Tuesday's a big day — the entire U.S. House of Representatives and about a third of the Senate is up for grabs in the midterms.
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'FTX is fine,' Sam Bankman-Fried insists 😬
Sam Bankman-Fried has insisted "FTX is fine" after his crypto empire was rocked by a series of allegations. The saga links back to a CoinDesk article last week that delved into the finances of Alameda Research, FTX's sister company. An investigation revealed its balance sheet mainly consisted of FTT — a token issued by FTX — raising questions about liquidity. To make matters worse, Binance's CEO Changpeng Zhao then said his exchange would offload the FTT remaining on its books. Alameda insists the balance sheet scrutinized by CoinDesk is incomplete, and misses out $10 billion in other assets it owns. Nonetheless, the flurry of speculation has hit FTT hard — and it has fallen by 30% over the past seven days.
Bitcoin is now back below $20,000 📉
The crypto markets suffered a sharp pullback in the early hours of Tuesday — dragging Bitcoin back below $20,000. A sudden correction means BTC has now handed back all of the gains made late last week, when the world's biggest cryptocurrency surged to two-month highs of $21,466. While Bitcoin is down 4.9% on the day at the time of writing, many altcoins are faring far worse — with Ether sliding 5.8%. And the reversal of fortunes has been especially calamitous for Dogecoin, which has fallen by 12.7% over the past 24 hours. As euphoria surrounding Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter begins to fade, DOGE has also plunged by 30% on a seven-day timeframe. This might all be linked to nerves over FTX, or jitters surrounding the U.S. midterms.
Feds seize a whopping 50,676 BTC 🚨
A whopping 50,676 BTC has been seized by the U.S. Department of Justice — the second-largest seizure ever. The stash was recovered back in November 2021 — days after Bitcoin hit a new all-time high — and was worth $3.36 billion at the time. It comes after a man called James Zhong pled guilty to unlawfully obtaining the Bitcoin from the Silk Road marketplace all the way back in 2012. Explaining how the seizure was achieved, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: "For almost 10 years, the whereabouts of this massive chunk of missing Bitcoin had ballooned into a $3.3 billion mystery. Thanks to state-of-the-art tracing and old-fashioned police work, law enforcement located and recovered this impressive cache."
