Daily Crypto News | July 8th, 2022

1. KeyFi CEO Accuses Celsius Of Ponzi Scheme

Jason Stone, a DeFi entrepreneur and the CEO of KeyFi, Inc., one of the people behind yield farming account 0xb1, is suing cryptocurrency loan company Celsius for allegedly failing to uphold its contract. Stone is asking for unspecified damages that will be decided at trial.

The lawsuit, which was submitted on Thursday in New York, accuses Celsius of using customer funds to “manipulate crypto asset markets, had failed to institute basic accounting controls which endangered those same deposits, and had failed to carry through on promises.”

The DeFi account 0xb1 managed roughly $2 billion in assets for Celsius at one point, according to Stone in a lengthy Twitter conversation, and Celsius “assured” him that it was implementing proper risk management precautions, like “hedging any potential impermanent loss from our activities in liquidity pools.”

2. Celsius Repays Loans, Moving Collaterals Into FTX Wallet

Celsius used DAI stablecoins to pay off the remaining $41 million debt on its Maker Vault, where borrowers can lock up collateral and create DAI stablecoins worth half the value of their collateral via the Maker DeFi protocol, early on Thursday morning. Three times in May and June, Celsius came dangerously close to having its collateral liquidated when its value was just beyond the crucial 150 percent threshold, but since then, it has been making regular payments.

The Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), a tokenized variation of Bitcoin that can be used on the Ethereum network, that it had deposited as collateral was subsequently withdrawn when it paid the remaining balance this morning.

Several hours later, members of the r/cryptocurrency community on Reddit and users of Crypto Twitter saw that Celsius had transferred the recently regained collateral to a wallet on the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. WBTC worth $531 million that belong to the corporation are currently on the exchange.

3. International Money Fund Warns About Global Economy

In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), talked about the forecast for the world economy and the possibility of a worldwide recession. The IMF managing director made the following remarks regarding the world economy: “The outlook since our last update in April has darkened significantly.”

She identified a number of causes, including a wider distribution of inflation, larger increases in interest rates, a slowdown in China’s economic growth, and escalating sanctions connected to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The IMF reduced its estimate of global growth in 2021 from 6.1 percent to 3.6 percent in 2022 and 2023 in April. The Fund remarked at the time that this was “0.8 and 0.2 percentage points lower for 2022 and 2023 than projected in January.”

4. Nigeria Central Bank Failed To Stop Naira’s Depreciation

According to a study, the CBN’s initiative to encourage beneficiaries of international transfers to withdraw money through authorized channels did not succeed in encouraging the currency market or achieving the bank’s objective of stopping the naira’s depreciation.

The naira’s exchange rate against the U.S. dollar has decreased by more than 25% since the Naira for Dollar program’s debut more than 13 months ago, according to a report in a local news site called Blueprint. The rate of exchange between the naira and the dollar on the black market is currently 612 naira to the dollar. The official exchange rate has remained at 415 naira per dollar.

5. Bitcoin Miner Firm Compass Mining Cuts Staff

Compass Mining said today that it would lay off 15% of its workforce and decrease CEO pay by up to 50%.

Compass co-founders and interim CEOs Thomas Heller and Paul Gosker stated in a letter, “Today, we have made the difficult decision to reduce the size of the Compass team by 15% and to implement significant compensation and spend reductions across the rest of the business.”

According to the post, Compass will be offering “financial and non-financial assistance” to those who are affected by the staff cut.