Daily Digest - 27 March 2023

Headlines

▌Data: The U.S. government holds 205,515 bitcoins worth $5.6 billion

According to current statistics as of 25 March 2023, the U.S. government holds 205,515 bitcoins, worth $5.6 billion, accounting for about 1.06% of the circulating supply. These bitcoins were confiscated in three cases, including the Silk Road bitcoin forfeiture in November 2020, the Bitfinex hack in 2022, and the James Zhong bitcoin forfeiture last year. Among them, 69,369 bitcoins were seized from "Individual X", 94,643 bitcoins were seized from Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife Heather Morgan, and 51,326 bitcoins were seized from Zhong in November 2022. According to Glassnode report on March 9 in 2023, some of these bitcoins have moved, reducing the total from 215,338 bitcoins to 205,515 bitcoins.

Policies

▌Venezuela has arrested 21 people in cryptocurrency-related oil corruption cases

Venezuelan prosecutors have arrested 21 people involved in oil corruption cases related to the country’s cryptocurrency.Eleven of them are businessmen, and the remaining 10 are government officials. In addition, the Venezuelan government has issued an arrest warrant for another 11 people suspected of participating in the same cryptocurrency scheme.However, Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek Saab has not disclosed the names of the relevant companies and personnel.

Cryptocurrency

▌Lawyer believes former Coinbase manager insider trading is wire fraud rather than securities fraud

Former Coinbase manager Ishan Wahi admitted to providing transaction information to his brother and a college friend this year, making illegal profits of nearly $1.5 million. As an Indian immigrant, he could spend more than three years in prison and be deported after serving his sentence. But Wahi is still fighting the SEC, which is suing him on the grounds that some of Coinbase’s assets are securities. In a motion for early dismissal of the case filed in Seattle federal court, Wahi’s attorneys argued that the SEC didn’t need to get involved because Coinbase’s digital assets are not securities. Prosecutors charged him with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, not securities fraud.

▌JPMorgan Chase: The global economic expansion will end in 2024

JPMorgan Chase said that they predict the global economic expansion to end in 2024, because inflation cannot return to the comfort zone of the Federal Reserve, which requires the central bank to further tighten monetary policy to trigger a recession. However, the timing of this outcome and the path of interest rates are unclear. The uncertainty stems from the tension between a strong pull-up in the current economy, a tight labor market and rising inflation, healthy balance sheets in the corporate sector and a growth-oriented policy bias. This tension is in flux in two key ways. First, the drag on credit from monetary tightening is increasing, as is the boost from receding supply-side bottlenecks. Second, the central bank's propensity to keep interest rates high for an extended period of time is being challenged by persistent inflation and heightened financial stability concerns.

▌The Aave community’s ARFC proposal on deploying the Aave V3 MVP version on the zkEVM mainnet is now open for voting

The Aave community has started voting on the ARFC proposal to deploy the MVP version of Aave V3 on the zkEVM mainnet. zkEVM is an EVM equivalent zk-rollup L2 developed by the Polygon team and is expected to be deployed on March 27. Aave V3 has been successfully deployed on the ZkEVM testnet for about 6 months. This ARFC proposal, which should be considered a temperature check, allows development and risk service providers to conduct deeper analysis of the zkEVM network, will close on March 29th at 18:00.