Binance announced Friday (May 13) that it is suspending spot trading for LUNA and UST, which will be lifted when the network becomes stable.
In a company blog post, Binance said it’s “continuing to work with the project team to create a more stable environment for users, and will keep the community updated accordingly.” Meanwhile, OKX said that it would be terminating the exchange-traded UST market on Friday.
This comes after the de-pegging of the UST coin to the U.S. dollar, which has had disastrous effects for both the coins and crypto throughout the past week or so.
In other news, Bloomberg reported Friday that tax officials have identified over 50 leads to possible tax crimes involving crypto.
This could lead to official investigations in the next few weeks. One of the cases might be a $1 billion Ponzi scheme, the report said.
The statements were made by top criminal tax and financial crimes officials from the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, which is known as the J5. They met in London recently, where they spoke on the emerging trends, including decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Jim Lee, the IRS’s chief of criminal investigations, told reporters that some of the leads “involve individuals with significant NFT transactions revolving around potential tax or other financial crimes throughout our jurisdictions.”
Furthermore, a five-year battle to launch the first spot cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the Asia-Pacific region is seeing “muted demand,” The Financial Times wrote Sunday (May 15).
Bitcoin and ether ETFs, which are managed by ETF Securities out of Sydney, worked with 21Shares to start trading on Thursday (May 12) on the Cboe Australia exchange. Another ETF from Cosmos Asset Management also launched the same day on the same exchange, the report said.
The funds beat rivals to market in spite of delays investing in “physical” cryptocurrency, which was only available in a few countries. The U.S. regulators have only allowed futures-based crypto ETFs thus far.
Finally, bitcoin has had a “modest” recovery and has hit around $30,000 after a period of turmoil, Bloomberg reported Sunday.
This has brought on more of a calm after the UST coin collapsed and caused widespread trouble for crypto last week. Bitcoin was able to move 3.4% on Sunday, hitting $30,350 as of 4 p.m. in New York.
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