A Gibraltar court has ordered Binance, Crypto.com, Bitstamp and Kraken to freeze wallets or identify owners linked to the collapsed crypto trader.

A Gibraltar court has ordered several crypto exchanges to cooperate with the liquidators of crypto trader Globix, who are seeking to track $43 million that went astray, according to a report in the Financial Times.

Crypto.com, Bitstamp and Kraken have been ordered to identify the owners of suspect wallets, and Binance to freeze transfers, said the report, which cited the April 13 court order and talks with a person familiar with the search.

Gibraltar has sought to become a crypto hub, housing spot trading services for the Huobi exchange and ZUBR, a subsidiary of collapsed crypto exchange FTX.

The crypto trader stopped receiving investments in June amid crypto market turmoil, and filed for liquidation last month. Damian Carerras, its owner and director, who is from Gibraltar, told the FT the company it had tried to recover funds, but had been the victim of cyber crime and theft.

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The platform is now in the second stage of a three-state licensing process.

Singapore-based crypto platform Crypto.com has received its minimal viable product (MVP) preparatory license from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), the firm announced on Monday.

Obtaining license involves three stages, including getting a provisional permit, a preparatory license and an operating license. Crypto.com is in the second stage of the process.

“Once licensed to be operational, Crypto.com will be able to extend its approved suite of duly regulated virtual assets activities spanning a range of crypto exchange services (spot and derivatives), brokerage, margin/leverage trading and OTC (over-the-counter) offerings around settlements for institutional investors,” the announcement said.

“We are pleased to welcome Crypto.com to the MVP Programme preparatory phase,” VARA CEO Henson Orser said in the statement. “As such, participation from credible players like Crypto.com will further our mission of delivering a progressive and future-focused regulatory framework.”

Dubai recently unveiled its crypto regulatory framework that included a set of rules for all crypto companies and required the companies to get a licenses in order to operate in the country legally.

The past few months have seen Crypto.com go from the highs of successful approvals to operate in France and Brazil to a banned advertisement in the U.K., workforce cuts and difficulty maintaining fiat on-ramps during the current banking crisis.

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In a live question session, Kris Marszalek said the company’s balance sheet is strong.

Expect a tough crypto winter, but Crypto.com isn’t going anywhere, CEO Kris Marszalek said during a live interview hosted on its YouTube channel.

Over the past week, Crypto.com’s CRO token has dropped almost 45% on concerns the Singapore-based exchange will be the next to face a liquidity crisis. The exchange’s daily volume has collapsed from last year’s highs of around $4 billion to about $284 million this past October, according to data from Nomics, and withdrawals are on their way back up as users and investors remove their funds from the platform.

In the interview, Marszalek reiterated that the exchange has a strong balance sheet and said its exposure to FTX was limited to $10 million.

“We recovered $990 million from FTX,” Marszalek said, pointing out that fund flows between exchanges are a necessary part of the business.

An audit of Crypto.com is underway, but it will take some time. Audit firms “don’t work at crypto speed,” he said, emphasizing that Crypto.com and the industry both need full transparency to move forward.

Withdrawals are working as expected, he reiterated. The only stoppage has been related to GALA, SRM, and Ray.
“SRM is closely tied to FTX,” he said.

Marszalek said that CRO, Crypto.com’s token, has never been used as loan collateral, unlike the relationship between FTX and Alameda and FTX’s token, FTT.
“We’re never going to raise funds,” he added, stating that the business is cash flow positive.

One of Crypto.com’s more controversial moves has been stadium sponsorship, with eye-watering price tags. There are questions about how effective the whole thing is as a sales funnel. Marszalek says it is a worthwhile investment, reminding people that the contracts are paid yearly.

“We pay a small amount every year, which amounts to around 10% of our revenue. This is not crazy compared to other companies,” he said. “Growth to 70 million users is not possible without some investment into brand awareness.”

Part of the market’s mistrust of Crypto.com might stem from the exchange’s recent $400 million mishap, where it accidentally sent ether to an account at an exchange called Gate.io. That was the second time the company had mistakenly transferred an amount in the millions. In August, it was revealed the exchange had sent $10.5 million to a woman in Melbourne, and took seven months to notice.

Marszalek explained that all addresses for transfers of these scales are whitelisted and approved. The destination address was Crypto.com’s corporate account at Gate.io, and the funds were returned after Gate.io raised the corporate account’s daily transfer limit.

“The funds were at no risk of being lost,” Marszalek said. “The system would not allow us to send money somewhere it can’t be recovered.”

While some on crypto Twitter have speculated that this was part of a scheme to bolster Gate.io’s holdings before its proof of reserves were published, Marszalek said this was not the case.

As for Crypto.com’s critics Marszalek says he’s looking forward to proving them wrong with actions and words.
“Their allegations have no substance,” he said.

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The firm did not publicly disclose the deal size.

(Seoul, South Korea) – Digital asset exchange Crypto.com said on Monday that it has acquired South Korean payment service firm PnLink Co. and virtual-asset exchange OK-BIT Co.

The move has allowed Crypto.com to secure the Electronic Financial Transaction Act and Virtual Asset Service Provider registration licenses in Korea. These licenses are provided to trading and financial firms to conduct business legitimately within Korea and extend services to locals.

“This is an exciting next step for Crypto.com in an important market,” Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com, said in a statement “We are committed to working with regulators to continue to bring our products and services to market, particularly in countries like South Korea where consumers have shown strong interest and adoption of digital currencies,” he added.

Crypto.com did not disclose the deal size or whether the firm would face any regulatory hurdles.

The acquisitions come in the middle of a crypto market downturn, which has pushed several large exchanges to cut jobs and revise their growth plans.

However, in the midst of the downturn, Crypto.com has made several strides to expand. It recently received regulatory approval to operate in Italy, and Greece. In June, it obtained a license in Singapore, and in March the exchange opened an office in Dubai.

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Validators restarted the network after four hours of downtime by disabling the so-called “durable nonce transactions” that have found favor among some exchanges.

Solana suffered its latest outage Wednesday, felled for over four hours by a bug in how the blockchain processes a niche type of transaction that’s designed for offline use-cases.

Validators began restarting the network only after disabling these so-called “durable nonce transactions,” Solana Labs Communications Chief Austin Federa told CoinDesk. They will remain nixed until developers identify and patch the exact culprit that threw Solana’s consensus mechanism off-kilter.

That may have ramifications for any offline custodian whose transactions fall under this category, perhaps even freezing their ability to move funds until the patch is in, validators said. CoinDesk has begun reaching out to exchanges to ask about their Solana transaction setup.

Even so, at press time Wednesday a number of exchanges were reporting problems with Solana deposits and withdrawals. Among them: Binance, Coinbase and Crypto.com.

The chain’s native SOL token was already trading lower Wednesday when the outage began around noon Eastern; it continued its 24-hour slide and was down nearly 13% around 8:30 p.m. ET, trading at $39.98, according to CoinMarketCap.

Federa said durable nonces represented “an incredibly small percentage” of transactions on Solana until recently. The technology has been growing in popularity among exchanges. In cryptography, a nonce is a random number used for a specific purpose.

“This was probably a bug that existed for a while but never really became an issue because it isn’t something that most people use,” Federa said.

Durable nonces on Solana are designed for token-holders users with complex offline signing setups that can’t always prep their transactions fast enough for the speedy network.

For example, a custodian that signs Solana transactions with two air-gapped computers might not be able to finish the job within a single block. Normal transactions on Solana would fail in this scenario. Durable nonces give the token-holder time to work.

What happened on Wednesday was a failure in Solana’s ability to handle durable nonces. Instead of treating these niche inbounds as a single transaction, the network’s validators double-counted them as a single transaction at two different block heights, Federa said. This impossible situation effectively broke Solana’s consensus mechanism.

In a tweet, Laine from Stakewiz, a Solana validator operator, said the bug was “known” and was being fixed prior to Wednesday’s events. It “hadn’t been triggered in this form previously,” they said.

The network was slowly coming back to life on Wednesday evening as key infrastructure pieces such as RPC nodes resumed work.

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Staking rewards of as much as 8% would be offered to its card users, the company’s CEO said.

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the firm would continue to offer staking rewards to its card users a day eliminating the reward program.

The decision had led to a vocal backlash among community members on social media sites like Reddit and Twitter. Most comments were negative and critical, as reported, while prices of Crypto.com’s native CRO tokens fell as much as 11% in the hours afterward.

Crypto.com has since backtracked on its decision to fully end staking rewards, where card users locked up CRO for a 180-day period to earn yields.

“Instead of eliminating card staking earn rates completely, we will offer a more balanced approach: 8% APY for Private Members (Obsidian, Icy White, and Frosted Rose Gold) 4% APY for Royal Indigo and Jade Green card holders,” Marszalek said in a tweet on Tuesday morning.

The rewards are still lesser than those currently offered, with some users still expressing dismay. Marszalek, however, noted the changes were necessary to ensure “long-term sustainability” of the yields offered on its card product.

CRO is down 10% in the past 24 hours but showed a slight recovery in Asian hours on Tuesday after Marszalek’s tweet, CoinGecko data show.

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Newly hired GP Jon Russell says larger pool of capital is coming from Crypto.com’s balance sheet.

Singapore-based Crypto.com Capital announced today that it is expanding the size of its fund to $500 million, from the $200 million it announced in March 2021.

Jon Russell, its newly hired General Partner based in Bangkok, told CoinDesk the fund will do seed and series-A deals, typically up to a $10 million check for the series-A.

So far Crypto.com’s maiden fund has invested in play-to-earn guild YGG SEA, Ledger, and Frax Finance

The fund will be focused on investing in DeFi, NFTs, and gaming. It will typically want to lead rounds.

Russell said the fund will be focused on growing the overall crypto ecosystem, not about making investments where Crypto.com thinks it can get business.

Companies that the fund invests in won’t necessarily get listed on the Crypto.com exchange, he said.

While Crypto.com capital is expanding, management wants to keep the fund lean and entrepreneurial. They don’t want to become “an a16z” with hundreds of staff — it’s not relatable to entrepreneurs in the crypto space that run a thin organization.

Although the fund is based in Singapore, and Russell in Bangkok, it will have a global remit.

In 2021, crypto firms raised $30 billion from VCs, according to PitchBook. Despite the bear market, there’s no sign of this slowing down as alongside Crypto.com Capital’s announcement FTX kicked off the year establishing a $2 billion venture fund to invest in crypto startups.

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