Silvergate Capital has announced that it plans to shut down Silvergate Bank’s operations and voluntarily liquidate it in an orderly fashion, in a move that comes shortly after the bank incurred significant losses over the collapse of FTX.

The Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Rostin Behnam, has defended that stablecoins and Ethereum’s Ether should come under the purview of the regulator, as they’re “going to be commodities.”

Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency trading platform in the US, has unveiled a new service aiming to make Web3 technology more approachable by simplifying digital wallets, called Wallet as a Service.

 Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• Silvergate Bank to Wind Down Operations
• CFTC Chair Says Stablecoin and Ether Are ‘Going to Be Commodities’
• Coinbase Announces ‘Wallet as a Service’ Offering
• Binance Spot & Derivatives Market Share Reach New All-Time Highs

Silvergate Bank to Wind Down Operations

Silvergate Capital has announced that it plans to shut down Silvergate Bank’s operations and voluntarily liquidate it in an orderly fashion, in a move that comes shortly after the bank incurred significant losses over the collapse of FTX.

Silvergate Bank was one of the few mainstream financial institutions that cateredto the cryptocurrency space, which helped it grow rapidly along with the wider sector. The bank’s liquidation plan includes full repayment of all deposits, with the company considering how to best resolve claims and preserve the residual value of its assets.

FTX’s collapse led to a crisis of confidence in the space, which saw investors pull money out of Silvergate. The bank reported that customers pulled more than $8 billion of their cryptocurrency-related deposits in the final quarter of 2022, forcing the bank to sell billions of dollars in assets to protect its balance sheet.

The company’s shares tumbled over the announcement, and are now down over 96% in the last 12 months.

CFTC Chair Says Stablecoin and Ether Are ‘Going to Be Commodities’

The Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Rostin Behnam, has defended that stablecoins and Ethereum’s Ether should come under the purview of the regulator, as they’re “going to be commodities.”

During a Senate Agricultural hearing, the CFTC chair told Senator Kirsten Gillibrand that it was clear to the CFTC’s enforcement team and the commission that “Tether, a stablecoin, was a commodity.”

The CFTC has in the past said that digital assets, including ETH, BTC, and USDT were commodities, including in a lawsuit against FTX’s founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

When asked what evidence the CFTC would put forward to win regulatory influence over the second-largest digital asset by market capitalization, Behnam said it wouldn’t have allowed Ether futures products to be listed if it “did not feel strongly that it was a commodity asset.”

Benham added that the CFTC has litigation and agency credibility risk if it does “something like that without serious legal defenses to support our argument that [the] asset is a commodity.”

Coinbase Announces ‘Wallet as a Service’ Offering

Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency trading platform in the US, has unveiled a new service aiming to make Web3 technology more approachable by simplifying digital wallets, called Wallet as a Service.

The offering is a set of developer tools that allow companies to embed custom, digital wallets directly into their applications. The product, according to Coinbase, has been in development for over a year and is designed to be “use-case agnostic.”

Internally, it is considered to complement Coinbase’s Base, an Ethereum layer-2 network aimed at creating and hosting decentralized applications.

Digital wallets are a key element of the Web3 ecosystem andallow individuals to maintain ownership of digital tokens, such as cryptocurrencies or non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Some wallets, however, can be technically complex and deter the potential adoption of Web3.

Wallet as a Service aims to eliminate this friction, making setting up a wallet as easy as creating a username and password. Coinbase’s Wallet as a Service uses a type of cryptography called multi-party computation, where a wallet’s private key is divided among multiple parties, including Coinbase, as an added layer of security.

Binance Spot & Derivatives Market Share Reach New All-Time Highs

For the fourth month in a row, Binance has seen growth in its spot market share among Top-Tier exchanges. In February, its market share rose from 59.4% in January to 61.8%, setting a new record high for the exchange.

This growth is attributed to a 13.7% increase in spot volumes, reaching $540 billion. Binance's market share in derivative exchanges also increased to its highest-ever recorded monthly market share at 62.9%.

Learn more about the state of exchanges via CryptoCompare’s latest Exchange Review report.

State of the Crypto by Top Tier Exchange Volume

Build your project with the CryptoCompare API

Terms | Privacy

13 Charles II St, SW1Y 4QU

London, UK

This email may include advertisements by third parties. None of the advertised or promoted products and services have been verified or approved by us and this email is not any endorsement by us of the third party or of their products or services.