$590M Silk Road Bitcoin Selloff Is Unlikely, BTC’s Bull Rally Is Too Far, And More: Hodler’s Digest August 11

The main news of the week

Musk X Delays Trump Interview Says Hit By ‘Massive DDoS Attack'

X owner Elon Musk said the social media platform was hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack just as his planned interview with US presidential hopeful Donald Trump was about to begin.

“Looks like there's a massive DDoS attack on X. Working on shutting it down,” Musk posted on X on August 12th. A DDoS attack aims to flood a network or service with traffic and block legitimate users. Use it.

The attack came after technical issues with an X Spaces interview scheduled for Musk and Trump at 8:00 PM ET, with several X users saying they couldn't join. The site showed the stream as “unavailable”, but around 120,000 were still able to join. In a separate post, Musk X has already tested the system with eight million similar listeners.

Musk began the interview shortly after 8:30 p.m., saying earlier that “there will be a small number of live listeners” and unedited audio will be posted “immediately afterward.”

“As this massive attack shows, there's a lot of resistance to people just listening to what President Trump has to say,” Musk said as he opened the interview.

The US Court of Appeals reopened the HEX fraud case against Binance.US

A US appeals court has partially reversed the dismissal of a class action lawsuit filed against Binance.US, which alleged that the exchange illegally exploited the value of the HEX token.

A three-judge panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals previously dismissed the district court's class-action suit, finding that plaintiff Ryan Cox had valid claims against Binance.US and CoinMarketCap.

Cox filed a class-action lawsuit in 2021 against Binance Capital Management and Binance.US for artificially capping the HEX level on CoinMarketCap, the cryptocurrency price-tracking platform owned by Binance. Cox said this resulted in lower-priced HEX trading, while Binance's own cryptocurrencies were rated higher.

A district court judge initially dismissed the lawsuit in February 2023, saying Cox failed to establish any material connection between certain activities in Arizona and Binance.US, which would have linked Binance.US to the HEX scam.

In an Aug. 12 opinion, the justices disagreed with the district court's initial conclusion that Cox had to establish “sufficiently minimal connections” between Binance.US and Arizona — the state where Cox first filed suit — to establish personal jurisdiction. .

Kamala Harris May Continue Biden Administration's Crypto Suppression

Vice President of the United States and current presidential candidate Kamala Harris aims to continue the Biden administration's tough stance on cryptocurrency regulation.

Harris is reportedly working with Brian Dice and Bharat Ramamurthy, two of the Biden administration's economic advisers who opposed the previous 2023 Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act as too willing for issuers.

Harris' choice of economic advisers may indicate that the Biden administration intends to continue its hostile regulatory approach to crypto, Alex Thorne, head of research at Galaxy, wrote in an August 13 post:

@KamalaHarris New evidence that crypto fracking will continue. Her choice of advisor suggests that she shares Biden's anti-crypto stance.

Harris is set to unveil her plans for her economic policy agenda in a mid-August speech, which could give investors more clues about her approach to cryptocurrency regulation.

US Government's $590M Silk Road Bitcoin Transfer to Coinbase Can't Be Sold – Analyst

The US government has transferred nearly $600 million worth of bitcoins to Coinbase, but that is unlikely to turn into selling pressure. Specifically, as reported by Cointelegraph, 10,000 bitcoins worth more than $593 million were transferred on August 15.

According to on-chain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence, the bitcoin was sent to a Coinbase Prime deposit wallet. According to Ryan Lee, chief analyst at Bitgate Research, despite the initial concerns, Bitcoin cannot be sold. Lee told Cointelegraph:

“This does not mean that 10,000 bitcoins have been sold. Last month, the US Marshals Service, an agency under the US Department of Justice, announced a partnership with Coinbase Prime to ‘secure and trade' large amounts of digital assets.

Whales (entities that hold large amounts of Bitcoin) can have a significant impact on the price of Bitcoin. Investors follow the trading of major stockholders to gauge potential selling pressure.

MetaMask has launched a pilot self-service debit card with MasterCard.

Popular decentralized financial wallet MetaMask has partnered with Mastercard and digital payments company Baanx to develop a self-managed debit card pilot program for select users in the UK and EU, with plans to roll out the product in other regions over time.

The card allows users to hold their money on their own until the transaction takes place and customers' digital assets are exchanged for fiat payments at retail stores, online marketplaces and other merchants.

In a statement to Cointelegraph, Lorenzo Santos, senior product manager at Consensys, explained that users should use Linea to hold their cryptos on the Linea network and set spending limits on the card.

Santos also explained how transactions are handled from start to finish. According to the consensus executive, when a Metamask card is swiped, an on-chain transaction is created, sent from the user's wallet to the “CryptoLife” smart contract.

This allows the transaction to be authorized at the point of sale used by the merchant when receiving the card, and the conversion from crypto to fiat is done through this smart contract. Finally, the payment is completed on the Mastercard payment network.

Winners and losers

At the end of the week, Bitcoin (BTC) at $59,006, Ether (ETH) at $2,597 and XRP at $0.56. According to CoinMarketCap, the total market cap is $2.08 trillion.

Among the top 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week were Aave (AAVE) at 16.01%, THORChain (RUNE) at 15.15%, and SATS (1000SATS) at 8.75%. The top three altcoin losers of the week were Dogwifehat. WIF at 22.86%, Brett at 18.89% and Pepe at 15.48%. Be sure to read Cointelegraph's market analysis for more information on crypto prices.

The most memorable quotes

“A dollar-fueled liquidation-driven rally in Bitcoin and Ether joining at the end of the year will provide a strong foundation for the return of lust-inducing Shitcoin Soybeans.”

Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX

“Kamala Harris New Evidence That Crypto Crack Will Continue. Her choice of advisor suggests that she shares Biden's anti-crypto stance.

Alex Thorne, head of research at Galaxy Digital

“Not every memecoin, investment or speculative investment ends up winning, but it really brings people into the ecosystem.”

WonderFi CEO Dean Skurka

“Decentralized prediction markets are a significant innovation with real public utility.”

Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss

“Last week's false break below $50,000 put it in a clean position, and we look for Bitcoin to extend the trend channel resistance near $70,000 in the coming sessions.”

Tony Sycamore, market analyst at IG

“The way we came to regulatory approval to launch Ethereum spot ETPs was very quick and a bit shocking when I thought the whole market thought we might face rejection from the SEC.”

Dave Lavallee, Global Head of ETFs at Grayscale Investments

Forecast of the week

The Bibit bull rally will continue for another 350 days

Despite Bitcoin's recent correction to a five-month low, Bitcoin may extend its bull run for another year.

Based on the current price-to-price ratio, which analyzes the price of the top and bottom published by an asset or security, the price of Bitcoin may rise for another 350 days.

A report by Bibit and Block Scholes shared with Cointelegraph that the bull run will last until the third quarter of 2025, based on the Bibit ratio in previous cycles:

“At the current turkey-to-peak ratio of 3.5x, significantly lower than the 20x seen in previous cycles, the report suggests that the rally could continue for another 350 days before surpassing past highs.”

Bitcoin is currently recovering from a $510 billion crypto market selloff.

Bitcoin fell below $63,000, falling below a key post-halving trend line, but a retracement of the trend prior to the 2024 cut-off has seen Bitcoin return to $100,000 based on previous Bitcoin halving cycles.

FUD of the week

The ASX has since sued over its earlier disclosures about its now-abandoned blockchain project.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has sued the country's leading stock exchange in the Federal Court, alleging it made “misleading and deceptive” statements over a now-abandoned project to replace its aging system with blockchain technology.

ASIC said on August 14 that Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) statements that the project to replace the Clearinghouse Electronic Registration System (CHESE) trading platform are “going live” in April 2023 and are “progressing well” are misleading.

The regulator said the project was “not on track to plan” when the statements were made in February 2022, and the ASX had no “reasonable basis” to say the project would be ready by that date.

“In the year “The true state of affairs at 10 February 2022 is that the project is ‘not progressing well' contrary to the ASX announcement,” said ASIC Chairman Joe Longo. “We believe this was a collective failure by the ASX board and senior executives at the time.”

A Canadian crypto exchange has lost $9.5M worth of users' Bitcoin and Ether.

Canadian cryptocurrency trading platform Ezbit and its founder, David Smiley, allegedly defrauded customers of roughly 13 million Canadian dollars ($9.5 million) of their cryptocurrency investments and used the money to gamble.

Canada's provincial regulator, the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCCC), found that they misappropriated customer funds “for their own purposes.”

The ezBtc platform, which went offline permanently in or around September 2019 and will be liquidated in 2022, claims to have stored all of its users' crypto investments in cold storage. Between 2016 and 2019, ezBtc collected over 2,300 Bitcoin and over 600 Ether from crypto investors during its time in operation.

Solana Well continues to post $84M on sales of $2.8M.

Solana Whale, which has been selling tokens regularly since January, has invested nearly $2.8 million in multiple exchanges, bringing the investor's total tokens sold to $84 million this year.

In the year On August 13, blockchain data analysis company Lookonchain looked at Solana wallet tokens every week since January 15. According to the data firm, Well transferred at least 594,000 SOL to Coinbase, Binance and OKX.

As the SOL price hovers at $144.30, the tokens are worth a total of about $84 million. The whale has been selling tokens at least once a week, with the latest sale being a 20,000-SOL (about $2.8 million) token transaction.

Apart from the Solana case, another whale related to the Ethereum Initial Coin Offering (ICO) has been unable to load tokens for over a month. In the year On August 12, Lookonchain reported that the Ether whale deposited $13.2 million in ETH to OKX.

The whale has been selling tokens since July 8. In total, the tokens deposited into OKX were $154 million, with an average deposit of $3,176. The wallet received 1 million ETH during the Ethereum ICO.

The best magazine stories of the week

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‘No matter how bad, there's more to NFTs': 24 hours of wisdom, NFT creator

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Low users, sex predators kill Korean metaverse, 3AC Terra: Asia Express sues

South Korean meters fail, 3AC takes Terra to court, SBI and Ripple's NFT partnership: Asia Express

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Cointelegraph magazine writers and reporters contributed to this article.