Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin, which nosedived below $34,000 when the war began on Thursday, was flat on Saturday at nearly $39,000 per coin, compared with a 5 per cent gain in XRP digital asset and a 10 per cent rise in Terra's LUNA token, reports CoinDesk. The second major cryptocurrency Ethereum was at $2,710 per coin, up 2.66 per cent.

US President Joe Biden has announced new sanctions and limitations on what can be exported to Russia. The US will block five of the biggest Russian banks and freeze all assets they hold in America, worth over $1 trillion. Earlier, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled Britain's largest-ever package of sanctions against Russia, targeting banks and wealthy Russians.

Come Back Alive, a Ukrainian NGO that raises crypto funds for the Ukrainian army, received more than $400,000 worth of digital tokens in the past day, according to data from blockchain and crypto analytics firm Elliptic. The average amount donated is around $1,000 to $2,000, and the group has received at least 317 individual donations in the past two days, reports Fortune.

All crypto/NFT ads must carry the following disclaimer, "Crypto products and NFTs are unregulated and can be highly risky. There may be no regulatory recourse for any loss from such transactions." No advertisement for crypto/digital asset products or exchanges may show a minor, or someone who appears to be a minor, directly dealing with the product, or talking about the product, said the advertising watchdog.

As per a memorandum by the US National Security Council (NSC) memorandum, government agencies, include the Departments of the Treasury, State, Justice, and Homeland Security, will be asked to assess the risks and opportunities that crypto poses, and delve into the details of a central bank digital currency, Bloomberg news cited an administration official as saying last month.

The ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in the US has come in a 2018 case where some investors filed a class-action lawsuit against open-source cryptocurrency BitConnect and its promoters for running a Ponzi scheme and persuading them to invest for high returns. BitConnect's promoters told its victims that if they handed over their Bitcoin for a period of time, their crypto would be used by an automated trading bot that would return huge profits.

In more bad news for the unregulated world of cryptocurrencies, popular crypto lender BlockFi will have to pay $100 million in penalties in the US for operating as an unregistered investment company. The company's interest accounts, which let users earn returns on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, were found to be unregistered securities.

Forbes, known for its ranking of billionaires, said the deal would help make it a leader supplying information about digital assets, like Bitcoin. But news of the investment sparked questions among media watchers about potential conflicts of interest, the report said. Binance sued Forbes in 2020 for defamation, later dropping the case.

The couple -- Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and Heather Morgan, 31 -- faces charges of conspiring to launder money and to defraud the US government, facing up to 25 years in prison if convicted. They were arrested in Manhattan for an alleged conspiracy to launder cryptocurrency that was stolen during the 2016 hack of Bitfinex, a virtual currency exchange, presently valued at approximately $4.5 billion.

According to a report by Blockchain data platform Chainalysis, they found a small but growing portion of activity on NFT marketplaces that could be attributed to money laundering. "While money laundering in physical art is difficult to quantify, we can make more reliable estimates of NFT-based money laundering thanks to the inherent transparency of the Blockchain," the report said late on Wednesday.