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FTX Japan Might Soon Allow Fund Withdrawals to Its Clients

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FTX Japan stated that they are currently working with Japanese regulators in order to ensure customer withdrawals as soon as possible.

According to Bloomberg, the Japanese subsidiary of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX is working to facilitate withdrawals for its investors. If successful, this would be a rare case of investors getting their money back from a collapsed exchange.

On November 8, three days before FTX Japan filed for bankruptcy, the exchange had first suspended withdrawals. However, as stated on the FTX Japan website, the firm’s management team has decided to resume withdrawal services. The company is currently working on a security audit and incorporating controls, reconciliation, and reviews before resuming services fully.

Japanese regulators are requesting a timeline to return customer funds as soon after the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX. Once verification is complete, balances will be moved to the Liquid platform where customers can then withdraw their money.

FTX Japan K.K. currently has $46 million in fiat currency and $94.5 million in crypto assets held in customer accounts, according to a report from the company on Wednesday (Sept 9). FTX Japan said that Japanese customers’ digital assets and cash shouldn’t be included as part of FTX Japan’s estate, meaning that local unit will resume withdrawal services for its customers soon.

FTX Japan’s management team is in regular communication with the relevant regulators. In addition, they explained that all asset-segregated wallets have their private keys kept offline and under the complete control of FTX Japan’s operations team.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been making public appearances despite the recent crypto market crash. SBF recently gave his first network interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, adding that he feels the burden of not having done enough to save FTX.

“I expect I’m gonna have nothing at the end of this.”

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried sits down with @GStephanopoulos for a one-on-one interview following both companies in his cryptocurrency empire filing for bankruptcy last month. https://t.co/FxYbmQi92Z pic.twitter.com/lMviovTymN

— Good Morning America (@GMA) December 1, 2022

 

“I’m not the villain,” SBF said, defending his innocence. He continued:

 

“A lot of people look at you and see Bernie Madoff,” Stephanopoulos said. “I don’t think that’s who I am at all,” Bankman-Fried responded. “But I understand why they’re saying that. People lost money. People lost a lot of money.”

 

SBF’s latest tweets also included FTX US halting withdrawals, to which he responded with surprise.

Nearly 400K Ethereum Moved By Whales Amid ETH Price Dump

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In the last 24 hours, Ethereum (ETH) has dropped by more than 8% in value. However, this motivated whales to invest more money into ETH.

As seen in the Whale Alert data, Crypto whales have moved around 400K Ethereum from the crypto exchanges. More than $445 million worth of Ethereum was dumped into multiple unknown wallets amid a price crash.

The data tracker revealed that whales transferred around 300k Ethereum (worth $333 million) from Upbit, a cryptocurrency exchange, to different wallets. However, the biggest transaction recorded by the tracker was adding $129.1 million worth of ETH from the same exchange.

ETH’s price has decreased by 12% in the last week, trading at an average price of $1,128 at press time. Surprisingly, though, its 24 hour trading volume is up 103% to around $11.9 billion. ETH’s market capitalization currently rests at about $137 billion.

Coinglass data reports that 66,704 traders have cashed out a total of $180 million from the cryptocurrency market in the past 24 hours. However, approx $40 million was withdrawn from Ethereum by these same traders. Moreover, 85% of all liquidations came from long positions.

According to recent reports, the global crypto market cap has fallen below $800 billion and currently hovers at around $795 billion. In the last 24 hours alone, Bitcoin prices have decreased by 4%, with the average price per coin now resting at $15,998.

The hacker who stole $600 million from the now collapsed exchange of FTX is rapidly converting the funds to Bitcoin, as reported by Coingape. It was mentioned that the thief successfully converted all stablecoins over to ETH; The total value of their Ethereum accumulation came out to be around $288 billion.

CDBCs behind the scene

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The inevitable collapse of physical Fiat currencies is why central banks around the world have been scrambling to develop their Central Bank digital currencies or CDBCs.

Not surprisingly the bank of England has been one of the most active in this regard, but it’s not the only one.

Over 90 percent of central banks are actively exploring CDBC’s, according to the bank for international settlements or BIS.

Fun fact – the BIS is the bank for central banks and it has been coordinating the rollout of CDBC’s around the world.

Now, Australia recently announced that it will be testing its digital Aussie dollar mid next year, this is around the time that the FEDs own fast payment service is supposed to be rolled out note that fast payment services are effectively a precursor to CDBC’s according to the BIS naturally.

Russia is working on its own CDBC which it plans to use for trade with China.

Russia’s digital Ruble is reportedly expected later this year and China’s own digital Yuan appears to be entering its final phase of rollout note that these are retail CDBC’s meaning they will be used by regular people.

Next we have a CDBC test which involved Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE and China that was apparently very successful.

This test involved the BIS’s so-called multi-CDBC platform or MCDBC which is thankfully restricted to wholesale CDBCs that are intended for select individuals and institutions.

This is similar to the BIS’s so-called Icebreaker Hub, International CDBC experiment which will feature Norway, Sweden and Israel.

Note that Norway is reportedly testing its upcoming digital currency on Ethereum.

Israel reportedly did the same last summer, the more you know.

It seems that the only thing that’s left for the central banks to do is find some way of getting rid of cash.

Now I’ve long speculated that inflation is how they will achieve this and it looks like that prediction is starting to play out due to seemingly unrelated reasons, nobody will want cash when it’s worth nothing.

Luckily there is no way for these central banks to stop cryptocurrency, especially BTC there will always be a way to get your hands on cryptocurrency so long as the internet is intact.

Let’s hope they don’t do anything funny on that front.

Turning to the crypto charts of last week

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So turning to the charts we can see that BTC continues to trade sideways at around 19k.

Some would say that testing this level is a good sign for BTC as it’s building a strong zone of support.

Others would say that testing this level is a bad sign for BTC as it means BTC’s price will eventually drop.

I lean towards the latter outcome and one indicator I’ve been watching closely lately is the balance of BTC on exchanges.

Recently exchange balances have been quite positively correlated to BTC’s price correlation, doesn’t equal causation but it’s easy to understand.

The causal relationship now a lower balance of BTC on exchanges means more volatility as I mentioned earlier the hype around Aptos and the lack of Bitcoin dominance suggests that there’s still lots of speculation in the crypto Market.

This suggests that there is lots of Leverage and that means lots of liquidations as such if a bearish macro or crypto Factor comes around.

The liquidation of leveraged BTC Traders would cause BTC to crash taking the rest of the crypto Market with it conversely.

Of course a bullish macro or crypto Factor would cause BTC and the altcoins to Rally so prepare for either outcome.

Now last week’s top performing cryptos were the Hobie token, Aptos Ave, ton coin and Lido Finance.

Starting with the Huobi token HT has been rallying ever since about Capital announced that it would be taking control of the crypto exchange at the beginning of October.

It looks like Huobi has been listing lots of altcoins lately as well.

Now because HT is an exchange token there’s really no point in applying technical analysis to it, that’s because its price action is fundamentally dependent on what the exchange does or doesn’t do.

Even so you can clearly see that HT is hitting its head on some serious long-term resistance at around nine dollars.

Next up is Aptos which we already covered so let’s go straight to the TA because APT has only been trading for about a week, there isn’t enough price history to identify a trend.

All the TA indicators won’t even load because there isn’t enough data all I’ll say is that new cryptos tend to crash after listing.

As for Ave, the Ave token has been rallying ever since the Ave team provided a detailed update about the upcoming go stablecoin in mid-October.

For those unfamiliar go is a decentralized stablecoin like Maker Dow’s DAI, but with a lot more bells and whistles.

Interestingly the Bollinger band and RSI indicators suggest that are they has more room to grow on both the weekly and the daily chart.

That’s because RV’s price hasn’t pierced the top of the Bollinger band and the RSI is sitting at 50 on the weekly and around 60 on the daily, anything over 70 to 80 is overbought.

This extra room for a rally makes sense given that the RV team explicitly mentioned that the initial markets for the go stablecoin will be introduced to the Ave protocol in the coming weeks.

No exact dates were provided but the resulting speculation is probably carrying ave’s price.

When it comes to Ton coin, some of you may recall that this crypto was originally created by telegram, after some legal issues a bit of controversy and the establishment of an independent entity it looks like telegram is finally starting to integrate toncoin and that has Ton rallying.

This would be amazing were it not for the fact that Ton has limited exchange support and its long-term price action doesn’t look all that promising, either I do reckon though that this is a crypto to keep a close eye on during the next bull market.

Telegram has over 550 million monthly active users after all, not Financial advice of course.

And last but not least we have Lido Finance whose LDO token appears to have rallied on the announcement that the Lido Finance developers are beginning to prepare the protocol for ETH withdrawals.

Recall that these will be enabled as part of Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade that I covered earlier.

LDO seems to have reclaimed that zone between 1,40 and 1,50 which has served as a significant point of both support and resistance for LDO in the past.

It’s hard to see how LDO could rally much higher from here, especially since the rally has been driven by an event that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

You can find out when East withdrawals could be enabled on Ethereum’s Beacon Chain by checking out our most recent update about the project.

SEC continues its crusade against the crypto!

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As we’ve seen with cryptocurrencies like XRP a securities designation would result in a delisting from all US exchanges and worse.

Gary’s comments could actually be another reason why institutions haven’t fo mode into ETH just yet – they are likely waiting for regulatory clarity about ETH’s post-merge status before making any big moves.

Note that crypto regulations are cited as the greatest concerns among institutional investors.

Regardless of all this however there is a lot to look forward to for proof of stake Ethereum.

Unfortunately for all the institutions that are interested in ETH it doesn’t look like the SEC will be providing regulatory clarity anytime soon.

That’s because Gary recently reiterated that almost every cryptocurrency is a security without explaining why.

To clarify a security is an asset like a stock in a company.

Now whether an asset counts as a security is supposed to be determined by something called the howie test the TLDR there is that if there is a third party.

You can identify that’s creating an expectation of profit then said asset is a security.

The problem is that this doesn’t seem to be the same criterion the SEC is using.

The regulator is hypersensitive to anything that could be considered promotion of a cryptocurrency by a centralized party.

In theory larger altcoins like Ethereum and Cardano should be safe from the SEC scrutiny because they’re sufficiently decentralized.

This means that you can’t single out a specific entity that’s creating an expectation of profit when you stack ETH or ADA.

In practice however Gary unironically believes that every single altcoin is a security including stable coins.

Gary laid out his reasoning for this in his recent testimony which took place on the same day as the merge.

Another coincidence if ever there was one.

Gary sees Ethereum, Cardano and others as fair game for the SEC.

This is because there are individuals like Vitalik Buterin and institutions like input-output that are creating expectations of profit or so Gary says I’ll reiterate that this is Gary’s reasoning not mine and while Gary’s comments are supposed to be nothing more than his personal opinion they clearly could carry over to the SEC’s policies.

As such it’s safe to assume that we may see some sort of enforcement action taken against major altcoins.

It seems that the only thing that’s been holding the SEC back has been a legal precedent that it can cite to justify its crypto crackdown.

This is why the SEC’s case against a crypto project called Library is so important.

The decision on that is due any day now and it might even be out by the time you.

Now without getting into the weeds if the judge sides with Library then the SEC’s attack against XRP and any other cryptocurrency will have a lot fewer teeth if any.

Conversely if the judge sides with the SEC then it could set the exact precedent the regulator needs to go after other larger altcoins.

This case is more significant than you think because if the judge sides with the SEC it will also create a clear path for the regulator to go after cryptocurrency exchanges.

This is because the SEC can claim that Coinbase and others were offering unregistered securities to retail investors which is against the law.

What I’m especially concerned about is retail investors losing access to the decentralized finance ecosystem something the SEC has also singled out in its enforcement actions obviously.

Without ETH or ADA it’ll be extremely difficult to access the Ethereum or Cardano ecosystems.

For what it’s worth it looks like the SEC is starting to get a lot of pushback from US politicians and not just because of its approach to cryptocurrency.