CZ hits back at WSJ, Hong Kong crypto ETF takeover ‘worth $50B’: Asia Express
8 months ago Benito Santiago
East Asia's weekly news roundup reviews the industry's most important developments.
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ToggleBinance is under investigation again.
DWF Labs, a VIP client of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has been accused of firing its own investigators after discovering it was involved in market manipulation.
A May 9 Wall Street Journal report reported that DWF Labs engaged in market manipulation, wash trading, and allegedly inflated trades worth $300 million in deals with crypto projects. After the exchange's monitoring team recommended that the client be on board, Binance sided with DWF Labs and fired the investigator, arguing that there was insufficient evidence for the request.
Binance has denied involvement. We ensure our strict market surveillance program. We will not tolerate market manipulation,” the exchange said in a tweet. “Market maker competition is fierce and our investigative team's job is to be impartial and look at evidence without bias, including claims made by market maker firms against their competitors.”
It also announced that its employees have kicked off 355,000 users with a transaction volume of $2.5 trillion over the past three years for violating the terms of use.
DWF Labs also denied the allegations. “We want to point out that many of the allegations made in the press recently are baseless and distort the facts,” he said. “DWF Labs operates with the highest standards of integrity, transparency and ethics, and we are committed to supporting you and our more than 700 partners throughout the crypto ecosystem.”
Binance founder and co-founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao, owner of Binance, surprisingly wrote in response:
“I am very grateful to Binance for their constant and long-term commitment to WSJ, which has greatly increased our exposure and saved us a lot of marketing budget. However, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon where some mainstream media articles are driven by emotion and bias rather than facts. For example, complaints from former employees can be the basis of an article. You can, but Binance is not considered reportable to law enforcement agencies to investigate and arrest the mastermind behind the casino (in reality).
DWF Labs is a well-known business in the crypto industry. In the year Founded in 2021 by Andrey Grachev, the company invests in promising projects and provides them with long-term financial support, as stated on its website.
Thailand Web3 Music Festival has ended
Music Idol Protocol's Fanland Music Festival in Bangkok, Thailand attracted over 30,000 festival goers from May 4th to 5th.
Web3's appearance was perhaps less impressive than the performance of South Korean pop star PSY, the creator of “Gangnam Style.” More than 20 artists graced the stage, including famous Cantonese hip-hop artist Edison Chen, powerhouse vocalists Henry Lau, Gen1es, BKPP, Chanyeol, BUS, Dreamnote, Pretzelle, Sistar19, Taemin and 24kGoldn.
“Their exhilarating performance set the stage on fire, creating an atmosphere of pure joy and energy that left the audience in awe,” organizers breathed.
In addition to human performances, the festival also featured tokenized music products and AI-created music idols.
The festival had a unique NFT ticketing system where tickets were cut on Fansland and sold on secondary markets. The tickets can also be used as an access point to connect to Fansland DeFi.
The first NFT ticket holders for this music festival automatically became early participants in Fansland.AI, unlocking benefits such as token airdrops and future whitelist qualifications.
Fanland aims to create a decentralized fan economy infrastructure for global music lovers to interact with their singers and idols. Web3 focuses on music festivals, NFT tickets and real-world asset DeFi. Last month, Fanland received $10 million in funding led by IME, Linear Capital and Falablock.
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Hong Kong ETFs Attract $317M, But Can It Last?
Total assets under management of the six Hong Kong Spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs have exceeded $317.4 million since their inception on April 30.
Data from local crypto exchange OSL, which serves as the trading platform and subsidiary custodian for a few of the aforementioned ETFs, shows a combined inflow of 2,079.42 Bitcoin (BTC) and 396.79 Ether (ETH).
“Together, we've tackled some of our industry's toughest challenges: smooth digital asset protection, ensuring stable liquidity and bridging traditional financial markets with the speed of off-chain operations,” commented OSL CEO Patrick Pan.
Hong Kong Spot Crypto ETFs are denominated in three fiat currencies and allow investors to register and buy ETF units in both crypto and fiat. However, most of them are managed by ETFs – with over $200 million in assets that appear to have been listed before they were listed.
According to data compiled by Farside Investors, total asset inflows into the six ETFs as of April 30 amounted to just $24.7 million, a loss of tens of billions of dollars in bitcoin ETFs entering the U.S. in the first week of its launch.
Still, many industry veterans are optimistic.
“HK ETFs at $310m are equivalent to $50b in the US market,” said Eric Balchunas, senior Bloomberg ETF analyst on April 6, citing the relative size and liquidity of the Hong Kong market compared to the United States. “So these ETFs are already as big for their local mkt as the US.”
Thomas Fahr, founder of Apollo Sats, said: “The pending rumor in the Hong Kong stock market could encourage mainland Chinese to invest and fuel this market.” However, these are only rumors and Chinese investors are currently prohibited from using Hong Kong crypto ETFs, which prevents more than 1 billion people from entering the space.
He pledged $128 million to a Hong Kong crypto ETF liquid fund.
Market makers remain bullish on Hong Kong ETF prospects.
On May 8, digital asset managers LD Capital, Antalfa Ventures and HighBlock pledged a total of $128 million to “provide market-making services to Hong Kong ETFs, which aim to improve liquidity, improve the efficiency of capital flows and reduce associated risks.” In Liquidity Exchange and Trading Volatility.
LD Capital is a digital asset fund focused on primary and secondary blockchain investments, with more than 300 blockchain enterprises in its portfolio. Analpha Ventures is a financial services platform affiliated with Bitmain, the leading manufacturer of Bitcoin mining ASICs.
Founded by former executives from major global digital asset trading platforms, HighBlock Limited has over ten years of experience in blockchain quantitative trading. The company is licensed for digital asset quantitative trading in Hong Kong and provides quantitative trading and investment portfolio management services in the digital asset sector.
An increase in liquidity could be beneficial due to liquidity constraints in the Hong Kong market and the ongoing market downturn in China, where the six-spot crypto ETFs saw trading volume of around $100 million on the first day.
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Zhiyuan Sun
Zhyuan Sun is a reporter at Cointelegraph, focusing on technology-related news. He has several years of experience writing for major financial media outlets such as The Motley Fool, Nasdaq.com and Seeking Alpha.
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