Crypto News: Nasdaq, Binance, NEM, Cryptopia, Liquid, QuadrigaCX (end of January)

Crypto News: Nasdaq, Binance, NEM, Cryptopia, Liquid, QuadrigaCX (end of January)

Nasdaq working with crypto exchanges

On 30th of January the world’s second-largest stock exchange Nasdaq has revealed that seven crypto exchanges are already using its market monitoring technology. Just two of these seven collaborations have to date been publicized — the Winklevoss twins’ Gemini exchange, and Vctrade, run by Japanese financial services giant SBI Holdings.

The technology is called SMARTS Market Surveillance system and it is a cross-market, cross-asset surveillance tool that correlates real-time and historical data with detection patterns to trace illegal market activities, such as spoofing and wash trading.

Binance accepts debit and credit cards

On 31st of January Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, is now accepting credit and debit cards for crypto paymentst hrough its partnership with payment processor Simplex,

Binance users will be able to use Visa and MasterCard cards to purchase Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Ripple (XRP). These can then be traded against up to 151 other tokens offered by the exchange.

This opens access to cryptocurrency for a lot of users that previously couldn't buy their tokens through services like Coinbase for example. The biggest problem are high fees 3.5% per transaction or 10 USD, whichever is higher but those are bound to go down at some point so inn my opinion this is a huge development.

NEM financial issues

On 31st of January Blockchain asset management platform NEM (XEM) announced it had completely reformed its non-profit NEM Foundation due to financial difficulties.

The Foundation, which previously had a budget with a monthly burn rate of 9 million XEM (~$392,000), now plans to spend less than half that amount through restructure where they eliminate regional teams and replace them with newly created product-focused teams.

The foundation explained that this is mostly due to the XEM exchange suffering catastrophic drops from this time a year ago and that this will be performed so that the NEM survives through the bear market. As a result the price of NEM decreased even further with NEM being currently on 18th place on CMC.

Cryptopia is still having issues

Initial hack of the Cryptopia exchange happened on 14 of January but even now the exchange is having issues with hackers. The Elementus website reported that after the initial breach where the hackers stole $16 million worth of crypto tokens even more funds were stolen.

Another 17k Cryptopia wallets were drained of 1,675 ETH which is worth around $180k at today's market rates and according to the Elementus website Cryptopia no longer has control of their Ethereum wallets, and the hacker still does.

The website also mentioned that people are still depositing into Cryptopia even though it was obvious the website had terrible security. I personally stopped using Cryptopia when they lost my deposit over a year ago and it took over a week for the support to fix this issue.

Liqui.io is closing

On 28th of January Liqui.io which has been operational since 2016 has annouced that the exchange is shutting down and users have 30 days to withdraw assets. This is following the change in policy which users were given the choice to opt in or out on 28th of December.

Month later after this annoucement the team said that they are closing all accounts since they had no economic incentive to provide services. For those who remained with the exchange after the change in policy, Liqui says that they do not have enough liquidity to support operations.

Users were allowed to withdraw their assets within 30 days from the change in policy, and now they have been given another 30 days from the date the email was sent to withdraw their assets. Failure to withdraw assets within the stipulated time frame will incur a fee, as dictated by Liqui’s Terms of Use.

QuadrigaCX issues

On 31st of January QuadrigaCX issued a statement with the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia which has revealed that $190 million in