| Bitcoin | $22,781 | 7 day: +23.9% | | Ethereum | $641 | 7 day: +14% | | All crypto | $647B | 7 day: +19.2% | | Bitcoin dominance | 65.4% | 7 day: +2.7% | Prices as of 5:30 p.m. EST
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Bitcoin hit $23,000 today. Congratulations! I remain especially proud that bitcoin dominance has been rising during this rally, and encourage the ongoing rotation out of regrettable ICOs from 2017 and early 2018. What a ride it has been since then! | |  Aaron |  |
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 ROBINHOOD CO-FOUNDER BAIJU BHATT The SEC has revealed charges against Robinhood, a popular trading app with 13 million customers, alleging that it lied to its customers for three years. Robinhood recently closed a Series G financing at a valuation north of $11B. The company had intentions of a 2021 IPO led by Goldman Sachs. Robinhood was an immensely popular fiat onramp for bitcoin and cryptocurrency purchases. More: - The SEC said that one of Robinhood's primary selling points was that it did not charge its customers commissions. In reality, however, "commission-free" trading at Robinhood came with a catch: Robinhood's customers received inferior execution prices compared to other brokerages.
- The SEC said that Robinhood's "unusually high amounts" charged to principal trading firms for its customers' order flow caused gravely inferior order execution prices.
- The SEC said that from 2015 to 2018, some of Robinhood's retail communications failed to disclose its payment for order flow.
- The SEC concluded starkly, "Since Robinhood's launch, payment for order flow has been Robinhood's single largest source of revenue."
- Without admitting or denying the findings, Robinhood has agreed to pay $65M to settle the SEC's charges. Other lawsuits remain outstanding.
Outages and hacks: - Robinhood, which grew customer accounts from 10 million to over 13 million this year, has had a long history of failing to maintain service during market volatility. Various reporters have investigated.
- As recently as October, Robinhood customer login credentials were available for sale on illegal dark web markets.
- Like most brokerages, Robinhood disclaims customer losses caused by platform and technology outages.
More lawsuits: - Earlier this week, a Massachusetts securities regulator filed another lawsuit against Robinhood, claiming the popular trading app failed to act in the "best interest" of customers and exposed them to "unnecessary trading risks."
- Massachusetts said that Robinhood used illegal techniques to encourage "constant" use of the platform, approved unqualified customers for options trading, and acted "without regard for the best interests of its customers," in violation of state securities laws.
SEC 
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Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange and a direct competitor of Binance, has filed for an IPO. - Coinbase was founded in 2012. The company has raised more than $500M from Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global Management, Y Combinator, Greylock, and other venture capitalists.
- Coinbase has 35M verified users in more than 100 countries and $25B in assets under management (AUM).
- Earlier this week, Coinbase Pro curiously listed a digital asset, Bancor (BNT), which was charged by the SEC for conducting an illegal securities offering.
- Here at Inside Cryptocurrency, we also covered Coinbase's listing of Uniswap's voting rights token (UNI) within just hours of its creation.
Bloomberg
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 Logo of the Defunct, Miami-based Centra A judge sentenced Centra's (CTR) co-founder to one year in prison after pleading guilty to running a fraudulent ICO. - One of Centra Tech's co-founders, Robert Farkas, received a one-year prison sentence by ruling of a U.S. district court judge on Dec. 15, 2020. He was found guilty of defrauding victims in a scam initial coin offering (ICO) of Centra tokens (CTR) held in 2017, according to a U.S. Department of Justice announcement.
- Farkas, as well as his colleagues Raymond Trapani and Sohrab "Sam" Sharma, tricked investors out of at least $36M in the CTR ICO. They stated that they had developed a debit card called Centra to allow purchases using crypto at any merchant accepting Mastercard (NYSE:MA) or Visa (NYSE:V), which was not true.
- Farkas pleaded guilty to committing securities and wire fraud with Trapani and Sohrab as co-conspirators.
- The co-founders also duped investors into believing that an ex-Harvard CEO with 20 years of experience led the project and partnered with several large companies, including Mastercard, Visa, and Bancorp.
- The trio promoted the scam on social media and found investors with the assistance of DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather.
- In 2018, the SEC charged the two celebrities because they failed to disclose payments they had received to promote the investment scam.
- The two celebrities chose to settle the charges in 2019 by paying several hundred thousand dollars in disgorgement, penalty, and prejudgment interest, as reported by news outlets.
Bloomberg
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Japanese giant SBI Financial Services (8473.T) completes its acquisition of cryptocurrency OTC trading desk B2C2. - A subsidiary of SBI Holdings Inc. (SBHGF), SBI Financial Services, acquired London-based liquidity provider and trading company B2C2 on Dec. 15, 2020, to open a digital asset dealing desk in the future, according to Reuters.
- According to a press release, the acquisition of the company represents the "first step" for opening a "capable" dealing desk by the Japanese financial giant.
- The acquisition is finalizing four months after SBI bought an earlier, minority, $30M stake in B2C2.
Reuters
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 Chicago's commodity and derivatives giant CME Group will release Ethereum (ETH) futures for institutional traders by Feb. 2021. In 2018, CME Group launched the first compliant bitcoin futures in the U.S. More: - CME Group, host of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, and other enterprises, has scheduled a launch date for Ether Futures on Feb. 8, 2021.
- After completing a regulatory review, according to a press release dated Dec. 16, 2020, the new futures contract will start trading in addition to its already-listed bitcoin (BTC) futures.
- According to the announcement, the contract would be settled by cash and be based on the CME CF ether-dollar reference rate, which acts as a reference rate of ether price in U.S. dollars.
The Block Crypto
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- London-based investment company Ruffer (LSE:RICA) disclosed to Coindesk that its bitcoin investment is actually over $745M, or about 2.7% of its total assets under management (AUM). It bought the bitcoin in November 2020 as a "protective hedge against global financial system risks."
- A Swiss digital asset finance company, Sygnum, issued tokenized shares using distributed ledger technology on its Desygnate platform.
- Australian fiat-to-crypto gateway Banxa received Canadian regulatory approval for listing shares on TMX Group's TSX Venture Exchange by Christmas.
- The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBoE) will launch a series of crypto-related tools, including indices, historical data, real-time tick data, and other offerings by the end of Q1 2021. CBoE will license data from CoinRoutes, according to a Dec. 14 press release.
- CI Financial Corp., a Toronto-based mutual fund manager, closed a $72M IPO of a bitcoin fund. Shares of CI Galaxy Bitcoin Fund can be traded in U.S. and Canadian dollars on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Bloomberg reported on Dec. 16.
- Guggenheim Partners CIO Scott Minerd said bitcoin should be worth "$400,000" during a Bloomberg interview.
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 |  | Written and curated by wide-eyed bitcoin watcher since $1, Aaron Wise. Streaming headline junkie, Associated Press fanboy, eye-strained news terminal watcher, 2017 founder of Cryptocurrency Newsfeed. Temporarily based in Florida while awaiting the construction of cryptopia. | | | | Editor | Charlotte Hayes-Clemens is an editor and writer based in Vancouver. She has dabbled in both the fiction and non-fiction world, having worked at HarperCollins Publishers and more recently as a writing coach for new and self-published authors. Proper semi-colon usage is her hill to die on. | |
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