February 10, 2023

Crypto exchange Kraken will immediately end its crypto staking-as-a-service platform for U.S. customers and pay $30 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charges concerning the offering of unregistered securities. The SEC's official announcement confirmed a CoinDesk scoop from earlier in the day. The platforms offered the general public access to staking services since at least 2019. Governance tokens of the largest liquid staking protocols surged on the news, with LDO, the governance token of the largest liquid staking protocol Lido Finance with some $8.4 billion of staked ether (ETH) on the platform, jumping 10.4% in the hour after the SEC announcement. 

Kraken CEO Dave Ripley (Kraken)

Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) was a rare crypto in the green on Friday, gaining 7% as most other tokens were sizably lower. Hadera, often described as an alternative to blockchain which is able to quickly and cheaply process transactions, is now up 67% over the past month. The network announced earlier in the week that technology company Dell had joined its governing council to “help organizations explore distributed ledger technology.” The governing council already consisted of Google, IBM, LG and more. 

The New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) is investigating stablecoin issuer Paxos. The full scope of the probe is unclear and a NYDFS spokesperson said the agency could not comment on ongoing investigations. Paxos’ stablecoins include the Paxos dollar (USDP) and Binance USD (BUSD), a Binance-branded stablecoin offered through a white-label service. Paxos has been in the news recently over rumors that the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) may ask it to withdraw its application for a full banking charter. Paxos has denied these rumors.

Optimism Network conducted a surprise airdrop Thursday, sending 11.7 million of its OP governance tokens to more than 300,000 wallets, according to a blog post by the layer 2 blockchain’s caretaker group, Optimism Collective.

Optimism’s airdrop is part of the blockchain’s initiative to distribute 19% of its initial governance token supply as it attempts to forge a path toward wider adoption. Its first airdrop last May was for 200 million tokens, or 5% of the initial governance token supply.

OP fell 13% yesterday on news of the boosted circulating supply after rallying nearly 200% in the weeks leading up to the airdrop.

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