Welcome to the daily crypto news :

• Crypto hedge funds and mining regulations: Bad crypto news of the week ;

• Over $150M Drained in KuCoin Crypto Exchange Hack ;

• Ethereum still not ready for DeFi, say some critics ;

• CoinDesk Reporters Discuss FinCEN Files, Venezuela's Stablecoin Flop and More ;

Crypto hedge funds and mining regulations: Bad crypto news of the week

It’s been a difficult week for Bitcoin this week. The price has fallen about 5 percent over the last seven days to drop beneath $10,400. It could bounce but if it continues downwards, it might drop below $10,000 and get dangerously close to the CME gap.

One sign that the price might fall further has been a decline in the number of Bitcoin addresses holding a single Bitcoin. They’ve reached a four-month low. But Tyler Winklevoss still thinks that Bitcoin is better than gold, and Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor has moved from bear to bull. His company recently bought almost 16,800 Bitcoins over 74 hours, spending about $175 million. Paypal is bearish too. The payments firm is working on a way to allow merchants to accept cryptocurrencies.

In Brazil, fund manager Hashdex has made an agreement with Nasdaq to launch the world’s first crypto asset exchange-traded fund. The fund will trade on the Bermuda Stock Exchange. And while Hashdex is deepening crypto trading, meat processing firm JBS is using the blockchain to monitor its supply chain and ensure that none of its suppliers are raising cattle on illegally deforested land.

Australia also sees an opportunity to secure food supplies with the blockchain. The government-backed agricultural supply chain platform, Entrust, will use Hedera Hashgraph to ensure that wine from the Clare Valley region isn’t counterfeit.

In Russia, the government has said that it will prioritize the development of blockchain technologies, while in Venezuela, the Maduro government has issued a decree to regulate crypto mining. Miners in the country now need a license.

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Over $150M Drained in KuCoin Crypto Exchange Hack

Over $150 million of an Asian cryptocurrency exchange’s funds have been compromised in a security breach.

The Singapore-headquartered digital asset exchange KuCoin said in a statement that it detected large withdrawals of bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH) tokens to an unknown wallet beginning at 19:05 UTC time on Friday.

In a live stream on 4:30 UTC time Saturday, KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu said that one or more hackers obtained the private keys to the exchange’s hot wallets. KuCoin transferred what was left in them to new hot wallets, abandoned the old ones and froze customer deposits and withdrawals, Lyu said.

KuCoin’s cold wallets were unaffected, Lyu claimed. Cold cryptocurrency wallets are not connected to the Internet and are considered more secure than hot cryptocurrency wallets.

In an updated statement on its website, KuCoin released a list of BTC, bitcoin SV (BSV), ETH, LTC, XRP, Stellar lumens (XLM), Tron (TRX) and Tether (USDT) wallet addresses where the stolen funds were transferred.

Two Ethereum wallets belonging to KuCoin have sent more than 11,480 ETH, which currently trades at a price of about $350, to the Ethereum wallet address associated with the hack, according to data from blockchain explorer Etherscan.

The Ethereum wallet address has also received over 150 Ethereum-based tokens worth more than $150 million from the two KuCoin Ethereum wallets, Etherscan’s data shows.

The other identified wallets have received exactly 14,713 BSV, 26,733 LTC, 18,495,798 XRP and 999,160 USDT, along with over 1,008 BTC, 9,588,383 XLM, and 199,038,936 TRX, according to blockchain explorers Blockchair and Tronscan.

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Ethereum still not ready for DeFi, say some critics

As DeFi projects flock to Ethereum, experts warn the network is not yet ready to support the frenzy.

Martin Froehler, a mathematician, former hedge fund manager, and founder of Austrian crypto trading platform Morpher, told Cointelegraph that although Ethereum is the “best thing [the blockchain industry] has” for DeFi, the current capabilities of the network are not enough:

“Ethereum can only handle about 15 transactions per second and has a block-time of 15 seconds, which is an eternity in finance. By design everyone interacting with it needs Ether. That is a huge barrier to entry and mass adoption.”

Froehler considers Ethereum the most decentralized smart contract platform. But because the network still has issues, developers have had to look for solutions to counter them.

Froehler added:

“There is cryptographic proof for everything that happens on the sidechain on Ethereum. (…) People are able [to] trade without needing Ether. They don’t pay any fees, enjoy a settlement time of one second, and are completely independent of the many congestions on the Ethereum network.”

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CoinDesk Reporters Discuss FinCEN Files, Venezuela's Stablecoin Flop and More

From the CoinDesk Global Macro news desk, this is Borderless – a twice-monthly roundup of the most important stories impacting Bitcoin and the crypto sector from around the world. It’s created by reporters Nikhilesh De, Anna Baydakova and Danny Nelson.

On today’s show: the FinCEN files, AirTM isn’t working in Venezuela the way people hoped and stablecoin regulations are reappearing in the U.S. and Europe.

CoinDesk’s inaugural episode of Borderless discusses the FinCEN Files, which showed that not only is a global superpower keeping tabs on thousands of financial transactions, but it doesn’t appear to actually be tamping down on the alleged crimes it purportedly wants to halt using this data. What’s more, many of these transaction records aren’t suspicious. Should the government hold onto this personal and financial data for 20 years?

Stablecoin regulations are resurging in both Europe and the U.S., with government officials in both regions publishing new guidance discussing how stablecoins might be regulated and how issuers can interact with banks. The EU wants stablecoin issuers to abide by strict “e-money” rules, according to draft legislation leaked last week. Meanwhile, a federal banking regulator in the U.S. says nationally regulated banks can offer stablecoin issuers financial services.

This applies specifically to hosted wallets, meaning wallets that are controlled by a trusted (regulated) third party. Wallets where users directly control the keys do not fall into the guidance. For its part, the Securities and Exchange Commission warns that some of these digital assets may or may not look like securities, and recommends that issuers contact it prior to launching a new token.

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