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Tesla and SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk officially acquired Twitter on Thursday following a series of court battles, memes, and terminations.

The $44 billion USD deal comes as Musk bought out the social media giant for $54.2 per share, following his successful bid on 11 April this year.

Musk also took the company private and delisted it from the New York Stock Exchange to remove it from public shareholders, the first time since it was listed in 2013.

To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies https://t.co/k4guTsXOIu

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2022

The NYSE mentioned Twitter will no longer be a public company and that the exchange would freeze its shares on 28 October, along with several trading platforms.

Public listing provides regulatory scrutiny, a key advantage following numerous rows the billionaire has faced with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in recent years over Twitter posts.

Conversely, Twitter as a private firm will allow it to avoid public oversight as it no longer needs to disclose quarterly reports.

Musk also ordered Twitter employees to print up to 60 pages of code from the platform for further evaluation, following his requests in recent months.

Why Musk Is Taking Twitter

The news comes as Musk, 51, aims to drastically restructure the social media platform by slashing key positions and hiring executives to lead the company’s new direction.

Speculators also believe the measures will allow for more free speech and less censorship under the new board’s leadership, which may entice a fresh user base to join the platform.

According to the New York Times, the company has struggled to grow its advertising operations and attract new users, triggering sweeping measures after he purchased the firm. Musk has dismissed several executives from the San Francisco-based firm, including CEO Parag Agrawal, general counsel Sean Edgett, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and legal and policy executive Vijaya Gadde.

The Twitter executives who were fired on Thursday include Parag Agrawal, the chief executive; Ned Segal, the chief financial officer; Vijaya Gadde, the top legal and policy executive; and Sean Edgett, the general counsel, said two people with knowledge of the matter. At least one of the executives who was fired was escorted out of Twitter’s office, they said.

ConsenSys, the parent company of MetaMask, announced on Wednesday it will fund $2.4 million for a MetaMask Grants decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) to develop Web3 solutions.

MetaMask employees will lead the 12-month-long project and manage the DAO for Web3 developers outside the company’s workforce. The funding will finance solutions built for MetaMask’s ecosystem and the global Web3 market, reports show.

The DAO will receive and process proposals and votes via the SnapShot feature of its Codefi Activate platform, with the New York City-based firm pledging $600,000 each quarter to back Web3 across sectors.

Three Faces of Consensys DAO

According to the DAO, it will focus on three primary components:

• Employee-led DAO for more than 900 full-time ConsenSys employees, who can become a Grants DAO member with equal voting rights.
• Leadership Committee (mini-DAO) consisting of seven people that seek out projects with high potential, write governance proposals, develop other content, and receive feedback.
• Multisignature wallets, which ConsenSys supervises, operates the treasury and token contract. It also signs off on transactions for dispersing funds and mints tokens for new and past employees.

Additionally, the Leadership Committee of the DAO will consist of the Co-Founders of MetaMask along with its global product and extensibility leads, its senior DAO strategist. It will also include the directors of strategic initiatives and product management for ConsenSys.

MetaMask, Sardine Fiat-to-Crypto Integration

The news comes after MetaMask integrated new technologies from fintech company Sardine earlier in October to convert fiat monies to cryptocurrencies.

This will allow users to instantly transfer fiat currencies to their crypto wallets rather than using typical banking mechanisms or traditional transfers.

Sardine, an instant fiat and cryptocurrency settlement platform, boasts strict “compliance and fraud prevention infrastructure” used for crypto trading platforms like “FTX, MoonPay, Blockchain, and Autograph,” the company wrote in a blog post on 11 October.

NEARStarter, a DAO-governed incubator on Near and Aurora, will be providing its incubation services to Meteor Wallet, a simple and secure wallet on the Near Protocol.

The NEARStarter incubator is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)-governed incubation program for early-stage projects launching on Near and Aurora.

In its two years of life, the popularity of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi), gaming and other Web3 projects on the Near Protocol has grown significantly, forcing the adoption of high-quality incubators to support them. 

As an incubator, NEARStarter not only helps projects like Meteor Wallet receive proper funding to benefit from liquidity but also introduces them to a significant and international crypto network, as well as increasing their social media presence by participation in AMAs or contests. 

Meteor Wallet, one of the up-and-coming incubated projects on NEARStarter, is a simple and secure Wallet on the Near Protocol that allows users to collect NFTs, access DeFi and explore the Near Ecosystem. Jonathan Myburgh, head of growth at Meteor Wallet, noted: 

“It’s pretty crazy to think that this all started from an NFT collection (Near Tinker Union) with the aim to build products that benefit the Near ecosystem. We started by building a no-code NFT launchpad but soon realized that Near lacked a wallet that matched its UX ambitions to help transition Web2 over to Web3.

Our goal is to be the go-to wallet that makes the Near blockchain simple and secure for users within one super wallet app (identity, financial, social, your gateway to the chain).

Edward Chew is the founder of Near Tinker Union NFT and leads the technical nature of Meteor Wallet. He previously worked at one of the largest e-wallet companies in Asia. 

We are grateful for the NEARStarter team that has been alongside us from the early stages of the project.”

The incubator program aims to serve as the Near and Aurora ecosystem’s top growth engine. To do so, they have so far been successful in helping several projects to develop in the Near market with great partners and international Guilds that NEARStarter is collaborating with.

The wallet was founded by an all-star team that also developed top-notch projects like Near Tinker Union, a top five NFT project on Near in terms of volume, and Enleap, a leading NFT launchpad platform on Near.

Ramiro Gamen, head of accelerator at NEARStarter, shared: 

“At NearStarter, we see tremendous potential in Meteor’s tech and community, but even more in their founders. They’ve harnessed their experiences from Near Tinker Union and their collective knowledge of the industry to develop an amazing tool for Near users to securely store, manage and exchange their digital assets, with unique features that prove ideal to new users coming into the Near ecosystem or blockchain in general.” 

Moreover, NEARStarter incubates other projects, including a lending 2.0 protocol and a Web3 Career Hub. 

The NEARStarter acceleration program is already recognized as one of the leaders in the Near ecosystem and has established partnerships with crucial projects, including Paras, Roketo, Shitzu, Fluxus and Decentral Bank among others.

Since the market is expanding at an unprecedented speed, NEARStarter, as an incubator, must constantly seek ways to enhance the services it offers. Future plans for the platform include continuing to expand the utility of the “Vicious Fishes” NFT collection, supporting incubated projects through additional high-quality partnerships, and launching the NSTART initial decentralized exchange offering soon. NEARStarter’s energy is in full swing to keep shaking the Near and crypto ecosystem.

More about NEARStarter

NEARStarter is a DAO-governed incubator acting as the ultimate growth engine for the Near and Aurora ecosystem.

Follow NEARStarter’s social media channels to be at the forefront of the Near ecosystem:

Telegram | Discord | Twitter | Blog | Website

The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday sued the indicted founder of a cryptocurrency “mixer” to recover a $60 million civil penalty that was imposed on him in 2020 by U.S. financial regulators for alleged failures to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program.

The lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C., federal court against Larry Harmon of Ohio who ran a cryptocurrency “mixer,” or “tumbler” called Helix, an anonymizing service that U.S. authorities said could send virtual currency in a way that concealed the source or owner.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department, in October 2020 imposed a $60 million civil money payment on Harmon for alleged violations of the federal Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). FinCEN, as the bureau is known, alleged that Harmon was operating an unlicensed money transmitting business in connection with Helix.

Last year, Harmon pleaded guilty to a money laundering conspiracy charge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He has not been sentenced.

Charles Flood of Houston’s Flood & Flood, a lawyer for Harmon in the criminal case, did not immediately reply to a message seeking comment on Thursday.

In court filings in the criminal case, Flood said “Harmon never set out to break the law and if he had known in 2014 that operating a bitcoin tumbler was illegal, he never would have done it.”

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia declined to comment. A representative from FinCEN did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

In a statement in 2020, FinCEN said its “investigation demonstrated that Mr. Harmon deliberately disregarded his obligations under the BSA and implemented practices that allowed Helix to circumvent the BSA’s requirements.”

FinCEN said Harmon failed to “collect and verify customer names, addresses, and other identifiers” on more than 1.2 million bitcoin transactions from June 2014 to December 2017 valued at the time at $300 million.

In the criminal case, Harmon agreed to a $311,000 restitution order, court records show. The authorities seized various bitcoin “wallets” from Harmon as part of the criminal investigation.

Harmon’s sentencing was deferred, pending cooperation with the U.S. that the government said last month “remains active and ongoing.”

The U.S. Treasury Department said on Tuesday that cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex Inc had agreed to pay $29 mln in fines for “apparent violations” of sanctions on certain countries and anti-money laundering law.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) had levied fines of about $24 million and $29 million, respectively, on Bittrex.

But according to terms of the settlement, FinCEN would transfer $24 million to OFAC after it receives its $29-million payment from Bittrex, as some of the violations stem from the “same underlying conduct” as the OFAC investigation.

Effectively, Bittrex will have to pay a penalty of about $29 million.

Bittrex failed to prevent people located in the sanctioned jurisdictions of Ukraine’s Crimea region, Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria from using its platform between March 2014 and December 2017, according to OFAC.

FinCEN said its investigation found that from February 2014 through December 2018, Bittrex did not maintain an effective anti-money laundering program.

“Bittrex’s AML program failed to appropriately address the risks associated with the products and services it offered, including anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrencies,” it added.

Cryptocurrencies and other digital assets have soared in popularity over recent years and are getting increasingly intertwined with the regulated financial system, saddling policymakers with monitoring risks in a largely unregulated sector.

Bittrex in an emailed statement to Reuters said it was “pleased to have fully resolved” the matter with OFAC and FinCEN on mutually agreeable terms.

A growing number of funds are betting on the long-term appeal of bitcoin and ether, a gritty gambit in the depths of a crypto winter.

Unfazed by a collapse in prices over the past 11 months, investment firms have unleashed a flurry of exchange-traded funds, anticipating that elite cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology will eventually prevail.

Of more than 180 total active crypto exchange traded products (ETPs) and trust products globally, half have launched since the bitcoin bear market started, Morgan Stanley said in a note published this month. The proliferation came even as the total value of assets in the market slumped 70% to $24 billion in that period as crypto prices tanked.

About 95% of those 180 funds are focused on the top two coins, bitcoin and ether, Morgan Stanley said.

“Naturally when the market is slower, prices are lower, people have lost money, the intensity of the appetite does diminish,” said Chen Arad, co-founder of crypto risk monitoring firm Solidus Labs. “But it’s not the case in the long run. As a whole, I don’t think anyone is giving up.”

The attraction of ETPs is that they provide exposure to digital assets on a regulated stock exchange, so retail and institutional investors don’t have to worry about securely storing their crypto and eluding hacks and heists.

In terms of money, cryptocurrency investment products have attracted about $453 million in net inflows this year with much of it going into bitcoin and investment vehicles that include the biggest cryptocurrencies, according to a report from digital asset manager Coinshares.

“There is more asset allocation towards baskets that combine the top five or 10 crypto assets by market cap. It’s a flight to quality compared to alternative assets in the crypto industry,” said Eliezer Ndinga, director of research at 21shares.

Other major cryptocurrencies include solana, cardano and ripple .

Most active crypto ETP products are registered outside the United States, though, with Switzerland, Canada, Australia and Brazil racing ahead with spot crypto offerings.

One reason is that U.S. regulators have turned down several applications for spot bitcoin funds, which mirror the cryptocurrency’s price movements tick-by-tick, citing multiple reasons including a lack of surveillance-sharing agreements with regulated markets relating to the spot funds’ underlying assets.

Investors in futures-based funds must often shoulder the additional cost of the futures rollover as contracts approach settlement day, to maintain their position.

Bitcoin has lost 17% in the past three months, while ProShares Bitcoin Strategy’s ETF , which tracks bitcoin futures, has shed about 21%. The world’s largest bitcoin fund, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC.PK), is down 34% in the same time.

ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, has seen assets under management (AUM) shrink to just over $600 million as of the end of September, according to Refinitiv Lipper data. At its debut a year ago it pulled in over $1 billion in a matter of days.

At Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust, the AUM have tumbled to $12.2 billion from over $30 billion at the end of 2021, data from the firm showed.

Will Peck, head of digital assets at WisdomTree, whose spot bitcoin ETF was blocked by U.S. watchdogs last week, said he wasn’t surprised by the decision, but expressed hope that an agreement could be reached.

“I think we’ll ultimately get there. But we’ll be in a holding pattern for the foreseeable future.”