Today in Crypto: Exchange Crypto.com Launches in Italy; Novogratz Says Current Crypto Instability is ‘Credit Crisis’

Crypto.com announced Tuesday (July 19) that it has received regulatory approval from Italy’s Organismo Agenti e Mediatori (OAM), which will allow it to distribute its products and services in the country.

That comes after it also recently received approval from Greece, Singapore and Dubai.

“We are committed to building lasting growth in the region and will continue working with regulators to deliver a wide range of products and services to our valued customers,” Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek said.

In addition, the biggest crypto exchanges from India are meeting in tech capital Bengaluru to hone in on new plans for the industry, CoinDesk reported Tuesday.

It was recently confirmed that the country’s central bank wants to prohibit cryptocurrency, per the report. The meeting comes after the Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council, which was the advocacy body representing the industry, was disabled by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, its parent organization.

Furthermore, Bloomberg wrote that billionaire investor Mike Novogratz, who had dubbed himself the “Forrest Gump of Bitcoin” at one point, thinks crypto’s current crisis is a big problem.

Novogratz reportedly said he was “darn wrong” about the magnitude of leverage in the system.

Speaking at the Bloomberg Crypto Summit on Tuesday, Novogratz said he didn’t think people had expected the sheer amount of the losses that would come to balance sheets for big companies, which had caused the “daisy chain of events.”

“It turned into a full fledged credit crisis with complete liquidation and huge damage on confidence in the space,” he said, per the report.

Finally, Coinbase has paused withdrawals of bitcoin SV as of Tuesday afternoon, a report from the company noted at 12:40 PDT.

The company cited “difficulty processing transactions” as the reason why this happened, and said it is working to fix the problem.

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