This week there has been a keen interest in the exchanges. Many are trying to figure out how much confidence can be maintained in centralized systems, while others bet on decentralized platforms!
- Interesting facts: 13% of Americans have ever worked with crypto
According to a recent JPMorgan study, the number of Americans who have ever converted their money into cryptocurrency increased from 3% in 2020 to 13% in 2022. There was a strong generational difference in the study, with millennials using cryptocurrency at 20%, Generation X at 11%, and baby boomers at 4%.
- The rise in popularity of decentralized platforms
Investors do not lose interest in crypto-assets, but because of the instability of exchanges, they move to decentralized systems. As it was mentioned in earlier news, users withdrew over $5 billion from Binance alone. According to Glassnode, users withdrew about $1.4 billion from BTC exchanges during December 14th. Also, net outflows were registered not only for Bitcoin, but also for Ethereum and Tether.
Also, the volume of Bitcoins stored on the balances of long-term holders reaches about 70% of the total currency volume and reaches a historical maximum of 13.9 million BTC.
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- Jack Dorsey donates 14 BTC to the decentralized project Nostr
Another businessman who decided to invest in a decentralized social network project was the former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey. This time businessman donated 14 bitcoins to the project, which equals more than $250,000. On Tuesday, December 13, Jack said in a blog post that he plans to give the network a grant of $1 million to support the development of an open Internet.
- Binance is storming
These weeks, the biggest part of the news concerned the largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance.
Nansen reported early on December 12, that Binance recorded $1.6 billion in outflows from its platform during the day. After it Binance suspended withdrawals of USD Coin Stablecoin (USDC) in TRON, BNB Chain, and Ethereum. That also sparked rumors of problems at the exchange. But Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, said that the exchange is not experiencing any liquidity problems, according to him customers can withdraw 100% of their assets without any problems.
Prior to that, after the collapse of FTX at the end of November, Binance ordered an audit of its assets, which was engaged by Mazars. So according to their reports, the company’s assets are secured by 101%. The company was criticized by several cryptocurrency platforms for its activities, which pointed out that the reports did not recalculate all of the organizations’ digital assets. Mazeras has now suspended service to all cryptocurrency clients and the Binance audit document has been removed from its website. At the same time, the results of Mazeras’ report were confirmed by CryptoQuant, an audit firm. According to their words, Binance reserves match the declared ones by 99%.
- Gemini users’ data leak
On December 15, Gemini exchange reported about leaks of the user data. As it follows from the press release due to phishing attacks scammers got access to email addresses and incomplete data about users’ phone numbers. The platform’s internal data was not compromised.
The day after, Gemini was shutting down the exchange to carry out technical work. The firm postponed the work several times and was offline for over 7 hours in total.