Hackers: Bitfinex, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange faced a temporary shutdown. On May 31, Bitfinex’s Chief Technology Officer Paolo Ardoino took to Twitter to inform the community of the temporary shut down due to an outage of one network. Ardoino said: “@bitfinex : due to the outage of one of our network providers we temporarily paused deposits and withdrawals. Funds are safe in cold storage. Situation should be restored ASAP. Apologies for inconvenience.” Even though the exchange clarified that it was a temporary shutdown, the community took time to adjust to the fact that it wasn’t a hack. Twitter users asked the CTO to clarify in the comment sections about the same and the official Bitfinex handle to announce the trouble. Even though the issue was resolved from the exchange’s end within three to four hours, the community responded with pump and dump speculations. This outage happened around the same time Bitfinex announced the launch of Tether on EOS blockchain.
Bullish Key Players: On May 30, overnight, the valuation of the crypto market dropped by $19 billion as the price of bitcoin briefly dropped from $9,000 to $8,000, a staggering 11% within a few hours on exchanges like Bitstamp. Technical analysts in the crypto sector, such as Josh Rager and Cred, foresee $8,200 as a crucial support level that could prevent the asset from dropping to the $7,000 region once again. The last time bitcoin’s price dropped below $7,000 was in a flash crash on March 17, when it fell to $6,400, triggered by the unexpected sell-off of 5,000 BTC on Bitstamp, which then led to the mass liquidation of contracts on BitMEX. Cred believes that as long as the $8,200 support level is defended, a rise to $9,600 remains a realistic target and a high time frame resistance level.
Banks & Institutions: A new financial institution is preparing to open its doors for crypto startups in the U.S., and raising capital in an unorthodox manner. Founded by two Russians and an American with finance backgrounds, Arival Bank is waiting for an International Financial Entity license from regulators in Puerto Rico before it can launch. In the meantime, San Juan-based Arival is about to kick off an equity crowdfunding campaign on two platforms: SeedInvest, recently acquired by crypto exchange Circle, and Crowdcube in the U.K. The campaign is scheduled to start in early June with a goal to raise $3 million.
Adoption: As the stablecoin wars continue to heat up, Bitfinex is looking to bring USDT to more blockchains, announcing earlier today that it will launch its stablecoin on EOS’s blockchain. Currently, Tether is issued on the Omni Layer, Ethereum, and TRON. In the next couple of weeks, the company is also planning to issue USDT on Blockstream’s federated sidechain Liquid. Tether would be the first mainstream asset to be issued on the Lightning Network, which could help the second layer protocol in furthering its adoption. Tether’s competitors, USD Coin, TrueUSD, PAX, Gemini dollar are all issued exclusively on Ethereum.
