Bitcoin drops to $67,000 level, and Gemini returns more than $2 billion to users: CNBC Crypto World

Bitcoin drops to $67,000 level, and Gemini returns more than $2 billion to users: CNBC Crypto World

today we’re on the ground of consensus 2024 one of the biggest crypto conferences in the world crypto exchange Gemini returns more than $2 billion doll to customers after pausing withdrawals about a year and a half ago and James Davies the co-founder of crypto Valley exchange discusses why he’s among the thousands of people descending on Austin for consensus welcome to cbc’s crypto world I’m Mackenzie sigalos on the ground here in Austin Texas as day one of consensus 2024 is underway organizers here tell me that they expect about 15,000 people to descend on the Austin Convention Center on par with last year’s attendance but I can say that the sentiment I’m hearing from attendees is very different than last year people are excited to talk about the latest developments in the crypto space and while here we’ll be speaking with some of the biggest stakeholders in digital assets and in trafi we’ll have more from consensus in just a bit but first let’s take a look at the markets as of noon Eastern Bitcoin dropped to the $67,000 level E fell more than 25% to the $3,700 level salana however held steady at $168 as PayPal announced today here at consensus that its stablecoin py USD is now available on the salana blockchain the development comes about 10 months after first debuting on etherum according to PayPal the salana blockchain is known for processing massive amounts of transactions at high speeds with low costs which provides quote significant benefits for the Commerce use cases okay let’s talk about a few of the other stories that we’re following Gemini announced today that it will return nearly $2.2 billion to customers of the crypto exchange’s defunct crypto lending program now the earn program paused withdrawals in November 2022 and customers had their funds locked up ever since in an email to customers today the company which is owned by twins Cameron and Tyler winkl boss said that about 97% of the digital assets owed to users by Genesis Gemini’s lending partner in all of this as of the suspension date are now available in their Gemini accounts this comes after Gemini’s previous announcement that it had reached a settlement with Genesis and other creditors in the Genesis bankruptcy which will result in all earn users receiving 100% of their digital assets back in kind now that means if users lent one Bitcoin in the earn program they’ll receive one Bitcoin back as well as any and all increases in the value of assets since they lent them into the program the development follows a$2 billion settlement with the New York attorney general and Genesis meant to make defrauded crypto investors whole again next Bitcoin miner bit Farms is publicly responding today to the quote unsolicited takeover proposal from Riot platforms saying the bid significantly undervalues theany company and its growth prospects now that’s a determination made by a special Committee of the board comprised only of independent directors today bit Farms confirmed that it received a proposal from Riot on April 22nd to acquire 100% of bit Farm’s common shares at a price of $2.30 per share a bit Farm says that the company had received takeover interest from other parties and stress that it’s committed to maximum value for shareholders last Ripple donated another $25 million to the digital asset Super PAC Fair shake and its support of crypto-friendly political candidates the latest donation is on top of the blockchain firm’s initial contribution of $25 million last year Ripple made the announcement this morning saying that it’s proud to contribute to shaping a positive regulatory landscape in the US the firm’s donations account for about half of the roughly $100 million that fairshake has raised so far from crypto companies like coinbase and Executives including Gemini winkled twins we’re sitting down with ripple CEO Brad garlinghouse here at consensus in the coming days and we will bring you that conversation on this topic and more all right back to consensus 2024 for our main story I spoke with James Davies of crypto Valley exchange to find out why he came to Austin for the conference what he’s hearing from attendees on the ground and why he thought that crypto winter was the right time to start his exchange so we’re here at consensus 2024 you’re our first guest on the ground at and I I believe you landed at 4:00 a.m. this morning you’re coming in from the UK and why is that there are hundreds of conferences around the world why did you feel it was important to come across the Atlantic for this one in particular so as we’ve talked to lots of people across the marketplace this is the landmark conference this is where everybody says they’re going to be and they’re going to be available to network so if you want to make it to just a couple of conferences and be able to see an awful lot of people and be able to get you know a good value for money on on how you’re spending your time then consensus is one of the few names globally that you would go to so you and I were both at consensus last year as well was talking to coinbase about their legal fight with the SEC a lot of centralized crypto exchanges Under Fire a lot of crypto firms winding their way through bankruptcy Fort uh this year how would you compare the uh spirit on the ground so far this morning well clearly I’ve only been here for a few hours but I have noticed a few things that feel different from last year I’m seeing a lot more Patagonia vests there are a lot more traditional Finance people walk around when you spent a good amount of time in traditional Finance you can pick them out so there seems to be a really positive vibe there seems to be a lot of people in here that aren’t just web 3 I can still see there’s lots of hoodies lots of uh web 3 Builders around so it’s a good mix it feels strong and positive you can see that response uh and you can see a lot of the brand names around from people who you would say well how were they going to respond to that last year how would they respond to the SEC and they seem to be here they seem to have a big presence and they seem to be very visible you mentioned the mix of trafi and folks from the web 3 space you yourself have experience in defi crypto you’re the former coo the London derivatives exchange and I think that this Narrative of institutional money coming into the industry has been a big one especially this year at the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs last week just getting that SEC rules change which gives the essentially the green light for spot ether ETFs uh couple of questions though about institutional money because we’ve seen interest wax and Wayne with respect to Wall Street coming into the crypto ecosystem is it different this time around or is it more uh dedic like and the reason I asked this is because I was going through a lot of the 13fs I was reaching out to the banks that now of exposure to bitcoin through these spot exchange traded funds and a lot of them are saying that this is more our wealth management clients who have an interest it’s not necessarily the bank endorsing crypto uh as a new asset class it’s here to stay the banks are classically driven by their buy side so they’ve always been responsive to the asset manag to the pension funds and if your conversation points are directly with the people at the banks who are driving that flow through their Prime brokerage then that that’s the response you’re going to get it’s always going to be about that what I think is more interesting is when we talk to the proprietary trading desks who have maybe a little bit more License To Go in different directions and over the last 20 years a lot of those have spun out of the banks and set up at the side and they also come and use the banks as service providers in traditional Finance they are here in droves it was really notable in London and I can already see a couple of the same face around consensus uh and this represents individual wealth that’s held within proprietary trading funds within professional trading groups and what they D bring is not just a large balance sheet which will come and trade but trade in a much more active way maybe than the ETS will which will buy and hold but also an enormous amount of investment in infrastructure and tooling and equipment and we SE we’ve seen this previously in other Cycles in other asset classes classically we saw this in ’98 through about 2001 in the the whole first arrival of web and the automation it was these people coming off trading floors and setting up businesses that really drove the adoption and the next step and I see that here now I see the same people in the same faces now a lot of them are walking around with people who are bright and young and capable and understand how this Market Works alongside them but you see the same people here and the same activity which is really positive in terms of capital inflow into this Market is a spat ETF for salana and xrp next oh that’s a question I I’ve got to say salana because I think uh it salana has such a good story around it that it’s going to be continuing that way that way through over the next year the question is whether it’s one of those or something else that comes through because there’s uh quite a large group of l2s that seem to continue to push that story so maybe you don’t even launch a spot ETF on a single coin next maybe you uh do a spot ETF against a collection of l2s or something like that that’s more interesting but salana has definitely got a better story you know we’ve got Bitcoin Point trading around $67,000 ether in the $3,800 range neither too far off of those all-time highs that we saw in March but to people even care about talking about the prices or are the conversations more you know centered on the tech and the developers and the kinds of products that are being built on blockchains right now this is the classical fundamental versus technical question so technical is always interesting because we always want to look at a chart we always want to see how well we’re doing what could the upside be but it it is a little bit of reading the te leads the professionals are always looking at the fundamentals always trying to see what the long-term drivers are because the capital’s going to be around for a lot longer so I think most of the conversation here will be about the fundamentals but when we all finish our day and go back to the bar and sit around and talk to people we’ll all take a look at the chart and see how things going what the responses have been so you launched crypto Valley Exchange in December yes so we we put the brand out there and pushed our go live will be in July our test net went out in in December and what was the thinking behind that timing because at that point I I had just finished 5 weeks worth of covering the Sam bakman free criminal trial he was sentenced uh recently to 25 years that was also after binance that just settled with the US government to the tune of $4.3 billion coinbase an active uh litigation with the SEC about their operation meanwhile they had already listed so they had gone through uh many levels of regulatory approval to even get to that point to be a publicly listed country in the US so you’re running a centralized exchange or you soon will be uh what was the thinking behind that timing to uh you know go public with it in December so decentralized but the the big difference here is how to do this right so we see uh a lot of different models across the decentralized and centralized spaces we see this backstory where all of them launched Perpetual Futures contracts and they launched them largely because they were payments companies and when you’re regulated as a payments company you can’t launch Futures and options you’re you’re banned from that perss wasn’t mentioned anywhere so they all launched pers and then they all had to contend with the regulation changing around them and people saying well actually you are promoting Financial products here decentralized exchanges we still don’t know how the regulation is going to deal with that space But what we do know across all of them is that they need to be done the right way there is an absolutely massive market demand signaled by the amount of interest in Perpetual markets it’s definitely the main barrier between here and the next step for cryptocurrency is how do we get Capital efficient how do we make sure that uh all of the normal web three treasurers the people who’ve raised money for their projects are actually able to hedge out their exposures and and put their Capital to work in a more effective way how do we make sure that the the new players that are coming into the market that we’ve just talked about the traditional Financial players are able to access the tool sets that they access for every single other asset class from sub Sahara and Africa to rural Indonesia inside cryptocurrency we need Futures and options and it has to be done in a way where we’re protecting people by doing it in trans arent and in the light so we believe doing that all on chain where everything can be verified is the OB obvious solution it’s just a lot more complicated than trying to do it in a centralized way you announced last month that you raised $7 million what what valuation was that at that was at 35 million we we get 35 minut fully diluted before tokens so I’ve been talking to a lot of Founders and they say it’s a very difficult time in general to raise money when they do is valuations that are far off of the kinds of numbers that they might have seen in 2021 2022 how how did you find the process of raising funds actually not too difficult at all I mean it was for us about a 6 to 8 week process with some relatively significant names in there who went through quite an extensive due diligence process on us uh but we came to the market with everything ready to go all of the mats uh on our risk all ready to publish we had a huge great white paper online I think the preparedness that we had made that much easier and I’m seeing that as I talk to other projects uh via the same DCS and Via other people and the network but there is a an expectation now that you need to be able to show your homework and it’s not just that you have a a really nice Vision you’ve got to be able to articulate effectively why you’re different and why you’re going to have an impact so they can see what the return will be you know really trying to open up this Market is ours uh but if you’ve got the homework done you can also do the rest of this very quickly okay that’s all for crypto world today but we’ll be back again tomorrow with more interviews from consensus 2024 and we’ll see you then

CNBC Crypto World features the latest news and daily trading updates from the digital currency markets and provides viewers with a look at what’s ahead with high-profile interviews, explainers, and unique stories from the ever-changing crypto industry. On today’s show, James Davies, co-founder of Crypto Valley Exchange, explains why crypto winter was the right time to start his exchange and discusses what he’s hearing from attendees at Consensus 2024.

Chapters:
00:00- CNBC Crypto World, May 29, 2024
1:01- Bitcoin drops
1:39- The headlines
4:25- Crypto Valley Exchange’s James Davies

For access to live and exclusive video from CNBC subscribe to CNBC PRO: https://cnb.cx/42d859g
» Subscribe to CNBC TV: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBCtelevision
» Subscribe to CNBC: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBC
Turn to CNBC TV for the latest stock market news and analysis. From market futures to live price updates CNBC is the leader in business news worldwide.
Connect with CNBC News Online
Get the latest news: http://www.cnbc.com/
Follow CNBC on LinkedIn: https://cnb.cx/LinkedInCNBC
Follow CNBC News on Instagram: https://cnb.cx/InstagramCNBC
Follow CNBC News on Facebook: https://cnb.cx/LikeCNBC
Follow CNBC on Threads: https://cnb.cx/threads
Follow CNBC News on X: https://cnb.cx/FollowCNBC
#CNBC
#cnbc-tv-nav-issue

Bitcoin drops to $67,000 level, and Gemini returns more than $2 billion to users: CNBC Crypto World