Decentral Block Post

The United States Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) won’t be allowed to fine executives involved in Voyager Digital should it end up issuing bankruptcy tokens to help repay impacted customers, bankruptcy judge Michael Wiles has said.

The comments from Wiles came on Mar. 6, the third day of hearings regarding a plan by Voyager to issue a repayment token and sell $1 billion of assets to Binance.US.

The SEC earlier argued that the repayment token would constitute an unregistered security offering, while Binance.US is operating an unregulated securities exchange.

In a supplemental objection statement, it also objected to a legal protection which stated that no U.S. agency, including the SEC, will be able to bring “any claim against any Person on account of or relating to the Restructuring Transactions.”

Essentially, this means that executives and restructuring advisers involved in Voyager’s bankruptcy would be shielded from lawsuits if they implement the bankruptcy plan, as long as it is court-approved.

A former Tornado Cash developer claims to be building a new crypto mixing service that aims to solve a “critical flaw” of the sanctioned crypto mixer — which he hopes will convince U.S. regulators to reconsider its position on privacy mixers.

The code of a new Ethereum-based mixer, “Privacy Pools,” was launched on GitHub on Mar. 5 by its creator, Ameen Soleimani.

In a 22-part Twitter thread, Soleimani explained that the “critical flaw” with Tornado Cash is that users cannot prove that they’re not associated with North Korea’s Lazarus Group or any criminal enterprise for that matter.

With Privacy Pools, however, Soleimani explained that depositors and withdrawers could opt out of an anonymity set that contains an address associated with stolen or laundered funds.

This feature of Privacy Pools is executed with zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, meaning that the privacy of the user is preserved:

The hopeful optimism of Bitcoin (BTC) traders seemed to dissipate in the first week of March as key on-chain metrics provided resistance.

Now Bitcoin is threatening a retest of the $22,000 level, and a wave of short sellers would stand to profit if that occurred. If the short sellers’ strike price hits, some analysts believe Bitcoin could drop as low as $19,000.

A handful of analysts still project BTC to hit $25,000 in the short-term, on-chain data highlighting a few reasons for price resistance at higher levels.

Realized price metric highlights profit-taking

Market participants’ concern over the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes and high inflation are heavy macro headwinds facing Bitcoin and this has investors weighing the time value of money (TVM) of BTC investments. To measure TVM on-chain, Bitcoin holders can be put into groups based on the amount of time they held BTC and average the acquisition cost.

Investors that purchased BTC within the last six months benefited from the early bear market conditions and have an average realized price of $21,000, which places them in profit. The average market realized price across all BTC holders is $19,800, also currently in profit.

The United States equities markets are trying to extend their recovery at the start of the new week. One of the reasons that could be boosting investor confidence is that the yield on the benchmark 10-year note has slipped further to 3.924%.

However, the bullish sentiment of the equities markets has not rubbed off on the cryptocurrency markets which continue to underperform. Bitcoin’s (BTC) tight range trading since March 4 suggests that there is uncertainty about the next directional move.

Generally, periods of low volatility are followed by a pick-up in volatility. The congressional testimony of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on March 7 and March 8 will be watched for the outlook on inflation and rate hikes. Later, on March 10, the release of February's job report could add to the volatility.

Could the strength in the U.S. equities markets and the weakness in the U.S. dollar index(DXY) attract buying in the beaten-down cryptocurrency sector? Let’s study the charts to find out.

SPX

The S&P 500 index (SPX) turned up sharply from 3,928 on March 2, indicating that buyers have not given up and are accumulating at lower levels.