News Roundup — MicroStrategy bags 14,620 Bitcoin ahead of Potential ETF Approval

Major news stories this week;

1. MicroStrategy bags 14,620 Bitcoin ahead of potential ETF approval
2. Mt. Gox Appears to Have Started PayPal Repayments Tied to 2014 Bitcoin Hack
3. Barry Silbert Out as Grayscale Chairman While Bitcoin ETF Decision Looms
4. UAE Imposes FATF Crypto “Travel Rule” in Revised AML Rulebook
5. Vitalik Buterin pitches 3 pathways to simplify Ethereum’s PoS model

Story Summaries;

1. The latest purchase, at $42,110 per BTC, brings MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries’ total holdings to 189,150 Bitcoin. MicroStrategy’s latest BTC purchase follows another massive purchase of 16,130 Bitcoin in November 2023, which the firm acquired at the price of $36,785 per Bitcoin. The company previously bought 6,067 BTC in September and October 2023 and 12,333 BTC in June. $MSTR now holds almost 1% of the circulating supply.
2. Almost 10 years after being hacked, the Mt. Gox crypto exchange appears to be starting to repay customers who lost 850,000 bitcoin (BTC) now valued around $36 billion. Some participants in the mtgoxinsolvency subreddit group said they had received payouts in yen over Paypal. Others, who’d chosen to receive cash into bank accounts, said they had not seen any inflows.
3. Barry Silbert resigned as chairman of the board of Grayscale Investments, the company announced Tuesday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Silbert, the CEO of Grayscale’s parent company Digital Currency Group (DCG), had not publicly commented on the resignation as of this writing. Another Grayscale board member, Mark Murphy, has also joined Silbert in stepping down from the board. Both resignations are set to go into effect January 1.
4. The financial watchdog of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has revised its anti-money laundering laws and introduced the FATF “travel rule” related to digital assets. While most jurisdictions and authorities have yet to enact laws covering digital assets, the UAE has taken progressive steps to establish crypto-friendly policies, which has prompted many companies to spread their tentacles in the region, including Ripple.
5. In a Dec. 27 post on Ethereum’s research forum, Buterin outlined his ideas for solving a budding pain point caused by increasing network validators and cryptographic signatures required for each blockchain slot. Buterin's 3 proposals include, incentivising mergers between validators teams by raising the minimum Ether (ETH) needed to run an Ethereum validator; secondly dividing staking layers into two. One layer would feature stricter parameters, while the other would offer more flexible conditions; and thirdly proposed mechanism to randomise a set of validators from a pool of network participants.

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And that’s all for last week’s news! Wishing you a great first week of 2024!

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