Bitcoin Daily: Charlie Munger Attacks Crypto; Bitcoin Under $50,000 After Tumultuous Weekend
Gary Gensler, SEC chair, says bitcoin exchange-traded funds could be ripe for manipulation and fraud, a Bloomberg report says.
Gensler, speaking with Senate Banking Committee top Republican Pat Toomey, said that although non-U.S. regulators have approved ETFs, the SEC wouldn’t be influenced by that.
Gensler said he’s fine with futures-based ETFs because they trade on highly-regulated exchanges – but that bitcoin was a different story and didn’t have enough regulatory oversight and surveillance.
Meanwhile, the Singapore financial regulator has suspended Bitget, a popular digital currency exchange, over a conflict involving a crypto pension scheme which says it’s connected to boy band BTS, Financial Times (FT) writes.
The report notes that this comes as the city-state is also looking to become a global crypto hub.
Bitget had been facing legal action over its Army Coin, named after the BTS Army, the group’s followers. Army Coin was touted by Bitget as a way to provide lifetime financial support to members of BTS. But Hybe, the band’s agency, said the coin isn’t connected to BTS.
Furthermore, Charlie Munger, the 97-year-old investor and vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, has continued firing off attacks against cryptocurrency, Cointelegraph reports.
Speaking at the Australian Sohn Hearts & Minds Conference, Munger said he supports China’s crackdowns on crypto.
He added that the people who are crating cryptocurrencies are “not thinking about the customer, they are thinking about themselves,” saying that he preferred making money “selling people things that are good for them” rather than the opposite, which he characterized crypto as.
Critics said Munger was likely too old to understand crypto, the report says.
Finally, Bitcoin’s price was volatile over the weekend, and as of Sunday afternoon, remained under $50,000, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports.
Read more: Bitcoin, Other Crypto Prices Plummet Overnight
The coin was sitting at $48,904 on Sunday around 4:30 p.m. EST, which was an improvement after it fell almost 20% on Saturday and hit $42,000.
The reasons for the volatility were potentially myriad, including the new Omicron COVID-19 variant, the Fed’s inflation response and the selling off of heavily leveraged crypto derivatives, WSJ writes.