The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will liquidate one of its 11 regional offices after a federal judge ordered it to pay around $1.8 million in legal and receivership expenses. The SEC announced on June 4, 2024 that its Salt Lake Regional Office would close in 2024.
The SEC had filed a complaint against DEBT Box in July 2023, alleging that the corporation participated in an illegal $50 million bitcoin scheme. However, in March this year, Judge Robert Shelby of the District Court of Utah concluded that the SEC had acted in bad faith by issuing a temporary restraining order freezing the assets of DEBT Box. He issued sanctions on the SEC, and directed it to pay all attorney fees and costs arising from the illegally granted ex-parte relief.
The Two SEC lawyers from the Salt Lake Regional Office have resigned over the case’s handling. The commission is pursuing enforcement measures against many cryptocurrency companies, including Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and Ripple. In May this year, lawyers for Terraform Labs and its co-founder Do Kwon announced that they had achieved an in-principle settlement in their lawsuit.
Matt Horn, Fidelity Bank’s head of digital asset strategy, has said that investors should own Bitcoin regardless of market theory. A small bet, typically 1-5 per cent, is good to limit risk should Bitcoin fall to zero, while also being large enough to get all of the digital currency and inflation hedge benefits.
Bitcoin has seen an increase in institutional interest since the launch of the Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the US in January 2024, pushing the price above the $70,000-mark. According to Coinshares, weekly inflows into the Bitcoin fund reached $148 million in May, and nearly $2 billion in monthly inflows.
Since the beginning of 2024, Bitcoin funds and exchange-traded products (ETPs) have experienced inflows of more than $14 billion, while Bitcoin short funds saw outflows of $12.3 million in May, indicating that market sentiment among ETF and ETP investors remains positive for Bitcoin.
Wormhole Foundation co-founder and chief commercial officer Robinson Burkey has said he expects a boom in the adoption of Solana by financial institutions following the launch of PayPal’s USD Stablecoin on the Solana network. Solana is the fourth-largest Blockchain by total value locked (TVL).
PayPal made its first step onto a Blockchain outside of the Ethereum environment on May 28, 2024, when it introduced its PayPal USD PYUSD $1.00 Stablecoin to the Solana network. After Ethereum, the multinational payments company Visa launched USD Coins on the Solana Blockchain in September 2023, thus making it the second network to support the Stablecoin.
Solana may theoretically handle up to 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) with an average transaction cost of $0.0025, accelerating Ethereum’s 15 TPS and significantly higher gas fees that start above $1 but can reach up to $50 during network congestion. Crypto investor and CNBC also speculates that Solana could be the next crypto to get a spot ETF in the US.
