DBS Bank Singapore Launches Asia’s First Direct Crypto Offering To Clients
Bloomberg
(Bloomberg) – The cyber-attack that crippled the nation’s biggest fuel pipeline this week triggered spot shortages of gasoline and a gusher of political rhetoric, with groups from across the political spectrum offering myriad, and contradictory, solutions.The oil industry says the answer is to invest in more fossil-fuel infrastructure, including refineries. Environmental groups think the key is more electric vehicles on the road and solar panels on the grid. A conservative think tank called the outage a “wake-up call” for pipeline protesters to stop. Even a coal group got involved, noting that its product doesn’t need to be piped anywhere.“Wind and solar power networks are by their very nature more distributed, more sensibly scaled, and more resilient than fossil fuel systems,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of the environmental group Food and Water Watch, said in a statement.The stark divisions reflect the increasingly vocal energy debate. The oil and gas industry has found itself on the defensive against growing calls to fight climate change by reducing consumption of its products. While many fossil fuel advocates agree that curbing greenhouse gases is critical, they point to the Colonial shutdown as a sign of the potential risks of making the green transition too quickly.Colonial Pipeline Co. began to restart the line Wednesday evening, after a ransomware attack caused the company to shut it down May 7. The pipeline delivers about 45% of the gasoline, jet fuel and diesel used on the East Coast.“Whew, crisis averted, that pipeline is back up,” tweeted Chris Horner, an attorney and former senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Now, back to our regularly scheduled agenda of shutting down pipelines.”Conservatives have drawn links between the Colonial outage that transported refined fuels and President Joe Biden’s opposition to the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline that would have ferried tar sands crude from Alberta to Nebraska. Even a fully operational Keystone XL would have had no effect on fuel supplies during the Colonial outage, since it would carry minimally processed crude, not gasoline and other refined fuel.“The Colonial Pipeline closure should serve as a wake-up call to pipeline protesters who pretend we don’t need the energy transported by these pieces of critical infrastructure,” opined the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based conservative think tank. “We are as reliant upon oil and natural gas as we are water, and that reality isn’t going to change anytime soon.”Refining advocates also used the fuel shortages to highlight the decline in fuel-making capacity in the Northeast. Where the East Coast previously had 12 refineries, closures have dropped that number to four. By some estimates, the Atlantic Basin has lost a total of 1.5 million barrels per day of refining capacity since 2008, making the region more reliant on imports and fuel transported by Colonial.A New Jersey lawmaker pressed administration officials to address the decline during a briefing Wednesday. Each time a refinery closes, we’re losing the ability to fuel our defense, the unidentified lawmaker said, according to a person on the call.The coal industry, whose chief product is a rock that can’t be carried by pipelines, used the incident to highlight the value of its fossil fuel. The National Mining Association, which represents companies such as Consol Energy Inc. and Peabody Energy Corp., promoted coal as a “valuable insurance policy in an era of emerging and deceptively dangerous threats.”“It’s becoming clear that pipelines and just-in-time fuel delivery are a particularly vulnerable link in the equation,” the Washington-based trade group said in a statement Wednesday. “The months of fuel stored on site at coal and nuclear power plants add a layer of security and resilience we have long taken for granted and continue to undervalue.”Biden administration officials cited the crisis to highlight the president’s multi-trillion-dollar plans for investing in the nation’s highways, electric vehicle charging and the grid.“This incident also reminds us that infrastructure is a national security issue, and the reality is that investing in world-class, modern and resilient infrastructure has always been central to ensuring our country’s economic security, our national security and, as we’re seeing right now, that includes cybersecurity,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at a White House briefing.Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm noted at least one group hasn’t been affected by the pipeline outage and the fuel shortages it caused along the East Coast.“If you drive an electric car this would not be affecting you, clearly,” she said during a White House briefing Tuesday.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Crypto Stocks Bounce After $6 Billion Drop as Bitcoin Churns
Benzinga
Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) recently saw a major downwards price movement after Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) announced it wouldn’t be accepting the cryptocurrency as means of payment over environmental concerns. What Happened: According to a recent Business Insider report, there are seven metrics that traders and investors should check after Bitcoin plunged as much as 17%, to below $50,000 from a high near $58,0-00. The first one of those metrics is the aggregated open interest on Bitcoin futures, which fell from a high of $20.39 billion on May 12 to $18.79 billion on the next day. Business Insider points out that traders of this kind of derivative can often leverage their position up to 125 times and that consequently, “the market moving only slightly can trigger liquidations on those positions.” According to a market analyst, in the previous 24 hours, “332 796 traders were liquidated, with a total of $3,640 million in liquidations. $2,210 million of which within one hour before the tweet was published.” John Wu, the president of a crypto firm Ava Labs and CoinShares CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti CEO commented on the open interest metric by explaining that it can inform on future movement in the spot markets. In other words, the higher the open interest, the more one can expect the positions to be leveraged, and the more easily the price could crash due to liquidations. Mognetti also pointed to Bitcoin options data, “You can also look at option implied versus realized to understand the Bitcoin price drop.” Crypto hedge fund Alameda Research trader Sam Trabucco recommended checking historical futures premia, historical futures open interest, and spot-price data. He explained that when open interest is skyrocketing and premia are high for a while, it becomes critical to starting watching price data. “When the price data dips down from a local maximum, for instance, all these combinations combine for an environment where liquidations are really likely to drive prices down even more,” Trabucco noted. CoinShares' Mognetti also suggested checking the market depth for the BTC/USD trading pair. He pointed out that the chart clearly shows “a rapid decimation of market depth on spot BTC-USD order books aggregated across 6 exchanges.” Ava Labs' Wu also highlighted the importance of anecdotal insights and news, providing an example about the mid-April crash: “For example, since the drop, I have had a lot of friends from traditional finance ask me if this is the dip they were waiting for to get involved. […] I am not sure if this is scientific, but based on my conversations with traditional finance people, this will invite new players into crypto and continue the trend of more players in the space of crypto.” Mognetti also recommended checking the divergence of the prices of the spot markets, pointing out that at the time of the mid-April crash, “the divergence in spot prices between Coinbase and Binance reached nearly 3% at one point.” He explained that this is significant because it shows that “most of the sell-off was coming from the Asia market, not the US or Europe” and said: “Futures traded at significant discounts to spot, with the annualized rolling 3-month basis on Binance falling to -37% according to data provider Skew.” The last metric, also recommended by Mognetti, is total liquidations. This data shows that on May 12, $3.46 billion of longs were liquidated in the cryptocurrency market, the highest number reported since April 17. See more from BenzingaClick here for options trades from BenzingaCiti Considers Launching Bitcoin Custody, Crypto Trading© 2021 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
How Did Dogecoin Buzz Treat the Indian Crypto Exchanges?
How Did Dogecoin Buzz Treat the Indian Crypto Exchanges?
Dogecoin mania reached Indian crypto exchanges and crashed its websites
After Ethereum and Bitcoin, it is now Dogecoin that has taken the internet by storm. The global trading volume of Dogecoin tripled last week and it hit more than a whopping USD80 million market cap recently. Dogecoin, the quirkiest cryptocurrency born out of a Doge meme back in 2013, is now gaining the most attention from crypto traders all around the globe.
It is a peer-to-peer, open-source cryptocurrency and its underlying technology is scraped off of Litecoin script. The low cost and the unlimited supply of coins make it highly acceptable among the crypto networks around. The recent Coinbase listings resulted in its value surging to a new record. Elon Musk has also been very vocal about crypto, which mostly seemed supportive. Recently Musk called the crypto a ‘hustle’ on a popular US comedy show, Saturday Night Live, which brought down the value of Doge. However, two days back Musk’s SpaceX announced that it will be launching its ‘Doge-1 Mission to Moon’ in 2022 and will accept Dogecoin as the payment. This has again resulted in much frenzy around this meme-inspired crypto.
The Dogecoin trend gradually reached India and the cryptocurrency exchanges in India witnessed record-breaking trading volumes of Dogecoin. This resulted in increased traffic on the trading platforms, which slowed the system and crashed it. One of India’s largest and most trusted cryptocurrency exchange platforms, WazirX, reported a fund transfer issue and system slow down due to the sudden surge in traffic. According to a Times Now report, a statement by WazirX stated, “It is a peer-to-peer, open-source cryptocurrency and its underlying technology is scraped off of Litecoin. The low cost and the unlimited supply of coins make it acceptable among the crypto networks.” Users took the issue to social media and complained about the transactions issues on Twitter through #WazirXScam that soon became trending.
It was unfortunate that such a big trading exchange could not manage the user traffic with a sudden demand for accelerated Doge transactions. WazirX had clarified in their responses that they were unable to accommodate the user traffic and ensured that they will repair it soon.
Further on May 10th, WazirX tweeted, “Trading issues have been resolved. We’ve enhanced our trading experience that will handle the heavy load due to high volumes. We’re improving the app/website experience further and will keep #BUIDLing.” Another platform CoinDCX also came up with a crackdown due to a surge in doge trade.
Dogecoin saw this escalated price movement after the anticipated appearance of Elon Musk on the Saturday Night Live show. Since Musk had been tweeting in support of Doge non-stop, traders took the hint as a prospective time to invest in the cryptocurrency. Another Indian crypto exchange CoinSwitch Kuber disabled its INR deposits temporarily. The platform tweeted that it is caused by the end of their Bank partner and will fix it soon on April 21. A report by the Economic Times revealed that since the hint on Musk’s appearance in the TV show, CoinSwitch Kuber witnessed a surge of INR600 crore in Dogecoin trade in 24 hours and it registered 200% trade volume month over month. While all this was happening, ZebPay stayed away from this frenzy by not hosting Dogecoin on its platform.
Meanwhile, the Indian Government is planning to introduce new regulations on cryptocurrency trading. The revised framework would demand the company details, and statements of profit and loss in digital currency trades, etc. The crypto network in India is already anticipating a strict move from the central authorities and that is when such a frenzy overtook the crypto exchanges. Many traders blamed the exchange platforms for not having the better capacity and not expecting any trade surge. The mania over Dogecoin dropped down once Musk uttered the word ‘hustle’ in the show. The Crypto market is ever volatile and thus there have also been statements from experts asking not to trust much in cryptocurrency investments.