Bitcoin Daily: China Shuts Down Gambling Sites Using Tether; Japan’s Soccer Star Debuts Own Crypto

On P2P marketplace Paxful, traders are selling up to $16.2 million in discounted bitcoin in exchange for gift cards — an amount that a report from Arcane Research says is half Paxful’s trade volume, Cointelgraph reports.

Trade of bitcoin for gift cards, the report says, comes out to 48 percent of Paxful’s revenue.

According to Arcane, much of that comes from trades done in areas with little developed financial services, including communities where migrant workers are sending funds to their families.

And, because many of them are done at large discounts from market value, they could be tied to illegal activity.

Vortex Blockchain Technologies has settled with the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) in a case where Vortex’s securities license was revoked as of Oct. 23 for failing to file any periodic reports with the commission in almost a year.

The last time the firm filed was in December of 2019, a filing with the SEC said, and because of the lengthy gap, the revocation was necessary.

In China, mass arrests are being made and online gambling rings shut down by a local branch of the Peoples’ Bank of China (PBOC), according to a report by CoinDesk.

The gambling activities involved the tether stablecoin. Seventy-seven arrests have been made thus far, and three gambling sites were shut down, CoinDesk writes.

The arrests came over alleged money laundering activity where “whitewashing” was implemented to obscure funds obtained from illegal online gambling. The total amount involved in the reported laundering is around 120 million yuan, or $17.95 million.

Japanese soccer star Keisuke Honda has launched a new cryptocurrency in partnership with Rally as part of the Creator Coin initiative, a Medium article says. Creator Coin is intended to offer custom-branded cryptocurrencies for content creators and personalities.

Called the KSK Honda Coin, the coin will “give his fans from all over the world unmatched access to his life as a soccer player and entrepreneur.”

Some of the benefits to the launch will include exclusive videos of Keisuke Honda going about his career, private discord chats and recognition. He said his idea was to “build new connections with my most loyal fans,” according to the article.