Here are some of the major developments from the world of crypto over the past few days
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) declared on November 1, 2023 that it was bringing fraud and unregistered securities sales charges against SafeMoon and three of its officials in relation to the SAFEMOON coin. At the same time, the Justice Department also made the charges against the men public.
The SEC has accused the CEO of SafeMoon, John Karony, and chief technical officer, Thomas Smith of embezzling investor cash and withdrawing $200 million in assets from the enterprise. The men are facing charges from the Justice Department for conspiring to commit wire fraud, money laundering, and securities fraud.
The Justice Department said that Smith and Karony had been detained, but Nagy was still at large.
While much of the liquidity pool was not locked, the SEC alleged that SafeMoon’s marketing misled consumers into believing that their money would be locked in the pool and inaccessible to everyone, including the defendants.
Billionaire and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, seems to have unintentionally brought attention to the case for Bitcoin Ordinals, by openly disparaging non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on a podcast.
“The funny thing is the NFT is not even on the Blockchain — it’s just a URL to the JPEG,” said Musk in an October 31, 2022 interview released on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Musk said NFT projects should at least encode the JPEG on-chain. “You should at least encode the JPEG in the Blockchain. If the company housing the image goes out of business, you don’t have the image anymore,” he said.
The use case for Bitcoin Ordinals, according to Bitcoiners on social media, was essentially encapsulated by Musk’s remarks. Thanks to the Taproot soft fork in November 2021, developer Casey Rodarmor was able to release the Bitcoin version of NFTs in January.
Will Clemente, a cryptocurrency specialist, was one of the people who applauded Musk’s remarks. He pointed out that the 38 million Ordinal inscriptions on the Bitcoin Blockchain will always remain.
Solana has gained around 81% in the last 30 days following the testnet deployment of Firedancer, the Blockchain’s much-needed scaling solution. The cryptocurrency reached over $41 on November 2, 2023, according to statistics from Cointelegraph Markets Pro, hitting highs it hadn’t touched since August of last year.
Long hailed as an “Ethereum killer,” SOL has surpassed its competitor Ether, which has seen increases of less than 11 per cent over the last month.
According to CoinShares, SOL-related financial products have also witnessed inflows of millions of dollars over the previous few weeks. Nonetheless, SOL has still dropped over 84 per cent from its all-time peak of nearly $260 on November 6, 2021.