Are cryptocurrency games innocent fun? Or are they Ponzi schemes facing an imminent crackdown by regulators in the United States? Tokens related to cryptocurrency games — known colloquially as “GameFi” — were worth a cumulative total of nearly $10 billion as of mid-August, give or take a few billion. (The number may vary depending on whether you want to include partially finished projects, how you count the number of tokens that projects technically have in circulation, and so on.) In that sense, whether the games are legal is a $10 billion question that few investors have considered. And that’s an …

Searching for more evidence that self-custody of your cryptocurrency holdings beats a centralized manager? Look to the latest action by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The agency sent a letter to FTX Exchange this month — along with four other entities — that included a cease and desist order for “false and misleading statements.” Namely, it accused the exchange of falsely implying that user funds were FDIC-insured. It could have turned into an ugly situation if customers expected — but did not receive — a certain level of protection in the event of catastrophic failure. It’s difficult to ascertain …

Two prominent YouTube content creators are set to lock horns in a legal battle over a cryptocurrency video allegedly promoting a project that ended up being a scam. Bitboy Crypto, a YouTube channel founded by Ben Armstrong, produces a variety of content focused on cryptocurrency news, projects and tokens and trading advice. The channel has been active since February 2018 and has over 1.4 million subscribers. The channel is known for its news pieces and trading-focused videos with headlines like ‘Top 3 Coins To Outperform Ethereum! (Strong Short Term Play)’ typifying the type of content disseminated to viewers. While these …

Crypto lending platform Celsius Network has filed a lawsuit claiming that custodian Prime Trust failed to turn over roughly $17 million worth of cryptocurrency. In a Tuesday filing with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, Celsius’ legal team brought a complaint against Prime Trust, alleging the company did not return $17 million worth of crypto assets in June 2021 when it terminated its relationship with the lending firm. According to Celsius, Prime Trust acted as crypto custodian for New York- and Washington-based users from 2020 through mid-2021, returning $119 million in crypto following the end of …

One user has filed a class-action lawsuit against crypto exchange Coinbase on behalf of account and wallet holders “who have had their accounts breached and incurred losses arising from the unauthorized transfer of assets.” In an Aug. 15 filing in U.S. district court for the Northern District of Georgia, plaintiff George Kattula requested a jury trial against Coinbase, claiming the crypto exchange did not employ practices aimed at keeping users’ accounts secure, and had “improperly and unreasonably” locked clients out of their accounts during periods of peak volatility in the crypto market. In addition, Kattula alleged that Coinbase should be …

Kathy Kraninger, former director of the United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, said while many in crypto have complained about the lack of regulatory clarity in the country, the legal gray area has afforded the industry opportunities. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Kraninger said Congressional action on dividing the roles of different regulatory agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC — would be the “best outcome” in her view. However, she added it was unlikely any single department would have total control over the variety of investment products related to …

Things have not been looking too good for the crypto market in recent months, with the market seemingly being gripped by one piece of bad news after another. To this point, on Aug. 8, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued legal sanctions against digital currency mixer Tornado Cash. As per the regulatory body, since the platform’s inception in 2019, it has been used for a host of illicit money laundering activities estimated to be worth $7 billion. Of this sum, it is estimated that $455 million was controlled by the notorious Lazarus …

Lawyers representing Nathaniel Chastain, the former OpenSea product manager accused of insider trading, have claimed United States authorities only filed charges in an attempt to set legal precedent that nonfungible tokens are securities. In a Friday filing with the Southern District of New York court, Chastain’s legal team from Greenberg Traurig filed a motion to dismiss the indictment against him, which included allegations of wire fraud and money laundering related to an NFT insider trading scheme from June to September 2021. The lawyers argued that the charges against the former OpenSea employee were invalid in part “because the NFTs at …

The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law this month by President Joe Biden, empowers the IRS with nearly $80 billion in new funds. The world’s most powerful tax collection agency is using the money to go on a hiring spree to fuel much tougher enforcement efforts. It is widely assumed that the audits will be brutal and widespread. Taxes start with tax returns, which must be signed under penalties of perjury. The Biden administration has said that the audits on steroids are for fat cats who have escaped having to pay their fair share for too long. The administration has …

While some think the Tornado Cash ban may negatively impact other projects focusing on privacy, others believe that these projects will keep pushing forward and keeping their commitments to anti-censorship and decentralization. In an interview with Cointelegraph, Ahmed Ghappour, the general counsel at the privacy-focused project Nym Technologies, shared insights on the importance of privacy in the crypto space, how to balance the interests of regulators and people who want privacy and what's next for privacy in Web3. According to Ghappour, there are contradictory concepts in the Web3 space. This is the promise of returning data ownership to the people …

The European Central Bank, or ECB, laid the foundation for the criteria it would be considering when harmonizing the licensing requirements for crypto in Europe. In a Wednesday statement, the ECB’s banking supervision division said it would be taking steps to regulate digital assets given “national frameworks governing crypto-assets diverge quite extensively” and seemingly differing approaches to harmonization following the passage of the Markets in Crypto-Assets, or MiCA, and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision issuing guidelines for banks’ exposure to crypto. The ECB said it would apply criteria from the Capital Requirements Directive — in effect since 2013 — …

The United States' move to sanction the open-source code that makes up the Tornado Cash privacy protocol may be shocking, but it’s not surprising. America has been tightening her grip over the global financial system for decades, ostensibly to cut down on bad behavior, but also to project power abroad. Economic sanctions, like the ones enforced by the aptly named Office of Foreign Assets Control, are a powerful weapon. The agency’s website states that it “enforces economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and national security goals.” It does this to fight drug dealers, terrorists, and “other threats …