Summary of notable crypto events in Q3 2024

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Coin68
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The SEC's green light for Ethereum spot ETF trading has been the biggest hit in Q3 2024. In addition, crypto's increasingly important role in the race for the White House has also brought the public's attention to the sector.

Summary of notable crypto events in Q3/2024

July

Bitcoin drops to $53,500 on July 5

On the morning of July 5, the Bitcoin wallet of Mt. Gox suddenly transferred out 47,299 BTC , worth 2.71 billion USD, to a new address.

Previously, Mt. Gox confirmed that it would begin refunding 142,000 BTC in assets to customers this July, exactly 10 years since the exchange was hacked in 2014, causing a loss of 850,000 BTC.

Bitcoin price has been continuously falling in recent days due to news about BTC sales by German and US authorities , adjusting from 63,500 USD to 56,500 USD on July 4.

At 11:15 AM on July 5, the world's largest cryptocurrency continued to fall to $53,500 - the lowest price since February 2024. Thus, BTC lost up to $10,000 in value in just 2 days. The 24-hour liquidation value reached$680 million .

The sharp drop at the beginning of the month also brought the Fear and Greed index down to the same level as BTC $17k in early 2023 , showing the panic in the market sentiment at that time.

Mt. Gox Pays Off Debt

As mentioned above, the reason for the July 5 drop was the Mt. Gox exchange starting to pay off its debts, after 10 years of litigation.

Although the exchange's plan to transfer BTC, ETH, and Japanese Yen to creditors was announced months ago, the crypto market still reacted strongly when the community witnessed large transfers of hundreds of millions of USD from Mt. Gox wallets.

Throughout July, Mt. Gox moved large amounts of BTC and BCH for many consecutive days to pay off debts, most of which were transferred to CEX exchanges that were distribution partners of the exchange such as Kraken and Bitstamp . The market also got used to these actions, and the BTC price gradually reacted less.

SEC Ends Investigation into Paxos, No Longer Alleging BUSD is a Security

As Coin68 mentioned, the SEC's lawsuit against Paxos alleging that the stablecoin BUSD is a security is one of the 23 notable crypto events of 2023 .

Recalling that action was like a bomb that "exploded" the entire crypto market, pushing Binance's legal troubles to a climax, as well as "putting an end" to the stablecoin that was once competitive enough with USDT and USDC.

But after more than 1 year, on July 11, 2024, the SEC "withdrew" from the Paxos investigation - BUSD escaped securities charges.

The agency's compromise was influenced by a recent court ruling in favor of Binance , which ruled that secondary market sales of BNB are not considered securities, similar to a mid-2023 ruling related to the SEC's lawsuit against Ripple.

In general, although it has "escaped the label" of securities, BUSD has had to fall into the fate of being forgotten, giving way to other potential competitors.

In addition, the SEC also had to end its investigation into the layer-2 developer Bitcoin Stacks .

WazirX India Exchange Hacked for Over $230 Million

On the afternoon of July 18, blockchain security experts discovered that the Indian exchange WazirX was attacked with a loss of up to 230 million USD. This figure is equivalent to 45% of the exchange's users' money.

WazirX quickly announced that it would suspend withdrawals to prevent further losses. The exchange then suspended trading again, promising a $23 million bug bounty for anyone who found the culprit.

Security experts believe that the notorious hacker group Lazarus Group is the culprit . But because of that, it is even more difficult for the exchange to recover assets.

By the end of July, WazirX faced a wave of criticism for "surveying user wishes" , almost asking users to share the damage from the hack, but not providing a solution to compensate the unfortunate victims.

According to the latest update, the Singapore government has granted a 4-month debt repayment moratorium to WazirX.

SEC Approves Ethereum Spot ETF

True to many previous signals , the SEC finally gave the final nod to the Ethereum spot ETF proposals, making ETH the second cryptocurrency after Bitcoin to have a spot ETF established.

Nine ETFs made an impressive debut in their first trading session on July 23 , with a net inflow of $106 million.

Although the Ethereum ETF did not perform as impressively as its predecessor in the following days, often recording outflows due to selling pressure from Grayscale's fund , as experts had predicted , this is still evidence that authorities are gradually opening up to crypto, helping the field to mature.

ETFs also help bring money from traditional finance into the crypto market.

Politicians Appear at Bitcoin 2024 Conference

Previously, Mr. Trump's election campaign made crypto one of the main arguments to attract supporters, stemming from the recent crackdown on companies in the cryptocurrency industry by the Biden administration and the Democratic Party.

But it was not until Trump appeared at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference held in Nashville (Tennessee, USA) on July 28 that the community was truly convinced by his determination.

Thanks to his eloquent speech and pro-crypto promises such as wanting the US to become the "center" and "superpower" of Bitcoin in the world, firing Gary Gensler, ending " Operation Chokepoint 2.0 ",... the betting rate for Trump also skyrocketed.

In addition to Trump, the annual Bitcoin conference has also become a stage for many politicians to attract voters, such as:

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August

Bitcoin crashed to $49,000 on August 5

The drop on July 5 was nothing compared to August 5. The event marked “Black Monday” for global financial markets, wiping out countless investors’ assets.

The deep drop pushed Bitcoin price to "collapse" to 49,000 USD, ETH to the lowest level of the year, the market liquidated more than 1 billion USD , with some of the following reasons:

It can be seen that just one of the above reasons is enough to push crypto prices down, but when a combination of the above factors occurs at the same time, the market "bleeds" even more severely.

Ripple Pays $125 Million Fine to End SEC Lawsuit

The lengthy lawsuit between the SEC and Ripple that has been going on since 2020 has finally come to an end.

On August 8, the blockchain company agreed to pay a fine of $125 million for the violations it discovered.

The long-running case only got a breakthrough in mid-2023 when Judge Torres ruled that Ripple’s sales of XRP through third-party exchanges were not securities offerings, but that direct sales to institutions were. This ruling partially cleared Ripple of liability and prevented the SEC from fully convicting the company.

Since then, the two have been at loggerheads over the fines that Ripple could face for its illegal securities offering. In March 2024, the SEC filed a $2 billion fine proposal against Ripple , which the company has fiercely resisted .

As a result, Judge Torres pegged Ripple's fine at $125 million based on "1,278 transactions with institutional investors found to have violated securities laws," as well as ordering the company not to repeat this behavior in the future.

WBTC "changes owners" and the surrounding controversy

On August 9, cryptocurrency custody company BitGo announced that it will transfer custody operations of Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) to BiT Global, a Hong Kong-registered company founded by Justin Sun , the TRON ecosystem, and BitGo, with BitGo holding a minority ownership.

This sudden "change of ownership" made the community "restless", because Justin Sun is a character with many "scandals" in the industry.

WBTC is currently one of the top collateral assets in major DeFi protocols on Ethereum, with top holding addresses being big names such as Aave , Compound , Spark Protocol , Maker , Wormhole bridge and bridges to Arbitrum , Polygon , Optimism , ...

As a result, DeFi projects using WBTC are starting to consider reducing their exposure to this wrapped Bitcoin.

- The first shot came from MakerDAO when less than 10 days later, it passed a proposal to stop accepting WBTC as collateral for DAI, reducing the debt ceiling to 0. Not stopping there, 1 month later, the MakerDAO community continued to propose completely removing WBTC , which if passed would affect 200 million USD of loans in the ecosystem.

- Next, Aave also proposed parameter changes to minimize the impact from WBTC.

- Threshold proposes to "rescue" WBTC by merging with tBTC .

- Coinbase announced a competing solution to WBTC called cbBTC but was questioned by the community because it did not publish proof of reserves .

In the face of so much criticism, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe himself had to speak up on Sky (MakerDAO) forum, clarifying that the new agreement on the upcoming transfer of management rights was misunderstood and asserting that BitGlobal – the company related to Justin Sun – only had the right to change the process related to one of the three security keys but they still had to use BitGo's software and hardware.

Mike Belshe also committed that BitGo will provide at least 60 days notice of any changes in management or ownership involving WBTC.

With such explanations, the Sky community is now reconsidering its plan to delist WBTC , intending to still use this token in its ecosystem.

SEC dashes hopes for Solana ETF

Since the Ethereum ETF got the green light from the SEC, there has been much speculation surrounding which coin could potentially open a third ETF.

It seems that the community has chosen its answer, which is Solana, as many Wall Street giants have been preparing to file an application to open a SOL ETF with the SEC.

However, on August 20, the SEC almost extinguished all hopes when it forced the Solana ETF proposals to withdraw because it still considered SOL a security .

Aside from the unresolved legal issues, Solana still does not have an ETF futures product , a prerequisite for a spot ETF like what happened with BTC ETFs and ETH ETFs in the past.

So, at least in the near future, the community is unlikely to see another crypto ETF.

Telegram founder arrested in France

On August 25, the global technology and blockchain community was shocked by the news that France had arrested the founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov , 39 years old, a dual citizen of Russia, France and the UAE.

A number of prominent figures in the cryptocurrency community havespoken out in support of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, criticizing the French authorities' unjustified arrest and calling for the swift release of an innocent citizen.

Under pressure from the international community, France announced 12 official charges against Telegram CEO, requiring the CEO to stay in France to await trial .

On September 6, Durovmade his first public statement since his arrest, declaring that he would increase censorship of criminal content, but also be willing to leave legally unfriendly countries.

Then on the evening of September 23, Durov announced that he had updated his Terms of Use and Privacy Policy to better prevent crime. The revised terms state that Telegram will provide user information to authorities if requested .

Ethereum criticized for poor performance

As the market's leading platform coin, Ethereum is not "immune" to criticism.

- Mainnet is underperforming, too "biased" for L2

It all started when ETH prices underperformed expectations in Q3, and gas fees hit a five-year low , leading to a resurgence in ETH inflation, raising concerns about the long-term impact on supply and value.

Some analysts believe the drop in Ethereum gas fees is the result of a combination of factors.

  • Lack of demand for Ethereum block space, even with a stable number of users, they mainly participate in interactive activities such as bridge, restaking/staking, approve (which does not cost much gas fee)... with the condition of locking tokens for a limited time to enjoy yield and the potential to receive airdrops in Ethereum layer-2.

  • Users are preferring to use other blockchains because they want to "catch the trend", for example, the memecoin trend on Solana is being attracted by platforms like pump.fun or makenow.meme .

  • Costs and performance on new or layer-2 blockchains have been cheaper since the completion of the Dencun upgrade in April, in line with founder Vitalik Buterin's vision of scaling to layer-2s.

- Ethereum Foundation accused of lack of transparency

Next is the controversy surrounding the Ethereum Foundation's ETH sales transactions, which are accused of being non-transparent, like "adding fuel to the fire" during a period when the price has no support.

The Ethereum Foundation eventually had to publicly allocate its budget to appease public opinion.

- Vitalik Buterin criticized

While his pet project is being criticized, Vitalik Buterin is not very interested in "shill" support but instead expresses his "dislike of DeFi" opinion.

Despite the clear argument and explanation, this statement has completely "displeased" the DeFi development community, as DeFi is the sector that has brought Ethereum to the "throne" as it is today.

Lightly, they wrote articles to refute, and heavily criticized Vitalik for being too "outdated" and no longer keeping up with the latest technology trends. Even Charles Hoskinson of Cardano said that Ethereum is too dependent on Vitalik Buterin's vision .

September

Bitcoin drops to $52,500 on September 7

Bitcoin has seen a steady wave of selling from US Bitcoin ETFs this week, with outflows of over $200 million regularly recorded. Not stopping there, some say the $50,000 price zone will be difficult to maintain as the market remains concerned about the upcoming interest rate adjustment from the Fed in mid-month.

Some have even pointed out that Bitcoin prices appear to have formed a new pattern, which is to drop sharply at the beginning of the month and then spend the rest of the month recovering, similar to what happened in July and August.

But ETH fell even further, all the way to $2,150, coming very close to its August low of $2,111.

At this price, Ethereum has effectively wiped out its 2024 growth .

The only "good" sign is that the liquidation value was only 290 million USD, more modest than the two declines in July and August.

friend.tech team gives up control of the project

On September 8, 2024, the friend.tech development team made a big splash when they decided to transfer control of the platform's smart contract to an Ethereum null address.

When a smart contract is transferred to a null address, it means that the developer will completely give up control of the project's contract and cannot make any changes in the future.

The team claims that this change will not affect the project's operations and that friend.tech will continue to operate. However, many investors believe that this means that friend.tech has been virtually "abandoned" with no one able to make new changes or improvements.

The price of the FRIEND token also dropped sharply because of this announcement. This is seen as the end of the once prominent SocialFi project.

Fed cuts interest rates for first time in more than 4 years

Early morning on September 19 (Vietnam time), the US Federal Reserve (Fed) decided to cut interest rates by 0.5 percentage points, as previously confirmed .

This is the Fed's first interest rate cut since March 2020, opening a monetary policy easing cycle, in the context of cooling inflation and increasing concerns about the health of the labor market.

At the same time, the Fed signaled another 0.5% interest rate cut later this year. The Fed then plans to cut four more times in 2025 and two more times in 2026.

The Fed has raised interest rates a total of 11 times from March 2022 to July 2023, from a low of 0-0.25%/year to 5.25-5.5%/year to curb inflation.

The Fed's interest rate adjustment history over the past 10 years. Photo: Trading Economics (September 19, 2024)

Thanks to that, BTC also skyrocketed to $64,000 after many days of struggling with a deep decline.

Trump House Launches World Liberty Financial Project

On the morning of September 17, the Trump family held a press conference on social network X to officially announce their crypto project , called World Liberty Financial (WLFI).

This project was revealed in July, then Trump and family members "hinted" and "shilled" to create curiosity from the community. But the community raised many questions .

According to some leaked sources, World Liberty Financial will be a “crypto bank”, allowing investors to deposit and borrow money in crypto, paying interest to the platform. It is known that 70% of the project’s capital is owned by the Trump family and other investors.

Some X users have found evidence that World Liberty Financial will have its own token called WLFI, planning to sell up to 30% of the total supply to raise $540 million, with a token valuation of up to $1.8 billion.

Binance criticized for listing 3 memecoins at the same time

On the afternoon of September 16, Binance announced the listing of three new projects: First Neiro on Ethereum (NEIRO), Turbo (TURBO), and Baby Doge Coin (1MBABYDOGE, a 6-digit shortened version of the original BabyDoge token).

The community witnessed for the first time that the exchange that has always been considered a leading name, Binance, which has always been considered a "model" for project approval standards, now simultaneously listed 3 memecoins .

Notably, NEIRO is the most controversial memecoin on the market, and there are many NEIRO coins launched on Ethereum, Solana and TRON all using the same code name.

This confusion has led the community to believe that Neiro Ethereum, the coin that has been listed on Binance futures NEIROETH/USDT, will be listed on spot. But no, the spot coin is a completely different NEIRO coin.

Neiro Ethereum price increased slightly at the time Binance announced the listing, before the community realized the difference, then plummeted when everything was revealed.

As the memecoin debate continues to heat up, Binance continues to announce a new product, the Spot Pre-Market trading feature .

Solana introduces Solana Seeker phone, Play Solana Gen1 gaming console

In addition to skyrocketing prices, Solana is shifting to manufacturing more devices to serve its diverse ecosystem.

After the success of the Solana Saga phone line that once "made waves" because of its huge airdrop, the developers continued to launch the second phone line, with the newly announced official name of Solana Seeker. Although it was just released in 2025, Seeker has hadmore than 140,000 pre-orders .

Not only phones, Solana also launchedthe Play Solana Gen1 gaming console , inspired by the legendary design of Gameboy with familiar mechanical buttons.

DeGods “abandons” NFTs, switches to new token DEGOD

In a very surprising move, the NFT project DeGods has announced its decision to convert the collections in the ecosystem into a single token called DEGOD, which can essentially be understood as abandoning the NFT segment to switch to catching the memecoin trend on Solana .

DeGods believes that its project is fragmented into too many different collections, causing liquidity and the holder community to be divided. Therefore, to unify everything, the project decided to allow users to convert DeGods, y00ts, and Dust NFTs into its official token called DEGOD, with a specific conversion rate for each NFT set.

Most of the community believes that this is an extremely risky move by DeGods, but it is understandable, in the context of the NFT sector continuously collapsing in the period of 2023 - 2024 with no signs of recovery. Unifying the brand to a memecoin, although riskier, can help the project take advantage of the existing community strength to maintain.

However, there is still some criticism that allowing NFTs to be converted into tokens does not take into account the rarity of NFTs, which has played a significant role in their value formation in the past.

Former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison sentenced to 2 years in prison

Caroline Ellison, one of Sam Bankman-Fried's closest associates, has been sentenced to two years in prison for her role in the collapse of the FTX exchange, which caused billions of dollars in losses to customers.

Caroline Ellison was one of SBF's trusted managers and had a romantic relationship with him. However, in December 2022, just one month after FTX went bankrupt, she agreed to plead guilty to the US Department of Justice and agreed to testify against Sam Bankman-Fried in the hope of gaining leniency.

The charges against Caroline Ellison include bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Hamster Kombat Airdrop Criticized

On September 26, the HMSTR token of the 58th Binance Launchpool project, Hamster Kombat, was officially listed on most large and small exchanges.

A day before the listing, Hamster Kombat conducted an airdrop to 131 million eligible users out of the 300 million total registrations for the game since its launch this summer.

Previously, the project "eloquently" announced that it would set aside 60% of the total supply (equivalent to 60 billion HMSTR tokens) to airdrop to players.

However, the project's distribution strategy has created a wave of fierce criticism . Because many players said they spent nearly half a year experiencing the game, but after listing the official trading price around 0.01 USD, calculating the past time's efforts only brought in about 5 - 30 USD, a number too small compared to the statement "this will be the biggest airdrop in the history of cryptocurrency" .

Harris promises to support the crypto industry if elected

In contrast to her opponent Donald Trump, who has long "chosen a side" in favor of crypto, Ms. Kamala Harris has never established her views on this field.

However, as the race for the White House enters its final stages, the female politician finally expressed her stance.

Specifically, Ms. Harris promises to encourage technologies that have the potential to change the world in the future, including blockchain if elected. She also promotes AI technology and digital assets .

Not stopping there, the US presidential candidate also mentioned the idea of encouraging AI and digital assets once in the newly released 80-page economic draft .

However, Ms. Harris will not propose specific policies for blockchain and cryptocurrencies before this November's election.

SEC fines stablecoin issuer TUSD

On September 25, the SEC said it had sanctioned TrueCoin LLC and TrustToken Inc. — both now rebranded as Archblock — to settle securities charges against the TUSD stablecoin product.

TrueCoin was the original issuer of TrueUSD (TUSD) , while TrustToken developed the TrueFi lending platform that integrated TUSD. Both companies neither accepted nor denied the SEC’s allegations, but agreed to pay a fine of $163,766 each, with TrueCoin paying an additional $340,930 in illicit profits.

The SEC stated that as of September 2024, 99% of the assets backing TUSD will be allocated to high-risk investment funds.

TUSD was chosen by Binance as a stablecoin to replace BUSD after the latter was also accused of being a security by the SEC and had to stop operating in February 2023. In the following period, TUSD's capitalization increased from less than $1 billion to a peak of $3.8 billion in October 2023 with90% of the total supply on Binance , before the exchange gradually separated it to switch to the alternative solution, FDUSD .

Changpeng Zhao released from prison

CZ has been serving a four-month prison sentence since early June for negligence in managing Binance , leading to money laundering on the exchange. In addition to resigning as CEO , CZ was also fined $50 million and banned from holding a management position at Binance for three years. This is part of a settlement between Binance and the US Department of Justice, according to which the exchange also had to pay a record fine of $4.3 billion .

The former Binance CEO was then taken to a detention facility in Long Beach, California, but was transferred to a reintegration facility in late August in preparation for his release date of September 29. But because it fell on a weekend, CZ was released two days early, on Friday, September 27.

A few hours after being released from prison, CZ "gm" on social network X to confirm that he had returned to normal life. Then on September 29, CZ had his first post after being released from prison , sharing his upcoming plans.

"Name change" projects

This third quarter also witnessed a "trend" of changing the brand identity of some projects. Most of the reasons for the name change were to align with the upcoming direction of the project, which the old brand image could not fully express.

Projects include:

- Galxe converts GAL tokens to G .

- Solend changed its name to Save , announced 3 new products: SUSD, saveSOL and dumpydotfun.

- Fantom changed his name to Sonic .

- MakerDAO rebrands to Sky , aiming to make DeFi more accessible to the masses, in line with its long-announced Endgame plan . The project also has a new governance token and stablecoin, SKY and USDS, respectively.

However, this rebranding has upset the DeFi community , with some even suggesting that this is the beginning of the end for DAI's dominance in the decentralized stablecoin space. The Gnosis Chain project is even considering changing its gas token to reduce its exposure to USDS.

- DEX Camelot (GRAIL) on Arbitrum changes brand name .

- Polygon converts MATIC tokens to POL .

New stablecoin projects

Stablecoins have become a new hot-hit segment as they increasingly assert their usefulness in cross-border money transfers and daily payments.

Recognizing that potential, a series of companies, from crypto projects to traditional organizations, started building their own stablecoins.

Projects include:

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Disclaimer: The content above is only the author's opinion which does not represent any position of Followin, and is not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, investment advice from Followin.
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