Bitcoin Daily: Tether Beats Out Bitcoin In Trading Volume; EOS Receives $24M Fine From SEC

Believe it or not, bitcoin is no longer the most used cryptocurrency, with data from CoinMarketCap.com revealing that the token with the highest daily and monthly trading volume is Tether.

While its market capitalization is more than 30 times smaller than bitcoin, Tether’s volume has consistently exceeded it since early August at about $21 billion per day.

“If there is no Tether, we lose a massive amount of daily volume — around $1 billion or more depending on the data source,” Lex Sokolin, global financial technology co-head at ConsenSys, said, according to Bloomberg. “Some of the concerning potential patters of trading in the market may start to fall away.”
In other news, German police raided a data processing center installed in a former NATO bunker, seizing $41 million worth of funds linked to dark web sites that deal drugs and child abuse imagery. Seven people were arrested and the main suspect is a 59-year-old Dutch man who police believe bought the former military bunker in Traben-Trarbach (western Germany), according to Associated Press.

Authorities said he turned the bunker into a very large and heavily secured data processing center “in order to make it available to clients, according to our investigations, exclusively for illegal purposes,” prosecutor Juergen Bauer said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that is has settled charges against blockchain technology company Block.one for conducting an unregistered initial coin offering of digital tokens (ICO). The company raised the equivalent of several billion dollars over approximately one year. As a result, Block.one will pay a $24 million civil penalty.

“A number of U.S. investors participated in Block.one’s ICO,” Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, said in a press release. “Companies that offer or sell securities to U.S. investors must comply with the securities laws, irrespective of the industry they operate in or the labels they place on the investment products they offer.”

“Block.one did not provide ICO investors the information they were entitled to as participants in a securities offering,” added Steven Peikin, Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.  “The SEC remains committed to bringing enforcement cases when investors are deprived of material information they need to make informed investment decisions.”

And two men have pleaded guilty for conspiring to launder money using bitcoin after selling marijuana on the dark web.

Connor Brooke and Aidan Curry agreed to forfeit “tens of thousands of dollars worth of cash, cryptocurrency, and [computer hardware]” that was used to commit the crime, reported the Times of San Diego.