Binance hits out at Reuters, USDD loses peg, Paxful delists ETH

The biggest news in the cryptoverse for Dec. 12 includes Binance saying “Reuters has it wrong again,” obscure token takes up 15% of ETH gas fees, USDD loses peg, and more

CryptoSlate Top Stories

XEN crypto, an ERC-20 token launched in October, accounts for about 15% of all Ethereum gas fees.

A recent chart shared on Twitter by Mhonkasalo showed that the XEN token gas as of December 11 is four times that of all Layer-2 networks and 20% more than that of OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace.

Binance said on Dec. 12 that Reuters falsely stated that the U.S. Department of Justice is looking to prosecute Binance over money laundering changes.

In the statement, Binance claimed that Reuters was “attacking our incredible law enforcement team” as the company shared the press release sent to Reuters. The company also shared a new blog post focused on its ” Fight Against Crypto Crime.”

The Hong Kong Securities and Regulatory Commission plans to draft new regulatory provisions to implement under its new crypto regulation system in the wake of FTX’s collapse, according to local media reports.

The Commission reportedly argued that the FTX fallout had affected other virtual tokens and the entire crypto industry. The incident demonstrates the possible catastrophic effects of using a trading platform that is not fully regulated.

Tron’s USDD stablecoin has lost its peg as its price dipped to $0.97, sparking fears of another UST collapse.

The Tron-based algorithmic stablecoin launched on May 5, and its market cap currently stands at roughly $708 million. Tron founder Justin Sun said USDD would be over-collateralized by low-volatile assets like USDT, USDC, and Bitcoin, to avoid a repeat of UST’s collapse.

The Tron DAO Reserve shows the USDD supply at $725.3 million, with collateral consisting of TRX, BTC, USDT, and USDC totaling $1.4 billion in value — equating to a ratio of 200%.

Ray Youssef, CEO and co-founder of Paxful, announced plans to remove Ethereum from the platform and said that the “revenue is nice but integrity trumps all.”

The comment came in response to an assessment from Jeremy Garcia, the CEO of Bitcoin education site Satoshi’s Journal, who blasted Ethereum as “poorly designed” and uncompliant with the “1st principles” of cryptocurrency.

Research Highlight

Using realized cap, instead of market cap, to calculate BTC.D gives a current figure of 60%, which is more in line with expectations of the bulk of users cycling into Bitcoin as a safety play during a bear market.

However, like the market cap method for calculating BTC.D, the realized cap method also shows dominance at much higher percentages (than 60%) during past bear markets, such as in 2015, when it was around 90%.

This begs questions about changing market dynamics in 2022 versus 2015.

Bitcoin ownership is still growing among retail investors, with three million BTC holdings at present, while whale accumulation is declining, with the recent number around nine million, according to Glassnode data analyzed by CryptoSlate.

A retail investor is someone who holds one bitcoin or less, and a whale is someone who holds more than 1000 bitcoins. Bitcoin holdings by retail investors have doubled since 2018, when they held 1.5 million, whereas institutional investors held 10 million.

Crypto Market

In the last 24 hours, Bitcoin (BTC) increased by 0.26%  to trade at $17,164.94, while Ethereum (ETH) increased by %1.12 to trade at $1,268.27.

Biggest Gainers (24h)

• Magic (MAGIC) +38.66%
• Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) +10.67%
• BinaryX (BNX) +10.44%

Biggest Losers (24h)

• Hooked Protocol (HOOK) -15.27%
• Celsius (CEL) -14.91%
• PlayDapp (PLA) -14.12%