intuition’ CBDC
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has the “feeling” that there will be a digital euro in two or four years. In a virtual panel yesterday, Lagarde said an EU-wide central bank digital currency should be explored, “If it will facilitate cross-border payments.” The ECB has previously said it is researching a CBDC. The latest statements are another indicator of what to expect and when: “A digital euro will not replace cash,” Lagarde said. “It will be a complement.” Separately, Benoit Coeure, head of the Innovation Hub at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), said any potential CBDC for the supranational bank could involve blockchain. “Anything is possible,” he said.

Verified and attacked
Decentralized Finance Platform (DeFi) Akropolis suffered a $ 2 million loss following a sophisticated “flash loan” attack. According to platform founder Ana Andrianova, the attacker withdrew tranches of $ 50,000 in DAI from the project’s yCurve and sUSD pools, leveraging the dYdX derivatives platform. While there is a lot of talk about the audit trails of the new DeFi protocols, especially after the hacks, the Akropolis code has in fact been verified twice: once by CertiK and also by the companies SmartDec and Pessimistic.

Exchange flows
Bitcoin flows to Binance from Huobi have reached an all-time high. According to data provided by CryptoQuant, approximately 18,652 bitcoins, worth nearly $ 300 million, were transferred from Huobi to Binance from November 2-11. beginning of the month. For months, Chinese regulators have cracked down on cryptocurrency trading platforms, as part of a broader fintech industry breakthrough.

Dignity and bitcoin
“Systems don’t always work,” Robby Gutmann, co-founder of Stone Ridge Holdings Group, told NLW in his first public interview since the company made a sensation by investing heavily in bitcoin. That’s why the $ 10 billion alternative asset manager placed his “primary treasury reserve” in bitcoin.

In short, bitcoin is an exit from an inflated monetary base that has failed to serve the public. Last month, Stone announced that he would be hiding more than 10,000 BTC with his crypto subsidiary NYDIG. This follows other corporate companies like MicroStrategy and Square transferring some of their cash treasures into bitcoin, also citing currency devaluation.

“The expansion of the US money supply has not manifested itself in the growth of CPI in any measurable way, but in other measures of inflation,” Gutmann said. In particular, Gutmann views the prospect of living a “decent” retirement as an ideal indicator for inflation.

“The idea of ​​financial security is much broader in bitcoin,” he said, stating that only a “single-digit number” of fiat money systems are functional or scale. “Can I save my work day on something I can spend tomorrow next week,” isn’t a question most US workers are confronted with, but it may be a legitimate concern elsewhere.

This is why a world economy based on bitcoin could better serve nations that were not part of the industrialization processes of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Gutmann further explained that the NYDIG thesis is to promote the “long-term development of an open source monetary system”. This includes opening some of its internal bitcoin infrastructure to other companies – “we won’t be the last people to have this challenge” – and applying for New York State “BitLicense” and a limited trust card.

“To the extent that we can push the bitcoin project forward, it seems we can do something measurable in today’s society around this idea of ​​financial security for people outside the first world,” he said.

The full hour-long interview can be found here.