Bitcoin's price unexpectedly dropped below $70,000 after a strong US jobs report, causing liquidations across the crypto market.
Ark Invest dropped out of the Ethereum ETF race, leaving its partner firm, 21 Shares, to continue on its own.
Crypto investigator Zach XBT called out Floyd Mayweather for promoting yet another potential crypto scam.
A data breach at Coingecko's email provider has seen massive amounts of user information stolen, and over 23,000 scam emails have now been sent.
Elliptic also warns about the growing threat of AI-driven crypto scams and hacks, on the heels of a major Elon Musk crypto scam from last week.
Last week came and went by fairly quickly, even with the unexpectedly bearish turn of events when Bitcoin crashed from $71,000 to less than $70,000 after a particularly strong US jobs report.
We had reports that Ark Invest dropped out of the Ethereum ETF race. We also had reports from a blockchain detective, who called out boxing champion, Floyd Mayweather on Twitter (X), over ANOTHER crypto scam after allegedly pulling several of them off in recent years.
Here are some of the most interesting stories across the crypto market from last week:
After the SEC gave the green light for 8 Ethereum ETF filings only two weeks ago on 23 May, last week came with reports of how Ark Invest dropped out of the race, leaving its partner firm, 21 Shares to continue solo.
21 Shares has since refiled an updated application for its Ethereum spot ETF, which has now been renamed from “Ark 21Shares Ethereum ETF” to “21Shares Core Ethereum ETF”
The updated filing shows no major changes to the Ethereum ETF application.
However, according to Ark Invest CEO, Cathie Wood at Consensus 2024 in an interview with Peter McCormack, the company decided not to proceed with an Ether ETF, because “ARK Invest's Bitcoin ETF from January wasn’t making the firm any money”
This decision doesn't affect the 21Shares + Ark Invest collaboration on other projects but will see a possible approval of the spot Bitcoin ETFs without Ark Invest.
Last week, crypto vigilante and detective, Zach XBT called out another famous name over a massive crypto scam.
This “famous name” is boxer, Floyd Mayweather, and according to reports, Mayweather had a long history with crypto token scams, lawsuits and court settlements.
The boxing ring legend has allegedly been involved with promoting NFT scam projects like Mayweverse and RealFloydNFT, plus other well-known scams like Ethereum Max in 2022, Bored Bunny, and Moonshot.
This time around, Mayweather launched a new crypto memecoin called $FLOYD, promoting it on Twitter and other social platforms—before deleting his tweets.
This is similar to the crypto scam involving Australia's Iggy Azalea, Nigeria's Davido, along the US' Caitlyn Jenner among others.
Recall that in 2022, the SEC charged Mayweather and DJ Khaled with failing to disclose payments they received for promoting three ICOs, plus a separate $100,000 payment from Centra Tech.
Before that, in 2018, the boxer was also forced to pay fines of over $600,000 for illegally shilling tokens that turned out to be scams.
Bitcoin crashed straight down to $69,000 this month and last week on 8 June, along with a general crash across the stock market.
The cause of this crash came from reactions to the latest U.S. payroll data, which suggested that the labour market was coping much better with recently tightened fiscal policies.
The total crypto liquidations chart
Because of this crash, Bitcoin alone wiped nearly $70 million off the board in terms of liquidations.
The rest of the market combined ended up with $360 million worth of bullish liquidations, with thousands of traders kicked off leveraged trades.
According to crypto analyst and trader, Skew in a recent tweet, the $71.6K zone is likely the major determining factor in Bitcoin’s ability to continue further upwards.
Bitcoin’s long/short ratio
At the time of writing (9 June) the Bitcoin long/short ratio has flipped bullish, showing that more investors are now buying the dip (51.9%), rather than selling (48.03).
According to Coingecko in a recent report released last week on 7 June, its third-party email management platform GetResponse was compromised on 5 June.
So far, attackers have been able to steal and export the contact information of over 1.9 million CoinGecko users.
The report shows that users’ names, emails, IP addresses, and even other miscellaneous data like the location of email opens, sign-up dates and subscription plans, etc have also been stolen.
The attacker has also managed to send around 23,723 phishing emails.
So far, it is important to stay safe this week and in the weeks to come, and to be wary of emails promising airdrops, quick rewards, or suspicious links.
Last week, Elliptic, one of the forerunning blockchain security firms, issued a warning.
This warning was about the rise of AI-driven crypto crime, and that we might only be at the beginning of a wave of powerful cyber offences, backed by AI.
The report emphasized the growing trend of deepfake tech being used to create videos and pictures of high-ranking government officials and celebrities, before being used to promote scams and hacks.
Just last week, we had reports of over 35 YouTube channels live streaming AI deepfakes of Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, promising to return double the amount of crypto to people who sent money into a wallet address.
“This is not a fake, this is a real giveaway. I personally guarantee it to you," the deepfake Musks said, "everything is fast, simple and efficient”.
We also had videos of former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong being used to promote a similar scheme as outlined on page 9 of the elliptic report.
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