Weekly News Roundup: Bloody Monday, Tether and Bitfinex Settle, MicroStrategy and Elon Musk Draw More Attention

This week will go down in history as yet another wild ride for cryptocurrencies. The market started the week with investors seeing nothing but red on Monday as the prices of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other altcoins took a nosedive. One legal issue wrapped up in court while another reared its ugly head, and Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy pulled another rabbit out of an old hat. Here’s your weekly round up.

Bitcoin and Ethereum Lead Bloody Monday

The prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum dropped more than 10% on Monday amidst a broader selloff in traditional financial markets. The selloff continued throughout the week. Over the last seven days, the price of Ethereum is down nearly 22%.

While the price of Cardano is up over 24% this week thanks to its continued advancements in project development, five of the top 10 altcoins by market capitalization are all down a minimum of 20% on the week.

Whether or not this is a sign of a bear market grabbing hold of cryptocurrencies will depend on what traditional financial markets do over the coming weeks. It’s clear that cryptocurrencies are still closely correlated with traditional markets and have yet to decouple at the present moment.

Tether and Bitfinex Settle Lawsuit for $18.5 million

The company behind the U.S. Dollar Tether token and crypto exchange Bitfinex are agreeing to pay out $18.5 million USD to the New York Attorney General’s office in order to settle a court case as the state alleged the two firms tried to cover up $850 million USD in losses.

The U.S. Dollar Tether token is currently the fifth most valuable cryptocurrency in the world with a market capitalization of more than $166.3 billion Canadian. It’s the world’s leading stablecoin and every time the project prints more Tether tokens, the price of Bitcoin goes up.

The headline isn’t the best news in the short term, but in the long run it could give investors confidence knowing that Tether is going to continue to be closely monitored now that a precedent has been set by regulators.

Elon Musk Draws the Ire of the SEC

Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk is going to have to talk to the SEC and answer questions related to his tweets about Dogecoin that saw the ‘meme’ crypto with no fundamental value pump nearly 1,000% in price in a span of two weeks.

This is the second time in his career that Musk is being summoned by the SEC over comments made on Twitter. In August 2018, he publicly tweeted about taking Tesla private in a deal that valued the company at $420 per share.

In order to avoid jail time, Musk agreed to step aside as chairman of the company for three years and pay a $20 million fine.

Since Musk doesn’t own Dogecoin, the government likely won’t come after him for pumping the price of a meme coin, but it does make his announcement of Tesla’s $1.5 billion Bitcoin purchase shortly after the pump look bad.

MicroStrategy adds another 1.026 billion USD in Bitcoin

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor is at it again. In a press release issued earlier this week, the company announced the acquisition of 1.026 billion USD in Bitcoin at a price of $52,762 each. This means the company now owns 90,531 bitcoins.

The acquisition makes it safe to say that MicroStrategy’s stock price is now more of a proxy for investors that want to be closely connected to the price of Bitcoin than it ever has been before. The current value of all of those bitcoins at the time of this writing is $4.2 billion USD.

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That’s it, that’s all for your weekly round up!