Crypto exchange KuCoin is reportedly looking to hire 300 employees over the next few months, which runs contrary to the fears of a recession getting worse, Seeking Alpha wrote Monday (July 11).
The report quoted KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu, who said the company has no plans to cut staff. He added that the company wants to keep growing and will focus on “releasing new products and maintaining a healthy atmosphere in our team.”
In other news, almost all industrial-scale bitcoin miners in Texas have shut off their machines, with the companies bracing for a heat wave that might strain the power grid in the state to its breaking point, according to a Monday Bloomberg report.
Several miners, including Riot Blockchain and Argo Blockchain, ended up moving to Texas because of its low energy costs and liberal regulations around crypto. Now, the miners will likely see less profits, with the heat waves making it so they have to keep their machines off.
Furthermore, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said crypto might have some value because of the desires of people to collect the assets, Bloomberg reported Monday.
Bailey has previously been critical of crypto. He did qualify these comments, made in a testimony to U.K. lawmakers, by saying there was still risk inherent in crypto.
Additionally, Coinbase announced Monday that it has updated its Coinbase Prices application, now called Coinbase Explore, which will help give users a lone platform to research crypto.
This will be an upgraded version of Prices, which gave users detailed research on crypto assets. Explore will cover more than prices and will be able to research “all aspects” of things, including basic educational content, detailed data on decentalized finance (DeFi) protocols or searching on-chain transactions and addresses.
In more crypto news, Celsius Network has paid down $95 million of its debt to the Aave and Compound DeFi platforms, weeks after having to halt customer withdrawals because of liquidity issues, CoinDesk wrote Monday.
This has freed up $172 million in collateral which had been locked down on the platforms.
Finally, Voyager has started a voluntary restructuring process under Chapter 11, which will help it resume account access, according to a company blog post.
The company has been clarifying some concerns for users. For example, for those wondering how this will impact their cash, Voyager said it’s working on restoring USD deposits, which will go back to customers after a reconciliation and fraud prevention process.
In addition, some users have questioned whether their money is safe and whether they’ll get all of it back. Voyager has said the USD for customers is held in a special account called a For Benefit of Customers account with the Metropolitan Commercial Bank of New York (MCB). The company said the amount of USD in that account is equal to the amount in customer accounts.
The company also confirmed that the USD in the Voyager cash account held at MCB is FDIC insured, meaning it’s covered in the event of a MCB failure up to $250,000 per person — though this doesn’t protect against Voyager’s failure. However, the company said it doesn’t hold customer cash.
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