Tigran Gambaryan was remanded pending trial, reports say.

Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan, who was detained by Nigerian authorities in February alongside a colleague, pleaded not guilty to money laundering charges at a high court on Monday, local outlets reported.

Gambaryan was remanded until trial, according to reports, while bail can be requested until April 18.

The head of Binance’s financial crime compliance was detained in the country along with another executive at the company, Nadeem Anjarwalla, back in February amid accusations by Nigeria’s government that Binance had helped process illegal funds worth billions of dollars and that it had manipulated the exchange rate for the Nigerian naira.

In March, Anjarwalla escaped custody and, since then, the two executives have filed suit against the Nigerian government accusing it of violating human rights.

Nigeria’s Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) has accused Binance, Gambaryan and Anjarwalla of tax evasion, while the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has accused the same parties of laundering money.

Despite Binance’s statement last week urging Gambaryan should not be held responsible for the company because he doesn’t have any desicion-making power, a Nigerian judge allowed the suit to continue, reports said.

Justice Emeka Nwite reportedly argued that Gambaryan and Anjarwalla had in the past engaged with officials in the country regarding the crypto exchange’s operations, and therefore could pass as representatives of the firm.

Gambaryan reportedly pleaded not guilty to five counts including one alleging that he, Anjarwalla and Binance used the crypto exchange to “unlawfully negotiate foreign exchange rates in Nigeria and you thereby committed an offense contrary to and punishable under section 29(1) (C) of the Foreign Exchange (Monitoring And Miscellaneous Provisions) Act.”

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The bank lifted its rating on the stock after bitcoin hit record highs and the crypto exchange’s trading volume reached levels not seen since 2021.

Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs (GS) called time on its bearish stance on crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN), upgrading the shares to neutral from sell after bitcoin (BTC) hit a record high and daily trading volumes hit levels not seen since 2021, according to a report published Thursday.

The bank also lifted its price target to $282 from $170. Coinbase shares were little changed at $242.10 in premarket trading.

“While we still see limited use cases of crypto at present, the ‘beta’ to the price action has significantly outweighed any alpha from not seeing an acceleration in retail adoption over time,” analysts led by Will Nance wrote.

Goldman attributes the stock’s advance this year to the large jump in crypto prices as well as the “company’s commitment to managing towards more consistent profitability over time.”

As bitcoin hit new highs above $67,000, data shows Coinbase’s daily volumes in the $3 billion to $5 billion range, and the bank’s analysis shows that much has been driven by increased retail participation, “which fundamentally come in at much more attractive take rates for COIN.”

The exchange has seen fundamental benefits from “increasing price on the simple trading platform, while maintaining market share, a renewed commitment to greater expense control and profitability in all market environments and tailwinds from higher interest rates as a result of COIN’s 50% revenue share of the interest income earned on USDC reserve balances,” the report added.

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The surge comes ahead of the anticipated halving event and rising inflows on bitcoin ETFs.

Bitcoin (BTC) crossed the $65,000 mark in European morning hours on Monday, inching closer to its lifetime time peak of $69,000 set in November 2021.

BTC added over 6% in the past 24 hours. The CD20, a broad-based liquid index of various tokens, was up 5.6% in the same period.

Euphoric sentiment, institutional buying demand, and historical gains linked to bitcoin’s halving event are putting the asset on track to cross its lifetime highs of $69,000 in March, some traders previously told CoinDesk.

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‘Nairobi’ is the blockchain’s fourteenth upgrade.

Tezos blockchain deployed the network’s fourteenth upgrade “Nairobi” on Monday in a move that makes transaction speeds up to eight times faster, among other enhancements.

The blockchain could previously process upto 1 million transactions per second (tps) after March’s “Mumbai” upgrade.

Developers said Nairobi introduced a new fee mechanism that charges users differently based on network usage instead of a one-size-fits-all flat fee as charged in prior blockchain versions.

Nairobi also enables Tezos’ Smart Rollups – a scaling tool that allows even faster network usage – to get upgraded continually and automatically as newer upgrades on Tezos are deployed in the future.

Meanwhile, Tezos network usage currently remains significantly low. Tezos processed just 68,000 transactions over the past 24 hours compared to popular blockchains in the same time period.

The network’s XTZ token was down 2% at 80 cents at the time of writing.

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The Solana blockchain was stuck for more than one day over the weekend, recovering only after validators restarted the network.

Solana developers said on Monday that the reason for a network-wide outage over the weekend was still unclear and that investigations were ongoing.

“At approximately 05:46:16 UTC 2023-02-25, Solana Mainnet Beta suffered a significant performance degradation,” the developers said. “Eventually leading the validator community to opt for a restart of the network. The cause of this is still unknown and under active investigation.”

“Root cause is still unknown and under active investigation,” developers added.

The problems that started as sluggish transaction processing spiraled into a near complete shutdown of activity on Solana, validators and developers told CoinDesk over the weekend.

Users were unable to move any tokens or conduct any transactions during the outage period, before a restart by the network’s validators saw transactions occur again, albeit very slowly.

Market reaction to the halt remained relatively timid. Solana’s native tokens (SOL) fell from $23.50 to just over $21 on Saturday night, before erasing all losses from Sunday to Monday.

Meanwhile, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko dismissed theories of increased network voting as a major cause behind the network outage in tweets on Monday evening.

“Votes aren’t just counted as transactions, they are literally implemented as transactions because there is no cheaper way to do it,” Yakovenko said. “If there was a cheaper way to get votes to all the nodes in the network, then why wouldn’t user transactions also take the cheaper path?”

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In 2022 India instituted a 30% tax on profits and a 1% tax deducted at source (TDS) on all transactions for the crypto sector.

India has kept its restrictive crypto tax rules unchanged in 2023. In fact, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman did not mention crypto, virtual digital assets, blockchain or central bank digital currencies (digital rupee) while unveiling the nation’s budget, which indicates the latest tax rules.

Last year, the world’s largest democracy instituted stiff taxes on crypto transactions: a 30% tax on profits and a 1% tax deducted at source (TDS) on all transactions. Predictions from the industry that the year would be a “period of pain” ostensibly came true.

Crypto trading volumes plummeted almost immediately, Indians moved more than $3.8 billion in trading volume from local to international crypto exchanges in the nine months after the announcement and interest in crypto nosedived.

Several individuals closely working in the crypto regulatory space had publicly said they were hopeful for a tax cut but privately opined that it was unlikely, CoinDesk had reported earlier this week.

The primary demand from the industry and recommendation from policy think tanks was to reduce the TDS to 0.01%, or at minimum to 0.1%.

No changes to existing crypto taxes has left “indian crypto companies on the stairway to heaven,” said Rajagopal Menon, Vice President of Indian crypto exchange WazirX. “We hope that the government will reconsider its position on crypto taxes.”

India has kept a crypto bill in cold storage since early last year saying crypto regulation cannot succeed without global coordination – something its prioritized with its agenda setting power of holding the G-20 presidency.

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The exchange denied using users’ token holding to vote on Uniswap governance.

Crypto exchange Binance denied allegations of misusing its users’ token holdings to exercise voting power on the Uniswap decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

“Binance doesn’t vote with user’s tokens. In this case, there has been a misunderstanding of what happened during the transfer of a large balance of UNI (around 4.6 million) between wallets,” a Binance spokesperson told CoinDesk this morning.

“We’re currently in discussions to improve the process to prevent any further misunderstandings from happening again,” they added. Separately, Binance pointed out in a Thursday tweet that its wallet had never voted on any Uniswap governance proposal.

The statements were in response to Uniswap creator Hayden Adams claiming on Wednesday that Binance delegated some 13 million UNI, Uniswap’s native tokens, from its books, to become the second-largest UNI delegate.

A group of core developers maintains the Uniswap codebase, but key protocol decisions are governed by the Uniswap DAO, which grants users voting rights according to how many UNI tokens they hold.

Users may also “delegate” their tokens to other entities, thereby enabling those entities to vote on their behalf.
Binance currently retains 5.9% of the voting power on Uniswap, second only to venture capital giant a16z, which controls 6.7%, as reported.

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The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures wants to know if stablecoins can fulfil their promise of cheaper, quicker transactions, according to a new Financial Stability Board report.

Global payment standard-setters want to slash the cost of sending money abroad – and on Monday, an intergovernmental group announced that they’ll be looking at whether stablecoins can help.

The Committee on Payment and Market Infrastructures, an international body that sets norms for the sector, has said it wants to probe the case for cryptos that seek to maintain value against fiat further in the coming months, according to a report published by the Financial Stability Board, an international entity tasked with monitoring the global financial system supported by central banks and finance ministries worldwide.

The CPMI “is considering whether and how the use of well-designed and risk-managed SAs [stablecoin arrangements] could enhance cross-border payments by addressing existing frictions,” the FSB said, with outcomes to be finalized by the end of this year.

“As the stablecoin sector is evolving rapidly with potential to have an impact at global scale, close attention will be required around risk management,” the report added.

The FSB, supported by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and chaired by the Netherlands’ Central Bank President Klaas Knot, is shortly due to present plans to set the world’s crypto rulebook, including sharper norms for stablecoins, ahead of a Wednesday meeting of finance ministers.

The FSB said last year that it wanted credited cross-border payments to be possible within one hour, and with transaction costs of under 1%, by 2027, and is currently exploring a number of avenues for achieving this goal.

Proponents of stablecoins such as Libra, later renamed Diem and then abandoned, have cited the current high cost and uncertainty of making cross-border payments as a compelling case, for example helping migrant workers send remittances back home.

But others have been more skeptical, especially in the wake of the high-profile collapse of algorithmic stablecoin terraUSD earlier this year. An August report from the European Central Bank proved more skeptical, saying that bitcoin and stablecoins were among the worst options for cutting costs, citing concerns over the dominant market power of privately led solutions.

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Users of Ethereum’s quicker, cheaper layer 2 networks will have access to the new wrapped staked ETH (wstETH) token.

Lido, the leading liquid staking system on Ethereum, said Thursday it will support a wrapped version of its popular staked ether (stETH) token to Ethereum layer 2 networks Arbitrum and Optimism.

Each stETH token represents an ether (ETH) token staked with Ethereum’s network, meaning it helps to secure the network in exchange for rewards. stETH, which has a market cap near $5 billion, trades around the price of ETH and has become an extremely popular asset in Ethereum’s budding decentralized finance (DeFi) scene.

Arbitrum and Optimism allow users to transact in the Ethereum ecosystem without falling prey to the network’s historically high fees and slow speeds. These so-called optimistic rollups process transactions on networks separate from Ethereum’s congested main chain, bundle those transactions up and pass them back to Ethereum where they are added to its ledger.

Over $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency was circulating on Arbirtrum and Optimism’s networks at press time according to DefiLlama. Now, users of these faster and cheaper Ethereum sister networks will have access to wrapped staked ETH (wstETH), a “wrapped” version of stETH that has been bridged over from Ethereum.

What is staked ether?

Ethereum, the largest blockchain network behind Bitcoin, moved last month to a new “proof-of-stake” system with a major upgrade dubbed “the Merge.” The new system ditched cryptocurrency mining in favor of staking, where users lock up ether (ETH), Ethereum’s native token.

Today, staking ether means sending it to an address on the Ethereum network where it accrues rewards but cannot be withdrawn. Staked ether (stETH) will remain impossible to withdraw until a network upgrade – expected sometime next year.

Users wishing to participate in staking without losing liquidity have turned to liquid staking solutions like Lido, which take their ETH, stake it, and give them a stETH token in return. This token tends to trade around the price of ETH on the open market; it will eventually be exchangeable 1:1 for ETH once the network allows stakes to be withdrawn.

Exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken have replicated the Lido playbook but their staked ETH offerings are nowhere near as popular.

Nearly $1 billion stETH sits in liquidity pools on the major decentralized exchange platform Curve, and the asset is used widely by borrowers, lenders and traders who view it as a convenient way to easily stake Ethereum (and earn interest for doing so) without losing the ability to buy and sell their tokens.

Currently, Lido – which spreads user deposits between several different validator partners – holds around 29% of all staked ETH. Staked ETH represents control of Ethereum’s security apparatus, so the high concentration of stake with Lido has led to concerns around centralization.

Wrapping tokens, moreover, comes with risks. Bridge systems like the one being used to transfer stETH from Ethereum to Arbitrum and Optimism have, in the past, been the victim of major exploits, including a recent $190 million attack on the Nomad token bridge.

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The bankrupt crypto hedge fund once aimed for a $100M NFT collection, which now may be worth less than $1M.

Starry Night Capital, a fund backed by bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, had its non-fungible tokens (NFT) moved to smart contract wallet Gnosis Safe, according to Nansen.ai.

Starry Night was set up by the doomed Singapore-based firm in August 2021 to act as an investment arm for digital collectibles following the early NFT boom. The fund partnered with well-known NFT collector Vincent Van Dough to assemble “the world’s finest collection of CryptoArt,” according to its now-defunct Twitter account. The fund’s website has also since been pulled.

CoinDesk reported last year that Three Arrows’ NFT wallets initially swooped up assets from popular collections like CryptoPunks and invested in multimillion-dollar artworks from artists including Dmitri Cherniak, with the goal of raising $100 million. In addition, the firm planned to launch an NFT educational portal and physical gallery.

Ultimately, Starry Night Capital moved its entire collection of 70 works onto NFT marketplace SuperRare, according to CoinMetrics researcher Kyle Waters, ahead of its June 2022 liquidation order. At the time, it was estimated to have spent more than $21 million building the collection.

According to Nansen.ai, NFTs previously collected by Starry Night have since been moved to a Gnosis Safe address, including a Pepe the Frog NFT Genesis, which sold in October 2021 for about $3.5 million; a Fidenza, which sold for about $1.1 million in November 2021; and several CryptoArt NFTs by XCOPY that sold at multiple points last year for around $5.5 million, among others.

The shifting of these assets into a Gnosis Safe is significant, given that the smart contract digital asset management platform requires multiple signatures to move assets – meaning, multiple team members need to approve each transaction in order for it to be executed. This method is helpful for companies that may have multiple owners of a digital portfolio and prevents any single party from running off with the funds inside.

As noted by CoinDesk’s Sam Reynolds, it’s difficult to value all of the NFTs in the Starry Night safe because different valuation tools use different metrics in their estimations. According to Nansen.ai, the portfolio of NFTs is worth about 625 ether (ETH), or about $846,431. In addition, it notes that about 89% of the NFTs in the collection have low liquidity, which it measures as less than 35 sales in the last seven days.

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