23 Hot Crypto Events of 2023
This year also witnessed extremely tense "collisions" between cryptocurrencies and legal frameworks in countries. Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried being found guilty of all charges or Binance being forced to pay a fine to close the lawsuit with the US Department of Justice can be considered typical case studies of the industry.
The cryptocurrency market itself, which is just over 10 years old, is not enough to build a solid foundation. Therefore, last year witnessed a series of dramas between companies in the industry, between each market segment. And even more serious, arguments about ideals and vision.
Digital Currency Group (DCG) and its subsidiary Genesis Lending were caught up in the spiral of crisis caused by the collapse of the FTX exchange in mid-November 2022.
Genesis was directly affected and had to block customer withdrawals, the largest of which was Gemini with $900 million in trapped funds. A few days later, the parent company DCG was also rumored to be involved through loans between it and Genesis itself.
Gemini and its two founders, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, were sued by customers for not being able to withdraw money. That is, on the evening of January 2, CEO Gemini personally issued an "ultimatum" to DCG and Genesis demanding to completely resolve the case.
Just a few days later, the media and social networks continued to make accusations about financial transparency between DCG and Genesis, causing the reputation of these companies to plummet and leading to FUD spreading throughout the market. school.
Under great pressure from public opinion, DCG CEO Barry Silbert finally spoke up to confirm the existence of a $1.1 billion loan commitment committed by DCG to Genesis to overcome losses of similar value. The situation that Genesis suffered when the investment fund Three Arrows Capital went bankrupt.
But in the end all rescue efforts were ineffective, Genesis officially filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 on January 20, 2023. The debt with the 50 largest creditors alone is up to 3.5 billion USD.
Even though it has filed for bankruptcy, the story cannot stop. The trio continued to "fight" each other, filing lawsuits back and forth to collect debts. All of this makes the community bored.
· On July 7, 2023, Gemini sued DCG and Barry Silbert;
· On September 7, 2023, Genesis sued parent company DCG, demanding payment of 600 million USD in Bitcoin owed;
· On October 19, 2023, the New York Government sued Gemini, Genesis, and DCG;
· On October 28, 2023, Gemini sued Genesis, demanding recovery of 1.6 billion USD of GBTC shares;
· On November 22, 2023, Genesis sued Gemini, demanding recovery of 689 million USD in funds withdrawn before bankruptcy;
· This long series of lawsuits only showed signs of ending when DCG agreed to pay an additional 275 million USD to Genesis to end the lawsuit on November 29.
2. Curve Risk (CRV) involving the DeFi industry
At the end of July, the liquidity pools on Curve Finance were continuously attacked because of security vulnerabilities, the bad news directly reflected the CRV price plummeting. At some point, sirens will sound loudly when a CRV mortgage loan is about to be liquidated.
The reason is because Curve founder Michael Egorov had previously used his allocated CRV - which accounted for 47% of the circulating supply - to mortgage large loans on DeFi lending platforms such as Aave, Fraxlend, Abracadabra,. ..
Once Michael Egorov's position is liquidated, CRV price will continue to fall deeply, pulling Aave and Fraxlend into risk. CRV dump led to a series of alarms from other liquidity pools in the industry, then depeg risks of USDC and USDT,...
In the early days of August, the situation was so serious that the founder of Curve had to sell CRV through the OTC portal to other whales to raise money and provide additional collateral to reduce the risk of loans.
That action created another problem, the "Curve OTC Wars" between the OTC buyers mentioned above, because those tokens were not locked by smart contract but only by agreement.
Fortunately, things did not take a turn for the worst. The Curve situation gradually stabilized, they recovered 70% of the stolen money and CRV prices gradually increased again.
3. The birth of BRC-20 and debate about the role of the Bitcoin network
Although it was the first blockchain to be born in the world, bringing breakthrough innovations, Bitcoin today is "slow" in the DeFi and NFT fields when compared to later blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, Near, Avalanche. ,…
The community is viewing Bitcoin as digital gold, more of a cumulative and investment asset than a blockchain platform used for microtransactions. But have you ever wondered:
Why doesn't Bitcoin have an "ecosystem" like other networks? Isn't anyone planning on building a DeFi or GameFi project or launching an NFT collection on the Bitcoin blockchain?
With this idea, an NFT project on Bitcoin, Ordinals, was born in the 2022-2023 transition period.
Ordinals: is the name of the protocol that allows NFTs to be created on the Bitcoin network and Ordinals currently only operates on the Bitcoin network. It was created by programmer Casey Rodarmor since late 2022.
Inscription: is the content engraved on sats to create Bitcoin NFT. You can also understand Inscription as NFT on the Bitcoin network.
BRC-20: is a token standard on the Bitcoin network developed by @domodata. In essence, BRC-20 is simply an Inscription on the Bitcoin network, but instead of storing images and videos, it stores a piece of content recording information about tokens and the number of ownership.
But for veteran programmers and “Bitcoin maxi”, Inscriptions are spamming the Bitcoin network. Since 2013, the network allowed users to set a limit on the size of the data, however, by obfuscating the data in the form of code, Inscription overcame this limit.
Led by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dash Jr., a new software update is underway to patch this vulnerability, thereby eliminating Inscription's existence.
But the Inscription supporters did not budge. Analysts say it will be impossible to stop Inscription from being added to the Bitcoin network. Because as long as they are paid, miners will continue to put Inscriptions into Bitcoin.
Adam Back, founder of Blockstream and also a Bitcoin network developer also mentioned:
"Bitcoin is designed to be censorship-resistant so no one can prevent the creation of Inscriptions on the network."
Furthermore, although Inscription spams the network, it is also creating an additional revenue stream for miners. When this additional revenue source is greater than the costs incurred, they will likely continue to maintain the Ordinals product.
Through these debates, it is clear that the answer comes from the value that Inscription can bring to the network and the market.
The cryptocurrency market cannot escape the influence of global macro and micro factors. Influenced by external forces, many projects seriously degraded, even forced to stop operating and leave the field.
4. SEC puts an end to BUSD stablecoin
The US government showed a "tight" attitude towards the crypto industry in 2023, starting with a crackdown on Paxos - the company that issues the BUSD stablecoin.
In just one day, February 13, the morning of the community was in turmoil because the SEC sued Paxos accusing the BUSD stablecoin of being a security, then in the afternoon of the same day, panic rose when Paxos was asked by the New York government to stop issuing new BUSD. . In the evening, when the BNB price dropped "a bit", CZ spoke out to deny his "relationship" with Binance USD (BUSD) and tried to distance himself from the center of the legal storm in the US.
The result of this story is that BUSD gradually leaves the stablecoin game because it cannot mint new coins anymore. Although Paxos ensures adequate collateral reserves, under pressure from the government, many exchanges, projects, protocols,... all began to "abandon" BUSD and look for other alternative stablecoins.
5. Crisis in the US banking industry and causing USDC to depeg
In early March, the crypto industry's "liquidity crisis" finally spread to Silvergate Bank. Silvergate is a bank operating in the US, famous in the crypto world for providing banking solutions to cryptocurrency companies through the SEN network.
Crypto partners were part of Silvergate's SEN network
Silvergate stopped operating, leading to companies in the SEN network having to notify them to stop depositing and withdrawing from bank accounts.
But that was only the beginning of a chain crisis that spread to the entire banking industry in the US. In the early morning of March 10 (Vietnam time), the US stock market and the crypto community were stirred by the news that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was stuck with money.
Bank-run concerns not only caused SVB stock prices to plummet, but also put pressure on crypto companies that reserve money at this bank.
The most severely affected is the stablecoin issuer Circle - the owner of the second largest stablecoin in the cryptocurrency market, USDC with a market capitalization of 43.4 billion USD - which confirmed that it has partial storage. Cash collateral on SVB. The specific number is 3.3 billion USD, accounting for 8.25% of total reserve assets.
Although analysts urged that 8.25% was just a small number and that Circle could completely cover this shortfall, FUD was spreading throughout the market at that time. Some investors decided not to wait any longer and fled USDC.
The most abundant stablecoin liquidity pool in the DeFi industry is Curve's 3pool, which includes USDT, USDC and DAI, and was also withdrawn when investors massively swapped USDC to USDT, causing the USDT ratio in the pool to decrease to only 3%.
These changes of course pushed the price of USDC to plummet, at one point dropping to as low as 0.87 USD.
On March 13, another "crypto-friendly" bank, Signature Bank, was forced to close by the US government, becoming the third US bank to collapse in just one week.
6. The US public debt situation makes the market "heart-stopping"
The world financial market is "holding its breath" waiting for the US public debt announcement as the June 1 milestone gets closer and closer. And cryptocurrency is no exception to the general movement.
In the last days of May, the market seemed to be "strangled", with little fluctuation, the community watched developments in US politics day and night. The situation is even more difficult when President Biden wants to increase crypto taxes to respond to the public debt crisis and criticizes "crypto investors" for influencing policy.
The clock ticked and then "heaved" a sigh of relief when the White House and the US House of Representatives reached an agreement on the debt ceiling, eliminating the risk of a historic default.
7. US legislation stifles the crypto industry
The US Department of Justice, SEC and state financial agencies are continuously taking legal action targeting individuals and organizations involved in serious collapses in the cryptocurrency market in 2022, with The “stock” argument is frequently used.
Crypto organizations targeted by US authorities
52 tokens were declared securities by the SEC
Then there are two lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase. Along with that, a series of tokens were declared to be securities, pushing the prices of the "spotted" coins down sharply.
As a result, many crypto organizations withdrew from the country one after another, including projects that had been incubated and developed in this market for a long time. These include Gemini, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Animoca Brands.
If they stay, they will either scale back their crypto operations like Jane Street and Jump Crypto or be forced to delist like Robinhood.
Binance itself, no matter how "unwilling" it is, is forced to "give a death sentence" to this child of its own. In the following months, the exchange encouraged users to convert BUSD to other stablecoins, stopping lending and staking activities.
Finally, Binance officially removed stablecoin BUSD from December 15.
A positive consequence is that new stablecoins will have the opportunity to emerge and share the pie left by BUSD, contributing to the development of this segment.
8. Multichain stopped operating because the founder was arrested
On the evening of May 24, Twitter was abuzz with news that the Multichain team in China had been arrested by authorities. At the same time, many on-chain signs show suspicious movements related to the MULTI token.
By the morning of the 25th, Multichain confirmed that some cross-chain money transfer portals were not working due to "force majeure reasons", with an unknown fix time.
Binance stopped supporting a number of related tokens and it was not until the evening of May 31 that the team announced that they were still unable to contact the CEO. This also affects Gate.io and a number of other projects.
On July 7, Multichain had a large amount of money withdrawn, causing the community to speculate that the protocol was hacked. On the 11th, we continued to witness "abnormal" cash flow, so we suspected it was an internal rug pull.
But everything cleared up when it was announced on July 13 that the project CEO was arrested by Chinese police. Plus, the CEO is the only person who holds the access key to the project's assets.
Finally, one day later, Multichain officially announced its shutdown, putting an end to the once famous project. Other ecosystems are also more or less involved in this incident, the most severe is probably Fantom.
This case once again shows the constant legal risk. Through just one crackdown by the government, a project considered a major industry project had to accept "surrender".
“Legal” is the keyword throughout 2023. Sentences are announced against the guilty, legal struggles are to restore justice to the field. The whole year of 2023 is a battle between the crypto industry and legal proceedings.
9. Do Kwon was arrested and served 4 months in prison in Montenegro, criminally prosecuted by the US
Do Kwon, as CEO of Terraform Labs, is considered by the cryptocurrency community to be responsible for the collapse of LUNA-UST. However, this person repeatedly avoided summons from the Korean government, fled Singapore and is believed to be hiding in Serbia, a country bordering Montenegro.
In the early morning of March 24 (Vietnam time), prosecutors of the US Department of Justice released criminal indictments against Do Kwon, including 2 counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, 2 counts of securities fraud, 2 counts of money transfer fraud, property fraud and market manipulation related to LUNA and UST. The US government wants to extradite Do Kwon to America.
Do Kwon was eventually sentenced to 4 months in prison by a Montenegrin court for using a fake passport. He was supposed to be extradited to Korea or the US to continue being tried, but according to the latest update, Kwon successfully appealed.
10. XRP is not a "stock"
On the evening of July 13, the judge ruled that sales of XRP to third-party organizations through direct or OTC agreements are still considered securities, but sales through order books of intermediary exchanges are not. Are not.
In essence, it partly refuted the SEC's claim that XRP is a security, demonstrated by the nature of an investment contract according to the Howey Test. Therefore, the court indirectly acknowledged that XRP does not fully constitute a security.
Although the verdict has not yet been officially announced, it can be seen that the balance of victory is in Ripple's favor. XRP price flourished, pushing XRP trading volume to increase strongly on Binance.
At the same time, it created a precedent for other coins declared by the SEC to be securities with a chance of winning the lawsuit, thanks to which the prices of SOL, MATIC, and ADA increased sharply.
Since this victory, Ripple and XRP have made a strong comeback after many years of "struggle". The project now does not hesitate to expand its market and cooperate with traditional partners because it is no longer hindered by the "stock" label.
11. Grayscale successfully complained to the SEC
At the end of August, the community received welcome news that Grayscale filed a complaint with the SEC over its successful Bitcoin ETF proposal.
This is considered the first victory in the process of paving the way for the approval of Bitcoin ETF, forcing the SEC to seriously consider proposals and not avoid them anymore. Evidence is that in November, the SEC began a dialogue with Grayscale about a Bitcoin ETF proposal.
12. Zhu Su was arrested by Singapore authorities and served 4 months
Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu Su was arrested by Singapore authorities at noon on September 29 when he tried to flee the country.
Su was later sentenced to 4 months in prison for not complying with court orders and not cooperating with the bankruptcy unit of Three Arrows Capital fund.
Previously, Zhu Su and Kyle Davies were banned by Singapore authorities from trading and participating in financial activities in the lion island nation for 9 years.
By the end of 2023, Zhu Su had been released from prison and was active again on social networks, but somewhat quieter.
13. Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on seven counts
The trial of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, which lasted more than a month, resulted in a verdict declaring Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of all 7 crimes according to the indictment, including:
· Conspiracy to commit customer deposit fraud;
· Customer deposit fraud;
· Conspiracy to defraud creditors;
· Fraud of creditors;
· Conspiracy to commit property fraud;
· Securities fraud conspiracy;
· Money laundering conspiracy.
The trial to confirm the sentence for the former FTX CEO will be held on March 28, 2024. SBF is facing a sentence of up to 115 years.
In the meantime, this person is experiencing a not-so-smooth prison life at MDC prison in New York City (USA).
Even though the crypto winter lasts, there will be no shortage of new projects landing in 2023. There are projects that have a certain resonance, there are also projects that are famous throughout the community because of many dramas,...
14. Coinbase launches layer-2 Base without tokens
After much speculation and mystery, Coinbase finally revealed information about its new product, Base. This is a Layer-2 solution on Ethereum developed based on the open source code of OP Stack - a superchain development support toolkit previously introduced by Optimism.
The network uses ETH as a unit to pay gas fees for activities in the ecosystem. Coinbase said there are no plans to issue a separate token for the new solution.
On the same day of launch, many projects simultaneously announced cooperation with Base. In addition, the number of NFT mints at this notable milestone also continuously increased dramatically.
Since then, Base has become one of the famous Layer-2, a destination chosen by many projects.
15. friend.tech started the airdrop rewards trend
Base's boom is largely thanks to friend.tech. This Web3 social network is supported by the crypto Twitter community, inviting each other to "farm" to interact to earn reward points and accumulate airdrops.
Thanks to that, Base rose to become one of the hottest Layer-2 hits today, along with Optimism and Arbitrum holding on to a small number of users amid the gloomy downtrend period.
The "specialty" of the crypto market is that any hot project on any chain is quickly copied to another chain, such as post.tech on Arbitrum, Stars Arena on Avalanche,...
Airdrop bonus point trend
The boom of friend.tech is also thanks to the way users calculate reward points. Simply put, users receive points when participating in activities, performing product experience tasks,...
Thanks to that, it created a number of users for the project in the beginning.
When the project is about to launch the token, the corresponding points will be converted to the number of tokens received. After friend.tech, many other projects also chose a similar implementation, such as Blast, MarginFi, Rainbow Wallet.
16. Arbitrum airdrop ARB token and the trend of building Layer-2
Arbitrum has announced that it will airdrop ARB tokens to users who support the project early on March 23. There are more than 625,000 wallets receiving airdrop rewards, out of a total allocation of 1.162 billion ARB, or 11.62% of the current total supply of 10 billion ARB. Besides, Arbitrum also reserved 113 million ARB for projects operating on this layer-2 as rewards for users. As a result, Arbitrum's daily activities also became record exciting before the airdrop.
Direct beneficiaries are projects revolving around the Arbitrum ecosystem when there is active cash flow and users. Next, projects rumored to have retroactive capabilities such as zkSync, StarkNet, MetaMask,... are all getting attention.
By the end of 2023, even though it is only nearly 10 months old, Arbitrum is the most sought-after Layer-2 name today, partly showing the development efforts of the project team, even in the dark downtrend period. protein.
Layer-2 construction trend
Reality has proven that Layer-2 on Ethereum is operating more effectively and attracting more users. Therefore, last year we witnessed the trend of old Layer-1 projects transforming into Layer-2 such as Celo, Canto, Manta, etc. Or Layer-2 of CEX exchanges such as OKX Chain, OP BNB, zkBNB ,...
Layer-2 is under construction
17. Worldcoin launches WLD token, leading the explosive AI trend
When the AI trend sweeps the world, crypto is no less competitive with blockchain + AI projects. Of course, few projects have launched real products, most are still "on paper" and only use buzzworld hot hits to attract community FOMO.
However, Worldcoin, despite a lot of controversy, is the project with the clearest real product.
Led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Worldcoin marked its launch by airdropping tokens to users who scanned their iris.
But this identification solution using retinal scanning has raised a lot of controversy in the community, pointing out potential risks. CertiK also reported a vulnerability that could cause Worldcoin to take control of the Orb.
Not only are leading industry figures like Vitaklik concerned, many countries around the world are also investigating Worldcoin such as: England, France, Germany, Kenya, Argentina, etc.
18. PayPal issues stablecoin PYUSD
In the context of US legal regulations still being too harsh on cryptocurrencies, global payment giant PayPal has made a surprising move by launching its own stablecoin called PayPal USD (PYUSD).
PYUSD was jointly issued by PayPal and Paxos, the stablecoin company behind Binance's BUSD that was ordered to stop operations by the US government. The plan has been cherished for a long time, but seemed to have been suspended after Paxos got into trouble with the US government in February this year.
PYUSD is backed by US dollars, short-term US Treasury bonds and other cash equivalents. This model is similar to popular traditional stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC), which are also ERC-20 on Ethereum.
Despite being questioned about its usefulness, technology and gas fees, PYUSD is still sought after by crypto giants, partly showing that traditional institutions have been looking to venture into the industry.
2023 ends with many ups and downs. Some people are satisfied with the winning trophy, some people feel sad and temporarily move back from the starting line.
19. Binance's "forgettable" year
Binance closed out 2023 with a fine of $4.3 billion to close a long-running investigation from the US Department of Justice, plus founder Changpeng Zhao was forced to resign as CEO.
But this exchange's legal troubles have lasted from the end of 2022 until today, exhausting the exchange in many aspects, and thereby creating an advantage for other competitors to take advantage of.
- Legal troubles in the UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands,...
- Internal turmoil with the departure of senior personnel;
- Losing market share to OKX and Upbit, market share shrinks even though Binance is still leading;
- There are strategies to keep prices and retain users that are not very impressive, reducing the "high-level" image of the Binance brand in the eyes of the community. Such as:
Listing "strange" stablecoins to replace BUSD are TUSD, First Digital USD (FDUSD), Anchored Coins EUR (AEUR), ....
List Futures of memecoins and less prominent but high volume coins to attract traffic;
Launching copy trade, trading incentives in lax legal markets such as Vietnam,...
20. Tether's great year
Strangely, in the year 2023, when everyone is involved in "legal" matters, Tether seems to be the most "unscathed".
Last year, the keyword Tether appeared in the news with "dream" financial reports, heavy profits and business expansion.
Under the leadership of new CEO Paolo Ardoino, Tether is shaping itself to become a solid company in the industry.
21. The year of moving-postponing-then-rejecting the SEC's Bitcoin ETF
The SEC is the "bogeyman" that shocked the red and green candles on the market last year. Not only has the SEC cracked down on the entire crypto industry, it has also continuously delayed Bitcoin ETF proposals from Wall Street giants.
But beyond that rigor, leading financial institutions all have positive predictions for the market, as evidenced by the fact that most big names in the traditional finance industry have applied to open a Bitcoin ETF with the SEC. . Such as VanEck, Bitwise, WisdomTree, Valkyrie, Fidelity, Invesco, ARK Invest, Global X, Hashdex, and Franklin Templeton.
Analysts predict the likelihood of a spot Bitcoin ETF appearing next year is up to 90%, creating a premise for optimism to return to the market.
22. Bitcoin peaks and the victory of the DCA strategy
On December 9, 2023, Bitcoin reached a 19-month peak at 44,200 USD, Ethereum also reached the 2,350 USD mark. As a result, the entire crypto market exploded.
Thanks to the hope in Bitcoin ETF and the belief that the market has passed the most difficult moment, cash flow and investors have returned one after another, bringing a new breeze to the community.
In general, cryptocurrency has gone through a standard year with only ups and downs. The beginning of 2023 is extremely gloomy, with no volume and lack of momentum. Along with a series of FUD and drama, the community is exhausted.
But towards the end of the year, the market became vibrant again, sentiment also changed from pessimism to positive optimism, directly pushing up price growth and creating a premise for development next year.
Furthermore, BTC's return to the track also brought MicroStrategy and El Salvador's DCA investments to strong profits.
If you still don't believe too much in the influence of Bitcoin ETF, remember one of the "tear-inducing jokes" on October 16, 2023, when Cointelegraph "accidentally" reported that BlackRock's Bitcoin spot ETF was approved. Browser.
At that time, the price of BTC "strengthened" up to 30,000 USD in just 10 short minutes - showing how "horrible" the level of fomo in the market was.
23. Hacker's "successful" year
The ultimate winner is probably the cryptocurrency hackers. No matter how harsh the crypto winter is, the attackers still "pocket" hundreds of millions of dollars from stolen assets.
Last year, hackers still made a lot of money, but this year hacking attacks in the market have been "upgraded" to a new level.
Hackers not only attacked the project, but also repeatedly expressed their "wild" attitude, challenging the project and the community. As well as many times mocking and laughing at his victims.
The most "stupid" hacker award of the year of course belongs to hacker Kyber Network, who "claimed" to take control of the entire project after stealing 47 million USD through a flash loan attack on November 23, 2023.
In the end, the Kyber Network team, after being unable to negotiate with the hacker, announced a compensation plan for users, but the consequences of the attack are still very severe.
