Week in review: Arbitrum conducts ARB airdrop; Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro

The Arbitrum team carried out the ARB token airdrop, Montenegrin authorities detained Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon, Bitcoin mining difficulty reached a new high, and other events from the past week.

Bitcoin holds above $27,000 as Fed rate hike takes effect

On March 22, the U.S. Federal Reserve hiked the target range for the policy rate by 25 basis points, to 4.75–5.00% per year. The regulator said that monetary tightening was appropriate given inflation in the United States remains at a fairly high level.

Through Friday, Bitcoin stayed above $28,000. By the weekend, prices corrected, but the asset closed the week up nearly 3%. At the time of writing, the first cryptocurrency trades near $27,800.

Most top-10 cryptocurrencies by market cap closed the week in the red. The standouts were Bitcoin, XRP (+19%), Cardano (+4.8%) and Dogecoin (+1.2%). The worst performer was the Polygon token, down 7%.

Total cryptocurrency market capitalization stood at $1.2 trillion. Bitcoin’s dominance index rose to 44.7%.

The Arbitrum team conducted the ARB token airdrop

Ahead of the airdrop, scammers created a number of fake sites impersonating Arbitrum, and the community began selling yet-unissued ARB tokens on OTC markets at around $1.

The day before the event, the project’s network daily transaction count surpassed Ethereum’s.

The airdrop launched on March 23 at 15:00 Kyiv time. Due to a flood of users, the Arbitrum Foundation websites and the on-chain explorer Arbiscan were unavailable. Leading crypto exchanges added ARB to their listings, but due to processing issues the transfers were credited only by evening.

Against this backdrop, unknown stole $500,000 from users by forging vanity addresses of legitimate token recipients.

Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro

Montenegro’s Interior Minister Filip Adžić said that Do Kwon, co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs (TFL), was detained at Podgorica airport at the request of law-enforcement authorities in the United States, Singapore and South Korea. Montenegro’s authorities charged Kwon with document forgery.

A few hours after the arrest, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York also charged the head of TFL. Specifically, he is accused of conspiracy to commit fraud and market manipulation, securities fraud and misleading investors.

SEC files suits against SushiSwap and Justin Sun. Regulator sets claims against Coinbase

Jared Grey, head of SushiSwap, proposed Sushi DAO create a $3 million legal defense fund after receiving subpoenas from the SEC.

The regulator also accused the Tron founder Justin Sun and three of his companies of an unregistered securities offering in the form of Tron (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) tokens. The lawsuit mentions a number of influencers. Ecosystem tokens reacted by falling.

Coinbase received a notice from the SEC regarding an investigation into listing procedures on the platform and its products — Coinbase Prime, Coinbase Wallet and the Coinbase Earn staking service. The company’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, explained that the document is not an official accusation or initiation of legal proceedings.

Wallet bot added ability to buy USDT on Telegram

The Wallet bot on Telegram opened access to buying and selling USDT. Users can transfer the stablecoin to internal wallets within chats, and also buy and sell it via a P2P service. There is no fee for peer-to-peer purchases by buyers, while merchants pay 0.9%.

DeFi Llama team forks project

The DeFiLlama developer under the alias 0xngmi announced the launch of a fork of the project. He cited disagreement with the decision to issue the platform token, which was made by “the person who controls the Twitter account and the defillama domain.” The community split into two camps and the conflict became public.

Days later, the official DeFiLlama account stated that there were no plans to issue a token.

What to discuss with friends?

• Users lost more than $1 billion in Ethereum due to bugs.
• 3299 bitcoins moved, linked to BTC-e.
• Google launched a preview of the Bard chatbot. Bill Gates called GPT the most important development since 1980.
• Joseph Lubin stated that Ethereum is not a security.

Binance halted spot trading

On Friday, March 24, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance halted spot trading, citing a “strange” error in the trailing stop mechanism. According to CEO Changpeng Zhao, the platform paused deposits and withdrawals as part of standard operating procedure.

The same day the company resumed operations.

Users transferred $8 million to zkSync in hopes of an airdrop

The hype around Arbitrum led users to transfer assets worth about $8 million to the zkSync blockchain in anticipation of a potential airdrop.

Among the strategies discussed on Twitter to boost chances of receiving a utility token are transferring assets, providing liquidity on DEXs such as ZigZag, and periodically trading.

Bitcoin mining difficulty hits record high

As a result of another recalculation, Bitcoin mining difficulty rose by 7.56%. The metric hit an all-time high of 46.84 T. The network’s Hashprice also rose by more than 37%.

Glassnode: banking crisis pushed Bitcoin out of bear market

Analysts at Glassnode noted that Bitcoin posted an impressive weekly rise of 35.8% thanks to emergency central-bank measures amid the banking sector crisis. The digital gold formed a structure reminiscent of earlier bull markets in their early stages.

Immutable and Nexon strike a Polygon partnership for Web3 games

Immutable entered into a partnership with Polygon to accelerate development and deployment of Web3 games. As part of the project, Immutable plans to use Polygon’s zero-knowledge proof technology. A developer platform will be built on its basis.

Nexon will build a dedicated Polygon Supernet to support the blockchain ecosystem in MapleStory Universe. The dedicated network will allow Nexon to tailor the blockchain to the needs of mass online games. MapleStory has 180 million registered users and a developed in-game economy.

Also read:

• Magic Eden added support for Bitcoin NFTs.
• Media: Binance provided a “superficial answer” to US senators.
• Bitcoin ATM maker General Bytes was again attacked by hackers.
• The Fear and Greed Index reached its highest level in 18 months.

What else to read?

Individuum Press is releasing Vitalik Buterin’s book “More Money. What Ethereum Is and How the Blockchain Is Changing the World” at the end of March.

With the publisher’s permission, the article was published with minor edits the translation of “Governance: Not Just Coin Voting,” which discusses some fundamental issues of decentralized autonomous organizations and current solutions.

In traditional digests, ForkLog has gathered the week’s main events in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence: cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.

The DeFi sector continues to attract heightened attention from crypto investors. ForkLog has compiled a digest of the most important events and news from the past weeks.