| Bitcoin | $52,362 | 7 day: +16.1% | | Ethereum | $1,833 | 7 day: +5.2% | | All crypto | $1.57T | 7 day: +16.4% | | Bitcoin dominance | 62% | 7 day: -0.5% | Prices as of 3:50 p.m. EST
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 Fireworks Bitcoin hit $52,000 today, setting a new record for the third consecutive day. - JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs are all looking to adding the asset class to their offerings or portfolios.
- Paypal continues to promote cryptocurrencies to its user base.
- Visa and Mastercard are onboarding payments for everyday products and services through their platforms with cryptocurrency.
- Tesla, Square, MassMutual, and MicroStrategy are a few of the significant corporations holding bitcoin reserves.
Decrypt 
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 MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) is raising another $600M in debt to buy more bitcoin at record high prices. Michael Saylor's business intelligence company is buying even after the cryptocurrency surges above $50,000. Details: - According to the announcement, the company is offering an aggregate principal of $600M worth of senior convertible notes in a private offering to institutional buyers.
- Buyers would also have the right to purchase an additional $90M, making aggregate proceeds to MicroStrategy worth up to $690M.
- The notes will mature on Feb. 15, 2027.
- This is the second time MicroStrategy has offered a private placement to raise funds for the express purpose of bitcoin investment; in December 2020, the company raised $400M for this purpose.
- Prior to raising debt to buy bitcoin, ithe Virginia-based company used its existing balance sheet cash to buy $250M worth of bitcoin in August 2020, naming the cryptocurrency its Primary Treasury Reserve Asset.
- The company said it owns approximately 70,470 bitcoin in total, purchased at the average price of $15,964.
Click to tweet the following text (you can edit it before sending): $MSTR @michael_saylor @MicroStrategy is raising another $600M of debt to buy more #bitcoin $btc Law360
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The lead platform engineer at R3 and long-time Bitcoin Core developer, Mike Hearn, is starting a new project. He is stepping down to an advisory role at R3 in order to focus on new initiatives. More: - Hearn, one of the first bitcoin core developers and an associate of Gavin Andresen, shared a memo with R3 on Friday about the transition.
- Hearn quit working on bitcoin full-time and allegedly sold all of his bitcoin in 2014 after the community disagreed with his suggestion to increase bitcoin's block size. He joined R3 in 2016.
- Hearn penned a highly controversial piece that year titled "The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment," citing "bitcoin is an experiment, and like all experiments, it can fail. So don't invest what you can't afford to lose."
- At R3, he contributed to the Corda platform and helped launch its Conclave system powered by Intel's (NASDAQ:INTC) SGX technology as the lead platform engineer.
- It is still unclear whether Hearn will now rejoin the bitcoin ecosystem or work on other blockchains. He has delegated R3's responsibilities to a new technical management team, according to CoinDesk.
Click to tweet the following text (you can edit it before sending): $btc Bitcoin Core developer Mike Hearn steps down from R3 to start a new project. Coindesk
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James Alexander, ex-CFO of Cred (LBA), has filed a chapter 11 case of his own after receiving orders to return $8M. We have covered the hundreds of millions of dollars that are winding down in Cred's initial bankruptcy filing here, here, and here at Inside Cryptocurrency. More: - Cred Inc.'s bankruptcy case took another curious turn as the former CFO of the crypto investment company filed a second Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California (San Fernando Valley).
- The move comes after James Alexander received U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey's order to return $4M in bitcoin and cash belonging to Cred immediately and verify the transactions.
- James Alexander listed his liabilities between $1M to $10M, without noting obligations owed to Cred as the U.S. Bankruptcy Court order suggested.
- The committee of unsecured creditors sought an injunction from the court to prevent Alexander from transferring assets into his possession.
- Alexander's attorneys proposed the creation of an escrow account for 50 bitcoin owned by their client.
- However, Judge Dorsey dismissed the escrow creation proposal on Feb. 5, asking Alexander to turn over the cryptocurrency within one hour of the end of their hearing.
- Cred's co-founders and ex-PayPal executives Daniel Schatt and Lu Hua blamed Alexander for seizing assets of a subsidiary, Cred Capital, and transferring $4.3M in bitcoin and other crypto coins to his digital wallet. He says he was scammed by sending $11.5M worth of funds to an imposter, according to a November 2020 court filing.
Click to tweet the following text (you can edit it before sending): The ex-CFO at Cred $LBA filed his own chapter 11 #bankruptcy after a judge ordered him to return $8M in #bitcoin $btc and cash. Law360
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The SEC has filed a motion imposing a permanent injunction and monetary relief against three companies involved in a $30M Ponzi-like scheme. - The SEC filed a motion for a permanent injunction in a Florida federal court against Argyle Coin LLC, Natural Diamonds Investment Co., and Eagle Financial Diamond Group Inc., for their roles in the $30M scam.
- Father and son Harold and Jonathan H. Seigel targeted investors in the U.S. and Canada for an illegal ICO of Argyle Coin (RGL).
- In October 2020, a federal judge ordered a permanent injunction against the pair, including a $4M settlement with the SEC.
- The court-appointed receiver is Jeffrey C. Schneider.
- The companies agreed to disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, prejudgement interest, civil penalties, and prohibitions from future violations.
- The SEC suit filed in 2019 cited that Jose Aman, the President of Natural Diamonds, was involved in the scam that impacted over 300 investors between May 2014 to May 2019, including elderly residents living on a fixed income.
- After pleading guilty to criminal charges in September 2020, a judge sentenced Aman in Dec. 2020 to serve 84 months in federal prison and pay $25M to victims.
Click to tweet the following text (you can edit it before sending): The SEC has filed a motion for injunction and monetary relief against Natural Diamonds Investment, Eagle Financial Diamond Group, and Argyle Coin LLC. Law360
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- A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack temporarily took down EXMO cryptocurrency exchange servers on Monday. The exchange is still suffering from outages as workers try to prevent more attacks.
- An Alabama man has been charged with stealing more than $150K in cryptocurrency using a SIM swapping scam that targeted New York City residents.
- In a note published this week, strategists at J.P. Morgan (NYSE:JPM) cited that bitcoin's price above $50,000 could be "unsustainable."
- San Francisco-based crypto exchange Coinbase opened a waitlist for ex-New York customers to join an Ethereum (ETH) 2.0 staking rewards program.
- Ross Steven's bitcoin custodian and financial services company, New York Digital Investment Group LLC, submitted an SEC S-1 filing on Feb. 16 to create a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) would be the ETF's authorized participant on the NYSE's Arca exchange.
- China-based gambling company 500.com (NYSE:WBAI) announced an equity deal with the parent company of Jihan Wu's BitDeer: Blockchain Alliance Technologies, which owns BTC.com. BTC.com is one of the largest bitcoin mining companies. The deal could close by April 15.
- L2Lab's decentralized exchange (DEX), ZKSwap, deployed its Ethereum-based layer-2 protocol mainnet on Feb. 14, 2021. It will increase DEX transaction output with low gas fees using zero-proof knowledge as a scaling solution.
- MotleyFool is buying $5M in bitcoin from cash on its balance sheet.
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 |  | Curated by Associated Press fanboy, eye-strained news terminal watcher, and bitcoin follower since $1, Aaron Wise. Temporarily listening to news squawk boxes 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. | |
