ProBit Bits — ProBit Global’s Weekly Blockchain Bits Vol. 39

Mango DAO Fraudster Charged

Do you remember the man whose trades in Mango’s token MNGO futures enabled him to withdraw $110 million in crypto from other investors’ deposits with no plan to repay the funds? Avraham Eisenberg was arrested in Puerto Rico. Last week, he was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for orchestrating an attack on the Mango Markets crypto asset trading platform. The 27-year-old U.S. citizen is now awaiting transport from Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, to appear before the Southern District of New York for parallel criminal and civil charges brought against him by the Department of Justice and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), respectively.

SEC Charges Nexo for Unregistered Earn Product

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week filed charges against Nexo Capital for failing to register the offer and sale of its retail crypto asset lending product, the Earn Interest Product (EIP).

Nexo sought a settlement and agreed to pay a $22.5 million penalty and cease its unregistered offer and sale of the EIP to U.S. investors. Relatedly, it also agreed to pay an additional $22.5 million in fines to settle similar charges by state regulatory authorities. The top crypto lender was earlier slammed with a cease and desist order for its crypto interest-bearing accounts by California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, and from the state of Vermont. Nexo also had a lawsuit filed against it by New York’s Attorney General for allegedly selling unregistered securities in the state.

FTX Debtors Confirm Asset Recovery

As mentioned in ProBit Bits Vol. 38 that more than $5 billion has been reportedly recovered in different assets according to a bankruptcy attorney, FTX affiliated debtors last week announced that $5.5 billion of liquid assets have been identified. The said amount comprises $1.7 billion of cash, $3.5 billion of crypto assets, and $0.3 billion of securities, a presentation in an update regarding asset recovery efforts to date shows. Though the information indicates important progress has been made to maximize recoveries, it is still preliminary and subject to change, says John J. Ray III, the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Restructuring Officer of the FTX Debtors.

New CEO Considers Restarting FTX Exchange

The twist to the case of the embattled FTX crypto exchange last week came from the CEO, John Ray, looking into the possibility of reviving its business. He told the Wall Street Journal that he and his team are working ​​to return money to the failed exchange’s customers and creditors. Ray says a task force has been set up to explore a restart of FTX.com, the exchange’s main international exchange, to see whether reviving it would help recover more value for the customers than his team could get from simply liquidating assets or selling the platform.

CoinDesk Reports 1 in 3 US Lawmakers Got Contributions from FTX

Last week, the top crypto news platform, CoinDesk, identified 196 US lawmakers who got financial campaign support from Sam Bankman-Fried and other former FTX executives. Most of the politicians who responded to the question of what they would do with the money said they handed it over to charities while others revealed they had conversations with the U.S. Department of Justice about setting aside the money until it can be dropped into a fund to compensate FTX victims.

Meanwhile, in a related development, CoinDesk is being offered for about $200 million and the co-founder of the Cardano blockchain — who is also a co-founder of Ethereum — Charles Hoskinson, said that he is considering buying the news platform to revamp it into a mix of a news and community site.

Circle Sees USDC Breaking Into the Payment Industry

Last week, Circle released its first annual “State of the USDC Economy” report in which it tries to establish that its stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC), is breaking into the mainstream and pushing economic activity at the internet scale. Dubbed the world’s leading regulated dollar digital currency, it says USDC is heralding a shift into the “utility value phase of blockchains and programmable composable always-on money.” The financial technology company sees dollar digital currencies like USDC, which it says have made it possible for more people and markets to be banked unlike fixed infrastructure or financial walled gardens, are likely to begin absorbing significant portions of the more than $2 trillion in payments industry revenue.

Polygon Ups Game to Be Better for dApps

Last week saw Polygon PoS complete a hard fork upgrade to effect a change in the rate at which the base gas fee will fall to 6.25% (100/16) from its current 12.5% (100/8). At launch, Polygon PoS sought to offer the much-needed solution for Ethereum’s scaling issues. Coupled with its tens of thousands of decentralized apps (dApps), over 207 million unique addresses, and more than 2.3 billion processed transactions, the Polygon PoS chain seeks to emerge as the premier destination for dApps. The critical hard fork was proposed to reduce the severity of gas spikes, and address chain reorganizations (reorgs) to reduce time to finality.