Crypto.com suspended withdrawals on its platform yesterday after users reported “unauthorized activity”. The company temporarily paused withdrawals while investigating, and many users experienced difficulty logging in. The company also advised users to sign back into their accounts and reset their two-factor authentication (2FA), although many users found that they could not set up 2FA due to an error. Later at 18:00 UTC, Crypto.com announced that withdrawals had resumed and all funds were safe.
Bank Alfalah, one of Pakistan’s major banks, reportedly asked its customers to avoid conducting cryptocurrency transactions, shortly after the country’s central bank, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), submitted a report to the Sindh High Court recommending a complete crypto ban. Bank Alfalah sent a text message to its customers warning that “virtual currencies / coins / tokens, etc. are not legal tender, issued or guaranteed by the government of Pakistan, and (SBP) has not authorized or licensed any individual or entity for the same”. Other Pakistani banks have blocked credit card crypto transactions or froze accounts linked to buying and selling crypto on the Binance P2P marketplace.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has issued guidelines to limit advertising of cryptocurrency trading, saying that such activity is “highly risky and not suitable for the general public”. The guidelines prohibit licensed crypto trading service providers from promoting digital payment token (DPT) services (in other words, cryptocurrency) to the general public in any public area in Singapore or use third parties (such as social media influencers) to do so. Crypto firms are therefore limited to their own business websites, mobile apps or official social media pages for marketing and advertising their services.
15 privacy-centric crypto assets have seen a double-digit spike in values over the last week, with Monero (XMR) rising 13%, Dusk (DUSK) 47% and Secret (SCRT) 50%, among others such as apollo (APL), bitcoinz (BTCZ), masari (MSR) and veil (VEIL). According to metrics from coingecko.com’s list of privacy token market caps, such assets are worth $12.2 billion. XMR has the highest market valuation at $3.9 billion, while DUSK’s market valuation is at $390 million and SCRT’s is at $1.4 billion.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is jumping on the play-to-earn (P2E) bandwagon, predicting that it will dominate the gaming world in just a few short years. Discussing potential blockchain tech uses in gaming on the Where It Happens podcast, he said, “90% of people will not play a game unless they are being properly valued for that time.” He added that in 5 years, people would “value your time properly” and “play some on-chain equivalent game” that allows them to actually earn value, instead of being “harvested for advertisements” or “fleeced for dollars”.
Ethereum’s EIP-1559 upgrade — which introduced a partial network fee-burning mechanism in Aug 2021 — has launched on Polygon in a bid to improve “fee visibility”. Ethereum said that the burning “is a two-step affair that starts on the Polygon network and completes on the Ethereum network” and entails the same fee-burning mechanism to Polygon that leads to the destruction of MATIC tokens. Since going live on Ethereum in July last year, the upgrade has resulted in the burning of 1.54 million ETH, worth around $5 billion based on current ETH prices.
According to data from the Huobi Global, BTC continued its decline to reach a current low of 41,723.02 USDT, while ETH fell to 3,128.59 USDT. The daily charts for both BTC and ETH show relatively sluggish trading volume and signs of a downward trend, with both experiencing three consecutive periods of price falls.
